This is Adolescence – Author Q&A: Bethany Meyer

Posted on April 21, 2015 by CNF • Posted in General • Tagged adolescence, Bethany Meyer, teens, thirteen, twens • Leave a comment

What is it about mothering a 13-year-old that you liked the most?

I love to laugh, and so does my teenager. By age 13, my son’s sense of humor had matured enough that he and I could share an abundance of movies, books, and television shows. We talked more, texted our favorite lines, and emailed clips we each knew would make the other laugh. It bonded us in a new way. It was unexpected and fantastic.

The least?

Once my son turned 13, he engaged less and less frequently with his younger brothers. He shares a room with his brother who is 19 months younger, and my 13 year old’s silence changed the dynamic of their relationship. My second son felt that loss keenly. While this withdrawal was developmentally appropriate, the effect of it on his siblings was still difficult to witness.

When did you know your child was a teenager?

When he began surfacing for breakfast at 11:00 a.m., four hours after the rest of the family had finished eating.

What do you wish you knew before you had a teen?

I had no idea how much a single person could eat between 7:00 and 10:00 p.m. every night. I have never witnessed anything like the teenage appetite.

What advice do you wish you could tell your former self about mothering a 13-year-old?

Hug him every day. He may act like he doesn’t need or appreciate the show of affection, but don’t let that stop you. Embrace him every day.

What about motherhood inspires you?

Knowing my children are connecting with people outside our immediate family inspires me. From their first acquaintances in pre-school to their newest teammates on the soccer field, every time one of my children makes a friend I smile.

What do you hope readers will take with them from your piece?

Once you have a teenager, life changes for everyone in the house—parents, teenager, and siblings. Some of those changes feel like a kick in the gut. But there is still space to connect. It’s worth identifying that space. It helps you, as a parent, feel bonded to your child and able to celebrate his growing independence.

Purchase Brain, Child’s Special Issue for Parents of Teens, which includes the This is Adolescence Series – Eight essays from America’s leading writers on ages 11 – 18.

Read an excerpt: This is Adolescence: 12

This is Adolescence – Author Q&A: Lindsey Mead

Posted on April 20, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Book Reviews • Tagged adolescence, kids, Lindsey Mead, mother writer, teens. tweens • Leave a comment

What is it about mothering an 11-year-old that you liked the most? The least?

I love 11. I know this particularly keenly now, writing three months into 12, because things feel different in a material way. Eleven felt like a golden time. I loved her company and she loved mine. Sports were important but not crushing. She was funny and smart and thoughtful and not yet moody. The only thing I liked least about 11 was that it ended.

When did you know your child was a tween/teenager?

I knew she was a tween when she really wanted Instagram. I let her have it, but our rules were (and still are) that she doesn’t post selfies, she doesn’t post group photos that might make others feel excluded, she has to ask before posting anything and when accepting follow requests. Somehow Instagram felt like the harbinger of a new season.

What do you wish you knew before you had a tween/teen?

I wish I knew that we’d make it through these famously rocky years with our bond intact. I wish I knew that before she entered tween-hood and frankly I still wish I knew that now that she’s in it. I have a lot of fear about what the next few years will bring, and I wish I could trust that on the other end we’ll be fine.

What advice do you wish you could tell your former self about mothering an 11-year-old?

Don’t sweat the little stuff. I remember people telling me tweens needed their parents more than infants and being absolutely flabbergasted by this. “But she sucks on my body every two hours. How could she possibly need me more than this?” I asked once. And it’s a different kind of need, but it’s a need all the same. It’s real and I wish I hadn’t worried so much about the baby ear infections and food introductions and all of that, because I see now it didn’t matter.

What about motherhood inspires you?

My children make me laugh every day. They say things that make me think, and their surprising moments of humor and kindness often take my breath away. They inspire me to be gentler and more positive in the world.

What do you hope readers will take with them from your piece?

I hope my piece reminds readers to take a moment to notice the details of where they are in their lives, right now. So much of motherhood—and life itself—is transient and fleeting, and the primary goal of writing for me is to capture some of a particular moment’s nuance and shimmer. If I can help even one reader do that, that’s a tremendous honor.

Purchase Brain, Child’s Special Issue for Parents of Teens, which includes the This is Adolescence Series – Eight essays from America’s leading writers on ages 11 – 18.

Read an excerpt: This is Adolescence: 12

Lucky Day

Posted on June 2, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Highlights • Tagged adolescence, Amy Silverman, mothering, puberty, special needs, toddler, tweens • 1 Comment

By Amy Silverman

One morning not long ago, I found myself in the bathroom with my 10-year-old daughter, Sophie.

