“So, did you dock the phone?” I asked my teenage daughter, “Cuz I don’t see it in the kitchen …” She was brushing her teeth at the bathroom sink. “I don’t know where it is!” She said too defensively through a mouthful of toothpaste. “You don’t know where it is??? Didn’t YOU take it?” She spat. “No! I don’t know where it is!” She said diverting her eyes. My instincts stood on the edge of a cliff, poised, keen, ready … “Where’s the phone?” I said firmly not letting her go. Her gorgeous deep-blue eyes held my gaze. “In my drawer,” she said, pointing to the knob below her hand …
Sigh. And that’s what happens. Is something wrong here? No. This is a teenager. A full-blooded absolutely normal teenager. “Give it to me, honey,” I said, holding steady — inwardly proud that she’d come around. I didn’t know what to say on the spot. So I went down the stairs and whispered loudly to the mound of my husband already asleep in our bed. “She lied to me! Right to my face! She docked her phone then snuck it away and she pretended that she didn’t know where it was! What do I do?!” He garbled a foggy command from La La Land. “Take it away. She can’t have it for a week and she has to earn it back …” So back I went to be Dad’s mouthpiece. “You’re losing the phone for a week,” I said as she watched me in an enemy encounter. I wanted to hug her though. I wanted to have a grown-up kind of heart-to-heart with her. I wanted to be sage, helpful, loving, great. But sometimes you just have to hold the line. Sometimes you have to be unpopular. And the mother/daughter complications are entering in because she has to let ME go. She doesn’t want to hug me. She doesn’t want to need me. She doesn’t want to SEE ME! Where’s that little girl? She’s there … this is her … my little love … Stop this world, I wanna get off! Meanwhile, the worst thing in the world for a child is for them to walk around feeling lousy inside about something they’ve done that’s wrong. She doesn’t need that guilt. She needs to live in the light and take the consequences of her actions. But thinking back to all the shenanigans I pulled as a girl … a teenager … she’s only just begun to LIVE!
