Help Me, Help You
Years ago I wrote a post entitled Flaws. It took balls to write that post which I didn’t realize until I just looked it up and I’m pretty proud that I was able to articulate my exact sentiments in a short post. Let me clarify, I am not proud of the person that I am, I am proud that I have the ability to use my words to express how I feel. The Flaws post exposes my thoughts about my mother and in the process, I face my own flaws. I remember getting so many texts and comments about that post.
The reason that I am bringing up a past post is because instead of writing about my mother, today I am writing about my daughter. In this stage of her life, I am especially not proud of the way I am because my daughter, who is now fifteen, is my reminder that life’s best laid plans are not always how life turns out - no matter how much we want to control it. I honestly do not know how I am going to make it thru her teenage years. I can say this with total seriousness because I don’t believe in using the “she’s going thru a stage” excuse. Using phases and stages is a cop out and I think it’s the easiest way to defer underlying issues which should be dealt with now rather than in therapy later. With that said, again, I don’t see how I am going to make it thru another 3 more years.
The joke is that my mom, in the 7 years that I have written the blog, has never read one of my posts. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree because my daughter will never read a post either. So just like I did when I wrote Flaws in 2016, I’m going for it. If either of them were to go to Thoughtfulpinch.com and find a post that pertains to them, it would be a surprise but more importantly, they would finally know how I feel.
First off, I must say that my daughter is very book smart. If one’s looking for a partner to do an English, Math or Chinese project, pick her because she will ensure an A. She’s a straight A student and is every teacher’s dream because she actually participates in class. She doesn’t just do well on tests or homework assignments, she actually carries the class in group discussions because she is THAT gal.
With all that said, she has the common sense of a gnat. She does things that get under my skin so badly that it makes me question my motherhood. It is pretty scary that in three short years, my daughter will be on her own at college. So instead of giving up or letting go, I gotta LOVE HER UP AS MUCH AS I CAN. This year, in order to demonstrate my concern for the following, I made a few little private videos. My daughter does not consider them thoughtful pinches but I do!
She is an athlete in a ballet dancer way. She will work her butt off for every single dance class. But she refuses to drink water and would rather stick a tampon in her nose to stop the bleeding caused by dehydration than to listen to me about drinking water. Because that isn’t embarrassing to walk around with a tampon in your nose.
She gets mad at the dog for eating the crotches out of her clothes but she refuses to either keep her clothes off the floor so the dog can not reach or here’s a simple solution: shut her bedroom door. Every single day she walks out of her room and leaves her door wide open. If this just happened once, I would not be wondering how she can continue to walk out of her room without shutting the door. Unfortunately, the dog eating crotches has happened to her friend’s clothes (Lululemon yoga pants are not cheap!) and her clothes a minimum of 6 times. These are items that are not easily accessible on Amazon; these are required ballet uniform leotards that take 3 months to complete the order.
My daughter loves to be clean. She will take at least a shower a day and twice is not uncommon. However, she will put on clothes that haven’t been washed in 5 weeks. She has piles and piles of clothes that are a nice mix of clean clothes and dirty ones. Here’s a math problem for you: if you haven’t done laundry in 5 weeks, how many pairs of underwear must you have in order to wear clean ones every day? Ok, how about clean underwear every other day?
If her clothes didn’t smell bad, I would be ok with her saving the planet and not washing her clothes. However, considering that I haven’t bought deodorant or toothpaste for her since May 2021 yet many, many bottles of shampoo, conditioner and body wash, we can do the math. Something isn’t adding up.
My daughter will complain about the loads of homework she has but when I offer to cook dinner for her she declines and makes her own dinner because she wants to prove that I am a bad mom because I didn’t make her dinner. In my defense, I drop her off at ballet at 315p and she never knows what she wants to have for dinner so I don’t cook until she tells me what she wants. So instead of working on homework while I cook what she wants, she cooks. It doesn’t make sense, who is she hurting by refusing my help?
