by Joni Cole
Sometimes, when these hormones took over my daughter’s personality, I forgot that she was even human, let alone a girl in a growing-up body. Instead, I started to think of her as one of those deceptively cute wild animals, like a dingo or capuchin monkey; one of those creatures that Ranger Rick warns against in his magazine: Remember, readers, these adorable-looking animals do not make good pets! They can be dangerous and are better left in the wild.
One day my daughter came home from school in another one of her moods. She dropped her overstuffed, pink backpack in the middle of the floor and headed straight to the kitchen. I had made sure it was stocked with her favorite after-school snacks—Thai soup, Little Debbie coffeecakes, orange juice. Times like these, Plan A was to spike her blood sugar.
“How was your day?” I asked.
“Fine.” She took her soup out of the microwave and beelined for her room. Plan B was to give her space.
Later that afternoon, for the sake of peace in the household, I didn’t call her on her lack of “thank you” when I dropped her off at field hockey practice. I also let it go when she (once again) ignored my request to pick up the mess of paper and scissors and glue that she had left in the back room after her scrap-booking project two weeks ago.
At dinner, she kept tipping her chair back—one precarious degree away from a skull fracture—until her father told her to sit properly or go to her room. Ah! Here was my chance to be the nice parent; to gain a tactical advantage over my husband. For some reason, the hormones that had convinced my daughter that I was Evil Incarnate hadn’t sullied her father, even when he corrected her behavior or dared to speak directly to her friends. The two of them maintained a close, easy relationship that consumed me with jealousy.
“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked kindly, watching as she excavated the chicken stir-fry on her plate, flicking slivers of transparent onion off her fingers like boogers.
“It’s gross,” she muttered, though she had always liked this meal before. Every day my daughter was discovering a world full of new and disgusting things, mostly related to food items (mayonnaise, tomato soup, shrimp) . . . and me. The other day, me eating a sandwich with mayonnaise was enough to drive her to her piano keyboard, where she pounded out her practice music to erase the images. The horror! The horror! I could just see the hormones, writhing like Kurtz on his deathbed.
After dinner, my husband took our younger daughter out for ice cream, probably to escape the miasma of moodiness overhanging our house. Her older sister disappeared somewhere while I hid in my room, reading a murder mystery. Then I felt guilty. Hiding wasn’t a good parenting strategy. I needed to reach out to my daughter, to try and connect with her in this new stage of her life. Besides, I missed her. When those drama queen hormones weren’t around, she could be non-threatening and the kindest person I knew.
“What are you making?” I found her in her bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor, threading little blue beads onto a string.
“Nothing,” she froze mid-bead, suddenly fixated by the needle nose pliers beside her. Translation: Go away. Leave me alone. Why do you have to continually ruin my life?
“Can I do some beading, too?”
“No.”
“Do you want to play Monopoly later on?”
“No.”
“Clue?”
“No.”
My husband, a psychologist, and I had discussed the best way to handle this kind of hostile behavior. In one of his pep talks to me, he shared one of the tenets of family therapy: “Try not to take your kids’ bad behavior personally. They’re taking their feelings out on you, but it’s not about you.” I took some deep breaths, determined to remain calm, a parent in control. It’s not about me. It’s not about me.
“I’m going to make a cup of tea. Would you like one?” I offered my daughter.
“No.”
Still, she refused to look at me. What was her problem? Had I grown a third eye? Did she think she would turn into stone if she looked at my face? Did it ever occur to her that I had feelings, too? Or that sometimes her behavior made me want to scream and cry and give up on our relationship?
Just in time, I remembered the hormones.
“Honey, what’s the matter? I don’t want to fight. I just want to spend some time with you.”
“Oh. My. God!” Finally, she looked, or rather glared, at me. “You always do that! ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’” she pitched her voice high and whiny, mocking me. “When’s Daddy coming home?” Tears glazed her eyes, as if I was Mommy Dearest and her father was social services.
