Mother, daughter gap wide

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

"All we do is argue," the woman tells me over a cup of coffee. Her 16-year-old daughter has just stormed out the front door ("I'm going for a walk.") because her mother suggested in front of "company" that she might want to shut off the TV and go upstairs and clean her room.

"I didn't yell at her," the mother says. "I was simply making a suggestion.

"My daughter and I are like oil and water these days. I tell myself to be calm and patient and understanding. I try to remember how I felt when I was her age. I know I was a slob, too. But it isn't just her room we fight about. It's everything. She looks at me like I'm a fly on her dinner plate. She sighs every time I try to talk to her. She shuts herself in her room and talks on the phone for hours, and I can hear her up there laughing and giggling and having a great time. Then she hangs up and comes downstairs and thumps around here like she's in prison and I'm the guard.

"I say, `What's wrong, honey?' and she says, `Nothing!' I say. `You seemed fine a few minutes ago when you were talking to your friends,' and she says `What? Were you spying on me again?' And then I lose it. Then I start screaming.

"I drive her to school and pick up two of her friends on the way, and every morning they're all smiles and `How's it going's?' They seem to enjoy talking. But then she tells me, `I wish you wouldn't try to act like one of the kids, Mom. They're not interested in anything you say. They're only being polite.'

"Her words hurt. I don't know where they come from. We used to be so close. All the time people told me about problems they were having with their daughters I thought: that'll never happen to us. My daughter and I are best friends. We do everything together. We talk about everything. Then it changed and I can't figure out why.

"It's like one minute she was sitting on the couch next to me telling me who liked who, what one friend said to another, asking my opinion, and then the next she was up in her room with the door shut. I didn't even know she had a boyfriend until one of her friends mentioned it on the way to school. She was furious. That's when she said her friends didn't want to talk to me in the car. That's when she said they were just being polite."

"The problem with my mother," the daughter says, "is that she wants to know everything. She expects me to tell her every little thing that went on all day. She comes home from work, and I'm on the phone and she expects me to hang up and talk to her. Like I'm waiting around for her to walk through the door. Like I'm supposed to drop everything the second she arrives.

"`How was school?' she says. School's the same as it always was. She's been asking me that my whole life. `Did anything exciting happen today?' Nothing exciting ever happens. What she really wants to know is who I talked to, and what I said, and what I'm thinking, and what my friends are thinking. And I don't want to tell her. I'm not a little kid anymore. I'm a junior. I'm practically an adult.

"But she still treats me like a child. Like telling me to clean my room. Like making those queer faces whenever someone brings up the name of this boy who isn't my boyfriend but is just my friend. Like asking my friends things, hoping she'll learn about me through them. She embarrasses me.

"Don't get me wrong. I like my mother. I love her. Only I hate how she hovers. I don't ask her every time she gets off the phone, `Who was it? What did you talk about?' I don't grill her about what she does every second of the day. She says I don't like spending time with her anymore. And she's right. I don't. But that's because we spend all our time arguing.

"I need her to get off my back a little. I need her to let me grow up. I know my room's a mess, but it's my room. I know I'm moody, but so is she.

I need her to get off my back a little. I need her to let me grow up.

"She always says, `When I was your age I did this and I did that.' She always has a story to tell. So how come she can't remember that when she was my age she didn't run home and tell her mother everything. Why can't she remember that she wanted to be with her friends, too?"