This is not an uncommon occurrence. We live in Tempe, Arizona, in an old house with screened porches and original hardwood floors, but only one bathroom you’d want to spend any amount of time in, and let’s just say its charm is limited. I’m pretty sure that if you tugged too hard on the soap dish in the bathtub, the entire house would come down.

But it’s all we’ve got, and my husband Ray affectionately refers to it as the “his and hers and hers and hers bathroom.”

As our daughters have gotten older, Ray’s bathroom time has shrunk considerably. Our little girls are growing up.

Well, one of them is. At nearly 13, Annabelle is a ballerina, petite and poised; she leaves behind a trail of hair nets, nail polish bottles and Instagram photos, and is appropriately modest about her changing body.

Sophie’s a little more complicated. She has Down syndrome, an extra 21st chromosome that affects every bit of her. From her straight hair to her oddly shaped toes, Sophie doesn’t look like the rest of us. I have heard that sometimes kids with Down syndrome go through puberty early. That is not the case, so far, with Sophie. She’ll soon be 11 and shows no physical signs of change.

She’s not very happy about that.

So there we were, Sophie and me, together in the bathroom one morning before school. We both needed showers, and she was up first. I turned on the water, then turned to Sophie. Much like getting Sophie to put on her shoes, or eat her dinner, or give me back the iPhone she’s snagged, this task – getting her into the shower – required a serious game plan.

I cajoled and bargained her out of her clothes, and was insisting that no, taking a shower did not deserve the reward of a shopping spree at Barnes and Noble, when Sophie stopped, grinned and held up one arm.

“I have armpit hair!” she insisted. “Feel it!”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” I said, running my fingers along her armpit, distracted by the clock and the day’s long “to do” list.

“Hey, Sophie, I’m sorry,” I said, pulling my hand back and tuning in to the conversation. “I don’t feel any armpit hair. You’ll get it, but you don’t have it yet.”

Her eyes welled with tears, her naked little chest started to heave.

Shit! I thought. At this rate, we’ll never get to school.

“I know!” I said. “Let’s check and see if you have any hair – you know where.”

“Okay!” she said, super excited.

I crouched down and squinted hard, standing up straight to report my findings. A white lie wouldn’t really hurt, right? We couldn’t afford another tardy at school.

“I see some!” I said.

You would have thought I’d told the kid we were going to live at Disneyland. She jumped up and down, squealing, her entire body shaking with the kind of pure joy most of us are lucky enough to experience once or twice in lifetime, and announced,

“IT’S MY LUCKY DAY!”

It was my lucky day the day Sophie was born, though I certainly didn’t know that then. Before Sophie, I’d never met another person with Down syndrome and had no idea what it meant, other than that this was going to seriously fuck things up. When Sophie was about two weeks old, I suddenly remembered something that made my stomach fall to my ankles: Pink Slip.

In the early 1990s, there was a VHS tape that made the rounds at certain parties in Phoenix. Ray and I had both seen it. Known as “Pink Slip,” it was an instructional video about menstruation from the 1960s or 70s, the kind the school nurse showed, but different because this one was geared toward a girl who was “slow.” That’s all I thought of her as – slow. It wasn’t until Sophie was an infant and I went back and watched the video on YouTube that I realized that, like Sophie, this girl had Down syndrome.

Since she was “slow,” it took a lot of extra explanation to teach this girl, Jill, about her period. In fact, in the video, the entire family gets in on the act. Mom and sister Susie show Jill a big calendar and explain (again and again – and again) that “every 28 days, blood will come out from an opening between your legs for three or four days.” We all thought it was hilarious. At least, I thought we all did. I know I did, a fact I owned unhappily the day I made the connection between Sophie and Pink Slip.

“I’m going to have to show that video to Sophie someday,” I thought, wincing.

Ten years later, I realized it was time to teach her about puberty. I didn’t know what I was going to do about it, but I did know one thing: No way was “Pink Slip” going to be the way Sophie learned about her period.

There had to be a better way, something less condescending. Something that hadn’t made the rounds at parties – and now on the Internet – as a big, fat joke. So when the local Down syndrome support group sent out an email advertising a puberty workshop, I signed us up.

The workshop, led by the foremost authority on Down syndrome and puberty, was split into two parts. The first day was for parents only, with a Power Point presentation and hand outs about how to teach a developmentally disabled young person about puberty. The plan was to come back the next day and separate into two groups, boys and girls, for The Talk.

“So tomorrow,” the speaker said as we were wrapping things up on the first day, “I will be showing a video about menstruation. It’s pretty out dated, I know you’ll all laugh at it, but it’s – “

I raised my hand.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Pink Slip,” was all I could get out. Ray was staring shut-the-fuck-up daggers at me.

“Oh no,” she said. “That’s not the name. I don’t recall it at the moment. You’ll love this one. It’s about two sisters -“

“Jill and Susie,” I said, my face hot.

