Angela Mollard: How my teenager taught me to be a better mother

Angela Mollard’s youngest child is turning 18 in a few months and that upcoming milestone made her realise she’s no longer mothering, but smothering her teen.

My daughter sends me a message as I am driving to a trivia night.

“Mum,” she writes. “I think we need to work on our relationship because clearly it’s not working well.”

She has a point. Minutes earlier I’d phoned her to rant about the smell of fast food in my car. She is now a P-plater which, far from marking a lovely new-found independence, appears to involve driving her friends around, littering the car with half-eaten chicken nuggets and half-slurped frozen Cokes, linking her own phone to the Bluetooth and failing to take off the P- plates when she gets home. Worse, it has somehow become “the” car rather than “my” car.

But it’s not just the/my car. We’ve started arguing about everything from how much she is studying and how late she goes out, to mundane issues like leaving the lights on and her propensity for getting holes in her school tights. I can also see that my lack of trust and constant questioning of her whereabouts is starting to infuriate her.

Indeed, as I sit at trivia, troubled and unable to concentrate on which US state has the most active volcanoes or which year the Spice Girls disbanded, she sends me a screenshot from a parenting website: “Strict parenting can turn children into adept liars as they do not feel safe telling the truth, experts have claimed.” Gulp.

The next day we have a “chat”. We seem to have lots of chats which end with cuddles and good intentions but within 24 hours I’ve reverted to my reactive, hyper-controlling, nitpicking self.

At least, I tell her, I’m not like the Jennifer Aniston character in Dumplin’ who fat shames her daughter. Or the mum in the new Netflix series Ginny And Georgia who sleeps with her boss and steals from her workplace.

“Yes, but at least she’s fun,” remarks my daughter.

Jennifer Aniston in a scene from the Netflix movie Dumplin’.

By chance a new parenting book has landed on my desk.

The New Teen Age by my media colleagues Dr Ginni Mansberg and Jo Lamble promises “no-nonsense” advice for raising happy adolescents. I’ve already raised one adolescent but I flick through the book wondering if I’m a bit rusty or if this second daughter is different.

And that’s when it hits me. It’s not her that’s different. It’s me. I’m the one with the problem. It shames me to say it but with her 18th birthday just a few months away I’m mourning the mother I fear I will no longer be.

When my eldest left home at the beginning of last year I wasn’t prepared but I still had one child to care for.

There were still school shirts to wash and drama monologues to listen to and if my breakfast efforts were a little more elaborate and my hugs a little more intense it was only because I had a bit more time.

But I now realise it’s the thought of being rendered redundant from the job I’ve cared about, and loved more than any other which is making me hyper-vigilant. I’m no longer mothering, I’m smothering. I may have a big, happy, purposeful life but being retrenched from this role is more than losing a job.

When that happens, you go home. For 21 years these girls have been my home.

“Fortunately, it happens slowly,” says a friend. No, it doesn’t. It’s a particular quirk of parenthood that you spend 120 hours teaching them to drive, enjoying deep chats which unfold organically while you’re side-by-side, only to have that closeness wrenched away the second they can drive themselves.

Columnist Angela Mollard. Picture: Tim Hunter

Another friend points out that my youngest daughter is a “cracker”, an engaging, witty kid who’s blessedly escaped the descent into drug-taking and self-harming that afflicts so many of our teenagers.

She’s right, of course, and it reminds me of what I have always known about this imp of a girl who burst from the womb like a cartoon character, hair on end, legs akimbo, grinning madly despite the indignity of being yanked into the world with barbecue tongs.

A decade ago I wrote that this was my child least like me.

The yin to my yang. The one I could never predict but who I loved so fiercely it felt like my heart had been peeled.

This child, I mused at the time, would teach me as much as I’d ever teach her.

As she sees out her school days in laddered stockings and an impatience to get on with life I realise that’s true. If her elder sister spearheaded my mothering, by sheer dint of being first, then she has softened it in the way all subsequent children do as they find a place and a space not occupied by the first.

My youngest child has been a kaleidoscope into a colour-filled, constantly changing world and even now, as she points out the need to work on our relationship, she is teaching me still.

Her growing up doesn’t make me redundant but invites me to be another version of the mother I will always be.

ANGELA LOVES …

CHOCOLATE

Having spent a lifetime failing to see the fuss about chocolate I have been introduced to Caramilk and a love affair has begun. Straight from the wrapper or repurposed into pannacotta, I’m a convert for life.

CANBERRA

As a beach lover I’ve always thought our capital city lacked real amenity but a trip last weekend to see my eldest daughter brought fresh appreciation as the stark architecture was softened by glorious orange-hued winter leaves.

CANDLE

Every year for my birthday my best friend buys me a Mr Rosado candle by SOH Melbourne. It smells like a handsome man in a log cabin.

Originally published as Angela Mollard: How my teenager taught me to be a better mother