Parents Just Don’t Understand
by Pan
Chapter 1:
The moment my mother entered the house, my entire body tensed. The entire scene played out in my head—she’d storm into the living-room, find me finishing a report for my boss (I do social media for a local theater) and find some reason to pick a fight.
Reality didn’t disappoint.
“Tiffany,” she said, clucking her tongue—a habit I hated, and not only because it meant a lecture was coming. “Did you drive my car this morning?”
“Yes, mother.”
“What on earth were you thinking? You know that you’re far too young to be driving without supervision.”
I raised one eyebrow.
“Seriously?”
“Of course, young lady. I don’t care what your friends are doing, but I don’t want you on the roads unless I’m sitting by your side.”
I stared at her for a few seconds—she must have seen it as some kind of challenge to her authority, because she leaned forward, unblinkingly staring back at me. In truth, I was just gobsmacked, and it took me a while to assemble the words for my reply.
“Mom,” I said, unable to believe I actually had to say it. “…I’m 23.”
“Well that’s as maybe, but you’re still my daughter.”
After dropping what she clearly thought to be the definitive last word, she sauntered out of the room, head held high. I turned back to my textbook, utterly bewildered by her behavior.
The next day was almost an exact repeat of the first. This time, Mom was furious that I’d brought wine into the house—no, sorry, into her house. Again, I pointed out that I’d been legally able to buy and drink wine for almost two years now (and refrained from mentioning that I’d been drinking it for over three years before that) but it had no effect.
Maybe I should have dropped it. I was moving out at the end of the year—I didn’t have a place yet, but my friend Britt and I had already started looking for a place.
And—as well as being obnoxious—Mom’s new attitude was starting to weird me out. I guess since Dad passed she’s been a little bit more protective than normal, but she’d started pushing it past the extreme. Acting horrified if I swear, yelling at me for staying out past “curfew”…it was truly ridiculous.
But the next day, when she caught sight of my tattoo—the tattoo I’d gotten when I was 19, the tattoo that she’d seen a thousand times before—she freaked out, and I started to seriously wonder what was happening. It wasn’t normal, I knew that for sure.
After the lecture (a short, stern one, and a promise that the cost of getting it lasered off was coming from my allowance…an allowance that had ended over half a decade ago) I went upstairs and did some thinking.
When my father passed, Mom didn’t handle it too well. For the first few months, she totally refused to get out of bed—when she’d finally felt up to facing life again, she started seeing a therapist.
A part of me wondered if she was simply regressing—when I was a teenager, she’d still had a husband, and so maybe she was just retreating back into that world to protect herself. But then I remembered—a couple of weeks back, she’d mentioned that her therapist was moving away, and from now on Dr. Williamson was going to be helping her.
Maybe this new doctor was trying something new, or maybe he just wasn’t very good. And even if he was completely on the level, he should know about this bizarre change in her behavior.
It didn’t take me long to decide that if I was going to get to the root of the problem, I needed to meet Dr. Williamson.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom said when I suggested that her new attitude might have something with her new shrink. She was cooking—something else she hadn’t really done since Dad’s death—and I’d caught her in a rare good mood. “Firstly, I haven’t been acting differently; you’re just growing up, and so of course the world seems like it’s different. You’ve gone through so many changes lately…”
I desperately hoped that she wasn’t going to start telling me about my “changing body”. It had been awkward enough when we’d gone through that the first time;.
There was a pause, and Mom’s lips twitched, like they were resisting the urge to again explain to me that I was going to find hair where there’d been no hair before, and talk me through a period.
She fought through it, and asked something that completely took me by surprise.
“I’m seeing him on Monday—why don’t you come with me?”
Monday was only four days away, but in that time Mom managed to take me to task for:
- hanging out with Britt (who Mom was worried was “a bad influence”)
- listening to my music too loud
- sleeping in
- not making my bed
- drinking coffee (“It’ll stunt your growth”)
- spending too much time on my phone
- playing video games
- arguing back (when I tried to explain that Tinder wasn’t a video game)
- not focusing enough on my studies (??)
- refusing to come to church on Sunday
By Monday morning, I was exhausted. I couldn’t even be bothered debating it with her any more, and whenever she decided to fault me, always replied the same way:
“Yes, mother.”
She’s not stupid—she worked out what I was doing—but, in what must have been an act of superhuman self-control, she didn’t confront me about it.
I tell you, by the time we got to the therapist’s office, I was starting to feel like a rebellious teen.