“Well, yes,” the instructor said. “But it’s not called “Pink Slip.””

Oh God, I thought. It has a street name.

“Yes it is,” I said.

“How do you know about it?” she asked.

“Let’s talk after class,” I said.

“Okay, here’s the thing,” I told her after class. “I’m not proud of this, but we used to watch that video at parties and laugh.”

Ray chimed in: “I never thought it was funny.”

Thanks, Ray.

The next day, Sophie and I showed up for the girls-only meeting. We talked about safety and crushes and the girls went into the bathroom to try on pads. When the instructor drew a girl’s figure on the board and asked everyone to add a body part, Sophie added a bra.

When it came time for the video, the foremost authority on Down syndrome and puberty gave me a funny look then showed something else. Not “Pink Slip,” but instead an innocuous, modern, dumbed down explanation about getting your period.

Since the workshop, Sophie has been obsessed with puberty. And so in the morning, when she’s procrastinating, I find myself agreeing to let her wear deodorant – which she doesn’t need – if she brushes her hair first. Mascara if she takes her thyroid medicine. And always, a bra from her collection.

The other day, Sophie was about to get in the shower when she announced, “I got my period yesterday!”

“You got your what?!” I sputtered.

“My period!” she said.

“Well, okay,” I said. “Here’s the deal. If you really got your period, then there would be blood on your underwear.”

We both looked down at her crumpled Barbie panties on the floor and lunged for them at the same time. A spirited game of keep away ensued.

I held the stain-free panties aloft, victorious.

“I really did get it!” Sophie said.

“You didn’t get it yet, but you will – soon,” I said. “I promise. Now get in the shower.”

Sophie climbed carefully into the tub. I adjusted the temperature of the water, secured the shower curtain, made sure she could reach the No More Tears shampoo. As I walked down the hall to my bedroom, I could hear her singing her ABCs and was reminded that, despite the bra collection and the hair obsession, Sophie is still a very young girl. And on so many levels, despite what happens to her body, she is destined to stay that way.

Amy Silverman is managing editor of Phoenix New Times. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, on the radio show This American Life and on salon.com. She co-teaches the workshop Mothers Who Write and blogs at Girl in a Party Hat [www.girlinapartyhat.com]. Amy lives with her husband and children in Tempe, Arizona.

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The First Tour

Posted on June 2, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Highlights • Tagged adolescence, children and childhood, Christi Clancy, college, emotions, family, leaving, loss, motherhood, teen/tween, teenagers, teens • 1 Comment

By Christi Clancy

I never thought that a college tour with my seventeen-year-old daughter would be an emotionally fraught experience. I’m a professor, so I’m used to the campus environment. Our friends who have gone through this process marvel at the ways colleges have changed since we went to school, but I’m not surprised by mindfulness classes and meditation rooms, dining halls with vegan and gluten-free options and gender-neutral dorms and bathrooms.

But there I was on my first campus tour, not a professor, just another mom in a traveling pod of parents, siblings and high school juniors following our guide’s bouncing ponytail. She was a pretty, self-assured co-ed in Cleopatra sandals and Raybans. She pointed out the student artwork in the library, the international studies office and the common room in the dorm where a lonely looking kid in a t-shirt that said WEED banged on a piano. She’d pause occasionally and put her hand on her hip. “Any questions?”

I didn’t know what to ask. I couldn’t even focus. I was thinking about how old all the mothers and fathers looked, and I was roughly their same age. I’d tripped on one of those age touchstones that launch you into existential angst. Where had all the years gone? Wasn’t I just in college myself? Why didn’t I think about schools in California? Why didn’t I look at small, private colleges? Why didn’t I major in geology? Why hadn’t I traveled abroad? What would it be like to start over again, forging a whole different chain of life decisions, starting with this one?

I looked over at Olivia. I could still picture her in her car seat even though she’s half a foot taller than I am. She was walking with her arms across her chest, the sun glinting in her golden hair. She was far enough away to be mistaken for a student, which was probably her goal. I wanted to shout out that she was mine. I had a vision of her walking happily across the quad to class while I was two thousand miles away … two thousand miles! Going to a college far away sounded fine before, adventuresome. Now I could measure that distance by the inch.

Suddenly I wanted to duck into a bathroom to cry. What was my problem? Olivia had already taken the ACT twice. We’d talked about college, poured over the US News and World Report rankings and researched student to faculty ratios and acceptance rates.

I thought of a story I’d heard from a woman whose child had been born premature but survived. She said that even years later, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her child had been ripped out of her, ripped away. The late high school years are like the final trimester of a second, different kind of gestation. I must have gotten it into my head that we were both developing, approaching a point of ripeness, like an egg timer would ding and she’d be mature enough to leave me and survive, and I’d be ready to turn her bedroom into an office.

