This is Adolescence: 16
By Marcelle Soviero
Sixteen is full of paper thin promise, delicate due to the decisions I can’t make for her anymore, decisions that will determine what happens next.
Stunning in her complexity, 16 balances in the gray area—in my moment of hesitation after she asks if she can stay out later tonight. Before I can answer she says, “Great, thanks Mom,” and I wonder if she’s heard me or if this is sarcasm. I don’t know if she’s going out with the older boyfriend I don’t like and don’t trust. “Not with HIM,” I shout as she hops in a friend’s car parked in front of the house, because some of 16’s friends drive now. And some of 16’s friends have sex and drink and smoke pot.
Sixteen is my peanut, the nickname I gave her when she appeared on the ultrasound in that shape. She is still my small-framed, green-eyed wild child. She is experimentation, pushing every button I have, and hugging me in between.
Sixteen loves me. She loves me not.
Sixteen is different than the early years, when milestones were more predictable—first steps, first days of school. Sixteen is unique, sometimes volatile, and I’m more alone and insecure in my parenting than ever before.
My sixteen is ripped jeans, eyes stenciled with black eyeliner and the Bob Dylan station on Pandora. She is love and peace; she is hate and war. She is the girl in the back of the class, not trying too hard. She is nothing I expected and everything I wanted.
She loves me. She loves me not.
She is the one who set her own path in kindergarten, dressing herself in her snowsuit and leaving the classroom to play outside, alone. She did not need cohorts to mastermind ideas, if others came along, they came along, if not, then not. She is still that way.
Unlike many of the 6-year-olds at that small non-conforming but still impossible-for-my-daughter Montessori school, she hated flower arranging and helping the teacher. My 6 loved to collect rocks on the playground, stash them in her pockets, and empty them when she got home. “See,” she would say displaying what was really gravel in her hands, and I’d ask her what she liked about those rocks. “They’re mine.” And I wonder now if those rocks made her feel grounded.
Sixteen is flunking Algebra Two, getting her driving permit in spite of my efforts to hold her back from the wheel of a car, you can always start next year, I say casually. Sixteen needs to prepare for SATs. “I’m not going to college,” she says when I sign her up for a test prep course. “I’m taking a gap year.” She is not, I say. Not a chance. She leaves the room and I am panicking, the prospect of 16 living at home for another year, it is not a warm vision, and I am glazed in guilt. Then she comes back. “What day is the test?” I don’t realize now that some day in the near future she will apply to far away schools, and I will wonder why so far, and wonder if it’s me. And I will miss her until my heart cracks sideways.
She loves me. She loves me not.
Sixteen is my first child, the first grandchild, the only person my mother—her grandmother—remembers now after five years of dementia. When we walk into the nursing home my mother looks at me and says “Sophia?” “No Mom,” I say, “she’s coming.” When 16 arrives my mother kisses her and 16 hugs back, and I remember “the hug” when 16 was six. When I told her her father and I were getting divorced, “and never getting back together,” so she wouldn’t get her hopes up. She scootched her way out of the big upholstered chair where she had been reading her Lola book and came to me, her shoulders narrow under her ladybug sundress. She took my hand and we walked out to the swingset and sat side by side. “Watch me kick the clouds,” she said. “Mommy kick the clouds!”
The clouds are not kickable these days and they are often lined with black. No silver. No blue. Really, I can’t tell. The storm changes by the day. No hour. No minute. She is suspended for buying alcohol but she is also first violin in the county orchestra. She is a girl in a tattooed halo, my girl. Regardless.
She loves me. She loves me not.
Sixteen is full of paper thin promise, delicate due to the decisions I can’t make for her anymore, decisions that will determine what happens next. Yet she has no fear and no sense of consequence; she makes the same mistakes more than once, if the boyfriend asks her to ride on his motorcycle—to do almost anything—she’ll do it, then tell me, “it’s no big deal, Mom.” And I will have my words with her, and she will dismiss those words before they even have a chance to dissolve in the air.
Sixteen quit the volleyball team, and instead got a job as a counselor in an after school program she once attended, the program where she lost her first tooth during the square dance in the gym. When I pick her up at work she is the only adult in the room, with a dozen 1st graders, and I am astonished. Little girl, I want to say, where did you go?
And she loves me. She loves me not.
Sixteen breaks up with her boyfriend, “to be the breaker is harder than to be the breakee sometimes, Peanut,” I say. She tells me too much about the relationship (I get all or nothing) and I note to call the gynecologist in the morning. We sit on her bed, legs Indian style, cans of cranberry lime seltzer on the bedside table. She is crying and her pale face against the orange walls that were once wall-papered with baby barn animals, looks older. Instead of the froggy sheets with matching comforter, the one we sit on is tie dye, and she has written I hate her, in ink across the top edge of the blanket, and I wonder if it’s me she is writing about.
She loves me. She loves me not.
Sixteen stays home from school sick, we snuggle on the couch both stuffy-nosed and sleepy. “I caught it from you,” she says laughing. “No you,” I say. And I am reminded of the day she saw the first psychologist and told me after the session that she caught my depression, that I passed it to her, as if I passed the mashed potatoes. I blamed myself. I blame myself for all of it. Always. I look at her on the couch next to me, spent and sniffling. “Peanut let’s go get ice cream,” I say and we drive to Stop n’ Shop in our sweatpants and slippers and buy three flavors of Haagan Dazs. It is 10:00 in the morning. “You are so much fun Mom,” Sixteen says as we check out. And I think, I am fun.
And she loves me, and I stop here.
Marcelle Soviero is the Editor-in-Chief of Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, and the author of An Iridescent Life: Essays on Motherhood.
This is the sixth episode of This is Adolescence, an essay series conceived by Lindsey Mead and Allison Slater Tate. The series will be published in full in Brain, Child’s Special Issue for Parents of T(w)eens, coming in Spring 2015. To order our previous special issues for Parents of Teens click here.
