pondering the ways of teenagers

teenagers seem a bit like raptors at times

the child came home from italy more of a moody teenager than when she left. i guess two weeks of sunshine and eating real pizza and lying on a beach and staying up too late will do that. she was, in any case, tired and not really that happy to be landed back in this little town in the middle of nowhere. apparently, she's convinced that within her beats the heart of a city girl, or at the very least, the heart of a copenhagen girl (little does she know that copenhagen, with a population of only a little over half a million, isn't really a city in the strictest sense).

over dinner, she expressed dissatisfaction with plans to spend a year in the states (school year 16-17) in the little town where i grew up. apparently going from one middle of nowhere town to another isn't appealing when you're tired and have just been hanging out in italy. but i imagine she'll go willingly when it comes down to it. we may have scared her last week with talk of extreme religious nutcases and long distances to amenities like movies and proper shoe shops and apple stores. but then, i got out of there non-religious and there's always the internet for shopping, so she'll be fine.

initially, her negative reaction to studying for a year in my little hometown hurt. it felt like a rejection of me. i think it's important for her to know her roots - to get to know the extended family still living there and to have a taste of what it means to be a member of our family and to have a sense of groundedness in that place. but then i realized that rejection is a natural part of the rebellion of growing up. and i had to admit that i too cannot imagine ever living there again, so how can i expect her to imagine it, if only for a year?

but i'm also confident that she'll get over it and will undoubtedly want to go and look forward to going. she'll be able to get a driver's license (something she can't do until 18 in denmark, to my great dismay), make new friends, spend time with family, participate in competitive cheerleading (after a year at a gymnastics-focused boarding school, she'll be awesome) and try a whole host of other things that you can only do in a small high school, where the very life of the place is dependent on everyone participating in everything. and she will get in touch with a part of where she comes from. it will undoubtedly be uniquely her own perspective and grounding and that's ok too.

in a few weeks, she's off to boarding school. it's only 30 minutes away and she will come home some weekends. people keep asking us if we're freaking out and sad about it and i keep looking within for those feelings. and they aren't there. i love seeing her taking flight, setting goals, working towards them. it's the natural progression in her growing up into the person she will become. i think i've felt all along that as a parent i'm witness to something magical, but which i have only had the smallest modicum of control over. and i feel privileged to be there for each stage of a natural progression of this amazing child coming into her own. going to the gymnastics boarding school for her final year of primary school is exactly what should happen next. she's ready and so are we.

on having a relaxed attitude to alcohol

it's approaching midnight again and again, i'm sitting here at the computer. we're having a big party this weekend to celebrate husband's 50th (it was back in february, but we waited (perhaps in vain) for better weather) and all of the plans and preparations are whirling in my head. thank odin for pinterest. and for being a list-maker. i'm off to germany tomorrow to lay in supplies (read: alcohol). because what party is complete without cocktails and wine and beer and cider? and a bunch of good food. although our weather is iffy and potentially not cooperating, it's going to be an awesome party.

and the child will have a party the weekend after, to celebrate officially leaving folkeskole for good, so i'll also lay in supplies for that as well. and some of her friends are having a party this friday and they've gathered up their pennies (almost literally) and given me a list of what to buy for them. yes, i have become that person we used to seek out when we were underage back in the day - that person who was old enough to buy alcohol and willing to do so.

buying alcohol for teenagers, you say, frowning. and yes, i say, smiling. because here in denmark, we have a relaxed attitude about such things. better to provide the kids with low-alcohol cider and "shots" in a bottle that have about the same alcohol content as wine and to know what they're doing and let them do it in a safe, gently observed environment, than to make it something that's taboo and have them sneak around. and what we find is that they don't drink all those ciders, they drink plenty of sodas (because we buy those too) and they laugh and listen to music. in actual fact, they're pretty darn sensible about it all. and that's because it's considered normal and not something forbidden and exotic and therefore appealing.

and we're not the only parents that are relaxed like this. pretty much everyone i know is. and it makes me grateful to be raising my child in a place where common sense still prevails. and cheap cases of cider are available just across the border. kind of like back when i was in college in south dakota and the low-point alcohol drinking age was still 18 in minnesota...

is negativity just another word for parenting?

it's very hard to be negative in the face of a delightfully cheery bouquet of surprise flowers from a good friend. but i've been pondering negativity of late. mostly because i feel i was recently wrongfully accused of it. and generally speaking, i think i'm a fairly positive person, tho' i will grant that it is hardest to see oneself, so i may not be a good judge. i can be dragged into negativity by my work environment. and i can feel negative.  i have been known to be cynical for comic effect. but generally, i feel myself as a positive person. so it rocked my world a little bit to have my negativity cited as the reason that one of husband's daughters hasn't been here on the agreed weekends for the past few times. and here, i thought she had to work...

i've written before about the challenges of step-parenting - especially when, like me, you intentionally do not take on the step-mother role, thinking that your husband's children from a previous marriage already have a mother of their own and do not need another one. but it's a delicate balance. and sometimes i think that in my desire not to be mother, i end up a bit aloof and cold. which is different than negative, in my view.

but i can also see how a lack of warmth might end up seeming negative. especially when there is a streak of disapproval in me towards the teenager in question. but you see, when i'm awakened at 4:30 a.m. by loud voices and laughter and go out to look and find said teenager on a video chat on her little sister's computer in her little sister's room, while her little sister sleeps, i'm probably not going to be a particularly happy or positive person. so if i'm deemed negative for putting my foot down about such behavior, then so be it.  and if i think it's a bit ridiculous to stay away for a month because you can't take being reprimanded for your thoughtless behavior, then, yes, call me negative. and perhaps even call me parental, which is another thing i'm not keen on.