I could air out more family laundry but everyone gets the gist and this may be typical. For years, the infamous line that I have been saying to my daughter has been, “Help me, help you to get out of our house at 18 years old.” My daughter is so laser-focused on being independent that she doesn’t realize that she is cutting her nose to spite her face. Here’s an example - Me: “Would you like me to make the soy meat with rice and veggies?” Her response, “No, I’ve got it.” And then I see her looking for anything other than those three items to make dinner. She ends up eating a cup of cereal, a fruit smoothie and leftover pizza crust for dinner after she danced for 2.5 hours. Way to sock it to me! You’d think with trying to be so independent, all of our kids would You Tube “How to be good athletes.” But no, that would cut into the kids binge watching of Grey’s Anatomy. And besides, why would they want to learn that there isn’t an athlete in the world who doesn’t drink water, get lots of sleep and eat good meals? This leads to my next infamous line that I say to my daughter, “ I know you want to be independent and please trust me when I say that I want you to be independent. We have a common goal: you and I both want you to be independent.” I say this often. Why it hasn’t resonated, I am not sure.
My biggest problem with trying to be the safety net for my daughter is that she is not interested in being on the tight rope. Which means she is naive or she just doesn’t care. I think in her case, it’s both. She is more interested in the number of Snapchat views that she gets wearing a bathing suit top in her bedroom than she is about getting behind the wheel to have true independence in driving away from the house. She is more interested in watching You Tube and FaceTiming with friends all while doing Wordle rather than collecting all the required paperwork together for her 4 week trip to Connecticut (due in a week). She is neither concerned or motivated to get the heck out of my house.
Please do not confuse wanting my daughter to be out of my life with wanting my daughter to be out of my house. These are two MAJORLY different things. I want my daughter to fly - she is a butterfly and she always has been a butterfly. Containing her with “rules” and life lessons is not doing either of us any good. I think we may grow closer in life later. I’m not saying she will appreciate me once she’s away, but I do think right now I make her skin crawl and that can’t be good. Clearly we are not cut from the same cloth; I learned at a young age what I needed to know to move on. Unfortunately, unless she goes to college with a housekeeper, my daughter isn’t going to make it without getting some disease or have a rodent problem. She has no interest in wanting to practice good hygiene routines. I am not wanting this for her because I want to convert her into a Type-A, perfectionist protégé. I just know that she doesn’t have more than five pairs of underwear and the laundry isn’t doing itself.
I’d be remiss to write a blog post about my daughter without mentioning her outfits. Every parent looks at kids who wear the shorts that ride up the butt and make judgements about the girl and her parents. There is not one parent who doesn’t judge when it comes to girls’ clothing choices. A few weeks ago I had an epiphany about this judgement - it went along with a Catholic mass theme - the priest said, “You can judge the sin, but you can’t judge the sinner.” True. We know it’s wrong for our daughters to look like sluts. Of all the outfits, they choose to wear the one that makes hookers look like they’re going to church . However, I know for a fact that my daughter is not a slut and so I should be at peace with that. Knowing that is plenty enough to feel confident in my parenting. In my daughter’s case, her experience is poorly represented in her clothing choices. I can’t help but feel sorry for my daughter because she is truly very smart but she has to “dumb it up” by wearing nothing when it’s freezing or wearing shorts that are clearly too small for her. This generation prides themselves on Female Power - but in the end, fourteen and fifteen year old daughters all over the country are wearing “dumb” outfits because to be smart is obviously not what gets the Snapchat views. Sticking the butts out, crop tops tummies and pouting lips are what girls are made of these days. Instead of being mad at my daughter’s clothing choices, there’s a sadness in my heart that she thinks she looks beautiful. Plus, I also think that by the time she’s 18, 19, 20, during the ages that she should be dressing like she is now, she’s going to look so worn out - like past her prime - like the patina on a leather shoe. I’m hopeful - my fingers are crossed - that maybe sometime very soon, it will be trendy for teens to look like they know what they’re doing.
And now the culmination of what I really want to say to my daughter after airing out the laundry list of common sense insufficiencies: “Hey, you can do everything opposite than me but just so you know, I did the same thing and look how I ended up. If you really don’t want to be like me, you should actually copy everything I’m doing.” How reverse would the psychology be if I said that? The longer I am a parent of a teen, the more I find the irony of Flaws and I begin to see how close the apple falls from the tree.
Pinches,
Barb
