Teenage rebels: Jane Caro on the trouble with daughters
Do mothers and daughters ever see eye to eye? In a powerful piece, media commentator Jane Caro reveals her tricky and wonderful bond with her rebellious daughters.
“I hate you! I HATE YOU! ”
SLAM! My oldest closes her bedroom door so hard, I look nervously up at the ceiling to see if she has knocked any plaster down. No, it is still in place, but my heart is hammering inside my chest and a red mist has descended in front of my eyes. I have just enough control left to mutter a riposte at her closed door, low enough so she can’t hear it. I want to scream it full into her face and hurt her feelings as much as she has hurt mine. But I don’t. I am her mother and whatever I may feel, the instinct to protect my child – even from the full force of my own anger – remains. “Well, I don’t like you very much at the moment, either.”
I walk away. My 12 year old, who has turned up the volume on the TV to block out our battle, pulls a wry face, but when I start talking to her – to enlist her sympathy, unfairly and unreasonably – she gestures for me to be silent and turns back to the blaring TV. I am left feeling isolated with my anger and my hurt, but she is right to turn away. This is between me and her 15-year-old sister; I should not be asking her to take sides.
Half an hour later and my oldest emerges from her room. Tears stream down her face.
“I … don’t know why … I am … being such a bitch.” She manages to sob out the words. My anger melts. I don’t know why she is either, but there it is – I am the mother and she is the child. I let my hurt go. We embrace. We are friends again, until the next time.
I can no longer remember what our battles were about. It could be anything; homework she didn’t want to do; mess she left for me to clean up; or just a bad mood.
You name it, we fought about it.
It is one thing to be a rebellious daughter – I was a mild example of the genus myself once – it is quite another to be the parent being rebelled against. I had always thought I would be a good parent of teenagers.
My husband and I didn’t have many rules – both girls had curfews, we expected them to go to school and do their homework, we were strict about smoking, drinking and drugs (as much as any parent can be), but we were happy for them to have boyfriends and go out with their friends. We didn’t get fussed about swearing or the clothes they chose to wear. We didn’t mind too much if their bedrooms looked like tips. We picked our battles and tried to police only what we thought really mattered.
It all sounds very sensible and reasonable, but it made not a sod’s worth of difference. Both girls rebelled, not at the same time, thank goodness, and not in the same way.
My oldest’s rebellion was very out in the open. It was hot, loud, dramatic. From 14 to 16, she fought us and her teachers every step of the way. She had unsuitable boyfriends, took up smoking – and was lousy about not getting caught – and wagged school. We were constantly getting notes from the school about work not handed in and the cocky arrogance she displayed, particularly to teachers she had little respect for. We were worried for her and not at all sure what to do.
We even went to listen to a lecture by an expert in adolescent psychology about rebellious teenagers. It was comforting to see that the room was packed. We were not the only parents, it seemed, struggling with a rude and belligerent teenager.
That talk was useful. The lecturer pointed out that teenagers lose the capacity for empathy. He talked about recent research that showed 10-yearolds had more emotional intelligence than 13-year-olds, and that something about how the hormonal changes at puberty undid the ability to empathise and understand others for a few years.
Perhaps that is why it is often the young who are the most ruthless killers. Just think about Pol Pot’s teenage killing squads in the Khmer Rouge, Mao’s fanatical Red Guard and the Hitler Youth. Or the disaffected young men who are currently sought out and groomed for murderous, sometimes suicidal, mayhem by ISIS. Our angry teenager wasn’t in that league, but it did explain why her previously soft heart was not as much in evidence as it had been.
The comprehensive public school she attended helped us to weather the storm. They did this by disciplining her when she broke the rules – as they should – but always giving both us, and her, the impression that while they did not like her behaviour, they did like her. They achieved this very important distinction by ignoring her swearing and laughing at her jokes. I sometimes wondered whether they would have expelled her if we’d sent her to one of the posh private girls’ schools so many of our friends and neighbours had urged us to choose.
Towards the end of Year Ten, we started to see glimpses of the girl she had been before the hormonal storm. She even began knuckling down again at school and her grades began improving. Given that she was about to go into the last two years of schooling, her timing couldn’t have been better.
“The teachers love me now, Mum.”
We were walking along a dusty country road, on holidays, when she made this assertion. She was halfway through Year Eleven.
“Do they, darling? Why is that?”
“There’s nothing teachers like better than a bad girl gone good.”
We’d weathered a lot by then. Not least that she’d fallen for a young man when she was in Year Nine who had turned out to be facing criminal charges. Robbery in company was the offence, but it sounded more dramatic than it was.
Nevertheless, it was defined as a gang-related offence and it was an election year. Using law and order to demonstrate the “toughness” of politicians can cause a great deal of harm; this foolish but relatively harmless young man was sentenced to jail. We were, as you can perhaps imagine, horrified when this happened, especially when she said she wanted
permission to visit him. My daughter wasn’t about to take no for an answer.
“So, you think that when someone you care about gets into real trouble, you should just walk away?”
Well, no, we didn’t. Still, as I reassured Ralph, my husband, she was too young to visit the young man in question except in the company of his parents. She could only see him by trekking out to Sydney’s Emu Plains in the family car with the boy’s parents and grandmother. I doubt those visits were anywhere near as glamorous as she’d hoped. Jails – even low-security ones – are dispiriting places.
“Look,” I said to Ralph one day, as we were on our regular morning walk and obsessively ruminating over the surprising place we’d found ourselves in. “It could be worse.”
“How?”
“He might not have gone to jail. This way, she can only see him a few times a year, write to him and get the occasional phone call. I bet she’ll be bored with the whole drama within 12 months and going out with someone else.”