A scene played out in my mind. I saw myself picking up my daughter’s compartmentalized bead box—a rainbow of tiny beads that she had meticulously sorted—and turn it upside down. I saw hundreds and hundreds of beads skittering in all directions, falling into the uneven gaps between her bedroom floorboards, gaps that had accumulated decades of dust, dog hairs, and other old-house detritus. Unlike mayonnaise, or even me eating mayonnaise, those gaps truly were disgusting. Yet here she sat, amid the filth and squalor, perfectly content until I came along.
“You are such a spoiled brat!” I left, slamming her bedroom door so hard it bounced back open. We have rules in our house: no slamming doors, no name-calling. I shut it hard again. My pulse was racing; maybe I was having a heart attack. If not, I would fake one, right in the hallway outside her door. That would teach her a lesson, I thought. That would serve her right. See what you’ve done? My cold, lifeless eyes would haunt her. See how you’ve killed your own mother?
The next morning, my daughter came into the kitchen and cooked herself a bagel in the toaster. She was wearing cute white Capri’s, and her long hair was gathered in a perfect ponytail. I, on the other hand, looked five-hundred years old, and was wearing mismatched pajamas.
I told her I was sorry for my bad behavior, and suggested we start anew. My new parenting strategy, which I had devised around four in the morning, was to teach by example. I would be the first to apologize, the first to rise above. The expression “kill her with kindness ” popped into my head, but I was too close to the edge to feel comfortable with that language.
“It wasn’t my fault,” my daughter responded to my apology, but at least she didn’t take her plate into another room to avoid my company.
When the girls left the house that morning for school, I had to chase the older one down the walkway to kiss her goodbye, still wearing my mismatched pajamas. She allowed one quick hug, but there was no “I love you,” like she sometimes tossed over her shoulder.
I was an embarrassment-–-it hit me, as I watched my husband drive away with our daughters. Every morning, he chauffeured them to school on the way to his office—the perfect family of three. I was the outsider, like one of those visiting relatives that kids have to endure; the weird aunt who always has fuchsia lipstick on her teeth, is clueless about everything, and pollutes your sheets with her old-person’s skin. I didn’t wear fuchsia lipstick, but I was something to be endured all the same, me and my ridiculous pajamas.
The rest of the day, I couldn’t concentrate. I tried to work in my home office (“You’re always working,” according to my daughters), but I kept getting up from my desk, wandering around the house, carrying on upsetting conversations in my head. I was a horrible mother, a stupid idiot. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! In our house, we also have a rule about calling people stupid, but how else would you describe a mother who came this close to faking a heart attack, just so her kid could discover her dead?
But then I would get angry all over again. Hormones or no hormones, there was no excuse for my daughter’s behavior. How dare she be so rude to me? I was her mother. She needed to show me some respect. In the kitchen, I made myself a sandwich, slathering on the mayonnaise. I was sick of catering to her moods. Sick of feeling rejected. Sick of being told what I could and could not do.
“Tween,” I yelled, even though there was no one in the house. “Tween! Tween! Tween!”
I needed to get a grip. I needed another parenting strategy. From now on, I decided, my daughter and I would simply cohabitate. We would live in the same house, under the same roof, but she would do her thing, and I would do mine. No more trying to connect, no more reaching out. She could stop feeling embarrassed and disgusted. I could stop feeling mad and hurt. Her father could raise her, and I wouldn’t take it personally one bit.
At 3:15, the school bus arrived at the end of our street. I watched out the kitchen window as my daughter trudged up the driveway, her slim body bent from the weight of her overstuffed backpack. I knew why it was so heavy. It was full of homework she only allowed her dad to check, and books she refused to share with me, even though we both love to read.
Her footsteps sounded on the porch. Quickly, I reviewed my options. If she was in another one of her moods, I could tell her that her behavior was unacceptable. If she said something hurtful, I could go to my desk and pretend to work. I could scream and cry, in the hopes of making a lasting impression, or I could run upstairs to my room, and not make the mistake of coming out.