Letting go might be easy for some people, but on that college tour I started to think that it’s going to be a lot harder for me to be emotionally prepared for her to leave home than I’d thought. She’d been a horrible, colicky baby, comforted only by the hum of a vacuum cleaner. But over the years she turned into my favorite person to spend time with. We read People Magazine while we get pedicures, have long conversations about politics and religion, watch dumb reality TV shows and do her crazy workouts standing side by side in front of the mirrors at the gym.

It’s not that we have a perfect relationship. I resent the piles of clothes, crumbs on the countertops, the loud blender she uses to make her kale and chia seed smoothies in the morning. I worry when she’s out late, and we go to battle over too-tight, too-low outfits. But her habits, her days, are braided into my own, and the process of unbraiding will be a challenge— one that seemed unimaginable, or that I really just didn’t understand until we started looking at colleges.

Some of my friends have confessed that they experienced trauma when their kids left home, but I insisted to myself that they were the exception instead of the rule, and that the trauma was short-lived. One friend said she didn’t know how to fill her time anymore, while another friend said she would fold laundry on her daughter’s bed and cry and cry. My friend Susie said it’s not just your kid going to college that makes you sad, but the way your family changes, and you can’t ever go back. “Oh, honey. It’s like jumping off a bridge.”

Maybe the good news is that the jump happens in slow motion, one college tour, ACT test and college application at a time, slow enough that you understand what’s happening even if you can’t quite absorb it. Who knows, in another year I might be ready. But ever since the tours started, I go to sleep at night, thankful that my family is all under the same roof. Our daily drive to the high school seems more poignant. I feel a little rip in my gut every time she gets out of my car and I watch her walk towards the double-doors, one day closer to leaving.

Christi Clancy teaches English at Beloit College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Glimmer Train Stories, Hobart, Literary Mama and Wisconsin Public Radio. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband and two kids, Olivia and Tim.

Family Portrait

Posted on March 24, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged addiction, adolescence, alcohol, Anne Spollen, drug addiction, drugs, mothering teens, parenting teens, teen essays, teens, tweens • 6 Comments

By Anne Spollen

I am a recent refugee from the life I planned since I was twelve. For the last twenty years, I have been a mostly stay-at-home mom. I was the kind of mom who read to my kids pre-natally, breastfed, pureed baby food made from organically grown community supported agriculture, and dreaded their inevitable discovery of soda. I carried not only Band-Aids in my purse, but Neosporin and dry socks.

My kids had music lessons and birthday parties, religious instruction, family connections, parents who loved them. They had a community they were part of; they had success at school. They had safety and health and friends in abundance.

My dream had been delivered; here they were: bright eyed and bright, creative and thriving. For some people, life never gets this good and I knew it. I thanked Providence every day for my luck and love with these kids.

And then it all changed.

One spring day in the eighth grade, my middle son began drinking with a group of new friends. There was no warning: the kids arrived on bicycles at my front stoop in the same way a summer storm arrives. They had squeaky voices and acne. The boys seemed harmless. They told me they were going on the bike paths and I watched my son leave with them. When he came home, I smelled the alcohol on his breath.

By late summer, the scent of weed drifted from his room. Pills arrived as the leaves changed. Then he changed. He grew agitated and violent. He struck me when he didn’t get what he wanted.

I would think back to the days before the boys on bicycles arrived. How had this happened? And how had it happened so quickly?

We hired counselors and had him hospitalized. Sometimes the calm reigned for a few weeks, then the cycle would begin again. The drugs created strange behaviors, which led to multiple diagnoses. Some doctors said he had major depressive disorder; others pronounced him bipolar. They gave him pills. I had never heard of pill-chasing behavior, but I quickly came to see that my son could manipulate psychiatrists into giving him drugs. He knew the names of the pills he wanted and the symptoms he would feign to get them. Ultimately, he had no psychiatric illness aside from addiction.

A former honor student, my son began failing subjects. His intellectual energy was utilized in creating ways to obtain drugs. He was good at it. Money disappeared. Jewelry. Then trust and communication. He hid his phone and his thoughts. I would look at my son, only fifteen years old, and his eyes would glint in a way I had never before seen.

Then came the bombshell: his older brother told me that their father, an alcoholic supposedly in recovery for years, had participated in the first drinks with him back in the eighth grade. On that spring afternoon, they bonded over their mutual addictive behaviors.

My twenty three years of marriage ended as his father sheltered our son’s behavior. He allowed him to leave school at fifteen and take online high school. I fled to a New York apartment with my fourteen-year-old daughter. It was a refuge. From there, I would try to find a way to help my son.

One night after the divorce, I was cancelling email accounts in both names, my ex-husband’s email account accidentally opened. That’s when I saw the summons for my son’s arrest.

