Book: 'The 7 Stages of Motherhood'

Sept. 13, 2004 -- In The 7 Stages of Motherhood, Ann Pleshette Murphy, a mother of two, explains what parents should expect, and how they can deal with it, as their journey through parenthood begins.

Continued …

Of course, just as my mother was predicting that Nick's Oedipal passions would cost him years of psychoanalysis, he entered first grade, took one look at the adorable assistant teacher, and decided she could do no wrong. The year was punctuated with "Guess what Miss Thompson did today" accounts of golden afternoons, special games, even an excited announcement that he had invited her to dinner. "I think I'll make my black-pepper fettuccine," he said with a sigh as I tucked him in one night. And he did! Countless moms have told me similar "Oedipus wreck" stories of being displaced by a teacher or "best, best, best friend" or by Dad, who suddenly rules Olympus. Happy and sad describes the universal ambivalence moms experience when the child who wouldn't go near "the big swings" a year ago dares his pal to "race to the moon," or when a child whose voice rarely exceeded a whisper performs in the preschool show, or when all the kindergartners line up for graduation. By the time Nick turned five, the way he thought about me had developed along with his ability to communicate how he was feeling. Just a few years before, he would throw a fit because I couldn't read his mind; now he could express what he wanted using the hundreds of words in his ballooning vocabulary. But letting Nick do that, not trying to read his mind, was a challenge because it ran smack up against my desire to be needed, to maintain my place as the center of his universe. When he insisted on making his own snack, teaching me a card game, calling from a pal's house to ask if he could spend the night, it was more difficult than ever to celebrate these strides, not experience them as marginalizing my importance in his life. The key for me—and for many mothers of preschoolers—was to stay connected to or to develop other roles that were meaningful and gratifying. For some that meant a return to work at the time their children entered kindergarten. For others, their children's increased separateness signaled a chance to connect with their husbands more often. But for all of us, the preschool years should include plenty of time to step back and take note of the fact that had it not been for our constant, caring presence in our children's lives up until now, they would not be ready and able to move ahead with confidence, to take risks, to develop friendships, and to learn.

Stage 5 Reading the Compass to God-Knows-Where: Years Six to Ten

Stage 5 Summary

The "expert" take on this period in a mother's life is that her child is now more independent and self-reliant, and although that can bring up issues of separation, it's basically good news. Also, because the scary adolescent era seems miles away, and the stormy toddler years are long gone, moms breathe a sigh of relief, perhaps indulge in a little more introspection, confident that not much is supposed to happen between ages six and ten. Hmm. I found this period in my kids' lives one of the fullest and most challenging, especially once they started "real school." When our kids spend a full day or more in activities we are rarely privy to, we lose a certain version of ourselves. They're on their own and so are we. Handling this shift from the pitcher's mound to left field is one of the central challenges of this phase of motherhood. Feeling excluded from your child's school day, cut off from what she may be thinking or feeling, and less involved in her increasingly ornate life, can make you wonder, "What am I doing with my life?" At the same time, because this stage is comparatively problem-free, it's often tough to remain vigilant, to fight the tendency to ignore blips on the screen. If your child has been happily skipping off to school, developing friendships, sleeping and eating well, enabling you to live your life in a way that just wasn't possible a year or two ago, it's natural to breathe a sigh of relief. But then when problems do arise, as they inevitably will, it's sometimes hard to accept them, to really listen to what's behind the whining or complaining. Voltaire once said, "The road to the heart is the ear." This tender bit of wisdom is never more apt than during the school years, when we may be tempted to rush in and pick up the pieces or simply sweep them under the rug in an effort to get through the day. But as important as it is when they're toddlers to let our kids solve their own problems, to work through frustration and weather minor storms, it's even more critical when their primary developmental task is to validate the motto "I can do it!" Read more.

