I remember once many, many years ago going to see my mom thinking I would get a little sympathy from her for the fits Princess was giving me. After all, she’d raised a daughter too.
Over a pot of coffee, I detailed the latest stunts Princess had pulled. Like when she pulled all the pictures out of the sleeves in the photo album and left them scattered all over the floor. Or when she got into my make-up case and had Avon’s Classic Ruby long-lasting lipstick from her chin to her nostrils and almost ear-to-ear. And then there was the time she thought that if one squirt of bubble bath was fun, two squirts would be better and came out of the tub looking like a fermented Pillsbury Doughboy. I didn’t touch on all the temper displays I’d seen over the preceding few days; Princess’s reputation for being opinionated was the stuff of legend.
When the pot of coffee was gone, and I’d run out of tales about Princess, I asked Mom why she hadn’t said anything and was just smiling. She winked at me as she collected the coffee cups and said, “Because I had a daughter like that too.”
She then proceeded to recount how I had embarrassed her to death at church by pulling off her hat on a Sunday when she was having a bad hair day. Or the time we were visiting relatives and I noticed something sticking out of her pants leg. When I pulled on it, it turned out to be a knee-high nylon that had stuck there from the last wearing. I was the kid she couldn’t turn her back on or I’d be into something I shouldn’t have been. I was the kid who pushed every limit to the breaking point. I probably was the only kid in the history of the free world who didn’t get grounded until after she was 18 years old. Really, looking back, it’s amazing she kept me around at all. And I’m sure the only reason she did was so I could have children of my own and find out what poetic justice was all about.
It seems to be every grandparent’s dream to have their grandchildren (who are perfect, by the way) put the middle generation through the same kind of anguish created for the grandparents by that same middle generation.
This is why parents keep those blackmail-type photos around…so when their child starts dating, the pictures can be paraded out to their child’s embarrassment, thereby balancing the score somewhat. And this is also why grandparents love to have their grandchildren for short periods of time; just long enough to spoil them rotten and get them all wound up, just to drop them back in their parents’ laps to contend with. And yes, someday Princess will have a daughter, and when I listen to her tales of woe, I will say nothing except “I had a daughter like that too.”
While every child and parent and family is different, the life stages and phases remain mostly universal. All children go through a biting stage, a lying stage, a hormonal stage, a rebellious stage, and a maturation stage. And all parents go through the anguish and turmoil created by those stages, learning a few things and forgetting none. This is so when their grown child comes home looking for sympathy for his own offspring-related misery, they can smile, wink, and say, “I had a child like that, too.”
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