by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
‘Well, I don’t like you very much at the moment, either.’
I walk away. My 12-year-old, who has turned up the volume on the TV to block out our battle, pulls a wry face but when I start talking to her – to enlist her sympathy, unfairly and unreasonably – she gestures for me to be silent and turns back to the blaring TV. I am left feeling isolated with my anger and my hurt but she is right to turn away. This is between me and her 15-year-old sister; I should not be asking her to take sides.
Half an hour later and my eldest emerges from her room. Tears stream down her face.
‘I… don’t know why… I am… being such a bitch.’ She manages to sob out the words. My anger melts. I don’t know why she is either, but there it is – I am the mother and she is the child. I let my hurt go. We embrace. We are friends again, until the next time.
I can no longer remember what most of our battles were about. It could be anything; homework she didn’t want to do; mess she left for me to clean up; a fight over TV programs; or just a bad mood. You name it, we fought about it.
It is one thing to be a rebellious daughter – I was a mild example of the genus myself once – it is quite another to be the parent being rebelled against. I had always thought I would be a good parent of teenagers. My husband and I didn’t have many rules – both girls had curfews, we expected them to go to school and do their homework, we were strict about smoking, drinking and drugs (as much as any parent can be), but we were happy for them to have boyfriends and go out with their friends. We didn’t get fussed about swearing or the clothes they chose to wear. We didn’t mind too much if their bedrooms looked like tips. We picked our battles and tried to police only what we thought really mattered.
It all sounds very sensible and reasonable but it made not a sod’s worth of difference. Both girls rebelled, not at the same time, thank goodness, and not in the same way.
My eldest’s rebellion was very out in the open. It was hot, loud, dramatic. From 14 to 16 she fought us and her teachers every step of the way. She had unsuitable boyfriends, took up smoking – and was lousy about not getting caught – and wagged school. We were constantly getting notes from the school about work not handed in and the cocky arrogance she displayed, particularly to teachers she had little respect for. We were worried for her and not at all sure what to do. We even went to listen to a lecture by an expert in adolescent psychology about rebellious teenagers. It was comforting to see that the room was packed. We were not the only parents, it seemed, struggling with a rude and belligerent teenager.
That talk was useful. The lecturer pointed out that teenagers lose the capacity for empathy. He talked about recent research that showed ten-year-olds had more emotional intelligence than 13-year-olds, and that something about the hormonal changes at puberty undid the ability to empathise and understand others for a few years. Perhaps that is why it is often the young who are the most ruthless killers. Just think about Pol Pot’s teenage killing squads in the Khmer Rouge, Mao’s fanatical Red Guard and the Hitler Youth. Or the disaffected young men who are currently sought out and groomed for murderous, sometimes suicidal, mayhem by ISIS. Our angry teenager wasn’t quite in that league (we hoped) but it did explain why her previously soft heart was not as much in evidence as it had been.
The comprehensive public school she attended helped us to weather the storm. They did this by disciplining her when she broke the rules – as they should – but always giving both us, and her, the impression that while they did not like her behaviour, they did like her. They achieved this very important distinction by ignoring her swearing and laughing at her jokes. I sometimes wondered whether they would have expelled her if we’d sent her to one of the posh private girls’ schools so many of our friends and neighbours had urged us to choose.
Towards the end of Year Ten, we started to see glimpses of the girl she had been before the hormonal storm. She even began knuckling down again at school and her grades began improving. Given that she was about to go into the last two years of schooling, her timing couldn’t have been better.
‘The teachers love me now, Mum.’
We were walking along a dusty country road, on holidays, when she made this assertion. She was halfway through Year Eleven.
‘Do they, darling? Why is that?’
‘There’s nothing teachers like better than a bad girl gone good.’
