To fight or not to fight
Ignore me at your peril?
There is a lot going on right now (understatement of the year), in the world but also in my house. Let’s start with the local. I’ll get to the dystopian nightmare in a minute.
I learn a lot from my teenage daughter. She is not the nicest person these days, in fact she’s pretty f**cking mean. Especially to me. It’s different with her dad. With him it’s the normal teenage stuff, but with me it’s a whole other level of nastiness. In our house I’ve pretty much always been the “bad cop.” She’s never done anything really bad—except for the one time in eighth grade when she skipped band class to hang out with her crying friend in the bathroom and I got a call from her teacher—so it has not been a very difficult job. Until now.
Besides being rude and generally unpleasant to be around, teens today have an extra tool in the toolkit for ignoring their parents: They spend an ungodly amount of time staring at their phones. Tapping their fingers like they’re on speed, or scrolling TikTok, their eyes glazed over. (Remember this one? What Charlie Brown and his friends hear when adults speak, wah wah wah wah).
The other night, after dinner, we were sitting around the living room and I foolishly tried to make conversation with my daughter. I had read in the daily announcement from her high-school principal—yes, I read it every day start to finish—that they were going to have a guest speaker to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Holocaust survivor whose bio was very compelling (I googled him).
Me: “Hey, so I heard you’re having a guest speaker tomorrow, how cool, he sounds really interesting.
Silence.
“I wish I could hear him speak,” I continued. “He was a baby when he was sent to a labor camp with his family and then was saved from starvation by a German woman.”
Doesn’t look up from her phone.
At this point, my emotion regulation (a highly significant function in human life, it turns out, but one with which I struggle) was dwindling and I said, “Um, are you listening? Because I was talking to you.” To which she replied (deflected), rolling her eyes: “YOU do that all the time.” Then I lost my temper. I was DONE being treated badly and I did the thing I’m really trying hard not to do: I took her bad behavior personally. Granted, this was not an isolated incident; the tension—and the unkindness—had been building for days, weeks, years? What did I do wrong, I ask myself, to have raised someone who hates me?
Then, I did the other thing I’m trying really hard not to do: I got Daniel involved. He was sitting right there and witnessed the exchange. “Do you think this is okay!?” I asked him in a not-very-measured tone (emotion regulation by now out the window). I was hurt by her and so I had to hurt him (I know, NOT okay). While he generally agrees with me in these battles (but doesn’t always say he does), he should not have to mediate our fights or be forced to take sides. Lesson number one from family therapy.
Unfortunatly, I ended up storming out of the room and I don’t know what went on between them, but I felt excluded and triggered and ashamed for blowing up. Then I came back and instead of apologizing (I did that later), I flipped Daniel off. WHAT?! (I was really overreacting; all of sudden the bad behavior was mine, not the kid’s, sigh).
“Why are you flicking me off?” he said. “Why did you flick me off?” First I giggled a little, even though he was right to ask me that, then looked at June who was supressing a smile and I said, “I’m sorry, I was upset, and by the way, I flipped you off, not flicked.”
June: “Oh! She clocked your tea!” LOL
I had to admit that learning that expression was the best thing to come out of that terrible episode.
We are all a work in progress. It is normal for my teen daughter to treat me badly (within reason), I tell myself. We need to keep working on communicating better and being kind to each other. But holy crap is it hard! This raising teenagers—and especially girls, while I’m going through my own struggles—is no joke.
Another thing I remind myself in this difficult season of my life is that, as I’ve been told by people who know more about this than I do, the reason my daughter sometimes acts cruelly is because she feels safe and knows that no one loves her more in this world than me and her dad. We sometimes treat the worst the ones we love the most. Pot, kettle, black.
A few things I read this week while full of dread and RAGE:
Rebecca Solnit, in her new (rad) newsletter Meditations in an Emergency writes about the precarious and uncertain, but certainly bonkers, moment we are living in:
…Remember that underneath what we're furious about is what we care about, that our deepest feeling in this moment isn't necessarily anger, but protectiveness for what we love that may feel like fury. And that love is very, very powerful.
Maybe there’s something in that sentiment I can find meaning in for myself at home, too. Not to minimize the gravity of this particular moment in time, but I am mired in the murky and sometimes perilous waters of parenting and although at times I want to jump ship, I also feel SO protective of my family. My world is smaller than I’d like it to be right now. But love is what anchors it.
Also, laughter is my preferred medicine. Here are a couple things that made me laugh already this week and it’s only Wednesday:
From one of my favorite newsletters —in fact, the one that inspired me to write this one—Today in Tabs, started in 2013 (long before Substack existed!) by the hilariously brilliant Rusty Foster:
“Donald Trump is a gutless bully, a bloated home-pooper who has never experienced love or contentment or true human warmth, and never will, and that’s a fatal weakness.”
“A bloated home-pooper” Hehehe. The bathroom at Mar-al-Lago…the one where all the top secret files were kept? Gross.
The subject of Rusty’s wildly funny and informative missive is the INSANITY that is our government right now: “I guess it’s coup season,” he writes. Read the whole thing here.
And this meme:
Are you ready? It’s time to fight—the good kind of fighting, not the bad kind (see above)—and to laugh! So buckle up. It’s only just begun.