Arrest? I had not been told. Addiction thrives in secrecy.

This boy, a former National Honor student who had played in a Philharmonic band at the age of thirteen, had three felony counts against him.

They each involved heroin.

I used to think of heroin along with an image of poverty, of disenfranchised individuals who slept through rainstorms on city sidewalks. But of course, like any economic system, drug dealers need clients – and theirs tend to die young. Affluent teens of suburbia have stepped in to fill that vacancy. My son was one of them.

My son. I shut the computer off and sat there for a very long time after the reading the words of the arrest. I wished for someone to come into that living room and make everything better: I wanted Mary Poppins with a pocketbook full of songs and suboxen.

I spent that night looking through my son’s baby pictures, through his drawings and cards that he had given to me over the years. I Googled what type of person becomes a heroin addict until I realized I was looking for a reason so I could stop blaming myself. But there was no Neosporin for a heroine addiction, no amount of Band-Aids or dry socks.

I called his father. “What arrest?” he asked in a happy sing-song voice, despite the fact that the arrest summons was in his email. That is the voice of denial: it’s like living in a margin somewhere between surrealism and Dr. Seuss. Addicts and alcoholics live in that space where nothing is real; if it’s not real, it doesn’t have to be addressed.

My son, still a teen, is a heroin addict. I write that sentence and it is dream-like to me. Some nights I still Google heroin addiction. The experts state over and over that addiction is genetic. Still, I know this only intellectually; my emotions haven’t learned that yet.

I study addiction statistics. I go to open meetings for any kind of addiction. I want to know why doctors dispense scripts for hydrocodone as if it’s Tylenol when it is routinely listed as one of the three most addictive substances on earth. My son has told me that he first became addicted to hydrocodone, or Vicodin. “It was love,” he said. “It was all I ever wanted to feel.”

These pills change brain function. The drug makes itself the number one priority to the brain; life is second. Its use stops the creation of positive feelings. The user needs more and more of the drug. Tolerance builds. Then hydrocodone turns nastier. It no longer brings any type of euphoria; it only relieves the unbearable symptoms of withdrawal.

But pills are expensive, between twenty and thirty dollars a pill. Heroin runs about four dollars a fold now and does the trick. And it’s running through American high schools with the strength and speed of a rumor.

I got my son into a rehabilitation facility several states away. I cried as the plane lifted off because I knew he was on heroin even as he sat in his seat. But he was safe. I could breathe. Until the director of the facility called to let me know that my son’s father had sent a plane ticket back two weeks into the program. The director had wanted him to stay there for ninety days, then go to a halfway house. But my son was eighteen by now, there was nothing I could do.

At least after rehab, we could talk, my son and I. It was guarded conversation, but we could connect on some level. My son is trying to stay clean now. Involved in a program and meetings, I call him each day to make sure he has not relapsed, that his heart is still beating. I have to will myself not to think about him all the time or I wouldn’t be able to function. I have moments now where I do not think about him. I can’t afford to.

Two days ago, my young teen daughter went to visit her father and brother. When she came home, she was clearly under the influence of opiates. She refused a drug test.

Anne Spollen is the mother of three children. She has published numerous essays, poems and stories, in addition to two young adult novels: The Shape of Water and Light Beneath Ferns. She currently lives in Staten Island where she teaches college and is working on a book of essays exploring the effect addiction has had on her family. She can be reached at her website: annespollen.org

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Birch Whisperer

Posted on October 21, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page • Tagged adolescence, boys, Debbie Hagan, mental illness, mother and son, mothering, teens • 1 Comment

By Debbie Hagan

Above the black pines, above the rock crags, above the frozen streams I soar. Eyes shut, I am armless, legless, bodiless, weightless—a spirit cut loose, suspended over treetops. My nostrils fill with the sparkles of mountain air, and miraculously this lifts me so I’m floating higher and higher to a sunnier, more joyful place.

A sharp jerk and I awaken to realize I’m in a chairlift scaling the side of Sugar Loaf Mountain—ascending 1,400 feet. From a small cable, I dangle with my fifteen-year-old son who wonders why we’ve stopped. A pile-up on the off-ramp? A ski patroller loading a gurney? A mechanical failure? I look to the tiny cable that holds our enormous weight, and I think it’ll start in a minute. It always does.

I look to my son. Icicles dangle from his blonde chin hairs. He’s strangely stiff, his ski gloves iced to the restraining bar. I consider poking him just to be sure he’s okay. Then fog rises behind his goggles, and I know at least he’s breathing.

“Are you having a good time?” I ask.

I listen for that Mickey Mouse-high, ever-chipper voice that used to beg me for one more ryn.