She came into the house and dropped her heavy backpack in the middle of the floor.
I went over to her and hugged her. This time she hugged me back, a real hug that clarified everything. “There’s my girl,” I smoothed the top of her perfect ponytail. There’s my sweet, sweet girl.
“I’m starving,” she announced good-naturedly, and headed to the kitchen.
I watched her go, relieved to see her happy, grateful to have her back. The hormones, no doubt, would return in the near future to wreak more emotional havoc. When they did, I could choose from a whole list of parenting strategies, and likely would need every one of them. But the one thing I knew for sure, the one thing that I didn’t have to learn as a parent because it just was and would always be, was that I could never, never not love this girl. She was a tween. But I was her mother.
But Enough about Me
As bad luck would have it, the hostess of this luncheon for women in the arts had seated me next to an elegant woman with silvery blond hair smoothed back with a tortoise-shell headband. Worn on young girls, the tortoiseshell headband might simply suggest an over-controlling mother who wants her daughter to be perfect in every way. But on women of a certain age, this accessory delivers a clear message: I am a woman of considerable means. Do not presume we are equals. If we did not live in America, where any acknowledgment of class or aristocracy is frowned upon, we would neither move in the same circles, nor occupy this same table as we are now.
I tucked my purse and gym bag under my chair. A quick glance around the private dining room revealed other harbingers of my being outclassed—pearl chokers, linen dresses, pocketbooks with clasps. But unlike the tortoiseshell headband, those items didn’t come with parallel rows of sharp little teeth.
“Hello, I’m Marion.” Lady Headband paused her conversation with the woman to her right. She extended a creamy hand with prominent blue veins.
“And I’m Amanda.” The woman beside her—hair coiffed liked a Roman helmet, narrow-framed glasses—offered a polite smile. Replace the smile with a contemptuous look and Amanda reminded me of the lady who had put me in my place when I was at the library last week. My flip-flops had been propped on a low table while I typed on my laptop.
“That’s a beautiful piece of furniture,” the woman had peered down at my feet over her rims. “ Very expensive.”
It could be her, I thought, but then again I could just be paranoid.
Ours was a round table for eight; its circumference too big to reach across the expanse of white linen and shake hands with everybody. I was the last to arrive, save for the person assigned the seat to my left. The place card for the missing guest read “Beverly,” also the name of my mother-in-law, but given her predilection for clipping coupons, I doubted this was her.
It appeared I was also the youngster in our group. The woman directly across from me must have been close to one hundred, her pallor reanimated with a shaky hand—scribbled brows, a smear of dark pink liplines, two uneven spots of rouge. I wished I was sitting next to her. I like talking to really old people.
The server appeared, offering a choice of drinks. By the time I’d decided on a cranberry spritzer, the other ladies at my table had resumed their conversations. Eavesdropping, I learned Marion and Amanda had both recently traveled to Japan. Apparently, the Pure Water Temple of Kyoto was beautiful, and worth fighting the crowds.
I looked around the dining room, estimating about fifty women in attendance. I had assumed I would know a few people here, given that many of my friends are writers or artists of some kind. Like me, they aren’t the type to turn down a free lunch, or better yet a free luncheon, which implies fare of a higher social status. The only person I recognized, however, was our hostess who wasn’t even my friend—she was my landlady. I rented a small space to teach writing workshops in one of the many buildings she owns.
Suddenly, I caught on. These people were not women in the arts, not like me anyway, spending the morning at the computer, eking out a few paragraphs of prose, grabbing a shower at the last minute, trying to find something presentable to wear, realizing, too late, that the ruffle on this silk blouse looked like a baby’s bib, wondering what it would it hurt to put a little wine in a travel mug for the fifteen minute ride to the restaurant, deciding against it, and promising myself (again) that I would go to my exercise class right after this luncheon because I had already paid for it and I knew I would never do push-ups and sit-ups on my own because I was a lazy slob and a bad writer and in serious need of some endorphins.
