I just spent the entire day with my daughter. We had planned it, lots of fun things, and it was a really great day. This may sound like I know how to spend an entire Saturday with my teen with no eye-rolling, expressions of disgust, or instantaneous brush fires. This is not entirely true. But as we are both not just still alive, but unharmed, I feel that I have some small amount of authority to speak to this subject. So I’m going to blog on it before anything changes.
Let me just say up front that my daughter is pretty damn great. Her dad and I used to joke nervously between ourselves when she was little about how awful the teen years would be, how we might just ship her off to some distant relative at 13 and drive out to pick her up on her 20th birthday. After four-and-a-half of those teen years, I can thankfully say none of our fears were borne out. She makes good decisions and picks great friends. At 15, she weathered the divorce of her parents with consummate grace. She’s an all-round expressively loving and responsible kid. I haven’t actually tried to give her away once.
That said, I had no idea how dim I would become during the passage of her teen years. But just this morning, I was reminded of my extreme lameness as we embarked on our day together. She showed up around 8am, having seen her boyfriend off to the airport. My first glimpse of my general inadequacy centered on a discussion of how she had missed two dentist appointments recently. My sense was that she had known they were scheduled, but had double-booked and had to cancel at the last minute. Her sense was that “we totally forgot about them.” How I could have forgotten a dentist appointment I didn’t know was scheduled was difficult for me to understand. I tried for a minute. But already, I was implicated in the general imperfections of the situation. Just the fact that I hadn’t even known the appointments were scheduled turned out to be evidence of my lameness as a parent. And I hadn’t even got out of bed yet!
I got out of bed, determined to improve upon my parenting excellence before my second cup of coffee. My first cup of coffee had been consumed at 5am when I woke up. After that delicious hot beverage I fell asleep again for a wonderful extra hour. Nevertheless, when I relayed this information to my teen, she very kindly let me know that it is really dumb to consume coffee at 5am. I tried a spirited defense that it was decaf and I am a chronic insomniac. Her expression confirmed that this evidence was not permissible in court.
After an hour or two of home-based activities, we headed out to breakfast. As we got into my newly purchased car, and I rejoiced aloud at the driver-side door handle and windows that go up and down at the press of a button [see previous blog post], Jessie laughed and said “mom, you’re like one of those people who live at the poverty line and you give them a crappy car and they’re just so grateful because it’s better than walking everywhere.” Once again, she had me pegged. Except my crappy car is a 1999 Jaguar Xj8 and I happen to be in love with it. So ha! Take that, teen! One-zero to me.
Breakfast was at the Hummingbird in Fairfax: a New Orleans eatery complete with beignets, local color, and mardi-gras beads. We ordered our favorite dishes. As I embarked on my Fairfax Sunrise Breakfast, I must have been grinning more foolishly than usual, because Jessie asked me what was wrong. I looked out the window at our town, sparkling in the recent rain, clean and bright and full of good people, and around the Hummingbird, clean and bright and full of good people. “I’m just really happy,” I said. “Breakfast out with my girl, y’know?” She smiled back at me and nodded. Yeah, mom. Me too.
Skip ahead a few hours. We picked out our Christmas tree and brought it home on top of the car. Takes a village to put up a Christmas tree, but not really in our house. It takes the two of us to get it straight in the holder, but after that I am off the hook, because apparently I lack the skills to decorate a tree properly. She strung the lights, and they looked really good. Then she put on a few ornaments. I started feeling bad that I wasn’t helping. I kind of like the tree with just lights. So uncluttered. But our ornaments have a lot of memories and history for us. Especially the ones she made in preschool with the bowtie pasta. So all helpful like, I hung an ornament.
Apparently not in the right place. I know this because moments later she posted a photo of our tree on Instagram with the caption: Decorating our tree and my mom puts this ornament here. I case anyone missed my ornament placing faux pas, there was a big red arrow pointing at it. But I was fine with that, because it meant I didn’t have to hang any more ornaments but could go back to futzing on my iPad. Ha! Two-zero to me!
Moments later, her friend arrived to scoop her up for the evening. Most of the ornaments were still in boxes on the sofa. I was reminded how most of the laundry had been on the sofa earlier, in little folded piles, as her laundry chore did not quite get carried through to the putting away of the laundry. When I called her on this, her watertight excuse was that she didn’t know where most of the stuff goes. Of course! So it should stay on the couch! Where mom likes to sit, but now she can’t because the laundry is there!
The laundry got put away. But now there were boxes of ornaments on the sofa, proving the age-old teen law that if there isn’t folded laundry on the couch, there will be boxes of Christmas decorations. Oh no wait, that’s not the law: it’s that if you are in the middle of something and your friend arrives, you should immediately stop what you are doing and leave, because friends arriving trump homework, chores, and decorating Christmas trees. An unintended consequence of this law may be that stuff gets left all over the place. But that is really beyond any teen’s power to address, because they are just obeying the law.
The good news is that the tree mostly just has lights on it still. And it probably will for a few days, until #1 daughter person has time to finish the task. When I came out to the living room before dawn this morning, the tree sparkled and winked cheerily at me with its lights and its barely discernible few ornaments. So ha! Take that teen! I may not be able to sit on my couch, but the score stands at three-zero!
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