It feels like it’s been three years worth of thirteen;
Like it has always been, and will always be this way, with her rolling her eyes, holed up in her room.
There has been a lot of push and pull;
Nights when I’ve stayed up alone crying,
Thinking that the girl I used to know has to still be in there somewhere, just out of reach, right on the other side of that door.
I wonder where her confident voice went.
It’s a quiet mumble now.
I wonder if she’ll ever again be like she was before.
Last night the battle began once again, same old me, and same new, often unrecognizable, her,
but after several minutes of a stalemate, a line drawn in the sand, for a minute I just stopped talking,
and sat quietly looking at her.
I watched her chin quivering, and for a brief gift-of-a-flash, what I saw was my same, unchanged little girl.
I wished more than anything that it could be as simple as spreading the pages of her out to sort and examine them on the hardwood floor, but then,
out of the blue, the words came to me.
I knew what needed to be said.
“What do you most need me to see about you?”
She looked up, weighing how to respond,
internally testing the waters of how honest she could be.
Once she spoke again her answer surprised me, and as the words poured out in a rush, tears dripped as if their rhythm was tallying each one of her yearnings as they fell from her chin.
She told me of pains, and sadnesses, betrayals at school, things she’d been holding in for an entire year. I sat astonished that I hadn’t known that, wrapped up in her silence, she had kept all of this locked in.
For an hour we sat there in the dim light, the rest of the family asleep.
I listened without judgment or correction, because I so vividly remembered when the teenager crying on the couch in the low-light was me, and I wished that someone had taken the time to stop talking at me, and had instead asked me that same thing.
After a while there was a lull in her words.
She just sat looking down at her hands, willing her plugged-up nostrils to breathe.
I felt impressed that maybe it was my turn now to tell her what I needed her to see about me;
That I wasn’t a monster out to wreck her good time.
I wasn’t just here to say no, and to make her do things.
I wasn’t without deep feeling all those times she had pushed me away.
Most important of all:
I wasn’t her enemy.
“What I need you to see about me is how hard this phase has been. I’m trying the best that I can to let you stretch your wings.
I know you’re young, and you can’t imagine how it would be to have a baby girl that, from their first breath, becomes your everything;
How you give birth to them, feed them mush with a spoon, and sit up nights in ER waiting rooms.
You dry their tears when their hearts are broken, and you catch their throw up in your bare hands.
You do all of these things, knowing all the while, that even though you’ve done it, even though you’ll never get back all the lost sleep,
one day they will look at you like you’re the last person in the world they’d ever want to be with.
I need you to see that, while I sit out here night after night, reminding myself this is all normal, it doesn’t ever feel like it is to me.
I know I have to let go a little bit, but while I do that,
it feels like a ripping away of a huge part of who I am.
To give you your freedom,
that I know you need,
I have to bind up what feels like the biggest part of myself, and will it not to reach out and pull you right back under my wing.
I need you to see that I am just a human with feelings much like the ones you said you’re feeling:
Rejection, dashed hope, loneliness.
I’m grieving your littleness, and I’m trying to get through all of this on my own because I know you’re busy on the other side of the wall exhuming all your energy becoming your own separate self.
God knows I believe in who that person will be.
I believe in you with all that I am.
You are brilliant, and talented, and beautiful, and fierce.
The future has YOU to fear, not the other way around.
I want you to be you,
I’m trying to give you space,
but I am over here craning my neck
because I so desperately want to be able to see you become everything you will for my own self.”
She flew into my arms without one more word;
Her tears dripped onto my chest.
“I love you so much, Mama.”
“I love you so much, too.
I guess I just miss when you were more easily held.”
She went to bed after that.
The heaviness had dissipated from the air.
I stayed up and contemplated what it would be like if we just all stopped to ask each other that question, instead of airing grievances, and shouting expectations:
“What is it you most need me to see, hear, or know?”
What if we sat quiet and truly listened to whatever came next, hearing past the words to uncover the actual needs that cry out behind them?
What if we just gently shed our light to each other instead of flinging our “What about me”s?
For the first time in a year I felt like our eyes and hearts had truly met;
Nothing standing between my thirteen year old and myself.
I hope I remember to use that approach more as I move through the world.
Maybe it’ll bring more people to sit beside me in the quiet, knowing they can trust me with their hurts, their truths, and their words.
Just a “This is me. This is where I hurt,” and a
“Now, tell me about yourself.”
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.