We’d weathered a lot by then. Not least that she’d fallen for a young man she met on the train when she was in Year Nine (he was the adopted son of one of her teachers at primary school) who had turned out to be facing criminal charges. Robbery in company was the offence, but it sounded more dramatic than it was. Nevertheless it was defined as a gang related offence and it was an election year. Using law and order to demonstrate the ‘toughness’ of politicians can cause a great deal of harm; this foolish but relatively harmless young man was sentenced to jail. We were, as you can perhaps imagine, horrified when this happened, especially when she said she wanted permission to visit him. But my daughter wasn’t about to take no for an answer.
‘So, you think that when someone you care about gets into real trouble, you should just walk away?’
Well, no, we didn’t. Still, as I reassured Ralph, my husband, she was too young to visit the young man in question except in the company of his parents. She could only see him by trekking out to Emu Plains in the family car with the boy’s parents and grandmother. I doubt those visits were anywhere near as glamorous as she’d hoped. Jails – even low-security ones – are dispiriting places.
‘Look,’ I said to Ralph one day as we were on our regular morning walk and obsessively ruminating over the surprising place we’d found ourselves in. ‘It could be worse.’
‘How?’
‘He might not have gone to jail. This way she can only see him a few times a year, write to him and get the occasional phone call. I bet she’ll be bored with the whole drama within 12 months and going out with someone else.’
I was right. She had another couple of boyfriends – each an improvement on the last one. Instead of rebels without a clue, she began dating boys who were just testing the boundaries the way most teenagers do. Eventually she met an engineering student from Sydney Uni. He was the absolute best of the bunch and sensibly she married him.
Luckily, my daughter’s intense rebellion burned itself out quickly and now she is a determined and strongminded young woman who (rather hilariously) is a stickler for obeying the rules. No wonder she’s become such an excellent English teacher. Among other things, she is an absolute grammar Nazi. No doubt she will edit this essay of mine within an inch of its life.
‘Don’t come all deep and meaningful with me.’
Now that my eldest daughter had calmed down, grown up and was going to university, it was my youngest daughter’s turn to kick over the traces. But she did it very differently.
‘But I am just asking how you feel about doing the HSC, if you are anxious...’
I saw her face close down and her mouth form a thin, stubborn and disgusted line. She was shutting me out again.
‘Leave me alone!’ She spat it out between mouthfuls of udon noodles. ‘It’s my business, not yours.’
We were in a Japanese restaurant. There were people all around us. I did not want to make a scene. These days, it ended like this whenever we tried to talk – I pushed for information, she resisted. I no longer knew what to say to her. I could find no safe topic. I knew I irritated her almost beyond bearing, but I didn’t know how to stop it.
And the more she shut me out, the more anxious about her I became.
My youngest daughter’s rebellion was a withdrawal. Where the eldest would throw a massive tantrum when we told her to be home by 10.30pm, and then arrive back on the dot, the youngest smiled sweetly, agreed and waltzed in at midnight. Where the oldest had yelled and slammed doors, the youngest hissed and plugged in her iPod. She told us what we wanted to hear to our face: ‘Yes, I have done that assignment’, but did – or more
accurately, didn’t – do exactly what she pleased. I felt helpless in a way I never did with her sister, even at her hot and foul-mouthed worst. At least she talked. I earned my living as a communicator. I prided myself on my ability to get through to just about anyone. The one person I could not reach, however, was my youngest daughter.
She had become an immovable and impenetrable object and this was a much more powerful weapon than the noisy fury wielded by her older sister. No doubt she had watched, listened and learned. I had felt anxious and often furious while my oldest was at her worst, but I had never felt as if I had entirely lost contact with her. Now I was nonplussed and felt out of control. Worse, everything I tried to do just seemed to dig me deeper into a hole. I tried talking to her – she hated that. Someone recommended an anxiety clinic – she loathed that too. We tried family therapy and that went down like a bucket of cold sick. The only message my daughter seemed to take out of my increasingly panicstricken efforts to ‘help’ was that I thought there was something wrong with her.