He grunts, and his frozen face expresses what his lips can’t seem to say, Yeah right, Mom, I’m lovin’ this—freezing my ass off, sitting in a God-damn metal chair blown about by a Nor’easter.

Two more runs, I tell myself. Then I’ll let him go back to the condo, play his video games—whatever makes him happy. I just want this to be fun.

Then my heart sinks. I see poking out of his left ski glove, his hospital wristband, the one he wore four days ago in the psych ward. I try to think of something happy, like the time we raced down the slope to see who would end up in the lodge first. We’d hockey-stopped almost simultaneously, defrosted over mugs of chocolate, and then laughed at our whipped cream mustaches. It was fun, wasn’t it?

Now I take my fingers from my gloves, roll them into fists, and think, Oh God, when will this chair ever start? I can’t stand this endlessly waiting. Finally, I explode, “I see you’re still wearing your hospital bracelet.”

Instantly I want to take this back.

Connor stares at me.

I expect a snide remark, but he just lifts his shoulder. “I don’t know why I wear it. My name’s worn off.”

“Oh.”

Minutes drag by. More silence, more waiting. We dangle as I stare at the ground—at least 100 feet below. So close, but so far.

“How long are we going to be stopped?” Connor asks as if he thinks I have a hotline to the lift tower: Let’s see, one minute, thirty-two seconds.

The truth is I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen today, tomorrow, or even within the next thirty seconds. I hope. I wait. I guess. But nothing is certain. There’s nothing to do, but sit here in the cold and wait.

Suddenly the chair lurches, and we’re moving—skimming above trails cut by skiers and rabbits whose prints crisscross as if they can’t decide where to run.

Another minute passes, and I see the off-ramp—and I feel confident, just fifteen seconds and we’ll be free. I push up the restraining bar, which groans as it hits the back of the chair and gives us a good shake. I organize my poles, straighten my skis, and imagine us turning around the bend, sailing down the ridge, flying in the face of all our worries, letting them blow right over us.

But the chair stops again. We bob up and down. I grab the side. There’s fifty-foot drop in front of us.

My eyes shoot to my son.

He doesn’t appear scared in the least. In fact, he looks as if he’s caught up in a dream, staring down at the gnarled birch branches. I follow his gaze. The dark, wind-twisted limbs look like devil fingers curling towards us, coaxing us down.

Connor leans slightly forward, and then cocks his head as if he’s trying to hear them whisper.

He asks, “Do you think I’d be hurt if I jumped?”

Debbie Hagan is a freelance writer with more than 500 published articles and columns, she is also a Manuscript Consultant at Grub Street in Boston, Massachusetts.

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My Adolescent Life

Posted on October 7, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged adolescence, candy schulman, mothering, teens, tweens • 7 Comments

By Candy Schulman

This is how it feels to be the mother of a thirteen-year-old: every time we share a special moment together, I worry it’s the last one. I’ve read Reviving Ophelia and commiserated with friends who have already endured tumultuous times with their teenage daughters. I can still vividly remember my own adolescence. The lies I kept from my mother…the make-up I bought with money stolen from her purse…the fury I felt toward her old-fashioned, restrictive ways…the acute embarrassment she could cause merely by just showing up in front of my friends…the fights we had—over everything: hemlines, homework, household chores, curfews, career aspirations. I had my own secret life, albeit tame by today’s standards. I told my mother almost nothing. We were strangers by the time I was thirteen.

Today’s parents escort their children everywhere until almost driving age, it seems. I was a latchkey kid making my own lunch at the age of eight. At thirteen, my daughter still has difficulty “unzipping” a banana. Our generation of parents will undoubtedly be analyzed, maybe even criticized, for micromanaging our children’s lives. Adolescence, from the Latin adolescere meaning “to grow up,” no longer ends in late teens. New terms like “boomerang kids” and “emerging adulthood” have been created to define twentysomethings. Our kids move back home. The cell phone, some claim, is the longest umbilical cord ever invented.

I began to let go of my daughter when she was three weeks old, nursing her and quickly handing her over to a babysitter, running out to teach my class and be home before her next feeding time. I let go of her when she was twelve, reluctantly allowing her to walk eight blocks to school with friends. I have never punished or hit her, and sometimes remind her, when she’s sassy, that I had my mouth washed out with soap for far less offensive behavior. Her greatest restriction is that I don’t allow TV on school nights and I limit her access to the Internet. She has been allowed to make many decisions for such a young girl, whereas I was always told what to do (and more often, what not to do). When I came home from school the day we selected instruments for seventh grade orchestra, my mother was horrified that I’d picked drums. “We have a clarinet and a saxophone in this house, and you’ll choose one of those,” she commanded. I hated clarinet and gave it up after a year. Today if a child wants to play the drums, her parents would not only rush out to buy a set and welcome the noisy practice, but likely to take her for lessons at a specialty African drumming school.

