And Baby Makes Two
I was not quite 20 years old when I gave birth to Tiffany, terrified of the responsibility of raising her properly. She would stretch me beyond what I thought were my limits -- especially during her adolescent years!

When she was 12, we went to Virginia Beach so I could attend a week-long conference. I was eagerly looking forward to an oceanside vacation with my daughter, who was enrolled in a program for teens whose parents were attending the conference. Tiffany was not very sure she wanted to be there.

My daughter, an Aquarian who finds it imperative to do everything years before others, had decided 12 was the year of her independence. She had been sulky, belligerent, and noncommunicative for almost a year. There had been a new crowd of friends to hang out with in the neighborhood. She tried, then quit, smoking. She experimented with marijuana, and assumed a defiant attitude about contact with boys. As she became more secretive and withdrawn, our communication suffered.

As the conference began, she and the other young people formed a tightly knit group. Their activities during the day were organized, and in the evening they were left to their own resources. Tiffany chose to spend as much time as possible with her new friends. We didn't see a great deal of one another except at meals, and at night in the motel. I would ask her about her day and she would answer in monosyllables. This was the stuff of sitcoms, so I attempted to deal with it humorously by answering my own questions in great detail in what was ostensibly her voice. Her looks were withering! Composure cracking, I alternated between patience and exasperation. This was, after all, my only vacation for the year, yet here I was with a sour-faced 12-year-old who didn't wish to be there, and certainly not with her mother.

One evening toward the end of the week, I was sitting alone on the beach thinking about our relationship, feeling frustrated and sad. My daughter was slipping through my fingers while I felt powerless to stop her from doing so. I heard voices and laughter coming toward the beach from behind me. A group of adolescents were walking on the beach, so occupied with themselves they didn't notice me. Especially occupied were Tiffany and Thomas, a sweet and charming boy a few years older. They were walking closely together, with his arm around her. I watched them from the distance, seeing the circle of boisterous energy the little group made.

The others noticed me first. I heard them squeal, "Tiffany, your mother ..." elbowing her and pointing in my direction. She quickly slid out from under Thomas's easy embrace.

I called her over to me. The group split apart not knowing quite where to go, but certain Tiffany was in big trouble. She stopped a few feet away from me, looking sullen and ashamed at the same time.

I said, "Tiffany, did Thomas have his arm around you just now?"

"Yes," she replied in a challenging, if somewhat shaky, voice.

"Did you want him to put his arm around you?"

Again, "Yes."

"Did you think there was anything wrong with his putting his arm around you until you saw me?"

"No." She wondered what I might be getting at. These questions were not what she expected. "Then don't ever let me catch you going against what you think is right, no matter who is involved. Not even if it's me."

She stared at me in disbelief, trying to reconcile my stern tone with the grace of my message. Tears filled her eyes as she stared hard, seemingly right through me.

That night the floodgates opened and she began to talk to me. This was definitely a turning point in our relationship. She never treated me like a stranger again. Thereafter, even if she knew I wouldn't like it, she found a way to let me know what was going on in her emotional and social life. Sometimes for really difficult things, she would let me know indirectly, by leaving a letter to a friend open on the table for me to glance at, or speaking loudly enough on the telephone for me to overhear something important. I understood. I had done the same with my mother.

Cie Simurro, Massachusetts

Journey to a Foreign Land
My daughter was a sophomore in high school when she came home and announced that her French class was planning a trip to France. I was divorced and although Sarah's father didn't want her to go, I was determined she would take advantage of this opportunity.

I had begun working at home as a typesetter before the divorce. It was exhausting, mind-numbing work but it allowed me to take the kids to school and pick them up. I didn't get a vacation or holidays, but there was never enough money to go anywhere, anyway. I didn't date because there simply wasn't time.

When her chance to go to France rolled around in 1994, I simply went ahead making plans with Sarah, which meant devoting most of my weekends to helping her with fund-raising, a long, hard job. At the first parents' meeting, I learned that parents who wished to join the trip were welcome. I was thrilled and signed up immediately. My own highschool class had planned a trip to France back in 1965 -- but my parents had not allowed me to go, or even to participate in the fund-raising. I had been waiting over 20 years for this opportunity.

My daughter was livid.

"I don't want you to go. You'll be hanging around me and treating me like a kid. This is my trip and I want to be with my friends."

I was stunned and terribly hurt. Obviously, I didn't want my trip to spoil her trip. The "chaperones" were given room assignments with other chaperones -- not with their children -- so I couldn't understand what was bothering her. I felt I was doing everything I could to give her a wonderful opportunity.

After a while, she and I settled into a state of polite resignation. I was going on the trip and she was not going to be nice about it. It wasn't until we were in France that I learned from the other parents that my situation was not unique. All of their kids were being snots, too.

We were in Tours when the blowup came. The teens were scheduled to go to a dance with another tour group. The adults were going to explore the old town with the teachers. We left the kids in the care of the tour leader and set off on our walk. We had a lovely time until we started back and saw a young girl approaching us. She was scantily dressed, heavily made up, and a member of our group who had not been accompanied on the trip by a parent. She announced that the dance had been canceled, and that the tour leader told the kids they could entertain themselves for the evening. She had been "driven" from the hotel by "some immature girls who were running up and down the halls with squirt guns getting everybody wet." One of the girls with the squirt guns was my daughter.

