Part II
Almost two
weeks have passed, and today is the first day my daughter’s best friend is back
to our house since the makeup incident; neither of us brings it up. Teenagers are an elusive, transient, giggly
breed. She is the same girl she has
always been; only I know her better now.
I have invited her over for a teen talk, an interview with her and my
daughter on their new teen status, to talk about their expectations. Her friend seems overly polite, syrupy even,
as she teeters on the edge of the couch.
She is suddenly awkward, eyes flittering from my daughter to me, her
fingers nimbly stroking the keys of her cell phone as she talks. Parents, friends, schools, like chameleons
teens seem genetically predisposed to adapt to their surroundings. Who is she?
And even worse, who lounges comfortably beside her?
Twirling
her fingers through her freshly curled hair, my daughter’s friend now looks
innocent, almost. Though I try, it is
hard to reconcile the jean-clad, tee-shirt wearing girl pressing into the
couch, with the pubescent princess from a few days before. Wielding a Bic, I am a reporter, trained to
dissect the image she struggles to present, the good girl she claims “takes
grades more seriously” than she did so long ago, you know, when she was twelve. Rolling her eyes, my daughter giggles. “She’s much more mellow than me,” she
explains. My daughter doesn’t believe
the goodie-two-shoes act, and she knows me well enough to know that I don’t
either.
Reclining
comfortably within the folds of the couch my child sits, bare feet resting
firmly on the wood floor. In a pale blue
t-shirt and dark-blue jeans, my princess chews on strands of her braids as she
waits for her turn to play with her friend’s cell phone. While she chimes in when asked a direct
question, she leaves the answering mainly to her friend. Teens are, I’m told, “still a step up from
childhood but a step down from adulthood.”
Her friend would have me believe teenagers spend much of their time
studying, being responsible, and studying ways to be responsible. She would have me believe they are all
mature, little Bible readers. Somewhere
after reciting her goal of working to earn money to pay for college and well
before she has the chance to tell me about becoming a missionary for fashion-deprived
children, or something, I pop the cap on my pen and slip it in to my
purse. I become worse than a reporter—I
become a mom.
We talk
about her boyfriend, the one she has had for six months and, thanks to
technology, has met only once in person.
The girls, one mellow, one not, and I talk about sex, alcohol, drugs and
their friends who do them. Neither of
them held magical notions about becoming teenagers. One is, and has been since the age of 12,
allowed to wear make-up and date (though they “don’t actually go anywhere”)
boys. The other one is not. Today, both are teenagers. One will lead, one will follow. My daughter claims she doesn’t mind not being
allowed to wear make-up or to date.
According to her, she doesn’t feel pressured by peers to do
anything. Besides, she’d rather be a
leader. She says she’s too smart to
follow her friends; she’s the one in gifted classes, after all.
My daughter
doesn’t plan to have sex before she’s ready, to date before 16, to drink before
21, to do drugs or smoke, ever. I didn’t
plan on half of those things, but did most of them by the time I was 17. So, I recognize the difference between what
she wants to do and what she does, between what she says and what I hear.
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