Take note

I was dropping off my daughter, Alice, now a freshman in high school, at her soccer game. Getting out of the car, she stopped dead and said, "Shoot! John's here."

Since I knew she and her friend, John, had had a recent falling out, I asked her if it wasn't a good thing to see him today and tell him how she felt.

She gave me an exasperated look. "No, it's not a good thing, Mom. I wanted to talk to him on the phone. I don't want to talk to him right now because I don't have my notes with me."

Notes?

A few nights ago, she sat on my bed and, aware that my eyelids were at half-mast and falling fast, quickly recited her to-do list for the next morning. "I have to get up, go downstairs and put clothes in the dryer, take a shower..."

Here I interrupted, "Dad will put your clothes in the dryer tonight if you ask him."

She considers this and finds it acceptable. "Okay. I have to get up, go downstairs and get my clothes out of the dryer, take a shower, get dressed, dry my hair, pack my stuff, eat some breakfast -- I know you're tired, Mom, but I'm not going to talk long, I'm just going over my schedule right now for tomorrow morning -- and then get over to Bridgette's on time for once."

She looks at me every couple of seconds while ticking off points on her fingers to make sure that my eyes haven't slid sideways to the pages in my book. I'm not really having any trouble resisting the urge to read while she's talking because I've only just started this book and it hasn't gotten good, yet. Normally, I'd have to close the book to keep from irritating Alice but tonight it's more fun to leave it open, the pages a subtle threat in the competition for my attention, and see how many times I can make her check to see if I'm listening. Two, so far. She's getting pretty good.

Alice is proof that we're all individuals. If I hadn't been there I would swear that she emerged from another woman's womb. One lesson that I've learned as a parent: just because you and your spouse combined to create this person doesn't mean that this person is going to be anything like either of you. Although, come to think of it, Alice is a lot like my husband, Steve. Just not like me.

I've learned more about what my husband is like from watching Alice. He craves order and routine, like Alice. Schedules and having a plan B when plan A doesn't work out is how they operate. Funny how I can sympathize with my daughter's struggles to make sense out of chaos but I have no patience with my husband's same problems. I keep thinking that he ought to be over these petty difficulties by now and should just be more like me, more a live-life-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type person. I cut Alice more slack because I reason that she's relatively new to this living and learning stuff and it will take her longer to realize she ought to be more like me.

Alice is everyone's idea of the perfect daughter. She cleans her room three times a week. She mediates fights between her two younger brothers. She helps her friends' mothers when she visits someone else's home. Actually, I taught her that one.

"If you want to be invited to someone's house more than once, be especially nice to their mother. It doesn't matter whether the kid likes you or not. You might be that kid's best friend in the world, but if her mother doesn't like you, you'll never be invited back to her house again, ever."

Since about third grade, whenever I go to pick her up from this or that house and chance to speak with her friends' mothers, they all tell me the same thing. "Alice is such a nice girl. She helped me clean up after the party. I told her she didn't have to, but she insisted. She's wonderful!" I always nod and smile, guiltily suspecting that I've trained her to be everybody's favorite drudge.

So what am I hoping to train her to be? Well, I'd like her to be confident in who she is. It's hard not to criticize her efforts. Criticizing is my worst fault when it come to my children. The problem is that I want them to be perfect. Not like me.

I recently ordered a book that talks about how adolescent girls change as they grow to be women. They stop being outgoing and carefree and fun and devolve into opinionless, mindless, gutless nothings. I read this book and casually, I thought, asked Alice if she wasn't experiencing pressure to conform more to what's considered proper behavior in girls her age. She stared at me for a long moment before arching an eyebrow and asking me, "Have you been reading teenager books again?" Then she picked up the book from whence stemmed my concerns and started reading it herself. Now and again she'll point out some behavior of her friends' that she disagrees with and which is, coincidentally, outlined in the book. She's always triumphant about the fact that this book describes her friends and not her. I'm just happy one of us is reading it.

Alice is bright, funny and gifted. I marvel that she's my daughter. I somehow feel that I don't deserve to have her. I'm afraid that there will be a price to pay for all this delight, although I'll admit that there are times when this house is too small to hold two femmes on the rag at once.

Last Friday night, before the homecoming parade in which Alice was to take part, she experienced a major meltdown and dragged me, kicking and screaming, into her personal pit of despair. I resisted, of course, but it was futile.

In between clothes changes she cursed whoever had mislaid her favorite pin-striped men's suit (I didn't mislay it, I gave it to Goodwill), dissolved into tears once, begged for help twice and stared at me in disbelief when I suggested that it didn't matter what she wore because her friends would be happy to see her however she showed up. "No, they won't."

Eventually, after trying on nearly every article of clothing in three different closets, hers, mine and the boys', she finalized her costume for the parade -- a brown suit and fedora. I smeared a black mustache on her upper lip and then drove her two blocks to where the parade was supposed to start. She hesitated at the car door. "I can't see them!" referring to the freshmen float. I'd reached the end of my mothering rope. "Get out," I growled. She got. Later, when she came back home she hugged me and apologized for going off the deep end and I said I was sorry for losing my temper.

It's really pretty easy to get along with my daughter. I just have to be prepared to drop everything and listen to her when she's ready to talk to me. Usually, it's when I'm at my lowest ebb, say around 10:30 at night, or when I'm in the middle of a work crisis, juggling three clients at once. It's a kind of testing, I know. And no more than fair considering what I routinely put her though when she's reciting lists to me. My mother says I'm getting exactly what I deserve. Someone just like me.

Marie Marfia
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