There Goes My Baby

Truly was born on January 6th, the Epiphany. Because she was my first-born, and I was the first of my friends to have children, we brought out the fatted calf and sounded the bugles (I misplaced my vuvuzela). The three Magi came bearing gifts. We heralded her arrival with all the pomp and pageantry that befitted the second coming. Unfortunately, our scheduled parade through the streets of town was cancelled on account of the Blizzard of ’96.

We swarmed around her cot bed like flies buzzing around a picnic basket, hovering over this tiny new life, catering to each and every demand, and oftentimes anticipating the need before it was voiced. I made the switch from gazing at my own navel to gazing into her eyes, plumbing the depths of her soul, searching for the answers.

‘She’s wise,’ my sister said.
‘An old soul,’ I said.
‘Do you think she knows something we don’t?’ my sister said.
‘I hope not. That will make it difficult to keep up.’

Throughout the toddler years and pre-teen years, I managed to stay a half step ahead of Truly. This was, in part, thanks to the set of encyclopedias and later the Internet, always within fingertips’ reach. Also, when she was younger, I could get away with weaving tall tales which I fobbed off as truth. There was a time when she would come to me with all her woes, her stories of heartbreak, her moments of indecision, her cuts and bruises that required a bandage or a kiss or a special treat to dry the tears and light up her face.

However, as anyone will tell you, kids grow up. I’m not sure how I missed that section in Parenting 101. As children grow, we parents think we’ve been around the block for a while and assume that we get wiser and savvier, despite the teenager’s conviction that we know less than nothing with each progressive year.

Truly and I have a good relationship. She doesn’t get in trouble and rarely rebels. She excels in her academic studies. Unlike a few of her classmates, she steers clear of harmful substances and alcohol. Her star chart is filled with enough gold stars that I can overlook the occasional bouts of sulkiness, the wails of ‘it’s not fair’, and the bedroom that needs a ‘hazardous for humans’ sign on the door.

Recently, however, it dawned on me that maybe teenagers had a point. In some ways, we don’t know anything about their world. We know about the grades they’re getting in school, what they’re wearing when they leave for a friend’s house, the movies they’re watching, the books they read and the food they like.

But they are very selective about what they tell us when it comes to the inner workings of the teenage mind. Very little. The other day I took a trawl on Truly’s Facebook wall, perusing the tons of photos and comments, heavily peppered with enough LOLs to make me wonder if I had just laughed out loud without realizing it. Luckily, I didn’t find anything that would force Truly into a house arrest. But it brought me back to my own teenage years, the little secrets I kept from my own mother, and the conversations I had with my friends, secrets that my mother was never privy to. It’s not because I had anything to hide. I didn’t. I never rebelled until I went to university and that barely counts. It was more of a reminder that teenagers have their own language, their own location jokes (of the ‘you had to be there’ variety), crushes on boys at the school whose motto (according to the girls) is ‘God’s gift’, and a whole world that they only share with each other.

Truly is growing up and it’s a bittersweet time for me. She still has four years before university but she’s no longer the little girl who needs me to kiss it better. But you know what? She'll always be my baby.

Body Double: My mother, my self?

Last week Truly hosted a sleepover. Half a dozen 14-year-old girls sequestered themselves in my daughter’s room in the loft. The laughter, squealing and shrieking combated with the thumping music and reached the decibel levels of an Ibiza nightclub. After listening to the sounds of hormones bouncing off the walls, Scrumptious headed upstairs. She was armed with Dora the Explorer plasters to administer to possible injuries. Five minutes later Scrumptious returned to the kitchen and delivered the prognosis,
‘Liberty is fat.’
‘Honey, don’t say things like that. She is not fat,’ I said.
‘I didn’t say it. Liberty said it.’

Not one of the five girls in our house had an ounce of extra fat on their bodies. But when dinner was served they said no to the rice (oh no, I don’t do carbs) and took microscopic portions of the chicken and vegetable stir-fry. They did, however, inhale the brownies despite the ‘oh-my-god-gazillion’ calories in each wedge. And they shovelled the buttery, salted popcorn into their mouths as if the kernels came from the last cobs in the field. Through it all, they kept up a running patter, ‘Oh my god, I am sooo fat. Look at these thighs. My stomach hangs over my size 0 skinny jeans. Have you tried Atkins or the Miami Beach diet? Do they work? Oh, right, not eating. That’s the best diet. Sometimes I skip lunch. And breakfast. I’m not going to eat tomorrow. Just a carrot stick and a celery stalk.’

I’m not a nutritionist and I’m not a psychologist. But I am the mother of two girls and I have had a lifelong relationship with food which, for the most part, has not been co-dependent. As far as I’m concerned, no further qualifications are required to offer up my unsolicited advice.

‘Oh no,’ their eyes said. ‘Here goes Truly’s crazy mum again. Please spare us the lecture in the guise of a friendly chat.’ I persevered through the eye rolling and hair flicking and the study of, and subsequent nibbling of, ragged cuticles. I trotted out my timeworn adages, ‘You should never ever go on a diet, girls. It wreaks havoc with your metabolism. Eat healthy foods first. Start out with small portions and go back for seconds. Don’t deprive yourselves of chocolate, it will only lead to bingeing. Never ever skip a meal. Everything is okay in moderation. Eat slowly. With chopsticks if it helps. Stop eating when the food ceases to taste as delicious as it did in the first few bites.’

