Confessions of a Bad Mother_The Teenage Years by Stephanie Calman

Author:Stephanie Calman [Calman, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509882106
Google: BxsHvgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1509882103
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2019-05-14T18:37:14+00:00

Ages 12 to 14: Monsterosa Deliciosa

So: I’ve become convinced that adolescence is not a sudden meteor shower but a process that begins in childhood. Still, there are stages. And of those, it’s the ones after puberty we find the most challenging, with good reason. In the past there’s been great emphasis on bodily changes – hands up if you remember The Curse – but the Modern Parent knows there are issues of far greater import.

The children are far better informed about their bodies than I was, they talk to each other more, menstruation is on the National Curriculum, there is the indispensable PSHE, and everything else – fortunately and unfortunately – is online. Though we don’t realize the significance of it yet, Lawrence and Lydia have been born just in time for their first information about sex not to come from porn. Lawrence’s school sex video – and that episode of Friends – are, in a way, the best things ever to have happened to them on that front.

This leaves us free to worry about all the other stuff. For instance, your child is listening to some music you don’t recognize, and you say:

‘What the bloody hell is that?’

Or, being a Modern Parent, you don’t say that, but nod knowingly. Still they can see the blank look in your eyes. And anyway, your liking it slightly spoils it.

Or you come in and they’re laughing at something on their phone, and when you ask if you can have a look, quickly close it and say:

‘It’s not important.’

It’s those seemingly smaller changes that can be the most painful, like when they come back from an adventure weekend, or a stay with friends, and you rush to hug them. And they take a step back.

Then there’s the extreme self-consciousness you get at this stage; suddenly, everything you say is lame, stupid and wrong, and you just wish you could say the right thing, the cool thing, just once.

For your dear, sweet child, so trusting and mild – well, ours never were, but anyway – has gone. And in her place is a genius who knows everything. She is in effect from the future, while you, like the Renaissance Church confronted by Galileo, dwell in the past. You’ve gone from being the Oracle to the Village Idiot. If any of this sounds at all exaggerated, imagine you’re in a Jane Austen story, life going along much as it always has, with the carriages and the whist parties, and fatal attacks of pneumonia caused by wet hems – when in chapter twelve you innocently open a panelled door and find yourself in Bladerunner.

Did you ever try to get in with the cool crowd at school and fail? Well, that’s about to be your life all over again. And to make it really humiliating, the cool kids are just that – kids. Thirty-or-whatever years younger than you. You’ve got a whole life behind you, with achievements, experience and knowledge; they haven’t even taken their GCSEs. But you know nothing.

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