I was right. She had another couple of boyfriends – each an improvement on the last one. Instead of rebels without a clue, she began dating boys who were just testing the boundaries the way most teenagers do. Eventually, she met an engineering student from Sydney Uni. He was the absolute best of the bunch and, sensibly, she married him.
Luckily, my daughter’s intense rebellion burned out quickly and now she’s a determined and strongminded young woman who (rather hilariously) is a stickler for obeying the rules. No wonder she’s become such an excellent English teacher. Among other things, she’s an absolute grammar Nazi. No doubt she will edit this essay within an inch of its life.
“Don’t come all deep and meaningful with me.”
Now that my eldest daughter had calmed down, it was my youngest daughter’s turn to kick over the traces. But she did it very differently.
“But I am just asking how you feel about doing the HSC, if you are anxious …”
I saw her face close down and her mouth form a thin, stubborn and disgusted line. She was shutting me out again.
“Leave me alone!” she spat out between mouthfuls of udon noodles. “It’s my business, not yours.” We were in a Japanese restaurant. There were people all around us. I did not want to make a scene. These days, it ended like this whenever we tried to talk – I pushed for information, she resisted. I no longer knew what to say to her. I could find no safe topic. I knew I irritated her almost beyond bearing, but I didn’t know how to stop it.
And the more she shut me out, the more anxious about her I became.
My youngest daughter’s rebellion was a withdrawal. Where the oldest would throw a tantrum when we told her to be home by 10.30pm, and arrive back on the dot, the youngest smiled sweetly, agreed, and waltzed in at midnight. Where the oldest yelled and slammed doors, the youngest hissed and plugged in her iPod. She told us what we wanted to hear to our face: “Yes, I’ve done that assignment”, but did – or more accurately, didn’t – do exactly what she pleased.
I felt helpless in a way I never did with her sister, even at her hot and foul-mouthed worst. At least she talked. I earned my living as a communicator. I prided myself on my ability to get through to just about anyone. The one person I couldn’t reach, however, was my youngest daughter.
She’d fallen for a young man … facing criminal charges.
She had become an immovable and impenetrable object, and this was a much more powerful weapon than the noisy fury wielded by her older sister. No doubt she had watched, listened and learned. I had felt anxious and often furious while my oldest was at her worst, but I had never felt as if I had entirely lost contact with her. Now I was nonplussed and felt out of control.
Worse, everything I tried to do just seemed to dig me deeper into a hole. I tried talking to her – she hated that. Someone recommended an anxiety clinic – she loathed that, too. We tried family therapy and that went down like a bucket of cold sick. The only message my daughter seemed to take out of my increasingly panic-stricken efforts to “help” was that I thought there was something wrong with her.
The school (the same one her sister had attended) warned me that my daughter was sabotaging her Higher School Certificate (HSC) and advised me to seek some help. I did as they advised and suggested we make an appointment to see a counsellor. This got me precisely nowhere. Indeed, she seemed to take the suggestion as a final insult. We fought about it for weeks.
“If you’re so keen on f**king counselling,” my daughter screamed at me one morning, “why don’t you f**king go?”
This brought me up short. She had a point and it surprised me that despite the emotional intelligence I prided myself on, I had completely lost perspective when it came to dealing with my youngest daughter. Rather shamefacedly, I followed her advice and took myself off to a counsellor. At the first appointment, I poured out my tale of woe in great detail. Here I was, a good and conscientious parent (in my own humble opinion) doing my absolute best with a recalcitrant daughter. As I described my repeated attempts to get through to her and to re-establish our relationship, I had never felt sorrier for myself in my life.
“You tell me all this as if she is doing it on purpose.”
The counsellor’s remark also brought me up short. She was right. I did feel as if this was all about me, that my daughter was withholding communication and therefore affection from me on purpose.
I now felt ashamed of myself.
“She’s a teenager,” the counsellor said. “What she is doing is all she can do right now. Why don’t you back off?”
It wasn’t as easy as that, of course. I am not a natural backer-offer. But I tried. I decided to let her be, even if that meant stuffing up her HSC. I acknowledged her need to build a thick boundary between us. I didn’t like it, but I accepted it. I tried to be supportive, but not intrusive. I am sure I wasn’t very good at it, but
I was better than I had been. It helped a lot to realise my daughter wasn’t withdrawing on purpose to hurt me.
It took a while, but eventually taking the pressure off worked. I remember exactly when our relationship turned the corner. Her elder sister and I had decided to go to Canberra for the weekend to see the Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery. My youngest hadn’t achieved a brilliant HSC, but she had earned a place at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales to major in photography.
Tentatively, thinking she might therefore be interested in the exhibition, I asked if she would like to join us. I expected to be rejected out of hand. And I was. “No!” She pulled a face. “I don’t think so.” Then she went into her bedroom and shut the door. I looked at her sister and we both shrugged. Oh well, we had tried.
Suddenly, her door opened. “Actually, I will come.” She shut the door again. My elder daughter and I punched the air in glee silently. We knew this thaw was fragile and didn’t want to damage it. The three of us had a wonderful weekend.
Now my daughters are adults and I get along beautifully with both of them. It’s difficult to navigate the years when your children separate from you, but it’s what they must do if they’re to become their own people.
These days, I am proud of my rebellious daughters. I am proud of the courage both of them displayed when they insisted on showing me where I stopped and they started. I respect the boundaries they drew then and I hope I always will. My daughters have taught me far more than I ever taught them.
I tried talking to her – she hated that.
Extracted from Rebellious Daughters, edited by Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman. Published by Ventura Press, $32.99.