weather, lost homework, late-running buses, pens with no ink in them, broken pencil sharpeners, unacceptable exam results, Pritt Sticks with no lids, nail varnish that has dried up, past-its-sell-by-date sliced bread, toast that is toasted too much, missing Twix, teabags that burst in cups, oversubscribed festivals, mysterious stains on new duvets, the cold weather, Wetherspoon’s questioning fake ID, the traffic jams … it’s all your fault. Everything. Is. Your. Fault. For this moment you become the most unpopular girl in class in your own home, courtesy of your own offspring. Your teenager begins to view you as the biggest nitwit anyone could ever meet. This is not her rejecting you forever, it’s her separating herself from you. The little girl who once worshipped you to the moon and back now has to untether herself from you, and it seems to me that she sometimes uses a surprisingly mean, self-righteous moral superiority to do that. It’s her adolescent weapon of choice. She begins to talk to you in the patronising voice reserved for admonishing toddlers who are wearing their clothes upside down and eating jelly with a fork. Or very deaf elderly people. I was once so viciously reprimanded in the street on a cycle trip with my sixteen-year-old because I took a left instead of a right turn that a passer-by stopped to commiserate with me as my teen sped off up a hill shouting, ‘Get a move on.’ The wonderful mature lady walking along the path said, ‘I feel your pain, I’ve been there,’ and she blew a raspberry at my daughter on my behalf (because I was too scared to). It’s like being a freemason: only those in the know, know. That’s all mothers of girls. You may unwittingly become a new superhero – Moron Mum. I didn’t see this attitude coming, but I’m giving you advance warning, so suit up like a medieval knight, flip the faceguard down and allow the illogical insults to your intelligence to bounce off you in a cartoon fashion. (Of course, I am generalising here, they aren’t like this all the time and indeed some teenage girls may never be like this. Lucky you, if that is the case …) The jibes aren’t meant in a malicious way; it’s just that mums are often seen as rubbish at this stage of the parenting journey, otherwise it doesn’t make sense to separate from us. And when you recall some of this cruel behaviour with humour, they will look at you blankly and say, ‘Well, that never happened.’ Their brains have allegedly erased most of it, even though later on, in their twenties, they will feel guilty. I have worked with a lot of young women and they all tell me they feel guilty about being mean to their mums as teenagers. At this point in parenting they need to believe that you just aren’t important enough to them to remember specifics about you, though they can remember what everyone in the TikTok Hype House had for breakfast three days ago. I can only describe it this way: imagine your teenage daughter had to write a 2,000-word essay on any subject. She may not be able to manage it on something she is actually studying at school, but she could easily pen one entitled ‘An idiot’s guide to Mum, the idiot that lives with me’. There would be an epilogue and a prologue too, because you are such a dimwitted fool who has achieved nothing in life that your crimes are endless. She can only write this of course because she has been closely monitoring your every move since the day she was born. She is inextricably tied to you (with love, for that is what you must remember in these testing times, love is the bond). My eldest once said to me when she was fourteen and I was demanding some minor details of her next escapade, ‘Oh my god, Mum, what is the point of you?’ It was a blow to my self-esteem because I often find myself sitting quietly on the bottom of our stairs on my way up with the clean washing, questioning the point of me anyway – midlife will do that to you. The decline in oestrogen and testosterone whips away some of your memory and offers you brain fog and little dollops of despair instead. So much questioning is going on that it’s doubly hard to deal with a bright young thing dismissing your life away as she swishes out of the room. All ponytail and hi-top trainers. But deal with it you must. And you can at least love her new-found assertive confidence to say what she means, if you are looking for positives and let’s face it, we’re always looking for them in the teenage years. If you are the mum of a pre-teen right now you may not believe this will happen to you but it will. I was once asked to come and give a talk at my daughter’s school about fashion, having worked in the magazine industry for thirty years. I have won awards for the glossy publications I have edited. I’ve been on lists entitled ‘Fashion’s 100 Most Powerful’. I have given speeches in front of fashion’s most iconic names. Goddammit, I once had lunch with Donatella Versace and Vivienne Westwood at the same time. Yet the eldest looked at me with a genuinely perplexed expression on hearing of my school-assembly debut and said: ‘But what would you know about fashion?’ She dismissed a whole career in one sentence. When we were both interviewed by broadcaster Anne Robinson for a BBC show about parenting my daughter, then thirteen, made the same remark again for the benefit of thousands of viewers concluding, ‘Well, she doesn’t actually do fashion.’ Those ‘bring your kids to work’ days were wasted on her, clearly, though of course other people’s mums do exist outside of the bubble of dismissal, I find. Issey’s mum, for example, is ‘an artist’, my daughter tells me with pride, and Siobhan’s mum, don’t you know, is ‘a beauty entrepreneur’. When I lightly questioned the meaning of this job title (again, as someone who has worked in the beauty industry for decades myself, on magazines) both the teens looked at me with savage fury. ‘Why do you always criticise people for being good at things you know nothing about?’ they said, with no irony. For mums of daughters, parenting is not a popularity contest. You are not their best friend: please don’t try and be one, because they benefit from boundaries. A teen without proper boundaries is a scared young woman, in my opinion. At this age they often seem to go right off you – as they are separating from you – while still recognising the balance of power is in their favour because they know you love them so much you’ll do anything for them. I watch mine come into the kitchen some days and the pain of not being able to hold them close like I did when they were little is unbearable. No gently putting their hair behind their ears for them any more or smoothing Gracie’s little fringe down. The absolute proof they are going to leave me is inevitable as I observe them in these moments. Imagine a romantic affair where you are desperately and deliriously in love beyond your wildest dreams but you know with absolute certainty that the object of your affections will one day leave you, that really, every minute is a step towards that parting. You don’t see this when they are little, it feels as though childhood will go on forever, but it comes into focus as they hit adolescence. Yet it is all normal adolescent development, a stage they will pass through and out the other side. This teenage untethering alongside your midlife unravelling touches every part of your soul, because at times it can feel brutally personal. We don’t often talk about this, do we, as women? We just get on with life, taking each day as it comes, but the effect of this uncoupling must surely shake us; it is a subtle form of grief and it troubled me greatly at a time of life when I was questioning the point of everything anyway. Doing the ‘death maths’ on the years left and what could be achieved during them. We must talk about it, because if you know it is coming, the path to parting and eventually
This book what's the point of you mum. Is very helpful.