The school (the same one her sister had attended) warned me that my daughter was sabotaging her HSC and advised me to seek some help. I did as they advised and suggested we make an appointment to see a counsellor. This got me precisely nowhere. Indeed she seemed to take the suggestion as a final insult. We fought about it for weeks.
‘If you’re so keen on fucking counselling,’ my daughter screamed at me one morning in the car, ‘why don’t you fucking go?’
This brought me up short. She had a point and it surprised me that despite the emotional intelligence I prided myself on, I had completely lost perspective when it came to dealing with my youngest daughter. Rather shamefacedly, I followed her advice and took myself off to a counsellor.
At the first appointment I poured out my tale of woe in great detail. Here I was, a good and conscientious parent (in my own humble opinion) doing my absolute best with a recalcitrant daughter. As I described my repeated attempts to get through to her and to reestablish our relationship, I had never felt sorrier for myself in my life.
‘You tell me all this as if she is doing it on purpose.’
The counsellor’s remark also brought me up short. She was right. I did feel as if this was all about me, that my daughter was withholding communication and therefore affection from me on purpose. If I had felt sorry for myself before, I now felt ashamed of myself.
‘She’s a teenager,’ the counsellor said. ‘What she is doing is all she can do right now. Why don’t you just back off?’
It wasn’t as easy as that, of course. I am not a natural backer-offer. But I tried. I decided to let her be, even if that meant stuffing up her HSC. I acknowledged her need to build a thick boundary between us. I even saw how my dependence on her during her older sister’s worst moments might have contributed to her need to keep me at a firm emotional distance. I didn’t like it but I accepted it. I tried to be supportive but not intrusive. I am sure I wasn’t very good at it, but I was better than I had been. It helped a lot to realise my daughter wasn’t withdrawing on purpose to hurt me.
It took a while but eventually taking the pressure off worked. I remember exactly when our relationship turned the corner. Her older sister and I had decided to go to Canberra for the weekend to see the Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery. My youngest hadn’t achieved a brilliant HSC but she had earned a place at the College of Fine Arts at the University of NSW to major in photography. Tentatively, thinking she might therefore be interested in the exhibition, I asked her if she would like to join us. I expected to be rejected out of hand. And I was.
‘No!’ She pulled a face, ‘I don’t think so.’ Then she went into her bedroom and shut the door. I looked at her sister and we both shrugged. Oh well, we had tried. Suddenly her door opened.
‘Actually, I will come.’
She shut the door again. My older daughter and I punched the air in glee silently. We knew this thaw was fragile and didn’t want to damage it with too much enthusiasm too early.
The three of us had a wonderful weekend.
Now my daughters are adults and I get along beautifully with both of them. It is difficult to navigate the years when your children separate from you, but it is what they must do if they are to successfully become their own people. These days I am proud of my rebellious daughters. I am proud of the courage both of them displayed when they insisted on showing me where I stopped and they started. I respect the boundaries they drew then and I hope I always will.
My daughters have taught me far more than I ever taught them.
CONTRIBUTORS
Caroline Baum is a writer who reads for a living as Editorial Director of Booktopia, Australia’s online bookseller. Her short memoir was included in Best Australian Essays 2014. She is the winner of the 2015 Hazel Rowley Fellowship and currently writing a biography as part of a doctorate in Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong.
More at www.carolinebaum.com.au
Jane Caro is an author, journalist, broadcaster, advertising writer and social commentator. She has published seven books, including novels Just a Girl, University of Queensland Press, 2011 and Just a Queen, University of Queensland Press, 2015. Her memoir Plain Speaking Jane was released in 2015. She is a regular on Agony, Q&A, The Drum, Sunrise and Weekend Sunrise. In 2013 she co-created, co-produced (with Amanda Armstrong) and presented a radio series for ABC Life Matters, For Better, For Worse, which is now a TV series for ABC Compass. Her series Fathers and Daughters, Mothers and Sons for Compass is out in 2016. She writes columns for Sunday Life and Leadership Matters. Together with her husband, she is also a beef producer and timber grower.
