Parent of Teen Bangs Head Against Wall

I am the parent of a teen girl. She is seventeen. Ninety three point six percent of the time, this is by far the best thing about my life. The other six point four percent of the time I just want to bang my head against a brick wall because it would be more effective and productive than my efforts to parent her into the adult world.

Most of the time, despite the vast disparity in our ages and the depth of our life experience, my teen daughter operates on the assumption that she knows more than I do. In some ways, this is lamentably true. Anything to do with an iPhone, for example, makes me feel like a Brontosaurus. I try to figure out how the hell it all works, I really do. But any time I do something on my phone when she is watching, even if I have done it perfectly well a hundred times before, I just want to go outside and munch on leaves in tall trees, do what I actually know how to do without looking like an idiot.

Last night, on our way home from a night drive, we were discussing the inadequacies of my car. She was driving, and thus each time we got out of the car for something, I had to let her back in from the passenger seat because there is no outside handle on the driver’s door. There was also a bad smell coming from the engine, which I only noticed after we drove up a large hill. Usually I avoid large hills for precisely this reason. My car is twenty years old and its appetite for fossil fuels is insatiable. When I commented sadly about the bad smell, Jessie took the opportunity to point out the irony of my Love Your Mother bumper sticker with its picture of our planet. It should read Fuck the Earth, she said, laughing. Once again, she was right.

There is nobody like one’s teen for making keen observations about one’s shortcomings as a human being. The other day, while discussing food and things we like to eat, she mentioned to me how much she loved that her new boyfriend takes her out to eat a lot. Subtext, there’s never any food in our fridge. Okay, I admit I sometimes run out of milk, because she’s not home all the time and when she is, there’s no knowing whether or not she’s in a cereal-eating phase. Also, I don’t drink milk. So one third of the time there is fresh milk in the fridge. One third of the time there is sour milk in the fridge. And one third of the time there is no milk in the fridge. Occasionally, there is milk in the fridge that is so old it doesn’t actually pour out when you try to empty it down the sink. Has that ever happened in your house? See, life with me can be a really interesting science experiment!

She does have a point about the food thing though. I can cook a really great meal for a dinner party or Thanksgiving. But dinner every day? Not my forte. Why do people have to eat dinner every day anyway? Couldn’t it just be once or twice a week, and the rest of the time a cheese sandwich? Or old milk? When I am on my own, I sometimes have bread and butter for dinner and I do just fine. Wine is made of grapes, so as well as the carb and protein food groups I get my fruits in. This is an old joke, but I think it still works.

One of the best things about parenting my teen girl is that she opens me up to things I never did or had when I was a teen girl. Skin care products come to mind. Make-up. The other night we were at the mall, ostensibly to go shopping but in reality just to get free samples at See’s and Sapporo. It’s actually called Sephora, I just looked it up, but that will tell you how often I go to make-up stores. Sapporo is a Japanese beer. That will tell you something else about me, but it’s off topic. Jessie wanted to look at facial sparkle stuff and also to get a free sample of her favorite perfume, which the kind folk in Sephora will apparently decant for you into a tiny bottle, affording you about a month’s supply of perfume for free which would cost you $140 if you wished to purchase it, not for free, as it were. How she knew this is one of the mysteries of parenting. I did not know this. How did she know this?

Anyway, we marched boldly into Sephora, trying to look as though we were intending to purchase some of their perfume for $140 but first wanted just a tiny sample to make sure. She is really good at this, I could tell she had done it before. I, on the other hand, was setting foot in Sephora for the first time and I was instantly frozen with a sort of fear of make-up. It is a specific fear that comes over me when I am expected to know anything about this most feminine of topics. I was raised in a household of Irish men. None of them wore make-up. When I was about forty, some girlfriends were at my house and we were all getting dressed up for a party. One girlfriend opened my bathroom cabinet. Where’s your make-up? She asked. There, I said, pointing to my sad little collection of eye shadow and my one eyeliner pencil. No really, she said, where is it? The conversation went on a bit longer than this, but you get the drift. 

Now we were in a make-up emporium. The salespeople wore earpieces, like they were on the floor of the stock exchange. Most of them were gay men, whose make-up was more spectacular than Lady Gaga’s. I glanced around me, deer in the headlights. A saleslady came up to us with her earpiece and her fabulous red sproingy hair. Jessie confidently asked where she could find glitter highlighter and the saleslady pointed us to it. I complimented her on her hair because really, I thought it looked amazing. While Jessie tried on some glitter, I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I’m generally reasonably happy with how I look, but in Sephora, well, I looked a bit scruffy. I tried on some glitter too. Scruffy, but glittering!

Jessie got what she came for from a sales guy decked out like Ziggy Stardust, only crisper, and we exited giggling to ourselves. I had made it through my first foray into Sephora. I didn’t really give a damn that I don’t know what 90% of the products are for. Hospice nurses can’t wear perfume anyway in case their patients are allergic or sensitive. So I have a watertight excuse for not knowing what Naked Skin Highlighting Fluid really is or does. Or why it is made by a company called Urban Decay. Isn’t that a bit body-in-a-dumpster for a skincare product?

Next stop was See’s. I know my way round a box of candy pretty well so I didn’t feel too scruffy in there. Then Jessie wanted to go to Urban Outfitters and Free People. When we try on clothes in stores together, we have a huge amount of fun. But if I try on something that doesn’t look good to her, she has a special way of saying mom, no. It is similar to the way she cocks her head to the side and says mom when I do or say something that I think is funny or cool but she does not. It’s just the one syllable, but it is packed with delightful inferences. Principal among them is that any time I want to go outside and extend my crazy long neck up into the trees, I should just go right ahead.  

I treated her to a pair of pants in Free People. Usually she pays for her own clothes, but she’d spent all her week’s earnings on gas and I was brimming over with joie de vivre. She was so happy and it made my mom heart expand to around five times its usual size. These parenting moments roll in now and then and it’s important to seize them. Childhood is brutally short. The teen years may seem endless, but they are not.

Then we went into The Gap and I tried on a leopardskin fur coat. I didn’t even really like it, but I have a weakness for fake fur and at one point I used to wear a lot of leopardskin. There were no mirrors around but you really don’t need a mirror when you have a seventeen year old daughter. Mom, no. I put it hastily back on the rack. Fake fur looks silly on dinosaurs anyway.