She’s coming back…

No one ever really warned me that raising an adolescent girl would be difficult. Or perhaps I just chose not to listen to comments from seasoned parents that tended to sound like, ‘Just wait until adolescence kicks in,’ ‘She’ll eventually come back [to you],’ ‘Don’t hold your breath waiting for that cute little girl to return,’ or, the barely reassuring, ‘Good luck!’ I think that I was under some sort of naïve impression that there would be an easy transition from sharing picture books, to learning to ride a push bike and navigating Tamagotchi deaths, into the tumultuous world of a teenager.

Perhaps I even imagined, foolishly, that having shared my entire adult life with adolescents on a daily basis, I would be insightful enough to pre-empt conflict, maintain razor-sharp boundaries and enjoy a mature relationship with my daughter. God taught me otherwise.

American writer, Samuel Goodrich (2011) states insightfully that ‘there is so much of us vested into our relationships with our children. Hopes and fears, ardent wishes and anxious apprehensions are twisted together in the threads that connect parent with child!’

In our quest to fulfil our hopes for our children, we become expert script writers, constructing their futures in beautiful phrases, sculpting their opportunities and, sometimes, forgetting to include their voice and their choice in the way the text unfolds. We become deeply invested in maintaining the perfect storyline where the central character or characters are our children. Like me, you may come to the stunning realisation that the script that you have meticulously created is not so accurate, after all.

As my adult daughter heads back to work in London in January, I remind myself that she may never live in Queensland again, let alone Toowoomba, and the narrative I’d composed so carefully, the one where she might pop in for dinner on Sunday nights, is merely folly, fiction in the author’s mind.

Writer, Rachel Cusk warns us not to become too attached to that perfect script because, after all, ‘at some point the growing child will pick up [the script] and turn it over in [her] hands like some dispassionate reviewer composing a cold-hearted analysis of an overhyped novel. The shock of critique is the first, faint sign of the coming conflict, though I wonder how much of what we call conflict is in fact our own deserved punishment for telling the story wrong, for twisting it with our own vanity or wishful thinking, for failing to honour the truth.’

She paints a harsh but very truthful reality for those of us who hold too tightly to a treasured storyline. After all, letting go of our children is an art form (Brown, 2020) and yet it is the essence of adolescence – the period of time taken for a teen to define themselves as separate from their parents: not as a clone, not as a mini-version of said parents and certainly not as the protagonist of their parents’ script.

I think of this period of parenting as analogous to standing on the sideline watching our daughter play sport or sitting in an audience watching her perform on stage.

Do we find ourselves wanting to be on the field or stage with her, metaphorically or literally? Do we see her as emulating us? Are we wanting to correct adjudicators and umpires too vociferously? Do we analyse each moment of the performance on the car trip home – commenting, deconstructing critically, comparing to others? If we are honest, we’ve all done some of that in some way – but hopefully not all of it, all the time.

Letting go is the ultimate art form. No one does it easily, though it is possible to do it with grace. Given that statistics from the Royal Melbourne Hospital tell us that the period of adolescence begins at age 10 and that the average adolescence/adult in Melbourne leaves home at 27, there is a long period of time for us to perfect the skill of letting go, and lots of opportunity to do so with grace – if that is our will. Implicit in that grace lies humility and a willingness to manage our own shame when things don’t go to script.

Hodson (2020) writes that ‘all parents “fail” in some sense. A noted [psychologist] once[said]: ‘A parent’s place is in the wrong.’ That statement is not something for us to view as dire. It’s there as a reality check for us all, that pertinent reminder that our best intentions go hand in hand with our own flaws and ‘humanness’ – and sometimes it is a volatile mix. Whilst we all have a depth of life experience, we have worked, travelled, and faced challenging circumstances - these are our experiences, and they are not our child’s (Brown, 2020). Whilst our wisdom is valuable, how and when it is shared, matters. Sometimes we cannot share it at all.

Hold on for the ride and let go gracefully as you do so … enjoy the moments of unity when you escape with her, from what can sometimes be the ‘mild prison of home’ (Cusk, 2015), the place where hopes, expectations and the thirst for independence can meet in a volatile collision. She is coming back … eventually, but now is the time for her to explore, to find herself as independent from her parents, and to do so, with the security of knowing that home is also a place of comfort, certainty and love.

‘For as long as you cling to your children like a lifebelt, you will cease to grow up.’ (Hodson, 2020) – and neither will they. She is coming back … even from London, (eventually)!

Dr Linda Evans | Principal

REFERENCES

Brown, M. (2020). The Art of Letting Your Children Go »

Retrieved 4 August 2022

Cusk, R. (2015). Teenagers: what’s wrong with them? ‘The Australian’. April 25, 2015

Hodson, P. (2012). My message to the parents who can’t let their children go: grow up »

‘The Guardian’. 5 August 2012.

Retrieved 4 August 2022