Killing Me [Not So] Softly
What idiot in their right mind invented adolescence? I seriously am beginning to doubt that I ever should be the mother of a teen-ager. Don't they have any cheap boarding schools in this country? Preferrably in Vermont? Or Pennsylvania? Or Wyoming?
posted by The Warbler | 4/01/2006 09:46:00 PM
8 Comments:
Have you thought about an international student exchange program?
An excellent idea. Too bad it would be guaranteed to cause an international incident. Maybe I could ship her -I mean, send her via IFS - to someplace relatively harmless, like China, Pakistan or North Korea. Or the Maldives. Yes, definitely Maldives.
Warbler, dear!
If the situation is that drastic, maybe you should contact an agency like the CIA and see if they need a special ops agent to sow chaos, confusion and despair in a land or galaxy, far, far, away?
living for whirled peas.
M
Gosh, I thought that that was a teenager's job! You know, break rules, get in trouble, run away, have screaming fits, and all the rest. I shudder to think of what I did to my parents. Hey, I even got an allowance for being such a royal pain ...
And, dear Warbler, we all turned out just fine ...
There are no cheap schools in Vermont - it cost me $100,000 for 3 years and he still came back... (at least with a diploma and some job skills) I would strongly suggest the concept of setting teenagers adrift on an iceberg for a period of time. (Don't worry about global warming)
This topic is obviously too sensitive to be serious about it - probably because it hurts so bad.
But I think your daughter will love you as a sister one day, Paula. About 17 or 18 seems to be the magic age, at least it was for our daughter Samantha.
Samantha is my wife Lori's best friend now! I hope that works for you, too, in my prayers.
Sam,
Just a thought here.
A mother's love is uniquely different from a sibling. Your mom cares for you and nurtures you like no sibling ever can. Her happiness and well-being is intimately tied to the happiness and flourishing of her child. A relationship very different from the type of love that exists among sisters and brothers.
Aristotle describes sibling love as the sense of a shared or common life, whereas he describes parental love as the activity of loving a child as one loves one's own self. The parent, according to Aristotle, is like a benefactor to her child, she acts for the good of the child, delights in what delights a child and finds herself worrying for her child when the child is in trouble.
Apart from Aristotle, my own experience of siblings and parents is constituted by different experiences of love, unique to each relationship.
I would never want my mother's love for me to collapse into the kind of love I share with my siblings. It would be a great impoverishment.
Right ... good point ... I meant more like friends more than her former combative, sly, secretive, depressed, and pissed-off world our daughter was involved in. Sound familiar to anyone?
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