Conveying a practical sense of the mother/child ‘us’ - the relationship that holds mother and child together - is often most easily accessed by attending to those blissful moments when our infant is peacefully cradled in our arms or when we’re giving our toddler a big hug - congratulatory or soothing. For a moment, we may experience a connection and love that is hard to articulate or share but that captures us momentarily in a tangible experience of deep relationship. But the ‘us’ is not only these flowing, strange, expansive and treasured moments and our relationships with our children ideally go well beyond the infant and toddler years.
When you type ‘mother and child’ into a search engine, the most common images you’ll find are of infants and very young children with their mothers. Mothers might be holding their children, they might be sat beside them or walking together but the common denominator for the mother/child relationship, in popular imagery, is that of a mother with a young, still highly dependent, and physically affectionate child. That does not remotely capture the reality of the relationships we have with our developing children because in the evolving ’us’, mother and child are both maturing, and it is not an easy ride.
Today I’m going to focus on the ‘us’ that is possible during the adolescent mother/child relationship, when our cuddly, easily impressed children take their rose-coloured glasses off and let us know precisely what they see.
As they emerge into an unfolding sense of self and their own power, teens don’t necessarily appreciate, notice, or enjoy our words of wisdom or acts of love. They may feel our newly awkward attempts at affection - or even simple communication - stifle, impose, misinterpret, misunderstand, patronise, or diminish them. And sometimes they do, even when we don’t mean them to.
We are one of the few, once reliable, nestlike relationships that they now mess up, entangle, resist, disrupt and increasingly leap out of in an adolescent’s developmental pursuit of independence and individuality. And they’re not alone. As mothers, we can easily be just as cranky and chaotic as we flail about in the nest too. It isn’t what it used to be, and it will never be that again.
Just think about those times when your teen decides it’s important to highlight your, say, social-emotional flaws or disordered eating or tendency to flop in front of the TV of an evening after a full day of attending to everyone else’s needs. What once was a nest, is now a fight club. And we don’t talk about fight club.
We need to talk about fight club.
If we imagine the relationship or the ’us’ as a third entity, what once was firm, big enough, warm and often enjoyable, might now look like something ‘the cat dragged in’. A fragmenting mess of twigs, grass, moss, and mud; our relationship reflects the changing needs and expectations of the adolescent mother and child. It isn’t pretty or simple, it’s stretching, striving, and confused.
The teen who slams her door and rolls her eyes isn’t the only one struggling in this relationship. We often roll our eyes too. A good door slam might go a long way to briefly expressing our frustration and if there’s no one around (or even if there is) we can engage in a bit of shadow boxing or arm flailing as well. Just because our children are growing up doesn’t mean we immediately grow up with them. Adolescence isn’t easy on children nor is it easy on parents. We’re both developing whether we want to or not and just because the process is built into our DNA, it doesn’t mean we go along gracefully.
The furious mutterings of exhausted parents, the ongoing experiencing of micro or macro rejections, the desperate sense of loss of what once was, the despair or fear of what may be, and the shame entwined within the whole process spills into the now insufficiently sized nest of ‘us’ threatening its collapse. I’ve often internally cried out: ‘Is this really necessary?’ And the answer is: ‘Yes’.
Each mother/child relationship is unique and what works for some won’t work for others. The individuality of the mother and adolescent relationship at this time, more than any other, needs to be seen and cared for. Because this is a time when not only the identity of the child is emerging and explored, the mother’s identity is also changing. The confrontation(s) of a teen bring into stark relief our own limitations, points of view, blind spots, challenges, and tendencies. We bring our own adult detritus and gold to the nests we form with our children. And this stuff quite often comes from our childhood and adolescence, those limitations and hurts we’ve put aside as we’ve grown up.
When you’re on the receiving end of a seemingly relentless ‘attitude’ that positions you as less than you once were or unwillingly playing the role of combatant in this relational fight club, it is so easy to slip back into our teen selves resisting our own parents. I’ve had to regularly stamp down the desire to flee, to sulk in silence or to deliver a scathing response to the young adult in my house. I am all too aware of the ways in which I contribute to the mood and behaviour fluctuations present in our relationship. While my role as responsible adult requires me to take the high road, I’ve slummed it at times in the gutter. As for the disordered eating, do not deprive me of my comfort food right now. Things could get ugly.
The wonderful feeling of expansion into the relationship that was surprisingly encountered during infant cradling, bedtime storytelling or afterschool hugs, undergoes a radical change in adolescence. The ‘us’ doesn’t disappear in these teen years, it transforms. It demands a new spaciousness.
Your young adult needs room in the relationship to experience and experiment with their own developing identity – this will often frustrate, slam up against and abandon you. You’re going to need to find other places and relationships to support you through it. The mother/child relationship itself will need to morph with the teen and their less than perfect parent.
What this feels like is, at first, a series of conscious decisions to shut up, to be okay with silence, to give space for your young person to speak if they wish to and to mourn what was. To withdraw both excited and fearful chattering. To be still even with all your curiosity and catastrophising. An example from my own experience is the realisation, brought to me by my son, that I tend to fill up our shared spaces with words (often while driving). I want to recommend TV shows, I want to discuss interpretations of movies, I want to ask about what he’s reading or thinking or doing. That sign over there is funny. Do you remember when…? I want, want, want and then I want some more and meanwhile I’m crowding out any chance for him to feel his own experiencing and understanding. Or for me to benefit from it.
I’m learning (albeit clunkily) to slow down and enjoy the quiet with him. Sometimes a little jewel of thought will come my way and I try to gently place it in our much softer, more malleable, and expanding nest. Room is being made for him to construct other nests with other people without the diminishment of our own. It was going to happen anyway but it’s my job to help.
Our holding loosens in some ways while strengthening in others. We don’t lose those blissful moments of ‘usness’ but we try to recognise them when they’re erupting from new sources. I find myself feeling our deep connection in moments of shared laughter over a YouTube clip or when we’re side by side listening to music. I pay attention to these new golden moments, lining our nest with new memories and curiosities. My son feels them, or he doesn’t. The point is, I’m still constructing and adapting our nest, particularly while our relationship is not a conscious focal point for him.
Our ‘us’ is the home and foundation he’ll unintentionally carry with him as he moves further into the world, as will I. Some of our twigs and leaves he’ll use to help build new, significant relationships. We recognise that our mother/child ‘us’ is unique, there’s a particular history of power, responsibility, affection, and experience that only emerges from the relationship of a primary caregiver and their child. But hopefully there will be many other ‘us’ experiences for my son and I as we get older. We’ve both, in our own ways, just got to keep bringing stuff back to this particular nest. And if that stuff is unrecognisable and painful, as it often is, it’s still ours. Our nest, our fight club, our ‘us’.
This post is written by Dr Ariel Moy. She is passionate about developing mother/child relationships, she has a private practice as a creative arts therapist, is a Professional member of ANZACATA and is an academic teacher and supervisor at The MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia.
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