to talk to her mother, Chris would show up and give her mother a why-do-you-let-herget-away-with-it expression. Soon after, her mother would warn her to knock it off. It got so bad, in fact, that Hannah started having occasional panic attacks. Her mother found Hannah shaking uncontrollably in the bathroom one time, and she still did nothing. One time, Hannah said point-blank to her mother, “You choose him over me,” and her mother didn’t deny it. Now, Hannah says, she tries not to think about it too much. Instead, she fantasizes about having a boyfriend. She told me, “I think of having a boyfriend’s arms to wrap me up tight, kiss my hair, hold my hand, and cuddle with. I find myself now looking at any guy, imagining that. I don’t find many guys at my school attractive, and the ones that are have personalities that ruin it, or they’re into smoking pot, or I just have no way of approaching them. Now whenever I think I like a guy, I don’t know if it’s just because I’m desperate like my mom or if my crush is genuine. I just want to feel good and have someone there to love me like that. And it doesn’t help the way my mom is acting, and what she says makes me think I can’t be happy if I don’t have a man.”
Hannah’s mother has tons of work of her own to do before she can be a positive influence on Hannah when it comes to romance. Like Janet, she needs to examine her own issues with men and the ways she has turned to men to fill something in her that she can’t fill on her own. Clearly, Hannah’s mother has put her own desperation for love above her care for her daughter, something I too commonly hear from teenagers. Unless Hannah’s mother puts her daughter’s feelings first, Hannah will continue to feel confused about her own impulses when it comes to romance. Hannah has difficulty separating her identity from her mother’s, which is typical of a mother-daughter relationship, but particularly one where the mother has no boundaries around her behavior.
Every once in a while, I hear positive stories, too. I know a fourteen-year-old girl named Nel who recently started dating, and one evening she came home with a hickey on her neck. Her mother saw it, let her daughter know she saw it, and told her that she was fine with that hickey. Her concern, she let Nel know, was that Nel was making choices she wanted to make. She only wanted to be sure that Nel felt comfortable with what was happening and that she wouldn’t do something she didn’t really want to do. At first Nel rolled her eyes and said, “I know, Mom!” But about an hour later, Nel came back to her mother and said that she did realize that sometimes boys wanted to do more than she felt ready for, and sometimes even she wanted to do more than she was sure she was ready for. Nel and her mother wound up having a long, open discussion about how boys are always considered the horny, sexual aggressors, but really there were things girls wanted to do, too. But girls are very aware that if they let boys know they want those things, they quickly get labeled “sluts.” Nel and her mother agreed that this was unfair, and together they discussed ways Nel could work her way around this double standard while still staying true to herself, such as by thinking through her sexual behavior before acting, and perhaps even talking to her mother about it first.
Sometimes the media gets it right also. One mother-daughter sex talk that received lots of attention for being honest, realistic, and all-around positive came from the NBC drama
Tami: “And you know, just ’cause you’re having sex this one time doesn’t mean that you have to all the time, and you know if it ever feels like he’s taking you for granted, or you’re not enjoying it you can stop anytime… and if you ever break up with Matt it’s not like you have sex with the next boy necessarily.” (She tears up.)
Julie: “Why are you crying?”
Tami: “Because I wanted you to wait…but that’s just because I want to protect you because I love you, and I want to make sure nothing bad ever happens to you. And I always want you to always be able to talk to me even if it’s about something so hard like this.”
Julie: “I didn’t want to disappoint you.” (Tami shakes her head and hugs Julie.) {64}
A conversation like this one, and like the one Nel and her mother had, is a great example of mothers encouraging and supporting open dialogue about sex while respecting their daughters’ thoughts and feelings. In both examples, too, the mothers take responsibilities for their feelings about their daughters’ sexual behavior rather than projecting those feelings on the girls. This is a big difference from the kinds of conversations I hear about too often—one in which a mother simply tells her daughter that she should not have sex until she is married, or alternatively, one in which the mother is trying to be her daughter’s best friend. When a mother shares too much of her own past experiences with sex, or when she encourages her daughter’s sexual feelings as a way of validating her own, she crosses a boundary, one that can feel violating to a girl.
So a balance such as the ones Nel’s mother and Julie’s mother managed to find—where they remained their daughters’ mothers, guiding them and providing safety for the girls while also supporting their daughters’ feelings and sexual discovery—is a difficult balance indeed. Mothers have a unique responsibility here, one they must take very seriously as they navigate their ways through the treacherous field of a teenage girl’s sexual discovery.
This has been a long-standing stumbling block. My mother’s generation had mothers that tended toward silence. They simply didn’t speak about sex to their daughters. One day, the daughter’s period arrived, the mother took her to get Kotex, and that was it. They were told to not have sex before marriage. The end. Some of the mothers of my generation tried to do things differently, but many went too far the other way, offering too much about sex, breaking boundaries, wanting to share like friends. The mothers of today have still been mostly left out in the cold with this subject, mainly because mothers are women, which means no one has told them that their desire was normal when they were growing up, that it is a necessary part of the equation when it comes to sexual development. Mothers so often feel helpless in the face of this task of guiding their daughters safely through the wild, roaring rapids of adolescent sexuality. They try to tell their daughters what they need to know. They warn them. But such tactics don’t work with adolescents, who need to know that their knowledge and beliefs are respected. The most important thing a mother can do, really, is to just listen.
Fathers have their own set of challenges.
Chapter 5
DADDY ISSUES
Sarah, now in her late twenties, has slept with seventeen or eighteen guys, all in about five years. Three- quarters of them were one-night stands, and she can’t remember all the names or what order they came in. One was a professor in the college she attended. Three or four of the guys were actual relationships that lasted a year or more. Sarah didn’t have sex until she was twenty-one which is later than the average for girls (which is seventeen). In high school she was into sports and schoolwork and not so much into boys. She did have a boyfriend her senior year—but she believes she messed that up when she started looking to her best friend, a girl, for emotional fulfillment instead of him. All of this sounds perfectly normal.
But then, Sarah’s best friend had sex with Sarah’s father. From then on, everything changed. She said, “I like to blame my father and my shitty genes for my promiscuity, but I know this is just an excuse.” True, but her father’s behavior was also a reason. Sarah has more recently been in therapy because, twelve years after the incident between her friend and father, she still finds that her depression is uncontrollable.
Breanna had a military dad, and his job required him to travel overseas for the majority of her childhood. When she was nine years old, he left again for a one-year tour of duty overseas. A friend’s father was known for taking the neighborhood children on camping trips, with and without their parents, and Breanna’s mother thought it was a nice gesture, especially since her father was gone. It was on that camping trip that she says she learned about her body and her friend’s father’s body when he molested her. Her father returned several months later only to tell her mother that he wanted a divorce. The two events, both terrible disappointments and betrayals for Breanna, led her down a desperate path to feel loved by a man.
Stories like Breanna’s, and to some extent Sarah’s, are the stories we expect when looking for narratives
