One Woman Laughing... And Dancing With Adolescence

Wendy Christensen strives to be the perfect eco-parent, but as a working mother of three, sometimes this does not go according to plan.

Together with her friends, my daughter used to dress up in short skirts, pull her shirt bottom through the neck to make a crop top, do her makeup so that she resembled a tragic clown and dance around the house singing “White Horse” by Taylor Swift at the top of her voice. A song about a girl who has moved on from the fairy tale life, no longer waiting for her prince on a white horse to arrive. Fearless, innocent and confident; my daughter seemed to be these things, anyway…

…until the day she entered high school. And how does a mom of a teenage girl stay sane? She has to run really fast to a peaceful destination, at least once a day, to sit and think and then cry, while somehow finding the courage to return home again to survive another day with a girl that has…well…changed.

No more did she look at me with those innocent beautiful blue eyes satisfied with just a smile, and a hug from her mother. Now they were laden with cheap black goo somehow disguised as makeup. Her body was exposed in places that were cute when she was little, but not so much as a young woman, and toxic smells of chemical perfumes followed her like a mangy puppy. And we can’t forget the fake nails that, well, made everything challenging for her, except garnering attention from others. The day that my older son referred to her as a stripper I had to seriously take a look at what had happened to my little girl.

I always believed in letting my teenage daughter lead the way in her life with the assumption that she would check in with me along the way. But as she entered high school that conversation was sporadic and laden with an attitude that seriously scared me. I now lived my life in a constant state of fight or flight: either fight with the monster that daily emerged from her den or run away from what appeared to be a very dangerous threat. But really... she is just a 13-year-old girl. Why was I so scared?