Hey guys. This is my first submission to YWS beyond a blog. I recently submitted this article to an online magazine. I am open to all reviews and critiques. I hope it's appropriate for this category, and I also hope it's informative, enlightening, and enjoyable.
What If My Mom Finds Out?
All teenage girls face heart-breaking, tormenting, and even inconceivable challenges. Typically, their struggles revolve around guys, insecurities, peer pressure, cliques, and, ultimately, a lack of guidance. Contrary to popular beliefs, the young girls who tend to struggle in these areas are not limited to girls with mothers that abandoned them as babies, but girls fortunate enough to have devoted mothers in their households struggle just as much as, if not more than, any formerly abandoned girl.
In fact, girls with mothers whom they love and they know love them back, mothers who regularly commit themselves to taking their daughters to the mall, the hair salon, and to the nail shop, and mothers who spend hundreds of dollars to make their daughters’ sixteenth birthday celebrations sweet are the girls that tend to have the most secretive, sneaky, and spurious lifestyles.
The relationship between a mother and a daughter is supposed to be one like no other; a relationship grounded with unconditional love and trust. So what goes wrong somewhere normally between the ages of thirteen and eighteen? What creates the barriers in these once inseparable relationships, de-magnetizes the unbreakable bonds, and brings about malice and mistrust?
In my four years of high school, I befriended a number of girls on a very personal level. Out of many girls, very few relationships with Mommy were ever described as harmonious, balanced, or even edifying. Among graduation time, the most popular reason for college anticipation was that young ladies were going to “finally get from under” their mothers’ “hellholes”.
Take my roommate for example. We’ll just call her Sunshine. 19 year old Sunshine loves her mother very much; however, she describes living with her Mom as an “unnecessary challenge”. Sunshine feels as if her mother “always wants her way or the high way and makes every disagreement unfair, one-sided”. Although Sunshine would love to go home regularly, she stays on campus most weekends because of her and her Mom’s frequent tendencies to bump heads.
Most mothers think that their daughters have gone off of the deep end during their teenage years. They see these girls who were once their little angels as immature, inexperienced, hot and hard- headed, rebellious, and ungrateful. These mothers believe that their daughters think they know everything, but in actuality, know nothing.
Most daughters, on the contrary, think that their mothers are impossible. They feel as if their Moms constantly try to live their lives for them, overanalyze, overreact, criticize, and blow everything out of proportion, making every conversation a dreadful fury that ends with eye-rolling, lip-smacking, and grudges. These girls, in turn, seek advice away from Mommy, because “she doesn’t and probably never will understand”.
Moreover, the advice they rely on, the wrong advice, normally comes from their best friends or other girls their age who don’t know much more than they do. All along, Mom had the answers, but for some reason, “couldn’t get that girl to listen”.
So who is at fault in these blow-ups? Are the mothers at fault for never staying calm and actually listening to what their daughters are trying to say? Or are the daughters at fault for thinking they know everything and acting like they don’t care what Mom has to say?
The truth is that the blame often lies within a misunderstanding and a miscommunication between the mothers and the daughters. Mothers want to help their daughters. Daughters need motherly help. However, as simple as that may sound, it is not going to happen if they both don’t do a self-check.
Mothers have to be careful with their approaches. In their daughters’ fragile teenage years, the girls need to know that they can go to their Moms with anything and everything, so Mom has to make herself a better, calmer listener. Mom has to be patient, understanding, and not come across like everything her daughter does is so wrong or like her daughter is just so naïve. Mom has to pave the way for an open, honest relationship. When her daughter messes up, which she will, Mom has to know when to rant, rave, scream, and lecture, but more importantly, when to hug, encourage, and provide comfort.
Daughters have to be far more open-minded. In their mothers’ lifetimes, they have faced nearly all, if not more, of the same types of issues their teenage daughters are facing now. Moms know something about what they are saying, and all they want at the end of the day, is to help their precious angels be precious angels. Daughters have to relax, be receptive, and know that Mom is Mom for a reason, and although she may not be perfect, she would do anything for her baby girl, and there is no one on Earth who cares more.
Teenage girls are going to face some hard and cruel times, but a mother’s unconditional love and understanding should be the sword and shield needed and provided to conquer every hardship, win every victory. A mother and daughter is a precious relationship, and when they work together to communicate with each other, understand each other, and learn from each other, the two are an inseparable match.
Gender:
Points: 1312
Reviews: 9