Were they listening? I don’t know. I have no doubt that girls are affected by the media when it comes to body image. But I also believe that girls are heavily influenced by what their mothers say and do. It has been my experience that teenage girls have selective attention disorder (SAD). They don’t do a lot of what we tell them to do. But they tend to do a lot of what we do. And they listen, albeit subconsciously, to the tapes we play over and over again. Sometimes I think my well-worn tapes are silent, spinning round and round inside my own head. But all too often, I realize that the words are coming out loud and clear. ‘I feel so fat today. My boobs are sagging. I need to get to the gym. What a lazy slob. I have nothing to wear. This dress makes me look like I’m pregnant. Would you look at all those wrinkles around my eyes. And did you see those furrows on my forehead. Looks like a farmer tilled the soil to prepare for planting season.’ I know I say so many things on a daily basis, pretending to be in jest, without even realizing I’m sending a negative message to my daughters.

I want to work on silencing the negative tape playing inside my own head and stop the noise pollution. I want my girls to believe that they are beautiful, inside and out. I want to shift the lens and focus more on their kindness, their sense of fair play, their intelligence, both emotionally and academically, and their quirky and delightful sense of humor, instead of zooming in on their physical attributes or waif-like physique. Rather than fostering a dysfunctional relationship with food, I want my actions and words to reflect my healthy attitude towards my own body and the joy I derive from eating delicious and nutritious food with a proportionate amount of decadence thrown in. Instead of saying that my girls need to limit consumption, I say eat everything in moderation and then go for a jog around the park, do a funky dance, do the limbo, or hop on a pogo stick.

I want them to strive to be women who are more than the sum of their caloric intake. I want them to know that women are capable of discussing topics other than diets, beauty, botox and designer labels. I want to encourage them to try public speaking, learn to use a wok, delve into Buddhism, plant a vegetable garden, calculate the square root of pi, or whatever ignites their passion. I want them to do this so that the media won’t have as much power over my daughters, so that they will learn to eat and think for themselves, so that they will maintain a healthy body image and high self-esteem.

Airing My Dirty Laundry

When my younger sister (let's call her Laura Ingalls, her favorite character of books and TV) and I were growing up, our mother had a full-time job. We were latch-key kids and, instead of coming home to freshly baked sugar cookies, we came home to a list of chores. I know, take out the violin. But chores were a part of our life and we accepted that. More accurately, my sister embraced the domestic duties and I accepted the fact that she was better at them. So I bribed her to do my share because, from my first paper route at 11, I always had an after-school job. Laura Ingalls was, and still is, a card-carrying member of the Neatnik Generation. An organizational guru. When we were young, she color coordinated the clothes in her closet and kept the contents on index cards so she wouldn't repeat her outfits. If you were reading a book and put it on the coffee table to nip off to the kitchen for a snack, the book would be filed away in the bookshelf (alphabetically by author) by the time you got back. She proposed cooking weekends so we could make the week's dinners and then freeze them. I'm pretty sure she even knew how to use a crockpot and had her own sewing kit for reinforcing those pesky loose buttons. But that's just a little freaky and I think she knows that now.

As it turns out, Laura Ingalls is currently a successful entrepreneur running her own, very well-organized business. And I am the housewife. So you never really know, do you? The point is that we knew that Comet was not only something in the solar system that is bigger than a meteoroid, but it was also an abrasive agent we used to scrub the sink and bathtub. The washing machine was not a mysterious white elephant that lurked in the basement. And we could cook up a mean tuna noodle casserole. So, not only were we domestic teenage divas turning out barely edible casseroles, we were frugal too!

Anyway, I digress. Enough with the trip down memory lane. On Friday morning, approximately 30 seconds before it was time to exit the front door and run hell-for-leather for the school bus, Truly asked, 'Mum, where is my PE uniform?'

I counted to ten and breathed in and out and refrained from yelling like a fishwife, 'Why do you always wait until the VERY LAST MINUTE?' Instead I asked very calmly (New Year's Resolutions still fresh in my mind), 'Did you check the pile of clean laundry I put on your bed?' (Four days ago).

'It's not there,' she said.

So we looked in all the obvious places--the hamper, the laundry room, the toy box in Scrumptious' room, behind the sofa cushions. No PE uniform.

Eventually, we found the PE uniform. Rolled up in a ball in a canvas bag UNDER TRULY'S UNMADE BED. I'll spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say, when the bag was opened a troop of happy hormones marched out and performed an exuberant Irish clogging number all over the bedroom.

(Feel free to insert melody because an aroma this pungent deserves a lilting tune of its own):
Lift the wings,
That carry me away from here and,
Fill the sail,
That breaks the line to home.

Truly snatched the uniform and skulked off to greet the day. All I could do was stand back and thank the gods of crappy mothers everywhere that I wasn't one of her netball teammates.

So I wonder: Do stay at home mothers do too much for our children? Perhaps it's not only stay at home mothers, but 21st century mothers. Do we pamper them too much? Mommy-coddle them? Do they take us for granted? I'm not sure. But I'm going to teach Truly how to use the big white elephant in the basement. And maybe I'll enroll her in some Irish clogging lessons.