I don’t want to hear how it will get better. I don’t believe it will. It was lost somewhere in the past and I cannot retrieve it or make it into something that is remotely salvageable. There comes a time in a mother’s life when she must accept and surrender. Some children are attached to their parents, they are emotionally tuned in to each other. Some children are attached to their peers and to any adult other than their parents, regardless that their parents care for them and do all that is humanly possible to keep the child close.
Sometimes a mother will have to stand alone and be outraged at policies that do nothing for her child’s development, policies that encourage her child to be secretive and to not share crucial information with her mother. These policies are designed by law and wholly supported by schools, and specifically exclude parents. Sometimes a mother will have only one recourse at her disposal, and that’s to voice her anger at those officials who are purportedly responsible for her child’s well-being. And when a mother sometimes does this, sometimes there will be silence at the other end, but not a shameful silence. No. It’s a silence of disbelief at the mother’s overreaction. It’s a silence that says: You are angry for no reason. Shame on you for being so angry and for jeopardizing your child’s trust in us, her school counsellors, we who know your child better than you do. Now because of your overreaction, we told your child, and your child will no longer feel like she can talk to us, we who are much better at parenting than you could ever hope to be. We hope you’re proud of yourself; are you humiliated yet? You should be.
And sometimes the silence is shared by those officials, but not with the mother. They share it with the child, the same child who is peer-oriented, and the child is happy to know that those adults care about her much more than her own mother does. Her mother is an over-reactor, that’s the implication. A nuclear over-reactor. All the child’s friends say so, and the mother is the laughing stock among those wise and sophisticated 14-year-old peers. And among those university-educated, professional women who hold important titles and have years of experience dealing with peer-oriented children, including being mothers themselves.
What’s a mother to do? She cannot protect her child from the psychological consequences of certain actions that her child has decided to do. Anything the mother says is overriden by the All-Knowing school counsellors, and most important, her child’s decision to take matters into her own hands at 14 years old is lauded by these same wise gurus of child psychology. This leaves the mother out in the cold, standing barefoot on broken glass. Wherever she turns, any step she takes, will be a misstep, and will result in pain and bleeding.
Sometimes a mother must stand still and not move. She wants to scream and holler at the top of her lungs. But it’s futile, nobody will hear her anymore. The question is how long can she stand still before the glass under her feet start to feel like icepicks? She must be patient. Surely there is a glass-sweeper that will come by soon with His broom and dustpan, to clear a path that she can walk on again without cutting her feet. A path where she will be able to take her child by the hand and the child willingly will walk with her mother on that path, trusting her mother to guide her, just like she trusted her mother all those years ago when she learned how to walk.
Fat chance of that ever happening, the mother thinks. Sometimes the mother loses faith. She thinks she can regain it by being patient and trusting the One who brought her this far. It’s all she has left.
Her feet are hurting, though.
