Defcon 5

Last Saturday I had a defining moment of being a mom to a budding teenager. And it was awful. Awful. Ryan was in a mood. Her father yelled at her and she went downstairs to her room. I finally went down to span the generation gap and she allowed me to see into the black hole of hormones and junior high suffering. Because of my slight (by the world’s standards, mindfucking by my own) anxiety problem I immediately am horrified by any small symptom that could mean it has been inherited by my offspring. First, she scared the crap out of me. She wouldn’t tell me anything but that something bad had happened to her. I finally had to say to her what I was thinking. “Ryan, you have to tell me because all the things that I am thinking of are so much worse than it probably is and you need to have pity on your mother and her mental state. I am not leaving until you tell me.”
“Nobody can help me.”
“How do you know that? I don’t know everything and I am 37 years old. How do you know that when you are only 12? And if Bart and I can’t help you, we have the resources to find you somebody that can. We have the money, the insurance, the family, the intelligence.” I was spouting but she wasn’t saying anything.
I sat there and I sat there on her bed. Wondering what the right thing to do was. Wishing that I wasn’t the mother in the situation here. Wanting her to be my happy 2 year old daughter again.
“You can’t change the way people think.” She finally said. Apparently, this bad thing that has happened to her is that people think she was pretty in 4th grade and has become ugly. And fat. Can I just say THANK THE LORD?
And yet sitting there in her room and listening to her tell me she was ugly and fat and that she had tried starving herself this weekend was not that comforting.
“Ryan, I know you don’t want to hear this but most women who think back on their junior high years just remember them as absolute hell so all these feelings are somewhat normal. I mean, you feeling abnormal is normal if that makes sense.”
But I remember those feelings. I remember that you really hadn’t even acquired a vocabulary in order to voice your uncertainties, your challenges with your body and your emotional behavior, your moods swinging from tree to tree. I was speaking so very much from the heart when I told her that I was 37 and I still didn’t know everything. Everything about hormones, mood swings, life, women problems.
So, I did what every caring mother should do. I started reading her notes that she left in her pants pockets in the laundry. I went and read her journal. And there is very little guilt in my admission because I now feel qualified to diagnose her with normal abnormality. We have lowered ourself to Defcon 3 and will keep things closely monitored. We also talked about eating a good breakfast every day. That is requiring daily monitoring. We talked about taking vitamins. That is requiring daily monitoring. At this moment, I was guess she is going to live.
I have had to squelch many other remembrances of when my mother was caught reading my journal. I vowed that I would never violate the privacy of a child of mine. That was such a breach of trust. Now, no longer being in the throes of those hormonal mood swings, I feel that it is the right thing to do. And yet, I know what kind of feelings it will evoke if Ryan should find out what I did. What do you think?