We want to be our children’s “friend,” yet we can’t really be. We have to say “no” and let our children separate from us—even rebel. I “shadowed” Amy on the first day she walked to school, watching her from across the street. One year later I still worry whenever she forges somewhere new on her own. My mother used to say, “Come back for dinner” when we left to go who-knows-where?

It’s a different world today, but from the moment I learned from amniocentesis results that Amy was a girl, I tried to prepare myself for the time when she would reject me, even momentarily hate me. Some of her peers have already started. Every time I think Amy’s going to shut me out (there’s a DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door but she still leaves the door open), she lets me visit a little while longer. I cherish the reprieve, knowing it’s temporary, believing I may have just a tiny bit of time left.

And I try to avoid tears when I call her on a Friday at school dismissal time, suggesting she meet me at a store where I’ve found a pair of jeans she’s been yearning for, and she brusquely barks into the cell phone I bought her: “I’m with my friends! Can’t talk to you now. We’re going for ice cream together.” I stroll home through the park on a lovely spring afternoon, alone, the way I once enjoyed my private time before I had a daughter. This is my new life, but I’m already grieving for the mother/daughter life I’ve left behind. I sit in the park and listen to a folk singer’s free concert. Who am I? Where am I? Where is Amy?

We go to Florida a few months after Amy’s thirteenth birthday, just the two of us. My 89-year-old mother is ailing, and I take Amy to see her. We used to stay in my mom’s apartment but now her live-in caretaker sleeps in the den where we used to camp out on vacations. I book a hotel on the beach, and Amy thinks it’s cool to have beachfront breakfasts watching a line of lifeguards swim a half mile straight out into the ocean and back before taking their posts for the day. We spend mornings visiting with Grandma, and have some time for ourselves on the beach as well.

We rent bicycles built for two, giggling as we try to steer straight on the boardwalk. Become lost in long books under umbrellas staked in the sand. We take nightly walks in the moonlight, avoiding the kissing couples we pass on the beach. Amy shows off her seventh grade earth science knowledge, identifying the phase of the moon while she savors a chocolate ice cream cone. We sit in the sand close to the shore and watch the waves break.

“You know,” Amy says, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer, like you, because I look up to you.”

“You do?” I say, surprised at my surprise. I know she admires me, but lately she expresses embarrassment or distaste for my clothing, my fears, my singing, my mere presence.

“Of course I look up to you,” she says. “You’re amazing.”

“In what way?”

“You’re kind to people. The way you take care of Grandma. The way you help your students. Even strangers on the street.”

“That’s so nice to hear.”

She looks me straight in the eye. “Mom,” she says, “when you take a sip of water, I take a sip.”

Joyously I try to hold onto her words as long as possible. She bites into her chocolate sugar cone. If this is our last tranquil moment together, then it is a great one. We stroll back to our hotel, holding hands in the dark. Amy takes the ice bucket down the hall to fill it up. We’re both very thirsty.

Candy Schulman’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Parents, Salon.com, Babble.com, The Chicago Tribune and in several anthologies. She is an Associate Professor of Writing at The New School in New York City.

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I Looked Away and She Was Gone

Posted on July 29, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged adolescence, daughters, girls, loss, mother, mothering, teens, tweens • 14 Comments

By Janelle Hanchett

My daughter, she’s eleven. She’ll be twelve in November. She grew up one day a couple months ago.

We were going to a town about an hour away, in California’s Napa Valley, to hear my friend’s sister sing in a rock-n-roll band. We were going to have dinner first.

My daughter put on a dress, boots, hat, elbow-length gloves, and five years.

She wore them like a loose veil across cheek bones I never noticed, on the poise of squared shoulders, soft over eyes that knew something, something more than me, something adults know, or almost know, if they could remember.

She nearly stopped my heart when I saw her in that get-up, so beautiful she snatched my breath and words. I looked at her and looked harder and harder to see it clearly.

A woman?

The second I saw it, it vanished, and there stood again my little one, my first one, who played in the sand and still does sometimes.

My Ava. She was born when I was 22-years-old. I thought having her would be a cool new thing to do. Like going to Mexico or backpacking around Europe. We got her name from a magazine article about Ava Gardner. It wasn’t popular then. I thought it was the most beautiful name I’d ever heard.

“Mama, I hate you!” She screams and runs off.

I stir the meat in the pan and heat like the cast iron before me. I think “How dare she speak to me that way.” I AM THE MOTHER. I think about storming down the hall and demanding better treatment. HOW DARE YOU. Who do you think you are?

Well I’m a girl, growing up, and it sucks sometimes.A victim of biology.

Screw biology, hormones, and nature.

