I have a thirteen year old daughter that is actively REALLY teenagering.
She is teenagering so hard it leaves the rest of us frequently sitting with big eyes and sideways glances the moment she walks away from us.
As she is the fourth daughter, my husband and I have learned that sometimes it is best to just stay quiet and give her time to come back to earth, rather than immediately engaging, or telling her to “come right back here this minute, young lady!”
Sometimes she needs time to sit on her bed.
Often, she just needs to eat something and have no one look at her while she does it.
After a brief cooling off period, I will inevitably make my way down the hall to quietly knock on her door, and go in to sit with her to talk the whole thing over.
If given time, instead of trying to work it out in the heat of the moment, she will normally be much easier to talk to, she will make sense with her explanations, and she will also listen.
This is a thing we are working on these days almost daily.
This particular daughter has always been the one most full of thoughts and passion.
It’s like each sequential daughter gained more and more power, until the final one came crashing into this world, turbo-boosted, at 5:00pm on the nose as a symbol: A time my husband
and I always said was party time, and quitting time.
Paige is confident, adamant, highly intelligent, and deeply intuitive.
Once she hit 13, it nearly immediately became a question of whether or not she would use her powers for good or evil.
(In my experience, at 13, life loves to dangle the option of trying out that “Evil” part sometimes in front of a kid like a carrot)
It’s a thing I am dedicating a lot of time right now to shaping, because I refuse to go softly into
the dark night of letting any child of mine grow up and become a part of the problem if I can do anything about it.
Lately, this need for attitude adjustment is showing up on the soccer field following a tie or a loss: Any time she is feeling like someone came from behind when she thought she was winning,
or any time she feels like her team should have fought harder.
Soccer is Paige’s number one passion.
When she was younger she was no stranger to waking up before it was even light out to watch training videos.
I would come out and see her balled up on the couch, knees to her chest, face
lit by only a screen, and know right away she was back at it.
She would spend hours outside in the driveway juggling the ball and running drills, and she got herself to a point where at LEAST three times every game I would hear strangers talking about her from the sidelines.
They would come to me in awe asking,
“HOW long has she been playing?!”
Her skill is apparent on the field, but lately it’s her after-game skill that is in need of polishing, as she has been coming off the turf loudly declaring things like that her “whole team is terrible and it’s as if none of them have even ever played soccer.”
Several times lately I’ve pulled her aside and informed her that, regardless of her abilities, if she cannot work on her sportsmanship I will be forced to pull her from the game she loves in order to preserve the enjoyment of the other players who are there doing their best.
We have long talks in the car about things like our speech, and the effect it can have on others.
Last night she had a scrimmage against a team of boys, and her team was playing amazingly.
It had been awhile since they’d had a win, but last night they were up by two points for almost the entire game, and after a series of painful losses, I could see it on her face that she was actually feeling encouraged.
But then, in the final fifteen minutes of the game, the other team came from behind and ended up tying it.
Once again, she marched off the field red-faced, and starting to spiral.
I pulled her aside, also once again,
and insisted she go say “good game” to the opposing team, even though she was trying her hand at refusing.
I informed her that will not fly.
In this family, we will be decent, and civil.
The ride home was long, with her immediately sticking her ear buds in, but I tapped them and motioned for her to remove them for a minute and talk to me.
I started to talk to her about the importance of words and behavior, even when it’s hard;
Even when you are wronged, or your team keeps on losing.
“You don’t get it! I TRY!” She said, still tightly clutching her frustration.
“I really do! It’s like I just can’t help it!”
This gave me the opportunity to tell her that our emotions and responses need growth and exercise just like our bodies do.
In just the same way we work on running to increase speed, or lift weights to build muscle, the way we respond in our anger also takes some focused conditioning.
None of us are born with the ability to form perfect reactions.
This is why so many episodes of Daniel Tiger and Miss Rachel and Elmo are about learning things like sharing, and kindness.
Anyone who has spent any time around a toddler knows how often they do things like revolting and screaming their anger over the injustice of things like how you peeled their banana.
We talked about how each thought, behavior, or word we use forms a pathway in our brain, and if we keep using that same old method, that pathway gets deeper until it has formed a trench so deep we almost can’t climb out of it.
It takes work to form a new one.
It’s easy to slip into the one that is older and deeper, but some of our old trenches really need reconstruction.
“Honey, the way you respond and treat people in life is what matters most.
Not the points you score, or how good you are with your footwork.
In life you can be amazing at so many things, but if you are hurtful and uncaring of others, that is all that will ever be remembered about you.”
She nodded.
She told me that she was hearing me.
She told me that she promised she would be working on it.
We drove home in silence the rest of the way: Her with her ear buds back in, me thinking in the quiet;
My own words reverberating in my mind and heart, realizing the timeliness of the lesson,
even to me, who was the one speaking it.
I thought about how easy it is these days to respond too quickly, before we’ve had a chance to contemplate the best response moving forward.
I thought about how often we are letting ourselves express our anger and opinions freely without thinking about the real-life people who are listening to us do it, and weighing how what we say
and do will affect them; How it will affect their perceptions of us as their “teammates.”
It takes work.
It takes dedication to forming better pathways.
It takes recognizing the need for better conditioning.
My hope is that all of us will see that this area needs focus.
Kindness, patience, keep working at being better, even when it’s hard.
I promise that the pay-off, if we do, will be enormous.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
