This Week’s Winner
Cora Lim Acosta is a “part-time writer, full-time wife, mother, and lifetime student in the school called life.” She majored in journalism at UST and embraced the written word since she discovered at the age of nine her dad’s dusty collection of Collier’s Junior Classics short stories volumes 1 to 10. “Since then I have gobbled up, devoured, masticated, gorged, swallowed, consumed and digested stories like a starving man with a bottomless pit for a stomach. And I’ve never gone hungry ever since.”
I used to start a lecture with “When I was your age….” In fact, every question from any of my three daughters — Adrienne, Nina and Cheska — would be answered this way.
“Mom, why can’t I go swimming at my friend’s house?”
“When I was your age, we only swam during summer vacation.”
“Mom, why can’t I go to the mall with my friends?”
“When I was your age, there were no malls, we went straight home after school and studied until our eyeballs fell off.”
That standard five-word sentence opener was, I believed, a sufficient way of deflecting what would have been a long drawn-out argument on both sides. It gives a parent a sense of following tradition (if I wasn’t allowed to do it, then my children aren’t allowed to do it, either) and reinforces the belief that deprivation is actually good for character building (hey, the Amish lead a cheer-less, joy-less existence and look how they turn out…okay, next example, please).
Anyway, it was a creative way of saying no without sounding inflexible and unreasonable. It just sounded, well, better, and increased the credibility factor. Or so I thought. Until, one day, my youngest gave me a speculative look after I delivered my standard line. It was during dinner and my tweener was fervently asking permission to attend a friend’s party without her yaya hovering over her.
“When I was your age,” was my opening salvo, warming up to deliver a dissertation on the perils of going to parties without adult supervision, etc.
“I know, I know…” eight-year-old Cheska piped in beside me, “there were no parties during your age!”
Giving her a condescending smile, I answered, “There were parties, of course, but we were not allowed to go alone.”
Silence hummed for five seconds. I could see Adrienne and Nina digesting this info and getting ready to launch a rebuttal. Hoping to head off a volley of new questions that would start with why, but and how come, I opened my mouth to launch my coup de grace.
Before I could do so, however, Cheska leaned towards me and whispered loudly, “Mom, did you see the Tabon Man during your time?”
Well, that sort of question can stop a herd of raging elephants better than a stun gun could. Amid giggles from the girls and smirks from my husband (the traitor!) I could only fall back on that tried and tested parenting technique #2: Change the subject. Quickly! “Finish your dinner before it gets cold,” I muttered.
I decided then that it was time to change my parenting style. After all, I wouldn’t want my kids to be asking me next if I had migrated with the T-Rex during the Ice Age. And since I couldn’t ask my mom (she’d probably start her lecture with “When I was your age…”) and my husband is almost as clueless (he told my eldest that if a boy shows interest in her she should blow air through her nose to make her nostrils flare!). It’s definitely time to bring out the big guns, to consult a parenting guru and learn from the experts.
I bought the book Raising A Daughter by Jeanne and Don Elium. This was a sequel to their first book, Raising a Son. Their first venture into the publishing world was a success. “Everyone, it seemed, worried and wanted advice about their sons.” They wrote Raising A Daughter to answer the growing demands from readers who wanted answers about girls, and mother-daughter–father relationships.
The authors write that “girls are born believing that they can do anything but our media-driven culture of mixed messages and conflicting values can make growing up a confusing and shaky business. And for parents, it is a daunting responsibility to raise confident, independent daughters while still keeping them safe.”
Having divorced when the book was being written, Jeanne Elium felt “deep anguish” over her own effectiveness in nurturing her daughter. She felt “left out, inadequate, a failure.”
How easily I can empathize feeling inadequate whenever my daughters get low grades in school or when they refuse to tell me what’s wrong or why they are crying. I feel as if I have failed them somehow. When they first said they were having an “emo moment,” I thought they meant one of the largest birds (emu) that can be found in Australia. When my husband asked them who their favorite singer was, trying to show what a cool dad he was, they answered Rihanna. “Oh, you mean Rihanna Montana!” was his brilliant answer.
Great! We should be called Dumb and Dumber.
Bridging the generation gap apparently takes more than relying on your so-called age-old wisdom culled from your own childhood experiences and your college degree. Heck, you could be a brilliant neurosurgeon and still fail to figure out the thinking process of your daughter. My husband, who is a lawyer and can usually out-talk and out-argue almost anybody on this planet, is stumped for answers when bombarded by endless whys and hows from his sixth, fourth and second graders.
Mothers will tell you that the lessons they learned from their own mothers are usually the basis of their parenting skills. Our childhood is the yardstick we often use to measure our standards for raising good and healthy children. However, sometimes unresolved issues and unmet childhood needs lead us to make faulty decisions, unreasonable demands, and put emotional pressure on our children. In her experience, the author wrote that she had to make the long journey to “find the mother within who would sustain (her) enough to mother (her) own daughter.”
Raising a Daughter dwells on the difference between daughters and sons and developing a competent parenting partnership. It touches on relevant issues and questions that start from cradle to career, from babyhood, teenage years up to adulthood.
I guess, since my eldest is only 12, that I will be reading the book for a long time. I learned that raising a daughter should be given a different perspective from my own tunnel-vision approach. Rather than parenting them according to the old stereotypes of what girls should be, I will try to raise myself first. Learn what I need as a daughter, a woman and a wife before I can be an effective mother.
Great parents are not born. There is no special gene that will guarantee you’ll be an excellent parent. Parenting is both a work in progress and a labor of love. With our ever-changing cultural norms and values, we may often feel adrift in a large ocean when it comes to understanding our daughters. Only one thing is constant: love. Love is never changing and always unconditional.