We hurried back to the hotel and checked on the whereabouts of all the kids and the tour leader. Once we were certain all were present and safe, we returned to our rooms. Later, my daughter came knocking on our door. She wanted to exchange rooms with us because she and her friends didn't like the one they had been assigned. In front of her friends (since they appeared to be joined at the hip) I told her exactly (and at the top of my lungs) how I felt about her attitude and her behavior -- and her nerve in asking me for a favor after treating me so shabbily about the trip. I yelled. I cried. I swore. I held nothing back. We must have screamed at each other for an hour.

When the dust cleared, we were finally speaking again but our relationship had changed forever. After that night, we were people who could travel in the same group without being afraid to show that we cared about each other. Once that moment occurred, there was no going back to the way things were before.

She is almost 20 now, and will begin her junior year in college this fall. She will be an exchange student in England. I wish I could go with her. I think, deep in her heart, she does too.

Glennis Drew, Vermont

Lydia's Adolescence
Lydia is suddenly fighting back and beating her brother up. She has just gotten her period, and I'm horrified to see that she has breasts. She is 12.

For her thirteenth birthday, Lydia and her girlfriends all dress as hippies and pass a microphone around. Each girl has to perform a song. All of us are dying of laughter, and I am thinking, "This is the time I never want to end. They are still children."

In three months, my daughter has left me. We have moved 150 miles away, to a nightmare of a tract house in a small town of jacked-up trucks and Tammy Faye women. Lydia's hair sticks straight up in the air about seven inches high, jet black, her eyes black lined, her skin creamy white. Boys want her.

A boy I know nothing about who seems to have the IQ of a slug wants to drive Lydia to school. I don't know how to say "no" to this. Years later, I find out that my daughter desperately needed me to take charge and refuse because she was raped by this boy. All I knew at the time was that something was wrong.

I know I am losing my daughter. We hate where we live. Lydia sits in her box-like little room in our horrid little tract house and hardly ever comes out except for school. She keeps her two cats with her and loves them with all her heart.

She makes a friend, the daughter of another troubled single mother who is my friend. We move in with the other mother. Lydia's room is a tiny laundry room, and I hate it that we are so poor that I cannot give her a nicer house.

Lydia and her friend Mary go to a private school together and get in lots of trouble. They like to fill condoms with water, freeze them, and bring them out at parties to shock other kids.

Finally, my mother helps me buy our own house, an old wreck of a farmhouse, but our home, with Lydia's brother, her and me. We're family again, but everything is wrong. One night, about midnight, I am exhausted, grading papers because I spent most of the day driving Lydia around to do her errands. I move to sit down in our big wicker chair and she grabs it out from under me. I get mad, and Lydia yells, "You f*ck*ng c*nt!" I'm out of my mind. I chase her up the stairs and start slapping her. Lydia reports this to her counselor, and I am labeled an abusive parent. A friend says to me, one night, "You need to leave when things get abusive."

This becomes a lifeline for me. If Lydia screams at me, I leave, or I hang up. I drive to the park and, in my car, I scream and tell God how much I hate my children and how He will have to help me love them. I settle down, shocked to have finally admitted this. I think, "They will have burned down the house." Instead, when I return, Lydia will come running out, crying, and apologizing.

I am amazed, and watch this scenario happen a few more times over the years. It's as if once I get out of the way, she can finally begin to deal with her stuff instead of foisting it off on me. Finally, I start developing some backbone.

Lydia makes another best friend and lives at her house most of the time. She is in full war paint and far too thin. Men of all ages are at her feet. I hate this, hate finding lacy lingerie in the dryer. When she turns 18, she moves back into my house. She is going to the community college where I teach. Everything changes as she sees me in action and decides that what I do as an English professor is wonderful. The school is small, and everyone knows and loves her. She gets a job in the Writing Center as a tutor and saves up all the complaints she receives about me from my students. Since we have different last names, students don't realize she is my daughter and are shocked when they find out. She and I become allies against stupidity, but there is a brittle pride in it all as I watch the child I knew come back to me, along with the adolescent brashness that says, "I will not be walked on. I will not be ignored."

Dolly Bell, Washington

Life with Lindsay
Lindsay's father and I divorced when she was 5; she has one older brother. The worst memory I have of the day we told them Daddy was leaving was her running into her room, slamming her door and telling me what a bad mommy I was and how she hated me for making Daddy go.

Strong-willed and wise beyond her years is the best way to describe Lindsay. She's very determined, with little patience. She gets this from me, which is why we seem to always be butting heads.

Both sides of our family are fairly slender, so weight has never been an issue for any of us. When Lindsay was about eleven or twelve she began to gain weight until she was up to about 156 pounds. She never looked big because of her height, so I told her it was normal. I didn't realize every other weekend her Dad was commenting on how much weight she had gained since he last saw her. It's a wonder she didn't completely fall apart.

We recently spent about three hours one night just sitting on our patio and talking openly and honestly about everything: her dreams for the future, her relationship with her Dad and brother, college, sex, anything you could imagine. I realized how mature she was at 15, and it scared me, especially when she said: "Mom, I feel like an old soul in a young body."

It was on that night that she told me what she'd gone through for all those months during her visits to her Dad. Then she told me that she was sorry about the remark she made so many years ago about me and her Dad and said she realized how much I had done for her and it made me feel very good. When she told me she admired me, and wanted to be like me when she grew up, I really lost it. What a great kid. For the first time, I knew I had done something right.

Debi Dilling, Florida

Want to read more?

• Surviving Ophelia is available in most bookstores, and online.
• When Teens Make the Wrong Choices
• Are You Listening to Me?
• Talk about it!