These women, I realized, were patrons of the arts. It all made sense now: our philanthropic hostess; the predominance of older, well-appointed guests; the location of this restaurant, not in my economically diverse town, but one upscale town over. Most of the women who lived in this community were not only wealthy, but possessed a daunting degree of civic duty and global responsibility. During elections, for example, they didn’t just display campaign signs; they retrieved those signs post election, and turned them into book bags for needy children in Honduras.
“Excuse me.” The server reached over my shoulder to deliver a basket of hard-crusted rolls.
Good, something to occupy my hands. I took a roll, cracking it in half. With tiny, silver tongs, I retrieved two balls of butter from a chilled bowl. By now it was painfully obvious to me that my seatmate to the left, Beverly, was a No Show. This situation happened to me with peculiar frequency, at wedding receptions, dinner parties, and most recently at a conference of four-hundred humor writers. Every assigned table in the Marriott’s Banquet Room in Dayton, Ohio was filled with the exception of mine, occupied solely by me and a massive man with a walking aid who no doubt would have switched seats, if his gout-riddled feet had allowed mobility. Despite the focus of the conference, I failed to see the humor in this situation.
With no Beverly to turn to, this left me overly dependent on Marion, who was still chatting away with Amanda. What, I wondered, could be so fascinating about Japan? Actually I knew the answer to that question, not because I had been there, but because I had recently attended a reading by a novelist who wrote about Japanese women employed as table-tops. Apparently, people pay big money to eat sushi off their naked bodies. I learned that this is a long-standing Japanese practice called Nyotaimori, which some people consider degrading to women, while others view it as a healthy sexual fetish. Marion and Amanda could know all this, if they bothered to include me in their conversation. So could my other seatmates for that matter, except our overlarge table didn’t facilitate easy conversation.
Yes, I said sushi, I imagined myself repeating loudly for the benefit of the centenarian across from me, right off their naked bodies.
The server returned, bearing a large tray of bowls above her head.
“What kind of soup is this?” I inquired.
“Chilled asparagus with crème fraiche. It’s one of our most popular it
ems.”
“It certainly is an astonishing shade of green.”
“Fresh cracked pepper?” she asked.
“Oh yes.” If only she would stay and talk with me the entire luncheon.
“Enjoy.” She glided away, a single bowl remaining on her otherwise empty tray—the fucking No Show’s.
As always when surrounded by people of refinement, I found myself affecting their mannerisms. Already, I had used the word “astonishing,” which normally doesn’t roll off my tongue. Now I made a point to spoon my soup away from me, tilting it sideways into my mouth.
Plop.
A dollop of green foam landed on the ruffle of my silk blouse. I wiped at it with my napkin, smearing it down the light fabric. In general, I am not a clumsy person, with the exception of spilling food down my front when I am trying to look nice. Likely this is rooted in some deep-seated psychological issue: maybe I’m projecting my social anxiety onto my wardrobe, or trying to deflect attention to a flaw not part of my actual person. At the moment, however, I preferred to blame good manners, or more specifically, Marion and her tortoiseshell headband, for the stain on my blouse. This never would have happened if she wasn’t ignoring me.
“How do you know our hostess?” I asked, fixing her with a missile lock-on gaze.
She looked up, her soup spoon midway to her mouth. “Our husbands are law partners,” she said. “We’re starting a scholarship program for young artists.”
Always the young artists, I thought. Why doesn’t anyone care about middle-aged artists?
“Oh really,” I said, and then I couldn’t think of another thing to say or ask about her scholarship program, try as I might. Looking at her face, a smooth mask of pressed powder, all I could think of was how I needed to start saving for a facelift. An awkward silence followed, or at least it felt awkward to me, given my discomfort with even slight lapses in conversation. I sensed I would soon lose Marion, if I didn’t do something fast.