– Rudyard Kipling
You know when you’re on a plane and your seat doesn’t offer inflight entertainment so all you can do is scroll through your camera roll and old text messages? This happened to me recently. I decided to scroll to text messages with my mom from when I was fifteen. Now, let me preface this by saying I have infinite and overwhelming admiration for my mother. She is my best friend and I am her mirror— I have wanted to be just like her since I was a young girl. I copied her makeup and laugh, I sat with her in the kitchen when she cooked, and traced the freckles on her face when she slept all because I thought she was just the most beautiful in the entire world. However, being a nasty and irrational monster comes with the territory when you enter teenhood. The texts weren’t that bad, just an occasional bratty response here and there but just reading those over reminded me of how rude I would be to her just because I had simply no handle over my emotions that were flying out of me. I was hormonal and confused and had nowhere to take it out besides on her. It wasn’t just me who did this at that age. If you were a teenage girl at one point or another, you did this to your mother and you might also feel debilitating guilt for it now like I do. And our fathers never received the same treatment. Not like our mothers, who were always to blame. I read a quote years ago that really stuck with me. It reads “often father and daughter look down on mother together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, and cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.” While it centers around the relationship of a daughter and father, I think it helps explain why teenage girls are so mean to their daughters — we often feel closer to them and know that they felt this way too, which is frustrating but also makes us feel safer in acting out. Let’s all go apologize to our mothers, It is the least they deserve.