Stage 5 Summary, continued

The good news is that school-age children are actually amazingly competent and their eagerness to be good at things, to satisfy what Erik Erikson called "a sense of industry," makes them enthusiastic helpers. But there's often a disconnect between what they think they can do and what they're really about. One of the most difficult aspects of this stage of motherhood is accepting the fact that we can't be there to make it all better when our children stumble at school or when they simply lack certain skills. As mothers, we want to help a child who is in obvious pain, whose problem is fixable, and we should. But sometimes our motivations are less altruistic and more narcissistic, and our desire to provide the best veers dangerously into the neighborhood of "Whose life is it anyway?" The mother who holds her child back because he's not ready for first grade may have only the best of intentions, but there are countless others who retain their children simply to give them a better shot at quarterbacking the high school football team or leading the pack early on. Knowing when to push and when to coddle is particularly difficult at this stage; there seems to be a lot at stake, yet there's also plenty of time ahead to adjust the course. I've met so many mothers (andfathers) who simply can't step back. Their clashes over homework or violin practice or sports betray their own need to have a child who "does them proud"; ironically, such tensions only serve to undermine their children's motivation. Some of the most interesting research on children's motivation and self-esteem comes from work on optimism. Whether you're an optimist or a pessimist depends on your explanatory style. A pessimistic person feels victimized by setbacks. She sees them as an extension of some flaw in herself, one that dooms her to a life filled with problems. More important, she's not motivated to do something about her lot in life, because she sees negative events and situations as unchangeable. But what's really problematic is how easily pessimistic thinking rubs off on children. This is especially true during the early school years, when they're developing new skills every day and measuring themselves against their peers. A child who believes he stinks or who consistently blames his "dumb teacher" for his problems or who announces emphatically that "no one likes him" needs to learn how to dispute his negative thinking. But he can't do that if his mom is constantly blaming herself for the problems in her life. If you tend to blame yourself unfairly, to see the glass as half empty more than half the time, then devote the other half of that time to really questioning your own explanatory style. As psychologist Martin Seligman wisely suggests, "To beat pessimism, your own opinion of yourself needs to become the target of skepticism. Don't blindly accept your own insults. Take a step back and consider them with an open mind. If they turn out to be true, fine. Then you need to work on changing the aspects of yourself or your world that bring discontent. You may find that your beliefs about yourself aren't true, that they tend to be catastrophizations — interpretations of bad events in extremely permanent and pervasive terms. If this is so, you need to correct them." Taking a Child's-Eye View of Yourself Ironically, one of the best ways to change your perception of yourself for the sake of your kids is to try to see yourself through their eyes. On at least one occasion Nick's tendency to hold up a mirror to my life, to point out in his affectionate, slightly avuncular way that I was missing the point entirely, had a radical impact on how I saw myself. It was toward the end of a day during which I had run frantically on a squeaky wheel to nowhere, feeling a little like the kids' gerbil, that Nick treated me to a critical It's a Wonderful Life moment. I was keeping him company as he took a bath, sitting with my back to the bathroom wall, rewriting one of several to-do lists I had read and refolded so many times it was falling apart. I was not a happy camper as I stewed over my lack of productivity. When an audible sigh escaped my lips, Nick asked, "What's the matter, Mom?" "Oh, nothing, honey," I lied. "I'm just frustrated because I didn't get anything done today." "That's not true," he countered energetically. "You did lots of stuff." "Like what?" Looking at me as though I had forgotten his birthday, he said, "Don't you remember, Mom? You found Lego Man's hair." "Lego Man's hair?" I asked, stalling for time. Then it came to me: the fifteen-minute search on hands and knees under his bed and behind his chair and in his sneakers for a yellow, lentil-sized Lego piece. When I found it, Nick rejoiced like some crazed archaeologist celebrating the discovery of the Rosetta stone. I was still with the Lego excavation when Nick added, "And you made us macaroni and cheese even though you think it's yuck." True. I'm convinced that the orange cheese powder you mix with milk and a pound of butter is a not-too-distant relative of Agent Orange. "And now you're helping me take a bath, but you don't have to 'cause I'm bigger than yesterday." At that moment I felt as though I was soaking in a warm bath myself. My image, as reflected in my son's eyes, was decidedly brighter than the frustrated, frowning face I'd seen in the bathroom mirror earlier. Like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, I had been given an opportunity to see how different Nick's day would have been had I not taken the time to provide these seemingly random caring gestures. The problem was that I never bothered to put "Find Lego Man's hair" on my daily agenda. I didn't think twice about treating the kids to a side dish I happened to loathe, and I certainly never gave myself credit for keeping Nick company, even though, as he pointed out, he had learned how to swim when he was five. The countless acts of kindness that filled my day and pushed everything else sideways never made it onto my to-do list. Inspired by my little sage to take another look at that list, I tore it up and started over, this time including everything I had actually done that day; then, with a satisfied grin, I crossed off the top twenty to-dos, starting with "Find Lego Man's hair." The Entitlement Trap As wonderful as it had been for Nick to show me the light that night in the tub, I can't say it happened very often during their early school years. My children were sweet and loving, relatively well behaved and appreciative—most of the time—but the bitter taste of feeling taken for granted, underappreciated, and overworked often burned at the back of my throat. There were many mornings when my resentment and anger spilled over as I raced around the house before work, picking up discarded clothes, tidying the kitchen, cajoling the kids into their