By Jude Campbell
Courtesy of eVent! Magazine

Years after the fact, I can vividly recall the stunned look of horror, shock and anguish on my best friend's face as her darling daughter hissed, "I'm not mad at you! I just hate you!"
In that moment, 12 years of hugs and butterfly kisses, baking pies together, shopping for clothes and toys and having ice cream afterwards, came crashing down in one well-aimed flaming ball of teenage angst.

"Teen girls are puppies turned into cats," sums up parenting educator and author, Maggie Reigh, mother of 17-year-old Arleigh Dudar, who shares the stage with Mom when they hold mom-daughter seminars.

"Yesterday she was all cuddly, snuggly and all over you like a happy puppy. Today she's grown claws, become aloof and solitary; and yes, she's hissing."

Driven by surging hormones, inner emotional conflicts and a deep need to be both distant from yet close, the teen years can be a terrifying roller coaster ride for most girls and their equally confused mothers.Compounding the problem, most moms are either pre-menopausal or immersed in menopause when the simmering teenage volcano starts to explode.

Not only is Mom suddenly bombarded by her daughter's emerging hormones, she's trying to navigate her own rough hormonal waters. Both are besotted with mood swings and huge physical changes, and often neither is as "in control" of emotions as she would like to imagine.

"It's a time when many of us become the parent you never wanted to be," Reigh said. "We catch ourselves saying things we swore we'd never say, repeating thought patterns so reminiscent of what our own mothers said to us.

"It's definitely a difficult time to maintain that mother-daughter connection, while encouraging and embracing the independence that is emerging - sometimes very strongly!" Reigh and her daughter have "so far" survived the rocky road to independence and understanding, without "a lot of clashes," according to Dudar.

"Parents don't want to let go, and teens think they're too controlling, holding back too much," she elaborated. "If you hold on too much, we just rebel and go down the wrong road. We become the opposite of what you want. We know it's hard, but it's not about control; it's about letting us make choices - and learning from those choices - without dictating to us."

She underlined that many teens feel they face down a lot of pressures on any given day - pressures that they feel their parents "don't get." "The pre-teen and teen years are all about yourself, your friends, your life. Some days there's so much 'drama' to deal with, some times you feel like you're pushed up against a wall that doesn't give," she explained.

Teens think endlessly and care deeply about their social status, what people think of them, why they don't have a boyfriend, if others like their outfit, what rumours are swirling around school, and a million other concerns that are truly beyond the parents' scope of vision. "Some days, when we storm off to our room and slam the door, it just means we really need down time, really need to be left alone," Dudar said. "I'm not being 'catty,' I'll come back. I just need space."

Finding a way to "not take it personally" becomes the mom's chore.Reigh connects with moms who get the feeling that "after dedicating your life to this baby, this child" suddenly a wall of ice has
started to form. Before it becomes impenetrable, Reigh said, "It's really a time to step back, decide what you will do, not what you will make your daughter do.

"Try to keep the doors open to sharing, be careful of making judgments on friends, clothes, hair. If you hit a wall of resistance, don't keep pushing, back off, pick another time to talk or maybe have a trusted adult friend offer advice. Never say I told you so. Mistakes are for learning, not opportunities for punishment."

Even as an educator, Reigh admits there were tangles and clashes, days when she felt like "Swiss cheese" drilled through by her daughter's emotional eruptions; and shocked seconds later to hear a
"sweet as honey" change of tone and attitude when a girlfriend phones. "We've had our times, but certainly not the tearing apart kind," she added. "We've been respectful, even if we both felt lousy about the situation."

That fine line between dictating, demanding or knowing when (and how far) to step back becomes one of the central focuses of a workshop on mother-daughter relationships that the duo offers at local schools. "Most of us have to learn how to establish the 'rules of engagement' to prepare and to successfully navigate the teen years," Reigh said. "In the workshops, were explore ideas, tools and strategies to elebrate and strengthen that connection."

She added that there are numerous ways to turn power struggles into powerful mother-daughter relationships, as well as ways to develop healthy communication patterns and learning how to handle the inevitable conflicts in constructive ways. One such strategy is for moms to learn how to re-phrase and re-negotiate what teens see as "the interrogation drill."

"Yes it's important to ask questions about where they are going, who they are with and what's going on - but, try re-phrasing," she explained. "When you do 'this' (name the behaviour/conflict), I feel 'this' (name your emotion), because 'this' (name your concern) and I need is 'this' (name what will make you more comfortable with the situation).

"Being peppered with questions and demands adds to the cycle of anger and curiosity and then you're stuck," Dudar said. "Parents need to know they can't shelter us completely from the real world, you can't raise us in a perfect society, and our world isn't the world you had as a teen."

Standing together, Dudar and her mom help others find the humour and the humanness in preparing to bridge the burgeoning teen-mom gap. From the teen perspective, Dudar notes specific phrases that are surefire button-pushers. "Saying 'I understand' is a very bad thing; you are not in my
situation," she said. "When we're unleashing our emotions, don't try
to offer advice - instead, try really listening to what we're saying. Try sharing things that happened to you as a teen and how it turned out. But don't just talk-at us."

Conflict through the teen years is inevitable, but often it takes a step back from the knee-jerk response to be able to see the reality. "And sometime, it also means letting go of your supermom image," Reigh added. "Take time for yourself, de-stress. Don't take it all so personally, and remember what it was like going through these emotional years yourself."

For information on the mother-daughter sessions, 'I'll Match You Hormone for Hormone,' visitt www.motherdaughtercelebrations.ca