Eight family members are sun screened and ready to head to the beach. Lounge chairs, snacks, and sand castle building tools are already packed. Except my 14-year-old daughter, she is crying on the bathroom floor because she couldn’t put in a tampon.
I was impatient. We’d had the exact conversation before. My tolerance was waning. I was hot. I’d waited all day to go to the beach. I had MY bathing suit on. I was ready to swim.
But it was a defining moment in my parenting for me, and I’m proud to say that I rose to the occasion. I took a deep breath, exhaled the restless energy of the people waiting for us, sat on the bathroom floor with my daughter and talked. And listened.
“I can’t do this for you,” I told her.
I had actually tried that, but to me, it felt like I crossed a line, both metaphorically and literally. I naively thought that if she could feel how a tampon went into her body, she would know how to do it herself. Nope.
We had been in this conversation for months. Usually, she wore pads and didn’t swim when she had her period. But this experience was different. We were at the ocean. We live in Colorado, so it’s a once-a-year occurrence met with great anticipation – such a special occasion that my daughter had looked weeks ahead on her app that predicts when she’ll get her period, hoping that it wouldn’t come that week. Sadness and anxious anticipation alongside fervent prayers for defective technology.
Before the trip, I had enlisted the help of my friend, a midwife. Slender tampons, different angles, feeling your way through it when you’re not under pressure. We had strategized in advance. We thought she was ready.
Yet there we were, on the bathroom floor of a vacation rental house with eight people waiting for us.
“I don’t want to try anymore because it hurts so much, but I don’t want to miss going to the beach,” she said.
“You’ve got two tough choices,” I said sympathetically. “Maybe just wade today.”
We talked some more. We shared some silence.
“How can you partner with your body to find your way through this?” I asked.
She thought about that idea.
We talked about listening to her body rather than forcing.
“I’ll try one more time,” she said. “And if it doesn’t work, I’ll stay home.”
If we had been characters in a tween novel, that would have been the moment of triumph when it all worked out. It didn’t.
I left her on the bathroom floor and went downstairs for help.
“I have a problem, and I need help,” I told my mom, her wife, and my sister. This was a phrase one of my coaching friends had taught me the week before, and I was glad to be able to retrieve it from my memory banks.
They took a collective deep breath. They asked questions. And they listened.
Here’s what we decided: one car would head to the beach as the advance party. My sister and my mom would take my daughter to the drugstore and get slender tampons, KY jelly, and a renewed dose of possibility.
I went in the car that headed to the beach. The water felt great!
An hour later, the second car showed up at the beach. My daughter was glowing with triumph. She went swimming.
I bowed to my women tribe.
Later my mom told me she had been a little shocked when my sister told my daughter, “You need to learn to masturbate so that you can relax your muscles.”
My response: even more gratitude for my women tribe.
About 16 years ago, when I was in a parenting group after my son was born, one of the other moms told me about a revelation she’d had after, exhausted and broken, she turned to some friends for help so that she could have some rest and time away from the relentless demands of attending to a newborn. “I learned that I’m not the only one who can parent my son.” She cried when she said it, but she said her tears were both from relief and grief.
That other mom’s insight came back to me as I reflected on this experience. Sometimes, even when I bring my A game, it’s not enough, and the very best I can do for my daughter is get out of the way of her growth.
Maggie Graham is in awe that somehow this post managed to get written despite two kittens racing across her keyboard, popsicle splatter on her desk, and the temptation of porch lounging. With the approach of mercifully cool weather, perhaps a higher word count will emerge from her computer. She has no, none, nada social media links that she wishes to produce because all of her personal blogs are sadly dormant. How embarrassing.
1 Comment
I’ll remember this when the time comes for my daughter. Not long now.