Puberty vs Menopause Survival Kit

Part 1: Symptoms

Fu-u-uuck! The alarm I set for myself this morning goes off and I jump up in bed so high I almost hit the ceiling. Correction, I set it for myself only to wake up our 16 y.o. Why? This is the beginning of my dirge. The Alfa and Omega of everything we did wrong in upbringing. We failed dismally, and that from the onset. We’ve read every article and book that dealt with bringing up a healthy, intelligent and well – balanced child and in the end we did everything wrong. Or at least it feels this way now.

In our attempt to nurture, protect, help and guide, to prevent from adverse influences and enclose in a soft, bacteria – free vacuum, we seem to have created a monster. No, not our daughter: she is, as a by-product of our excessive parenting actually surprisingly ok, but a Golum consisting of variety of our feelings and phobias, that follows us everywhere, threatening to make us fall apart at a first prodding.

To start with, I have to add that both of us were mature parents as our daughter came to world. This in itself is a major problem, as I see it now. There must be a good reason why nature endows women with the ability to bear children early in life. And not everything our ancestors did was automatically wrong. When you are young, the world is your oyster. There are hardly limits to things you can do and bear. Or so it seems. You are stronger, healthier, but above all, your nervous system is intact. As a result you are more resilient towards whims of Fate. And those are aplenty. Not only that, being half-child yourself, you are hardly aware of all those monsters that are lurking in the dark. Your sense of responsibility may already be developed to some extent, but you are more prone to experiment and are able to shrug off some failures better. Why, you may not even register them as failures. Young and silly can be an advantage, yes.

Young and silly you are by the age of, say, 35, no more. Most of the time. Almost any decision you make is a conscious, well – contemplated act, with a clear understanding of consequences. Which is why some people decide that at this age they won’t become parents anymore. It’s not for me to judge. Anyway, this contemplating new self is a blessing and a curse at the same time. Making a decision to procreate at this stage is a heroic act on many levels. Your constitution is past peak, you are set in your ways, you most probably have a job, a mortgage and may be even other children. Responsibility you assume is a sacrifice on the altar of your life.

From this point on it should be crystal – clear to you and your spouse, if available, that when your other friends have long ago finished smelling the diapers and can leave their teenagers alone to spend a couple of days in the spa, you will still be looking for a babysitter so you can do your grocery shopping. When the above mentioned friends will go out in the evening and enjoy a film or a romantic dinner for two, reminiscing on how cute their kids were when their first teeth came out, you will be hastily brushing up your maths to help yours with homework. Or at least to avoid looking stupid in their eyes (won’t help). And when some of your female friends will have all the time in the world to wallow in self – pity discussing hot flashes, forgetfulness and those extra two pounds around the waist, you will be struggling to counteract your teenager’s attempts to develop their sense of themselves as a person, distinct from their body and your ideals.

Get the picture? And please understand, I am not trying to publish a collection of complaints. It is just a warning.

Coming back to that alarm clock. I need to mention that my grandmother originally came from some remote village outside Odessa, Ukraine. She moved to Odessa after getting married and then again to Australia with us, in the late seventies. She had no formal education, but was a wealth of emotional intelligence with innate clarity of mind, as I only noticed later (when she was no longer around). She never learned to articulate her thoughts in an eloquent manner, but most of them were to a point. One of the pearls out of the deep well of her conscience was: “The better, the worse”. “What?” – I demanded. She just shrugged and said: ”This is something you have to learn for yourself”. “Pfft, crap!”- I shrugged in return and gave it no more thought.

Years after, this idiom crystallized in my mind. Now I know that she tried to warn me that the better you are to others, the worse they will behave towards you, that there actually is such thing as shooting yourself in the foot by doing too much for others without need. There’s a wealth of experience behind this statement.

Another pearl of her wisdom was distinguishing between “own” and “other” enemies. “Own” enemies were notoriously members of own family. Grandma was given to incessant cursing, a habit I still detest. Wishing all sorts of evils on the heads of “bad” people, who weren’t kind, attentive and compliant. “Own” enemies were equally unkind and renitent, but as flesh and blood, could continue being so, for they could never be cursed out of loyalty and frequently told so. So there was nothing in the way of our development into pariahs.

At the same time grandma never forgot to do our beds, cook simple meals and wash our clothes, shrinking the hell out of them in the process. All the way cursing those she could and meaning those she couldn’t.

I guess the curve starts here. The loyalty to own family, the feeling of responsibility toward it, even if it is expressly unwanted. Taking all the burdens away from our children, thus denying them the possibility to develop independently, possibly with the hope that out of this dependence, there one day grows Attachment. Don’t thank me, please.

So our daughter is 16, and I am still setting a clock for me to wake her up. Anything that happens after that is downspiralling into a series of events, making everything that fails to work, my fault. The profanity in the beginning had to do with my setting that clock half and hour too late for her to absolve her makeup ritual to her complete satisfaction. She misses the bus, gets driven to the station by a neighbor, the first lesson is the German test on which she’s presumably too upset to concentrate now. Ergo – the resulting bad note is not her fault for not learning enough in the previous weeks, but mine for causing stress in the morning of the test. Get it? The better, the worse.

Cursing the “other” enemies, I try to reflect on how it got this far, all the time comparing how I dealt with the situation when my, in the meantime 32 y.o. son, was this age. Well, I didn’t. I was mostly at work, a single parent and had no time for a Valium. Yes, he grew up independent.

So what is better? The nourishing breast of an ever- present helicopter mother, or the involuntary neglect of a working parent?

To be continued…