When I was a young girl I remember my mom became very ill, and she was in bed in a lot of pain. We didn’t know what was wrong with her, and I was secretly very worried about her. I didn’t show her because I wanted to be strong and not upset her, so I did my best to make her feel better. She got worse as the day went on, and she called our family doctor. Back then, family doctors still did house calls if patients were very ill.
My mother called me into her bedroom and told me that the doctor was on his way, and she asked me to let him in when he arrived. I can still see her lying on the bed in a nightgown that I clearly felt was totally inappropriate for her to be wearing for a doctor’s visit; I was 13 and this seemed to be important to me. I turned to her and, very undiplomatically, asked her if she was going to change into something else. I knew as soon as I opened my mouth that I should have kept it shut. She turned to me, and I could feel the hurt that I had caused her emanate from her body. She glared at me and told me how disappointed she was that I would take the time to say something like that given how much pain she was in. She told that she was my mother and that saying something like that had hurt her feelings.
I was devastated. I remember questioning why had said something like that. Had I really wanted to hurt my mother? I loved her. Why did I care what she had on? I really thought that she would have wanted to change out of the negligee and put on her flannels. I knew that I could not fix this because I believed that once you hurt someone’s feelings, you could never redeem yourself. The damage was done, and I would need to live with that fact. We never had a conversation about that incident after in occurred because I wasn’t about to bring the topic up and I’m sure my mother felt that she had dealt with it effectively.
Now that I have teenagers of my own I know that my mother had good intensions. She was trying to teach me that what you wear doesn’t determine who you are and that criticism can be painful. Unfortunately, she was in a lot of pain and her fear determined how she communicated her message. Perhaps this was an error on her part, but to cut her some slack, she was not in the best physical or mental state to reflect on her delivery. She did, however, have a chance to think about what had transpired, and she also had the choice to come back to me later to discuss our interaction. Again, in her defence, she was probably absorbed in the fact that she was having a gallbladder attack and had to go to the hospital. All I could think of while she was in the hospital was how I had hurt and disappointed her.
So, herein lays one of the reasons we (mothers) have trouble communicating with our teenagers; we don’t think the same way. It’s not their fault and it’s not our fault; it just is. We may be saying one thing and our kids are interpreting it a completely different way. What they hear most often is criticism and doubt rather than guidance and support. We need to learn to understand their way of thinking and how they will absorb what we say to them. When they speak to us, we need to think about what they are really trying to communicate to us, rather than assume what they are saying. We also need to discuss when things go off the rails and place them back on track; it's our job.
Why do we need to do all the work, you ask? Because we are the adults here, the parents, and we have the experience and the ability to do the work. We are the ones who need to take the high road and decipher how to talk with our children in an effective manner, as well as, interpret what it is they are trying to tell us. Nine times out of ten, they are not trying to hurt, or disappoint or cause us any grief; they just think differently than you and I. Either way, young or old, we will all make mistakes. The important thing is to recognize this in each other and talk about it. No one needs to be "right" or "wrong"; we just need to understand one another.
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