coats. Like many baby-boomer parents, Steve and I had been eager to provide the kids with all kinds of opportunities, from private school to piano lessons to day camp. We applauded every accomplishment, framed countless crayon creations, boasted about their many talents, but we demanded very little on the responsibility front. What worried me during this stage of motherhood was that too much giving, praising, doing for our children might sabotage their need to learn from their mistakes, to suffer a bit of pain in order to gain perspective on themselves and their place in the world. Many child development experts have written persuasively about the insidious effect overindulgence has on our children. When—with the best of intentions—we give too much and expect too little, we run the paradoxical risk of jeopardizing our kids' happiness. I say "paradoxical" because it is often a desire to make our children happy, to avoid disappointing them, that drives our behavior at this stage. I've heard many moms sing the same tune when it comes to discipline and demands during their children's early school years: "He's in school and at sports so much these days, I hardly ever see him, so I don't want our limited time to consist of nagging and whining, which is what often happens." As psychologist Dan Kindlon, author of Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age, warns: "The desire to form a close bond with our children should not come at the expense of not being able to set an unyielding limit or rule when a child needs it." It should also not come at the expense of asking our children to take on increased responsibilities. One of the healthiest ways to gratify a school-ager's natural desire to be treated like a "big kid" is not to let her dress the part but to expect her to walk the walk. Values That Last One of the mistakes we all make is that we don't stop to ask what values we hope our school-age children understand now in order to practice them later. Teaching our kids to make good decisions when the stakes are really high is much easier if they've had practice stating their beliefs and standing firm on non-life-and-death stuff. But the only way they learn to do that is to have us model and articulate the values we believe are most important. Of course, teaching good values isn't something we can do in five easy steps, despite the promise of parenting-magazine headlines. You can rely on lectures, literature, or the litany of your particular faith to instill a sense of right and wrong, but unless you demonstrate caring, compassionate behavior, your kids won't absorb much. Even then you're usually left wondering if your children understand the importance of education or the gift of friendship or the importance of hard work. At an age when the "gimmes" can hit with a ferocious tenacity, it's often difficult to see past their obsession with stuff to the stuff inside. One way to do this is to take an active interest in our children's lives, to participate in the activities they enjoy. This is the time of life when your child is likely to become infatuated with something you're just as likely to find excruciatingly dull. It could be bugs or basketball or Britney Spears. It will involve hours of cataloging of inventory, mind-numbing recitation of stats, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for more. Why kids this age collect is intimately connected with their effort to define who they are and what provides them with a sense of mastery or control. Your response to their passions can send important messages about respect, motivation, and the value of finding something in life that really lights your fire. If you can't connect with your seven-year-old on the nuances of Nintendo, then it's critical to find some common ground, some way of opening up your life to him. One mom I met at a party recently described how cut off from her son's life she felt when his obsession with baseball became all-consuming. "I just couldn't get into it," she admitted. "I tried for a while, but all the stats about so-and-so's batting average or the team's latest trade made me want to throw myself down the stairs." Then she discovered that her son loved to garden. "I was very fussy about my flowers. I didn't want James to mess with the plants too much, but I realized that I had been handed a wonderful opportunity. The first time he yanked out a seedling, instead of a weed, I just took a really deep breath and showed him again what to look for. We've had one of the best summers in years planning and planting—and now waiting—for our vegetable garden to bear fruit. He swears he'll actually eat the broccoli!" My friend Jane felt that "latency is the best." Not only did she enjoy hanging out with her son, traveling with him, talking about the books he was reading or the friends he was making at school, but she discovered how proud she was to meet the parents of his friends and introduce herself by saying, "Hi! I'm Jesse's mom." Being the mom of this exuberant, bright, funny boy was a big part of how she defined herself. But as his ninth birthday approached, Jane experienced a deep and familiar sorrow. "My mom died when I was nine," she said. "So I do find that I look at Jesse and remember how it felt; I just can't help reliving that pain, even as I recognize how blessed I am to have my health and the promise of many more years as his mom. That's something my mother never experienced." Our tendency to reexperience our childhoods and project our memories of the school years onto our kids intensifies during this stage in part because the memories are so much more accessible and vivid. Many of us can't recall much about our preschool-through-kindergarten years, but I'm certain you could rattle off the names of your second-, third-, fourth-, or fifth-grade teachers. More important, you can summon the thoughts and feelings, the joys and pain, that characterized your relationships with your own parents and siblings; trace how those relationships shaped who you are now; and consciously decide to mother your children in ways that re-create, recast, or reject the mothering you received. Sometimes the ghosts that haunt our relationships with our kids are benign. We welcome, even strive to rekindle—through holiday rituals, family stories, "in" jokes—the positive connections we felt with our parents and siblings. Just as often, we remember painful times, when our parents' sins of omission or our siblings' cruelty left darker shadows that trigger complicated reactions to our own kids' behavior. There's a reason we refer to skeletons in the closet, and even more cause to leave them there. But it's far better to take advantage of this relatively easy phase in our children's development to work on our own issues than to wait until the preteen or adolescent years, when life gets, well, decidedly more interesting.