Jo Case is the author of Boomer and Me: A Memoir of Motherhood, and Asperger’s, Hardie Grant, 2013, which was shortlisted for the inaugural Russell Prize for Humour Writing. Her memoir and fiction have appeared in The Big Issue Fiction Edition, Best Australian Stories, The Australian, Good Weekend, Kill Your Darlings and the anthology Mothermorphosis, Melbourne University Press. Her reviews have appeared in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Australian Book Review and on ABC Radio National. She is program manager of Melbourne Writers Festival, and has been associate editor of Kill Your Darlings and deputy editor of Australian Book Review.
Marion Halligan was born in Newcastle, NSW. She grew up by the sea and has lived most of her adult life in Canberra, with periods in Paris. She writes novels, short stories and essays. She has regularly reviewed books. Currently she is writing short memoir pieces. She has received an AM for her services to literature. She has been shortlisted for many prizes, and has won some. Valley of Grace, Allen & Unwin, 2009, won the ACT Book of the Year and was long-listed for the IMPAC Prize. Goodbye Sweetheart, a novel, was published by Allen & Unwin in April 2015.
Eliza-Jane Henry-Jones’ debut novel, In the Quiet, was published in 2015 with HarperCollins Australia. It was shortlisted for the 2015 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and longlisted for the 2016 Indie Book Awards debut fiction category. Her fiction has been published widely in publications such as Southerly, Island, FourW, Award Winning Australian Writing and Etchings. Her background is in grief, loss and trauma counselling, psychology and community services. She lives on a little farm in the hills outside of Melbourne.
Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry and Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel The Waiting Room is published by Vintage, 2015, and Harper Perennial US, 2016. We’re all Going to Die, a work of creative nonfiction, is published by Harper Collins, 2016. She conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of works by prominent physician-writers, which starred on Booklist, Knopf US, 2012. With the Damiani family, she is co-author of Cracking the Code, Vintage, 2015. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. More at www.leahkaminsky.com
Maria Katsonis is a senior executive in the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet and author of the memoir The Good Greek Girl, Ventura Press, 2015, an account of
her experience of mental illness and rebellion against a traditional Greek upbringing. Her writing has appeared in The Age, The Guardian and New Paradigm. A vocal mental health advocate, Maria is a beyondblue Ambassador and a consumer representative with Mental Health Australia.
More at www.mariakatsonis.com.au
Krissy Kneen is the award-winning author of the memoir Affection, Text, 2010, the novels Steeplechase, Text, 2013 and Tript-ych, Text, 2011, and the Thomas Shapcott Award-winning poetry collection Eating My Grandmother. She has written and directed broadcast documentaries for SBS and ABC television. Her latest novel is The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine.
Lee Kofman is an award-winning Israeli-Australian author of four books, writing teacher and mentor. Her most recent book is The Dangerous Bride: Memoir of Love, Gods and Geography, Melbourne University Press, 2014, which has been included in recommended books lists The Age and Australian Book Review in 2014 and The Age in 2015. Her short works have been published widely in Australia, Scotland, UK, USA and Canada, including in Best Australian Stories and Best Australian Essays, and her blog on the writing process was a finalist for Best Australian Blogs 2014.
More at www.leekofman.com.au
Silvia Kwon is a Korean born writer based in Melbourne. She has written a novel, The Return, which was published in 2014 by Hachette Australia. It was voted as the debut novel of that year by the Herald Sun.
Michelle Law is a Brisbane writer whose work has appeared in Women of Letters, Growing up Asian in Australia, Destroying the Joint and in many Australian literary journals. She is an AWGIE award-winning screenwriter whose films have screened internationally and on the ABC. In 2014 she co-authored the comedy book Sh*t Asian Mothers Say, Black Inc, 2014. Michelle is currently working on her first stage play with La Boite Theatre, and is part of the Playwriting Australia Lotus First Draft group of playwrights, a program supporting Asian Australian writers.