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.

artist Wes Lang at ARoS

tattoo artist turned regular artist wes lang's studio exhibition was closing when we were at ARoS and so we were fortunate enough to see the man himself, since he was there to see it one last time. he was super gracious and talked to people and was totally willing to pose for pictures with all sorts of random strangers.

here, i caught a shot of him as he chatted with some visitors.

his art retains that tattoo feel and is infused with various american icons...native americans, motorcycles, flags, skulls (not that skulls are uniquely american). the exhibition was an ambitious rendering of his studio, so there were paints littered here and there on the floor and many large canvases that were works in progress. with him there, it definitely lent the feel of really being in lang's studio.

and although the teenagers didn't really want to admit it and they were quite embarrassed to ask, we did get a photo with him as he stood outside and had a smoke. he was super gracious about it and the kids were thrilled and excited. it was a very nice end to our visit to the museum. tho' i do hope that they won't all be inspired to get a tattoo...

visiting ARoS - the care and feeding of the teenage soul

we took five teenagers to modern art museum ARoS in århus on sunday. it was, in some ways, a long day, but it was also a fun day. they have so much energy and so much to talk about, it is both refreshing and exhausting.

ARoS is a relatively new modern art museum, sort of jylland's answer to the fabulous and much more well-established louisiana near copenhagen. but because it lacks the history of that wonderful place, it struck me as trying too hard in some ways. that doesn't mean i didn't enjoy it, but it most definitely wasn't louisiana.

ron meuck's boy is probably the most striking and significant piece in their permanent collection. it truly is enormous and yet so detailed and oddly lifelike. quite disruptive to the senses, actually. but then most art that's worthwhile is.

there was a special exhibition featuring the work of video artist jesper just. i liked this projection onto the floor, enabling you to walk directly on the exhibit. it was wet pavement without getting wet.

this crazy eyeball lampshade was part of the 9 rooms exhibit. you could sit down in a kind of living room and watch an ever-changing screen. the colors changed around you and it was somehow oddly surreal. i imagine if you were tripping, it would have been, well, pretty trippy.

i probably enjoyed the out of the darkness exhibition on the 6th floor best. mostly because i separated from the kids and went through it on my own. tho' there were others, i somehow had it mostly to myself as i walked through and i'll admit i like it best like that. this photo doesn't do it justice, but there was something quite powerful about walking down this darkened hallway with big fans turning slowly above. it felt dramatic and like i was contributing to the art itself through the act of walking down the hallway.

out of the darkness played with the notions of traditional ways of exhibiting art, even while it also engaged them by having a strict entrance and exit and only one way through, forcing you to follow a particular, pre-determined path. at one point, you come to a room that seems a bit like a warehouse for storing art, but instead it was exhibition space, featuring multiple andy warhols and bjørn nørgaard's jars of chopped up horse, among many other pieces, rather casually displayed and labeled with a dyno labler. (this may be one of the spaces that struck me as trying too hard.)

i would like to have studied this piece by danish artist tal r for much longer. layers upon layers of thoughts and sketches and inspiration.

surely the best part of ARoS is olafur eliasson's rainbow panorama on the roof - you look out upon the city of århus through literally (in some spots) rose-colored glasses.

i don't know what the kids will remember. they were quite engaged and excited to see contemporary american artist wes lang (more about that in another post), who was there in person, as it was the closing day of his show. they may have been chatting about all of their ordinary things like schools and friends and dramas, but doing so in the presence of art must surely be good for them on some deeper level.

there were a couple of floors that we didn't even get to, so we'll have to go back again. even tho' it's no lousiana, it's still definitely worth another visit and making sure they experience art is surely an essential ingredient in the care and feeding of the teenage soul.

we drove 600km to see a boy band in berlin

we've been in berlin. seeing one direction. hottest boy band in the world. it was, surprisingly, awesome. more soon, but first some rest.

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.

growing up is a painful process

molly mentioned recently how painful it is to watch your children wrestle their demons and come to terms with the world. i've found myself thinking about that quite a lot over the past couple of days. as you know, i have just the one rather spoiled perfectly lovely child. there are, however, two other almost-not-children-anymore in my life because husband has two daughters from a previous marriage. they're 18 and 15 and they come to our house every other weekend. they are adored 100% by their little sister, who gets the benefit of being both an only child and a little sister, and they seem to adore her back in equal measure. we're very lucky.

i'm fortunate to have escaped the drama i hear that other step-parents experience. i think because i never tried to be their mother. as i see it, they have a perfectly good mother of their own, so my role is something else. authority figure in our home, certainly, but more of a cool (in both senses) aunt than a parent. and that has worked very well for us. mostly because husband is very good at handling it and takes my side in matters of discipline. but there haven't really been matters of discipline, so that's helped it be a good situation now for more than a decade.

