There is a war that began when the first daughter cried her first cry and will continue until the last daughter takes her last breath. Every mother has fought it with every daughter, not one has escaped it, though some have been less gruesome than others.
This has been made even more clear to me in the last ten years of being a youth sponsor. I have spent countless hours listening to girls speak of how their moms “hate them” and “just don’t understand what it is like to be a girl these days”. I always giggled in my head as I remembered saying the same things and being almost certain that my own mother said them and so on and so forth. I found it so amusing that they had no idea just how much their mothers did understand and often wished I could be there the day the light went off in their heads.Now here I am on the other side of the coin hearing myself saying “my daughter hates me” and “she just doesn’t understand what is best for her” and suddenly I realize I am fighting in the war that has been going on for generations before me and will continue for generations after me. It isn’t amusing anymore.
I remember being at a youth conference one year and hearing a speaker begin to explain what was really going on in this war of mothers and daughters. He began to walk through how his wife and daughter had always been close and how they loved to be with each other, until his sweet little daughter became a full-fledged teenager. He started talking about how normal it really was for this battle to be raging in their home. He spoke of why it was raging and it all made sense in that moment, that moment when I didn’t have a daughter throwing daggers through her eyes at me. He said as a baby and a young child this girl needs you for everything, she follows you around and even pretends to be you. You know everything in their eyes and are the smartest most beautiful woman they know. She trusts you know best and listens to your advice that she asked for. Now, as you walk through the mall with her you notice she is the one that is beginning to get the looks from males and it hits you she is growing. She begins to realize it as well and the crazy begins. Suddenly you are the most clueless woman she knows, she can’t fathom that you were once pretty enough to have many a boys chasing after you, she doesn’t want any help from you because she can do it better nor does she want any advice from you because you just don’t get it anyway, and the battle begins. The battle for you to hold onto the control over their lives and for them to begin to pull away from you and become their own woman.
The war is real in bio families, and oh so real in adoptive. One minute you are riding on an elephant with your princess and the next you are ducking to miss the end of her flying broom. I know that she is becoming a young woman, but I often can’t separate the “normal” from the trauma. What is even harder is thanks to the trauma the “normal” is about a hundred times worse. Ok, I exaggerate, its more like a thousand times worse. As I walk the battlefield and look at the wreckage our last battle has left behind I am sadden and the guilt of my warpath falls heavy on my shoulders. I am in new territory with this girl who has been drug through new territories her whole life. I sometimes forget she is just as lost and confused as I am.
I have been reminded of this last week as I find myself back at that youth conference 7 years later and with far more understanding of the war I am now in. I am reminded in the hurts of the girls I listen to that their struggle is real. I am reminded with every pressure they open up about, that my daughter is just like them. As I hear their hurts and see their very real tears I began to see my daughter sitting in front of her youth sponsor crying out to God for healing in her relationship with her mom. As I sit across a young girl and hear the similar story she shares with my girl, I am finally invited into the hurts she is carrying. In this moment of clarity I am hit with the truth that I am not hurting anymore than my daughter but rather she is hurting more than I . Yes, trauma is real and the behaviors that come from it is exhausting, but “normal” resides in those behaviors as well. As I have sat here in my room I have had three young girls knock on my door and need a shoulder to cry on, advice, understanding, and grace. It is almost time to go and hear our last speaker and I will see all the faces of those girls that once looked normal to me and I will see the hurt that they have carried once more. I thank God for this week as it has opened my eyes to the war I am in. On this night I will lay down my weapons and surrender. I will no longer see my hurt girl as the enemy but as a casualty of war who needs loved, rescued, unity, and change. I can’t say she will put her weapons down as well or that she won’t fire at this new easy target and so I write…………………
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