30 September - teenage girls & jealous mothers
One that I missed out a while back but as the family in question may be visiting London and possibly staying with me soon, I want to remind myself… Was away back in July. Friend’s house in Cote d’Azur. Us singles are not ideally well placed to share holidays with families but so it goes that I did (was also expecting a visit from a previous lover from Italy and looking forward to meeting up with another house guest flown in from LA). As it came to pass, time spent with the other singles was almost nil and I found myself part of a very unhealthy dynamic between my friend Jackie and her daughter Alyne who is 11 and a half but looks about 13, a 5’7” lovely blonde girl who acts shy around adults, but who is probably very different around other teenagers (couldn’t really follow her around). The other daughter, Millie 9, is v. confident, still mother’s preferred one it seems because she’s not yet giving her any teenage mouthing back. The father, a handsome nearly 50 Swiss man, definitely super laid back compared to Jackie, who amongst other things seems to miss her London life and 11 years of being a mother have left her with just that vocabulary: do this, turn that off, pick that up, come here, listen to me when I talk to you, look at me when I tell you something and where do you think you’re going, you haven’t done your homework, John you tell her and so on. Increasing voice volume as she gets ignored..
I was caught in the cross fire mum/daughter, dad reluctantly drawn in and I don’t think it was just because it may have reminded me of the restrictions imposed by my mother in my teenage years but I found it very distressing. Though my mother never called me stupid. Couldn’t because I most certainly wasn’t and had top marks at school to prove it. It was just a major power struggle that slightly traumatised by younger sister too. She recently reminded me of an abusive episode I don’t remember and in which little sister was a spectator paralysed by the fact she wanted to help but couldn’t. To bring it up 36 years after the event is something. I was able at least to give her my assurances that she could stop blaming herself for being unable to help. A 5 year old can’t do much. Anyway, we all have the power struggles and it’s amazing how we end up being the same parents that ours were. Jackie certainly is very clear about how she suffered at the hands of her mother. Most bizarre.
It ended with me in the car to the airport replying to Jackie’s nice invite to come back next year that I wouldn’t unless she went to a therapist (ok she does, so er, increase the frequency of sessions) and sorted out her behaviour towards her eldest. Pick, pick, undermine, undermine. Not healthy.
I then was reading Elfriede Jelinek’s – sorry can’t remember title, but was not her most famous, The Piano Player or Piano Teacher? and she has some passages that are v. cutting about mothers wanting their daughters not to have any better lives than they had, presumably because by the time the daughters are teenagers the mother is sick to death of having been duped into this role which is pretty thankless (fathers still get away with not doing much of what’s needed). Jelinek is a most cruel writer, to the point I felt sick agreeing with her, and she knows how to twist the knife. It may well be fiction but if you relate it to her age and when she may have been young in very conservative, possibly rural, Austria she definitely carries some nasty baggage. Not sure if she’s got kids, she’s possibly in that v. small category of women who never had any because they knew they’d be cruel to them.
But am straying into conjectures and that’s bad.
Last year I made a conjecture; told a friend this man she liked and with whom nothing had happened with yet and subsequently never did, seemed to me like “someone who’s not comfortable in his own skin”. Ok not a conjecture, just a first impression but would you believe it she hasn’t forgiven me apparently for being so negative about someone I don’t know. I said first impressions are exactly that, and can be changed following gaining more information, facts etc, but I seem to have committed a big hurtful thing. Have apologised but if we can’t express impressions which are not even that critical then why have friends?
I was caught in the cross fire mum/daughter, dad reluctantly drawn in and I don’t think it was just because it may have reminded me of the restrictions imposed by my mother in my teenage years but I found it very distressing. Though my mother never called me stupid. Couldn’t because I most certainly wasn’t and had top marks at school to prove it. It was just a major power struggle that slightly traumatised by younger sister too. She recently reminded me of an abusive episode I don’t remember and in which little sister was a spectator paralysed by the fact she wanted to help but couldn’t. To bring it up 36 years after the event is something. I was able at least to give her my assurances that she could stop blaming herself for being unable to help. A 5 year old can’t do much. Anyway, we all have the power struggles and it’s amazing how we end up being the same parents that ours were. Jackie certainly is very clear about how she suffered at the hands of her mother. Most bizarre.
It ended with me in the car to the airport replying to Jackie’s nice invite to come back next year that I wouldn’t unless she went to a therapist (ok she does, so er, increase the frequency of sessions) and sorted out her behaviour towards her eldest. Pick, pick, undermine, undermine. Not healthy.
I then was reading Elfriede Jelinek’s – sorry can’t remember title, but was not her most famous, The Piano Player or Piano Teacher? and she has some passages that are v. cutting about mothers wanting their daughters not to have any better lives than they had, presumably because by the time the daughters are teenagers the mother is sick to death of having been duped into this role which is pretty thankless (fathers still get away with not doing much of what’s needed). Jelinek is a most cruel writer, to the point I felt sick agreeing with her, and she knows how to twist the knife. It may well be fiction but if you relate it to her age and when she may have been young in very conservative, possibly rural, Austria she definitely carries some nasty baggage. Not sure if she’s got kids, she’s possibly in that v. small category of women who never had any because they knew they’d be cruel to them.
But am straying into conjectures and that’s bad.
Last year I made a conjecture; told a friend this man she liked and with whom nothing had happened with yet and subsequently never did, seemed to me like “someone who’s not comfortable in his own skin”. Ok not a conjecture, just a first impression but would you believe it she hasn’t forgiven me apparently for being so negative about someone I don’t know. I said first impressions are exactly that, and can be changed following gaining more information, facts etc, but I seem to have committed a big hurtful thing. Have apologised but if we can’t express impressions which are not even that critical then why have friends?
posted by Lisa Taylor @ 7:05 AM
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