but even tho' they're not my children, they are an enduring presence in my life, so it's a bit hard watching them in their struggles. the older one has had a hard time with school. she switched gymnasiums and has repeated the first year. she seems to be doing better this time around, but there are signs of an inner struggle for her - she's gained weight and she's visibly lost confidence in the past year. instead of growing into a more capable young adult, she in many ways seems to have regressed a bit and needs more support rather than less. we're pushing her out on interrail this summer so she can experience getting along on her own (well, sort of, since she's going with a friend) a bit. we think it will be good for her.

the younger gets top grades in school, but lives like a vampire. not in dress, but in her habit of not being seen during daylight hours. she'll sleep 'til 3 in the afternoon and she doesn't seem to want to do any form of physical activity or anything other than watch television. her sisters shamed her into going outside on one occasion this weekend. sadly there was a downpour while she was out and she came back soaking wet since she was inappropriately dressed for the weather, but still, she did finally go outside. and her iPod didn't zap the hell out of her when she got soaked, so that was a plus. luckily for her vampire ways, the sun was behind clouds the whole time, so she didn't turn to dust.

what's worrying about the younger is that she doesn't seem to have any interests in any extracurricular activities (unless you count shoplifting, which isn't the healthiest of those and which she won't be doing again after getting done for eight counts of it a couple of months ago - or at least that's what we all hope). she was sent to dance as a child, but never really liked it the way her older sister did. she's tall, thin, willowly and beautiful (aside from some typical teenage incidents involving cheap hair color), so it's not that we think she needs to watch her weight, but we just worry that she doesn't have something she is into, something she burns for and is focused on. sabin has her horse. big sister has sports and dance, but middle sister doesn't have any visible interests.

when they come, i encourage creativity by providing materials and tools to support it - we've got loads of how-to-draw books, good pencils, fabric, sewing machine, stitching - everything you could want. and sabin and her oldest sister are often found sewing up monster dolls or designing costumes in sabin's top model books or building a shelter out of old boards and branches down by the lake. but it's difficult for us to pry middle sister away from the television and her facebook on sabin's computer.

i can appreciate that it's hard when you're a teenager to spend every other weekend away from your friends and your own everyday stuff. they have their own rooms at our house, but with the move, everything is still chaos. we've living out in the country and it must generally be rather "ew" for a teenager in her prime, especially one from a copenhagen suburb. but that's what's painful about watching it. the lack of engagement. i wonder what she'll remember when she looks back? will it be how she slept through it or how miserable she was, or will it be that they ran around outside and got soaking wet and came laughing in the door? it's hard being a teenager, but it's also hard to watch the process as a parent (or even as a cool aunt). you want to ease the bumps and blows that inevitably come of it.

i have different expectations for husband's daughters than i have for sabin (princeton undergrad and the danish olympic riding team are not too much to ask for her are they?), but i would love to see them discovering and then unfolding their talents and coming into their own. i see lots of young people both in real life and around here in the blogosphere who seem so much more mature and worldly and seem to be pursuing their passions, be it photography or art or rocket science or politics or whatever. i wonder what we can do to encourage that when it's only every other weekend we can exercise our influence. don't get me wrong, i'd go crazy if it was more often than that. and frankly we couldn't afford the grocery bill long term. but watching this process of becoming is, as molly said, a painful thing indeed.

grateful friday: because it's been too long...

grateful on a friday for...

~ the fact that it's friday

~ pretty, new, trendy, safe bike helmets (safety items do not violate "not buying it" mantra)

~ that my child wasn't done for eight counts of shoplifting (oops, was that out loud?)

~ sharing a carafe of wine with husband in a café while the kids saw a movie

~ party plans

~ laughing over my inability to muster a single bit of caring where the water pipes run from the well to the house. even after i really, really tried - giving myself a mental lecture and everything.

~ red velvet cupcakes

~ wine

~ espresso

~ a murakami novel (a wild sheep chase)

~ pierce brosnan

~ getting this post in while it's still friday. but only just.

happy weekend, one and all.

flying the coop

don't these parent birds look a bit like they'd like to get the hell away from the teenager birds?
or at least as if they don't really want to be seen with them.

when i found husband, he was someone else's husband (which is surely a whole 'nother story for another occasion) and that means that he came with a couple of complementary kids. daughters. husband is a filly producer, as my mother would say.  they're good girls and have always accepted me, so i've honestly avoided much of the drama (tho' not the angst) of being the step-mother. mostly because i've never tried to be their mother. you see, in my eyes, they have a perfectly good mother and the last thing they need is another one. so i've always tried to be the perhaps a bit aloof, cool aunt kind of person. the one who takes them exotic, exciting places (the philippines) and who cooks strange dishes and fabulous cakes. i've pretty much succeeded in that role. which is good, because i designed it myself and it would be a little bit sad if i couldn't even succeed at something that was exactly how i wanted it.

