Rebellious Daughters (28 page)

But just before my baby's first birthday, Mum and Dad announced they were moving to Brisbane. Dad had been ‘called' yet again by God to accept a promotion, and they didn't really enjoy living in Melbourne. It was too cold for them, and anyway they'd never stayed anywhere longer than five years. It was time to move.

I cried and cried, and felt confused. How could they leave me? How could they leave their first grandchild? Wouldn't it break Mum's heart to be away from this beautiful baby I'd given her?

‘To be completely honest, darling, it will be a bit of a relief to escape all the child-minding,' said Mum.

I was stunned.

‘But how will I cope?' I wailed. ‘I need you!'

‘You're an adult in your thirties now,' she said calmly. ‘And I raised two children on my own, without my parents' help, so you can do it. We'll visit you regularly.'

And then I saw it: the painful, complicated truth that my own mother possessed unfilled longings of her own, and they didn't involve me. She had the contrary desires to nurture and love on the one hand, and also to be free and selfish on the other. She wasn't quite sure what she wanted, but she knew what she didn't want, and that was to be an always-available, self-sacrificing Nanna. In this we were so ultimately alike.

Will I ever escape the push to rebel against my mother, and the equal and opposite pull to please her? I wonder at my compulsion still, to tell her everything, the whole truth, so that she might understand me, forgive me, accept me, difficult daughter that I am. As I'm writing these words, I wonder what she might think if she reads them. I want to send my essay to her, like a cat that's killed a rat and rushes to lay it at the feet of its owner. Would she see this as a gift of love, my struggling with truth and memory? Or as a mangled dead thing, disgracing her doorstep? Would she see that by writing it all down like this, I'm arguing with myself and trying to become more than just a rebellious daughter? I want to live
for
something, and not just against it. I want to accept the fact that I'm finally safe in my separateness; able to own my desires without needing to kick against the past. That's the dream, anyway.

I'm kneeling on my son's bed, pouring oil into my palm to warm it before I give him a massage. It helps him sleep. He says he knows he's spoilt. He's 12 now, on the verge of becoming something other than this soft, suntanned child laid out on the sheets before me. How long before he balks at my touch?

‘You're getting hands like Nanna's,' he says looking at them. I, too, can see my sunspots and veins, my short fingernails ruined by years of gardening and cooking just
like hers.

‘Sorry Mum, no offence!' he says, seeing my look of sorrow.

‘It's alright,' I say, kneading his smooth shoulders now, and bending to sneak a kiss on the nape of his neck. ‘It's true.'

WHERE MOTHERS STOP AND DAUGHTERS START

JANE CARO

‘I hate you! I HATE YOU!'

SLAM! My eldest closes her bedroom door so hard, I look nervously up at the ceiling to see if she has knocked any plaster down. No, it is still in place but my heart is hammering inside my chest and a red mist has descended in front of my eyes. I have just enough control left to mutter a riposte at her closed door, low
enough so she can't hear it. I want to scream it full into her face and hurt her feelings as much as she has hurt mine. But I don't. I am her mother and whatever I may feel, the instinct to protect my child – even from the full force of my own anger – remains.

‘Well, I don't like you very much at the moment, either.'

I walk away. My 12-year-old, who has turned up the volume on the TV to block out our battle, pulls a wry face but when I start talking to her – to enlist her sympathy, unfairly and unreasonably – she gestures for me to be silent and turns back to the blaring TV. I am left feeling isolated with my anger and my hurt but she is right to turn away. This is between me and her 15-year-old sister; I should not be asking her to take sides.

Half an hour later and my eldest emerges from her room. Tears stream down her face.

‘I… don't know why… I am… being such a bitch.' She manages to sob out the words. My anger melts. I don't know why she is either, but there it is – I am the mother and she is the child. I let my hurt go. We embrace. We are friends again, until the next time.

I can no longer remember what most of our battles were about. It could be anything; homework she didn't want to do; mess she left for me to clean up; a fight over TV programs; or just a bad mood. You name it, we fought about it.

It is one thing to be a rebellious daughter – I was a mild example of the genus myself once – it is quite another to be the parent being rebelled against. I had always thought I would be a good parent of teenagers. My husband and I didn't have many rules – both girls had curfews, we expected them to go to school and do their homework, we were strict about smoking, drinking and drugs (as much as any parent can be), but we were happy for them to have boyfriends and go out with their friends. We didn't get fussed about swearing or the clothes they chose to wear. We didn't mind too much if their bedrooms looked like tips. We picked our battles and tried to police only what we thought really mattered.

It all sounds very sensible and reasonable but it made not a sod's worth of difference. Both girls rebelled, not at the same time, thank goodness, and not in the same way.

My eldest's rebellion was very out in the open. It was hot, loud, dramatic. From 14 to 16 she fought us and her teachers every step of the way. She had unsuitable boyfriends, took up smoking – and was lousy about not getting caught – and wagged school. We were constantly getting notes from the school about work not handed in and the cocky arrogance she displayed, particularly to teachers she had little respect for. We were worried for her and not at all sure what to do. We even went to listen to a lecture by an expert in
adolescent psychology about rebellious teenagers. It was comforting to see that the room was packed. We were not the only parents, it seemed, struggling with a rude and belligerent teenager.

