The Second Stage of Separation

My parents – now just my mother, of course – have these friends, a couple their age with a daughter called Katia. Now, Katia is a very attractive woman, as Katias tend to be. Very attractive.

Katia’s mom was always gushing, “my daughter and I are so close! We are best friends! She never had a rebellious phase as a teenager. Always so sweet and loving to her mom!” The mom’s friends were very jealous.

Of course, now Katia is in her forties, and mom is still her best friend. Her only friend. Katia never married, never had children. Forget children, she’s never been on a date. And it’s not that she’s lacking in the looks department. It’s simply that she never grew up. Katia’s mom is devastated. She’s in her seventies, and she understands that Katia will be completely alone once mom dies.

The reason why I’m telling this story is because I saw comments regarding the invariably negative images of parents in literature for teenagers. As I said before, every stage of human development has its own developmental goals. The teenage years are the time of the second major separation from the parents. These aren’t parents as human beings. It’s parents as objects of a child’s psychological life. A child needs to reject the parents to become her own person.

And here’s the most important thing: the better the parent, the earlier and the harder is the rebellion. When a teenager says (or seeks out in a book), “mom and dad are bad”, it doesn’t mean they are actually bad. To the contrary, they are fantastic to have been able to bring the kid to this important stage of development. What the kid is actually saying with this “mom and dad are bad” is “it’s bad for me to be mom and dad. I need to be my own person.”

It’s only in the third and final stage of separation, which is young adulthood, when a child fully separates, comes into her own, and can finally return to the parents as an equal, as a fully formed grownup.

If a parent is this larger-than-life person, a fascinating individual, and a fantastic parent, it’s all the more difficult for a child to separate. Mom’s or Dad’s persona is so attractive that you don’t know how to create your own and not keep swimming in the comforting warm soup of their light. I anticipate that for my own kid I’ll be an absolute monster once she gets to be 15. And once she separates and figures out who she is, she’ll come back to me and see me finally as a normal, fallible adult that I am. Unless I freak out and prevent her, which I’ll try hard not to do.

Not everybody who failed to separate successfully is as tragic a case as Katia. But we all know people who are 27 and still stuck in the parents’ basement or freak out and cry for an hour when a neighbor says, “did you gain some weight?”

I have a friend who keeps saying, “I don’t know what’s happening, my daughter was always so loving, we were so close but now she turned 16, and she can’t stand me, always rude, always avoiding me, I must be a terrible mom.” And I keep telling her, no, you are a great mom. This is the proof that you did everything right. She thinks I say it to be kind (which shows how much she gets me) but it’s the literal truth.

So that’s why teenager lit aims to help teenagers explore this “my parents don’t get me” feeling. It’s not about the parents but about the “me” that is suddenly making an appearance. It’s very annoying to the parents, it’s a shitty stage for everybody involved, but the alternative is the Katia scenario. Would you rather suffer a sullen, eye-rolling, misunderstood brat for a few years or have a sweet, compliant Katia with a failed life at 40?