London - My eldest daughter has started to deliberately pick arguments with me. Every day there’s a different noisy fight.
The targets of her fiery pre-teen fury range from the relentless mystery of her missing homework (which she believes I secretly hide) to the infinite list of reasons I love the three younger inmates more than her.
It’s exhausting, but predictable. She’s 11 years old and just about to step out onto that perilous ledge of teenage independence. It’s scary and she needs irrefutable evidence that I love her.
However, proving the strength of the metaphorical umbilical cord holding her safe means she must put motherlove to the test. She’s doing this by being as challenging to live with as possible.
She needs to know that, even though I am clearly not responsible for her lost travel card / notebook / pencil case, I am happy to take the blame because I love her so much. She needs to berate me over breakfast, but still find me unexpectedly waiting for her in the car at the bus stop on a rainy day after school. Frankly, it’s a level of emotional chaos on a par with having ten Lindsay Lohans lodging with us.
But I don’t mind our ludicrous and loud squabbles, coming as I do from a childhood of boisterous bickering. What I do find hard to deal with is that she is now the same height as me (at 5ft 2in I am, as her sister Gracie-in-the-middle points out, one of the smallest parents in the playground).
I’ve lost an important advantage in the inevitable family power struggle. While your children are still little and you tower above them like Big Bird from Sesame Street, you know they’ll mostly do as you ask and you are in charge. The minute they get to look you in the eye as they bellow at you, the game changes.
The mother-daughter dynamic shifts irrevocably. Now I really do have to be the adult in the real sense of the word, not just the physical sense (even though our shoe size is the same!).
This is when parenting gets serious, isn’t it? When I have to grow up, too.
Until now I’ve just been grateful to get our four children to the end of the day fed, watered and with all four limbs still attached.
Today I have to do the hard bit, the emotional bit that gets remembered and revealed in therapy years from now. Everything that happens counts.
Last week American author Katie Hafner - who wrote last year’s poignant memoir Mother, Daughter, Me, which explored the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship drawing on a year she spent living with both her teenage daughter and elderly mother - unveiled what she called the “motherhood word cloud”.
This came after an experiment at book readings where she’d asked adults to write down one word that best described their mother. Later she put all the words together, with those most used appearing bigger than those least used.
“Loving” was obviously the biggest, but oddly the word “narcissist” cropped up as sixth largest. “Complicated” and “crazy” loomed large too. “Needy” was the same size as “funny”, so equally mentioned. Naively, I would have predicted almost all positive words dominating such a modern-day thing as a motherhood word cloud, but “narcissist”? Where did that come from?
Obviously, my first thought on reading this cloud was to wonder what my daughters may write about me in years to come. I expect my eldest would angrily scribble “nitwit” if you asked her this morning, but what would I want her to write when the teenage angst has passed?
That’s what I need to focus on as she and I grapple with a hormone storm of teenagerdom.
Motherhood, it strikes me, is a bit like being Van Gogh and having your genius recognised only when you die. She may not appreciate me much now, but I may come out better in retrospect if I play my cards right today.
The question is, have I got the patience to wait for the warmth of the eldest daughter’s love to revert back to the scale of warmth of my youngest daughter’s love?
Every day Mabel, aged two-and-a half, tells me: “I love you so much Mommy I could kiss you a thousand.” It’s what gets me up every morning and makes me smile every night as I go to sleep.
Maybe “devoted” is the word I want. - Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief of ELLE.