That talk was useful. The lecturer pointed out that teenagers lose the capacity for empathy. He talked about recent research that showed ten-year-olds had more emotional intelligence than 13-year-olds, and that something about the hormonal changes at puberty undid the ability to empathise and understand others for a few years. Perhaps that is why it is often the young who are the most ruthless killers. Just think about Pol Pot's teenage killing squads in the Khmer Rouge, Mao's fanatical Red Guard and the Hitler Youth. Or the disaffected young men who are currently sought out and groomed for murderous, sometimes suicidal, mayhem by ISIS. Our angry teenager wasn't quite in that league (we hoped) but it did explain why her previously soft heart was not as much in evidence as it had been.

The comprehensive public school she attended helped us to weather the storm. They did this by disciplining her when she broke the rules – as they should – but always giving both us, and her, the impression that while they did not like her behaviour, they did like her. They achieved this very important distinction by ignoring her swearing and laughing at her jokes. I sometimes wondered whether they would have expelled her
if we'd sent her to one of the posh private girls' schools so many of our friends and neighbours had urged us to choose.

Towards the end of Year Ten, we started to see glimpses of the girl she had been before the hormonal storm. She even began knuckling down again at school and her grades began improving. Given that she was about to go into the last two years of schooling, her timing couldn't have been better.

‘The teachers love me now, Mum.'

We were walking along a dusty country road, on holidays, when she made this assertion. She was halfway through Year Eleven.

‘Do they, darling? Why is that?'

‘There's nothing teachers like better than a bad girl gone good.'

We'd weathered a lot by then. Not least that she'd fallen for a young man she met on the train when she was in Year Nine (he was the adopted son of one of her teachers at primary school) who had turned out to be facing criminal charges. Robbery in company was the offence, but it sounded more dramatic than it was. Nevertheless it was defined as a gang related offence and it was an election year. Using law and order to demonstrate the ‘toughness' of politicians can cause a great deal of harm; this foolish but relatively harmless young man was sentenced to jail. We were, as you can
perhaps imagine, horrified when this happened, especially when she said she wanted permission to visit him. But my daughter wasn't about to take no for an answer.

‘So, you think that when someone you care about gets into real trouble, you should just walk away?'

Well, no, we didn't. Still, as I reassured Ralph, my husband, she was too young to visit the young man in question except in the company of his parents. She could only see him by trekking out to Emu Plains in the family car with the boy's parents and grandmother. I doubt those visits were anywhere near as glamorous as she'd hoped. Jails – even low-security ones – are dispiriting places.

‘Look,' I said to Ralph one day as we were on our regular morning walk and obsessively ruminating over the surprising place we'd found ourselves in. ‘It could be worse.'

‘How?'

‘He might not have gone to jail. This way she can only see him a few times a year, write to him and get the occasional phone call. I bet she'll be bored with the whole drama within 12 months and going out with someone else.'

I was right. She had another couple of boyfriends – each an improvement on the last one. Instead of rebels without a clue, she began dating boys who were just testing the boundaries the way most teenagers do.
Eventually she met an engineering student from Sydney Uni. He was the absolute best of the bunch and sensibly she married him.

Luckily, my daughter's intense rebellion burned itself out quickly and now she is a determined and strongminded young woman who (rather hilariously) is a stickler for obeying the rules. No wonder she's become such an excellent English teacher. Among other things, she is an absolute grammar Nazi. No doubt she will edit this essay of mine within an inch of its life.

‘Don't come all deep and meaningful with me.'

Now that my eldest daughter had calmed down, grown up and was going to university, it was my youngest daughter's turn to kick over the traces. But she did it very differently.

‘But I am just asking how you feel about doing the HSC, if you are anxious...'

I saw her face close down and her mouth form a thin, stubborn and disgusted line. She was shutting me out again.

‘Leave me alone!' She spat it out between mouthfuls of udon noodles. ‘It's my business, not yours.'

We were in a Japanese restaurant. There were people all around us. I did not want to make a scene. These days, it ended like this whenever we tried to talk – I pushed for information, she resisted. I no longer knew
what to say to her. I could find no safe topic. I knew I irritated her almost beyond bearing, but I didn't know how to stop it.

And the more she shut me out, the more anxious about her I became.

My youngest daughter's rebellion was a withdrawal. Where the eldest would throw a massive tantrum when we told her to be home by 10.30pm, and then arrive back on the dot, the youngest smiled sweetly, agreed and waltzed in at midnight. Where the oldest had yelled and slammed doors, the youngest hissed and plugged in her iPod. She told us what we wanted to hear to our face: ‘Yes, I have done that assignment', but did – or more accurately, didn't – do exactly what she pleased. I felt helpless in a way I never did with her sister, even at her hot and foul-mouthed worst. At least she talked. I earned my living as a communicator. I prided myself on my ability to get through to just about anyone. The one person I could not reach, however, was my youngest daughter.

She had become an immovable and impenetrable object and this was a much more powerful weapon than the noisy fury wielded by her older sister. No doubt she had watched, listened and learned. I had felt anxious and often furious while my oldest was at her worst, but I had never felt as if I had entirely lost contact with her. Now I was nonplussed and felt out of control.
Worse, everything I tried to do just seemed to dig me deeper into a hole. I tried talking to her – she hated that. Someone recommended an anxiety clinic – she loathed that too. We tried family therapy and that went down like a bucket of cold sick. The only message my daughter seemed to take out of my increasingly panicstricken efforts to ‘help' was that I thought there was something wrong with her.

The school (the same one her sister had attended) warned me that my daughter was sabotaging her HSC and advised me to seek some help. I did as they advised and suggested we make an appointment to see a counsellor. This got me precisely nowhere. Indeed she seemed to take the suggestion as a final insult. We fought about it for weeks.