Stage 6 Living in the Gray Zone: The Preteen Years, Ten to Thirteen

Stage 6 Summary

Depending on how you look at (and live) them, the preteen years can be either the shortest or the longest chapter in your mothering story. "There is no such thing as a preadolescent," an editor friend of mine declared when I asked her about life with her ten-year-old son. "Ten is the new teen! He started fifth grade and it's as if he's plunged into high school. It's such a radical change from fourth grade. Oh my God!" During this stage of motherhood, the progression-regression dance our children perform daily can throw into question not only practical concerns like rules and routines but more profound issues like trust and boundaries. The challenge to know when to be your child's pal and when to assert yourself, when to push and when to protect, forces many mothers to question with renewed intensity their roles at work, their involvement in their child's school, and their connections with other parents, with their husband, and, of course, with their child. It takes an ego of steel to navigate the preteen years, because one day your kid is going to wake up uncomfortable in her own body. And when she stands with one foot in childhood, the other in early adulthood, and struggles to maintain her balance, the person she will grab onto with a desperate, clawing intensity is you. Sandra, a single mom with two daughters, compared her eldest's fifth and sixth-grade years as "living The Exorcist." Shaking her head, she seemed to marvel at the fact that she and her daughter survived it at all. "I mean, I just felt as though Christa—who had been my sweet, obedient little girl—suddenly woke up with her head spinning around. I just wasn't prepared. Not at all."

In addition to the "velocity of change," there's often a volatility and intensity mothers say they associate with the toddler years. I spent much of Maddie's preadolescence with my shoulders tensed up around my ears and my antennae quivering in anticipation of a major mood swing. When your daughter freaks out because the shirt she's "gotta, gotta have right now" is still in the washing machine, or your son rants and raves when he realizes at 11 p.m. that his French quiz is demain, not next week, you're likely to blame those "raging hormones."

And certainly the approach of puberty brings about dramatic changes in a child's endocrine system, changes that profoundly affect his ability to regulate his emotions. But it may actually be your preteen's brain that's short-circuiting, simply because the area that helps control emotions and make judgments (the prefrontal cortex) isn't as developed as the limbic system, where emotions originate. The wet shirt throws her into a tailspin because she can't stop and say, "Okay, this isn't the end of the world. I have a drawer full of other shirts." And while you may be tempted to use your own superior prefrontal cortex to offer solutions, don't. Any attempt to proffer advice during the heat of a meltdown will be about as effective as banging your cerebral cortex against a wall. Read more.