For taking my girl from me, even if it’s only in moments still, so young. A victim of a uterus and ovaries a decade or two before she even needs them. I have no idea how to stand near this child. I have no idea what to say or where to reach as I watch her slip away, only in moments still, of beauty or rage.

So damn young.

But always moving away, or so it seems, until she tells me that she wants to hear my voice to feel better, and I want to cling to today for dear life. I want to weave her back into my skin and hold her there like it was and it’s always been.

Except that it isn’t. Not anymore.

And I cannot.

Except sometimes, like a couple weeks ago, when we went camping in Mendocino, along the heaven coastline of California, where the cold and redwoods meet. The fog sits soft on jagged black rocks, waves crash against them in bursts beautiful and deadly, and it’s clear. Clear that you’ve got nothing here and never will. Against this ocean, the relentless pull of time, moons and earth and water, a speck of sand on misty beach. You put on your sweatshirt and enjoy your nothingness. Breathe the gray serenity of something you know or knew once.

On the day we arrived it was sunny.

And through our campsite ran a little creek. It was my friend, pregnant, and her toddler daughter, and my own three kids. Our husbands not here yet.

I guess something about the place made my oldest one feel like the littlest one, or one of the little ones. Maybe it was having her own mama and another mama and just little kids around. Maybe it was the sun filling up our spot among the ferns and trees or the fog that rolled in, or the ocean cove across the street.

Whatever it was, I looked over and she was 8 again or 7 or 6 or 3.

She wore a bathing suit bottom and a t-shirt and she was gathering materials to build a fairy house, proudly running over to show me the couch, the walls, the shell vase.

She stomped around the little brook, building a dam, of course. She got filthy, put a banana slug across her nose.

She spent hours rigging up a chipmunk trap, sure the damn thing would come any moment now.

I watched her like the best movie in the world, one that plays only once, each scene sacred: each time she squatted down without a lick of self-consciousness, acted a little too young for a girl her size, each time she wanted my appraisal of the effectiveness of the trap, or how to make the couch stay together, weave together the leaves. Look at the moss she found. “Won’t it make a great bed?”

“Isn’t this great, Mama?” And I almost couldn’t contain it all, being that person again to her, the one to praise her childish constructions. I was her for so many years. I only get moments now.

And she wasn’t the girl yelling “I hate you,” then. She wasn’t the kid losing her mind about something, irrational, full of rage, hormonal. She wasn’t the kid flipping out about whatever drama is happening at school.

And she wasn’t in that dress that made her like the waves. So utterly beautiful and terrifying I can’t figure out if I’m in love or want to run away, from the power of it all. It’s almost too much…

“I HATE YOU!” the words sting my core because they’re true, for a moment, and maybe I hate her too. Because how can I do anything different with this pain taunting me, dangling in my face? I know it’s coming. It’s right there.

I’m losing her.

Nah, I don’t hate her, not even for a moment, but I dislike her sometimes in a way that’s shocking and new, like I dislike adults on occasion. It hurts my stomach to have that feeling toward my child.

They say she’ll come back, after the teenage years. That she’ll just seem gone.

They say it’s so wonderful again, after those years.

They say supportive things.

But what I see is that my daughter is growing up, and it’s all exactly as it should be, except that this is not a change a human can stomach. How can I take it? How can I accept it?

TELL ME WORLD, how can I let go? When all I want is one more day and one more after that of our little family and the oldest child still a child and she’s going.

She’s going.

I can only let go, and yet I cannot.

Once again, here I am. A mother. The Mother.

With nothing.

I stir the meat a little longer and remember eleven and twelve and sixteen and how I couldn’t see myself in myself sometimes, and I didn’t know either. “Who do you think you are?”

I have no clue, mom.

So I walk down the hall a few minutes later and open her door. She’s weeping into her pillow. I sit by her and say nothing, look at the trinkets and the papers and stuffed animals. I look at the jewelry and the books and treasures. I touch her arm. The clutter, the mess, the thousands of things on the walls. The notes from friends and things from second, third, fourth grade.

The little girl beneath a towering world.

Her little haven in an untouchable world begging her to join it, her place in my home, her home, all I can offer beyond what I am in all my broken form: a mother, her mother, a new mother I guess, to a new form of child.

I see again it’s all just a series of being reborn. It’s all just a series of recreation, of being tweaked and carved into something new, as I kick and scream and weep for the old.

Just when I was sure it would never end.

Just when I thought I knew what tomorrow would hold.

Janelle Hanchett is a mother of questionable disposition to three children aged 11, 7, and 2. She lives in northern California with her kids and a husband who thinks “getting dressed up” means shaving his forearm tattoo. If you want, you can join her in the fight against helpful parenting advice at her blog, Renegade Mothering (www.renegademothering.com).