part of growing up is taking the consequences of one's actions. so i'll accept that i could be deemed to be negative. but i think i also, as an adult, have a right and a duty to draw the line as to what behavior is acceptable at our house and what's not. even if it makes me unpopular.

i guess as long as there are teenagers humans, there will be negative moments in a home. and that's probably just part of life.  so thank odin for good friends who send you flowers that can put you right back in a positive frame of mind.

secret 22 - i'm a bad, bad mom

so, a few years ago, when sabin was still going to her børnehave (kindergarten or pre-school as we'd call it in the states), i was in mumbai, trying on gorgeous sparkling loungewear. just moments after this shot was taken, my phone rang. it was the børnehave, calling to say that sabin hadn't been picked up and well, they'd really like to close, so could i please come and get her. oh the horror!! i was three (and a half) time zones away and may as well have been on the moon, rather than the couple of blocks away i'd have been if i'd been home.  thankfully, while i was on the phone with them, our neighbor girl, who picked sabin up regularly and was a kind of nanny, showed up. she'd been scheduled to pick sabin up that day and had been delayed leaving her real job, so she was running late. so my panic subsided.

but it did cross my mind that maybe i should be there for sabin a little bit more on a daily basis, so that she wasn't the last kid picked up every day from school. it took almost two years for that to sink in and become a reality. but you'll be glad to know that i'm a much slightly better mom today. these days i only occasionally put her on a trans-atlantic flight by herself, make her sit in monkey class, force her to stay in dumpy eastern european youth hostels with no room service or leave her all alone as the only member of our family in the country (just for a few hours).

oh, and after all those gorgeous things i tried on, i didn't end up buying a single thing.

p.s. picture is from december 2005, so hopefully i look nothing like this anymore...hair is quite a lot longer in any case.

immune compromised and second grade girls

my head is full of snot, my throat is hurting like crazy, i slept like crap and i had to fly this morning. i'm in a soulless hotel room in oslo and bookbinder's design is out of my favorite purple binders (which i use for my monthly MPC printouts). not fun. i have the season's first cold and it's left me feeling miserable and sorry for myself. but i'm pounding vitamins (too little too late, perhaps), and drinking tons of orange juice. and i shall now attempt to leave the whining about my immune compromised/binderless state aside and proceed to regular blogging...

last evening, the parents of the girls in sabin's class were called to a meeting. apparently, earlier in the year, there were issues between some of the girls in the class. because girls will be girls. supposedly there were some who were requesting payment from some of the others if they wanted to play along at recess. not cool. we i have repeatedly interrogated sabin as to who it was and whether it had happened to her, but she was curiously silent on every occasion. i even asked her teacher about it at the parent-teacher conference last week. her teacher said that sabin was not part of those issues at all and that she was surely telling us the truth when she said she didn't know anything about it. that's a big relief.

it's also a relief to be told by the teacher, before we asked about this, that sabin is very popular and well-liked by her classmates. they clamor to arrange play with her during the recesses and at SFO (her after-school program). we are so happy about that. because popularity is an elusive and mysterious thing, but it's also pretty important to one's sense of well-being.

sabin's always been one to play with boys, all through her pre-school, her best friend was nicholas. through these early years of grade school, the ones she wants to invite to play on the weekends are named oliver and søren and mohammed (happy about that one, with all the integration issues you hear about). but lately, maria and laura have been calling more often. i'm personally not so keen on maria because she swears like sailor. and while i work with sailors and appreciate a good swear word myself now and then, it's not pretty coming from the mouth of a second grade girl. especially not at the frequency with which it happens with this particular girl. we might actually have to talk to her parents (they're politiken readers, i can tell, just by looking at them...which i think means that they won't take it very well, as they're no doubt wanting her to have the freedom to express herself without too many restrictions, which is surely how she became a foul-mouthed little hell child in the first place).

husband went to the meeting last night and i stayed home with sabin, who was a total crab. mondays are hard on her, she always comes home tired and out of sorts. husband said that they admitted that there wasn't really a problem anymore, things had gotten better. it was something to do with coming back from the summer holiday and getting into the swing again that had caused the problems and now things were fine. but still, the several recently-divorced moms in the group, starving for outside adult contact, rambled on and on about their kids and how hard it was getting them up and dressed in the morning, so the meeting lasted nearly two hours! husband only stayed 'til the end because there was cake. i'm really glad it wasn't me who had to go. we all know how i feel about those kind of meetings.

i've put a lot of thought into what it is about sabin that makes her popular. but popularity is elusive. i think she's popular in the way that the girl who won homecoming queen at my high school was popular...because she's nice. she treats people equally, she's not a snot, she doesn't show off (unless you count those times when she says, "who here has been to the philippines four times, raise your hand?" or "who here flew to the states by themselves last summer?"). she's good at getting games started, she never sits around, complaining she's bored (except at home on the weekends when she wants to annoy her mother)...she gets out paper and gets everyone drawing, or she gathers people to play cards or a board game. i think her preference for playing with boys has kept her out of that girl crapola and somehow made her more mysterious and appealing to the girls. whatever it is, we are grateful for it, because it surely has much more to do with how she inherently is as a person than anything we have done with her upbringing.

which brings me to this...why are girls so hard on each other? and how on earth does it start so early? why do we women do that to ourselves? i can remember my arch enemy all through school...my mom has said she used to pray that that family would move away from our small town...we made each other totally miserable. on purpose. and it was painful. and at the same time, i so loved that girl's two perfectly-placed chicken pock scars that were on her chin and her cheek. they were just so beautiful, i don't know why we just couldn't get along.

but now, my resolve not to whine about my besnotted head is fading fast, so i shall let you go.