but today, in the throes of PMS and dread about being away in the coming week, the teenagers had me pretty close to the end of my rope. the whole morning, listening to vapid conversation peppered liberally with incredibly annoying poptøser (one of those words that's just better in danish) slang, i held on to the thought that i'd leave it all behind for a blissful hour and a half when i took sabin to riding. during that time, i'd be able to forget all of the signs of aging that it surely represents that i have no patience for all that teenage stuff and i'd be able to breathe and hear myself think. but no. there were people coming to look a the house at 2 and so we had to be elsewhere. that was convenient for sabin and me, because she rides from 2-3 on sundays and we leave at 1:30 to go saddle the horse and get ready. so as i was leaving, i asked husband where the girls were going to be. and he informed me that they were going with me. which he was not, he was going to look at farm place with some friends with whom we might be interested in going together to buy a big farm place.

i can tell you that this did not please me. i informed him that if we did not return, it was because i had managed to find a large horse to throw myself under while we were away - in the interest of that being less painful and a veritable pleasure in comparison to spending the day in the company of vapid teenagers. however, sabin was riding the largest horse (felix) and i hated to scare her, so i restrained, but still, in retrospect, it would have felt better than enduring the emptiness of the exchange between the 17- and the 14-year-old.

and it's not to say that i wasn't undoubtedly as empty and vapid as a teenager. full of made-up crap, quasi-dirty lyrics to songs that were undoubtedly just noise to my parents, and self-centered, look at me me ME dance moves and lots of too-loud laughter and an appalling vocabulary. but sometimes, it's just too much. and i'm grateful that my full-time child is only 8 and that those days are still a few years away.

so am i getting old or what?

teenagers and other mysteries of the universe

it was a weekend with extended family. sister- and brother-in-law, nephews, husband's ex-step-father and the grown children of his recently deceased long-time girlfriend. on her deathbed, she had requested that proceeds from the sale of her old car be used for a family get-together, so we fulfilled her wishes this weekend. little cabins were rented in a campground in the little village of randbøldal, not far from legoland, so that we could spend the day there with the kids on saturday. we dragged sabin's big sisters along, they are, after all, family too and should take part.

the eldest, nearly 18, has more or less emerged from the sullen teenager stage and is fairly game to the experiences coming her way (this may be a skill she acquired at my sister's place last summer). however, the middle one is 14 and in the throes of pure teenager (read: sullen, sighing, brooding, eye-rolling, hanging back, only grudgingly doing what she's asked, sleeping the day away (i could go on...)).

so it was really funny when i opened my story of the day email today on the iPhone in the car on the way home and read today's story: That's the thing about free will, he told us. You can drag me along, but there's no way in hell you can make me have fun. i do love iowa artist brian andreas' sense of humor. he always seems to hit the nail on the head when it comes to people.

to be honest, none of us had that much fun at legoland. it was crowded to the gills. it was a bit more chilly than you'd like it to be. and the main thing we did was wait in line...for tickets, for rides, for food, for coffee, for ice cream, for legos. in fact, we ended up not buying any legos because the line at the end of the day was that daunting and we'd had enough. of course, the kids did have some fun moments on the rides and it was more worth it to them. but even they were all exhausted and whining by the end of the day.

the day was redeemed by a beautiful dinner consisting of grilled beef tenderloin, salads and a mess of freshly-picked mushrooms that one of the others (who had had the good sense to stay away from legoland) had found in the forest that day. we looked for more this morning, but found only a few porcinis (karl johan) and no chanterelles.

husband has a thing for little local museums. he has taken us to old mills and tiny little amber museums in the past. he sniffed out a local museum within walking distance of the campground and we went there before heading home today. husband drove the car down to the museum and i walked through the woods with the girls, hoping to find some more mushrooms. the woods were hushed and dampened by fallen leaves and filled with the sound of birds and a creek merrily rolling along. it was a beautiful short walk to the museum.

middle child walked ahead, refusing to enjoy any of the experience, and sullenly waited on a bench near the museum, looking thoroughly embarrassed and exasperated at the rest of us, as we stopped to take pictures and investigate along the way.  it makes me a bit sad for her. why do teenagers do that to themselves - closing off from what is purely and only a great experience? the outdoor part of the museum had countless experimental ways of moving water that you could try. she did finally cautiously give herself over and try one of them.

inside the museum, we found a lovely older woman who showed us how to weave and how to make paper. sabin and her oldest sister each wove a long cord while middle child looked on and sighed and occasionally asked how long it was going to take (apparently because she was so looking forward to the three and a half hour car ride home).

they had a whole room full of looms at the museum, where a weaving club gets together on a weekly basis. the museum is on the site of an old factory where they made fabrics and paper from the mid 1700s all the way up to 1974 (hence the two activities you could try). the volunteer staff were so wonderful, i didn't want to tear myself away. it made me want a loom (of course, just what i need, another craft). or at least made me want to find a similar weavers' group in my area so i could learn about it.

in all, despite the crowds at legoland, we had a great weekend. but i do wonder if middle child will look back and regret that she held herself back and didn't allow herself to enjoy it? sometimes i think she'd like to simply sleep through age 14 (and sometimes i wish she would). i hope sabin's not like that when she's a teenager, but i suppose i should brace myself. teenagers are simply mysterious beasts.