Stage 6 Summary, continued

It's also crucial at this stage to let your preteen fall on her face once in a while, to muscle through a problem without a guaranteed bailout from Mom or Dad. Natural consequences are rarely easy to enforce, but they can work wonders during this critical time in your child's life and foster a sense of mastery and responsibility. Even as I write this, I'm well aware of how abysmally I failed in this regard, how often I leapt to the rescue when Maddie or Nick was teetering on the edge of a cliff. Sometimes the cry for help was fairly minimal ("Mom! I left my math homework on my desk. Could you please, please drop it off at school?"), but on other occasions my rescue effort led to late-night "helping" with an English paper and the midnight thanks followed swiftly by "I suck at writing. I could never have done this without you." The problem, of course, is that when we help too much, we deprive them of a sense of mastery, of truly owning what they produce or create. On the flip side of the overinvolvement coin is a reluctance to let go, a deep ambivalence about everything from physical separation ("Can I walk to school by myself?") to emotional independence ("That's private, Mom!"). One could argue that every stage of motherhood is characterized by the conflicting desire to push and to coddle, to give our kids wings but clip them ever so slightly. But during their preteen years, our awareness of childhood's end is always present. It's like the fortieth-birthday card I received that read, "Turning 40 isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from there." Yearning to Be Home More The result of this consciousness, for several mothers of preteens, is a fierce yearning to be home more, to splurge on that European trip now—not when the kids are grown and out of the house—to dramatically change the way they live their lives. I experienced similar feelings of sadness, nostalgia, anxiety, even mild dread as Maddie's sixth-grade year came to an end. Knowing that seventh grade was typically the nadir in terms of social angst, I began to consider other alternatives. I wanted to write this book, badly, but I certainly didn't want to compromise my already limited free time. As I launched this project, it launched me through a door I had only cracked open in years past. The week I told my boss and staff my plan to take a few years off to write this book was marked by meetings that started on a professionally even keel and inevitably dissolved into weepy hugs. More than once I phoned Steve to whisper, "Are you sure this is a good idea? Do you think anyone would ever hire me again?" More than once I felt a sense of panic—never more than when my wonderful art director put her arm around my shoulders and said, "You know, you'll never have this again. This is really special." She was right. It's very hard to find a team of coworkers as amazing as the women I worked with at that time—not to mention a job that was so compatible with my role as a mom. But I was still convinced that if I didn't take this opportunity to be home more, to strengthen my relationship with my kids, I would never have that again, either.

Of course, it's often a fantasy that your chances of connecting with your preteen increase in direct proportion to the hours you spend warming up the hearth at home. Don't forget, it's your child's job to push you away at this age, to guard secrets, forge new friendships, figure out who the hell he is, often in direct opposition to you.

The Don't-Touch-Me Phase

There's no question that as your child hits ten or eleven, his need to appear more James Dean-cum-lone wolf increases in direct proportion to how many of his friends may be hanging around. Try to give him a hug or even tousle his hair at the bus stop or in the mall, and he's likely to flinch as though you've zapped him with a cattle prod. Hand in hand with the "don't touch me" message is the "you're so embarrassing" complaint, leveled several times a day. Suddenly you're dumb and dumber. Maddie remembers all too vividly an unfortunate faux pas I committed the afternoon I managed to carry on a lengthy conversation with a dark-haired girl I repeatedly called Claire, even though, according to my mortified daughter, Rachel (her actual name) bore absolutely no resemblance to Claire. "She has way lighter hair," Maddie hissed as she dragged me away, insisting in her next breath that I henceforth pick her up around the corner. My friend Kate's daughter presented her with a list of phrases never to be uttered in front of her school friends. They included any reference to mother-daughter conversations; for example, "Halley tells me" or "Halley and I were talking about . . . ." or "I understand from Halley." Happily for me, Nick's headlong plunge into adolescence hasn't included a dramatic Mom the Leper stage. Still, I've made good use of advice given to me by William Pollack, renowned expert on the psychology of boys, about ways to get even the most recalcitrant preteen to talk. "The vast majority of boys are not taught to open up, to say, 'I feel this way, Mom,' or 'There's something bothering me I'd like to talk about.'" He explained, "They're much more likely to express their feelings while they're doing something with you. If a boy has something else to focus on as he talks—shooting hoops, playing a game—then he successfully protects himself from the possibility of experiencing shame—which is paramount during the preteen years." Of course, there were many times when my kids retreated to their rooms or created a high-tech barricade that was tough to scale. How does one engage a ten-year-old when he's playing Mortal Kombat (a game you loathe), pausing only to type an instant message on his laptop or to adjust the gigantic "I can't possibly hear you" headphones cupping his ears? According to Ron Taffel, another gentle giant in the adolescent-psychology field, you create "comfort time" by pushing through those barriers and joining your kids in whatever activities they seem to enjoy.

