This post by me True Ann-Sister has occasioned many comments -- even for her lively blog -- and the usual admixture of blame-assessment and soul-searching among the commenters.
Meade has posited that the devaluing of teenage girls begins with the father/daughter relationship, and I find this a fascinating and disturbing thought. Like most theories, it may, in its simplest iteration, be too simple: after all, it can't possibly be that the only girls active under the bleachers are ones who've been devalued, demeaned or abused by their dads.
But it's not at all far-fetched. Isn't the father/daughter relationship the place where girls first realize their essential woman-ness? Where they begin to see that the male creature is wired differently, with different passions and powers than the female parent? And isn't the effort to love, please and appease the father where a girl's own theories about male-female relationship begin to form?
And of course, I think about my stepdaughters, 6 and not yet 4 when they were fired by their biological father -- who used his remove to raise his value in his dismissed daughters' eyes, holding out the promise of an approval he had unceremoniously yanked before they could possibly understand why (in truth, he fired the One True Wife, but he felt himself well rid of family life and hands-on fatherhood).
The girls approached relationship with me in very different ways. Oldest daughter -- defiant and argumentative for as long as I can remember -- had a fight with me early on and screamed that she did not want the One True Wife to marry me. Later there were other, more painful events, where each of us felt abused by the other and manipulated by the absent biological parent.
(And, yes: I maintain that, in this culture especially, it is quite possible for children to abuse their parents, regardless of the parents' age, or their mental or physical health.)
After her adolescent rage began to cool, she became very independent and very competent in the world. She is still dating and committed to her high school boyfriend, although they attend schools a thousand miles apart. Her relationships are the most important thing to her. She guards her feelings from all but those closest to her, and a slight hurt from those closest friends wounds her deeply.
Middle daughter runs in crowds. She is very attractive, and she is commitment-phobic. She has more close male friends than female friends, and is either oblivious or purposefully neglectful of (what to me is) their clear physical attraction to her. She is academically ambitious and very successful. She was still in a stroller when I first met her. She has always been demonstrative and (as I've noted) a little sneaky. The packs she sometimes runs in look to her to be the sane one, the designated driver, the phone ambassador, the rescuer. I fear some of her "friends" -- or fear for them, and for her when in their presence.
My entrance onto the scene as a stepfather complicated my life, but it complicated theirs far more. I was alternately a replacement, an obstruction and a triangulation of the parental circuitry and the political alignment of the family. Kids all over the world grow up without their biological parents, but, for whatever reason, my daughters are two of the only children of divorce in their social groups. They fly out to see their dad most holidays and parts of each summer. They have learned to partition their relationships, giving the male authority figures in their lives the very different assurances and facades that each one looks for.
The oldest turns 19 in a week (which also spells the end of child support from her father). To a large degree, they are who they are. I find myself haunted by how much I could have done differently, and I pray about their futures fervently, having already opened my hands and let them begin their flight.
What will become of them? Do they know how to love? Will they let themselves love? And be loved in return?
--T.A.
UPDATE: For those of you who didn't come here via Bells On, go read Vikki's forthright and indispensible take on this issue.
Shrewd in so many ways, David.
Posted by: Starry | January 18, 2006 at 04:34 PM
If I know anything from how you have loved me as a neice, they are loved, and they know how to love. You're awesome, don't front. :)
Posted by: sara | January 18, 2006 at 07:13 PM
Saree, you da best.
Posted by: uncle david | January 19, 2006 at 07:49 AM
I loved this piece and your sister's. Thanks for the link, baby.
Posted by: Vikki | January 19, 2006 at 10:22 AM