Lines and Limits

At the same time, your goal is not to be your child's best friend. As her parent, you're expected to be flexible yet firm – a mandate that's practically impossible to pull off consistently. Claire, a divorced mother of two, told me: "I feel like I'm living in this gray zone, and I hate it. It's not a good place to be as a parent. Especially when you have a kid like Sam, who has always needed stability, predictability in his life. Just when he needs me to be in control, to know what I'm doing, I feel like I'm constantly struggling to figure out what the right answer is to the myriad questions and requests I am confronted with on a daily basis. This is brand-new territory, and I can't go on my instincts, so I get really stuck." What Claire sensed—and what every parent of a preteen will confirm—is that showing indecision or weakness is like sticking your head in a shark's mouth. A tenacious, self-righteous eleven-year-old can smell equivocation from a mile away and, like a hungry predator, will move in for the kill: "You don't know anything!" "Why are you doing this to me?" "But everybody else is!" "What's your problem?" and "I hate you!" are just a few of the choice bites you're likely to feel. Even if you know in your heart that your preteen loves you, it's never easy to be sprayed with venom and not feel paralyzed by indecision or, worse, convinced that it would be a lot less painful to just lie down and admit defeat. Behind every preteen who claims to have a mother who is "a bitch," "so incredibly annoying," "clueless," or worse is a kid scrambling for a toehold on a very slippery slope. Even if the hand they grab onto grips a bit too tightly, it's nonetheless warm and sure. But the only way to maintain your own footing is to give yourself time to take that cleansing breath before responding. Only rarely will it be possible to do exactly the right thing, to stand firm and not doubt yourself a minute later. The ten-year-old who wants to get her ears pierced might have a long list of perfectly reasonable arguments to support her request. Your response may be as simple as "I want you to wait" or "I don't like pierced ears." But if you trust your gut, avoid the "Am I being overprotective and neurotic about this?" bug in your ear, chances are your child will back down. Will she thank you later for taking a sure and loving stance? Not a chance.

Class Cruellas and Cliques

More than anything, tweens want to belong, to be part of the in crowd or, better yet, a member of the most popular clique. There is a rich body of literature on clique dynamics; sociologists have parsed everything from "out-group subjugation" to violent bullying. But most of us don't need a sociology lesson to remember how painfully formative the fickleness of friends can be. Ask any mom to close her eyes and say the first thing she associates with "seventh grade," and she's likely to mention friends or cliques or fall back on a simple "Ugh!" I can recall choking back waves of anger and frustration when Maddie would recount some insanely complicated lunchroom dance that had left her outside the circle of "friends" on whom her fragile self-esteem depended. "They didn't even talk to me, Mom," she would whisper, the pain traceable from her hairline to her small, clenched fists. "No one likes me. I'm such a loser!" I knew better than to argue, to shower her with compliments or list her many wonderful qualities. With her emotional earplugs in place, Maddie was definitely not open to gratuitous advice; the best I could do was zip my mouth, shake my head sympathetically, and perhaps share some tragic story from my own sixth-grade memory bank. It was equally important for me to admit that Maddie could be critical, competitive, jealous (all I had to do was ask Nick), because assuming she was the innocent victim got me nowhere. I had heard her talking about other kids, complaining about teachers, joking about a celebrity's hideous outfit or latest romance. And of course, she had heard me talking about my friends, complaining about my boss, joking about a celebrity's hideous outfit or latest romance. When it came to gossip I was hardly a Liz Smith, but I'm sure both kids heard their share of stories around our dinner table or witnessed my siblings and me teasing one another—usually, but not always, "all in good fun." By the time Nick entered middle school, I so hated the kids' gossip that I instituted a fine for every nasty comment I happened to catch. Although this tactic primarily served to redirect the nasty comments my way, I made my point. Of course, there were several occasions when a phone conversation with one of my friends was interrupted by a shrill voice from the couch shouting, "I heard that, Mom! Fifty cents!" What did I learn from the preteen years? First and foremost, that my children are not me. They won't do their homework, practice piano, sketch a still life, make a friend, or write a letter the same way I would. And they certainly won't do any of those things just because I say to. When you've asked your eleven-year-old to do something fifty times and he's still not doing it, maybe he's not the slow learner! I also heard the rattle of childhood ghosts, witnessed the spillover from my own life onto the kids, and learned that when the going gets tough, the tough stop going. They pause, breathe, exit. Choosing to step out of an unproductive or, worse, destructive dance with your preteen is an extremely powerful strategy during this phase of motherhood. So is flexibility. I found that a willingness to bend a bit, even to surprise my kids by demonstrating that I actually had been listening and could be convinced to change my mind, defused many potential conflicts. Living in the gray zone meant recognizing that what worked on Monday might prove totally useless on Wednesday or that the child who seemed unfit for more responsibility one day could act with stunning maturity the next. Similarly, even if a minor missile launched at the end of a day from hell caused my heart to bleed, I could still be counted on to pull the troops through on days when I was calm, rested, and undistracted. Or when I had had the time to talk to Steve, the benefit of a friend's advice, a chance to meet with one of the kids' teachers, or perhaps a consultation with a therapist. Any of these lifelines might alert me to hot spots, help me stop and reflect on how to better negotiate the daily challenges and relish the fun of living with a preteen.

Stage 7 It Gets Easier . . . and Then They Leave: The Teen Years, Thirteen to Eighteen

Stage 7 Summary

For mothers of teens, letting go is the seminal challenge of this phase of our lives. And only the 'superhuman' or the 'comatose' can pull it off without experiencing feelings of loss, resentment, anger, and exhaustion. On the other hand, if this process of change and separation produces a well-deserved feeling of pride and accomplishment, not to mention the pleasure of sharing life with an almost-full-fledged adult, then the teen years can be golden ones. In fact, you may find that behavior that one day drives you screaming from the house can actually prove exciting, even charming, the next. For example, as your teenager's brainpower develops, so does her ability to formulate more mature opinions. She may still assume you're "totally wrong" before you've even opened your mouth, but the argument that follows has the potential to be far more engaging, interesting, and adult than discussions were a year or two ago. Your child's growing brain contributes to her improved debating skills, her ability to employ sarcasm, appreciate a pun, and maybe, just maybe, concede that you have a point. Unfortunately, certain aspects of your teen's growing brain may lead him to do some incredibly lame brained things. Adolescents are notorious risk takers, a tendency that neurologists are beginning to explain by actually looking at the physiology of those areas of the brain that are associated with decision making. Once a child enters adolescence, his mortality rate soars by 300 percent. The vast majority of teens (78 percent) try alcohol in high school, with some five million admitting to binge drinking at least once a month. One out of every five kids has sexual intercourse before turning fifteen and far more are engaging in oral sex or other sex play they think "doesn't count."

Reading these statistics or, worse, recognizing that your kid is in pain or in trouble, as many are during adolescence, can make this phase of motherhood feel less like the toddler years and more like infancy. Just as you were probably advised to "trust your gut" or to "read your baby's signals" at a time when your gut twisted into a pretzel every time your newborn cried, your attempts to read your teen's behavior now inevitably run headlong into a wall of self-doubt and insecurity. When Maddie was a fragile, helpless newborn, exquisitely ill equipped to tell me what she needed, how could I know for sure that I had done the right thing? When she was a young teenager, increasingly independent, vulnerable, and unwilling to tell me what she needed, how could I know for sure that I had done the right thing? Panic attacks, which I associated with my first months as a mother, were part and parcel of my experience of the kids' adolescence. Read more.

Stage 7 Summary, continued

The bottom line is that our teens probably will try drugs, get drunk, and have sex before they're in college (we hope not all on the same night). The most we can do is try to arm them with enough self-esteem and good sense to make only a few stupid decisions "none of them life-threatening" and to have the courage to learn from their mistakes. In fact, we really shouldn't aspire to raise Prince Perfect or Miss Goody Two-shoes. Why? Because there's compelling evidence that teens who never break the rules, who refuse every beer and cigarette and come-on, don't fare so well when they're out on their own. Think about the kids who die each year from binge drinking. Inevitably, there's an article citing the child's unsullied past. His parents or close friends appear totally flabbergasted. "He was always such a good boy...he never drank or did drugs'never." Apparently that's the problem. According to researchers at Boise State University who studied the drinking behavior of 266 incoming freshmen, the model students were less likely to know how to handle their liquor or how to pace themselves than veterans of the party scene. Also, they were less likely to have had a discussion about binge drinking with their parents. Mom and Dad just assumed they knew better. After all, why would you have to tell an A+ student that drinking successive shots of vodka can kill you? You have to talk to your kids for the simple reason that all teenagers say they have good judgment when they don't. All teenagers engage in risky behaviors, because they believe they're invulnerable. And all teenagers lie to their parents, even when it's patently obvious that they're guilty. The key is to avoid the trap of focusing so intensely on the lying that you lose sight of the behavior behind it. When you find yourself caught up in the heat of an argument or, as often happens, put on the spot or cornered, find a way to stop the music and step out of the dance. There's absolutely no way to communicate effectively with a teenager who is screaming "You don't trust me! You never believe me! I'm never, ever telling you anything again!" Nor is there a way to keep your cool and say exactly what you want when the top of your head has just flown off.

When It Comes to Sex

More than anything these days, I worry that I won't know what's going on. Or I won't want to know. Or my kids won't want me to know what I know particularly when it comes to sex. It's not so much the door to their room that I worry about them shutting but the door to our continued communication about a subject that's increasingly difficult to discuss. Embarrassment isn't a problem for me; thanks to the content of 90 percent of the shows they watch on television, we've discussed date rape, STDs, masturbation, penis size, contraception, vibrators, and what I think "going to third base" really means. But as the kids mature, I'm faced with the conundrum (a word that sounds vaguely X-rated) of trying to provide the right information without crossing the line into conversations that are gratuitously revealing or unnecessarily personal. In Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They'd Ask), Justin Richardson and Mark A. Schuster note, "It's one thing to say, "Sex can be wonderful," to your six-year-old, who is making puke sounds about it in the backseat. It's another to say it to the sixteen-year-old seated up front next to you. You know and she knows that you didn't just read about this in a book." What strikes me as most critical is that you communicate the message that communication is the message when it comes to good sex. Being able to talk to the person you love, to make certain that sex is always consensual and that both partners feel comfortable expressing what they like and what they don't, should be the headline every time our kids broach the topic of relationships. Long before they get involved with someone sexually, they'll be practicing and demonstrating their skills at asserting themselves, listening, empathizing, and negotiating with their friends and family. The irony at our house is the fact that my children's sexual development coincides with my approaching menopause. For some mothers this awareness of their "sexual devolution," as one friend put it, brings out competitive or even inappropriate behavior. "I realize now how often I flirted with the girls' boyfriends," the mother of twins told me. "I wasn't aware of it until my own mother pointed it out. And though I was really defensive and angry at first, I had to admit I turned on the high beams around certain of their male friends. I'm really quite ashamed of it, looking back." Feeling envious, competitive, or suddenly displaced when your teenager falls in love for the first time may be natural, but it's usually unexpected and often guilt-provoking. Even if you think the young man or woman in question is a doll, you're suddenly relegated to a sad and awkward corner. Even if you swear your child's happiness makes you happy, the longing for a time when nightingales sang from blossoming trees the minute your beloved entered the room may render your own garden sadly in need of weeding (or planting). Even if you think you're prepared to deal with the inevitable break your adolescent's first romance produces, think again. Several mothers I interviewed described experiencing a vicarious thrill when their daughters started dating. And even those whose children were not involved in a relationship talked about the tension generated when their teens' personalities began to take shape. We love the better halves of our adolescents, the parts we lack or envy or through which we relive pleasurable parts of our past. But when our children are not like us, when the qualities we associate with a successful adulthood 'integrity, intelligence, thoughtfulness, tenacity, determination, ambition, affection' are in low gear or in reverse, we often panic or become infuriated.

When your recalcitrant seventeen-year-old refuses help in math even though he's been getting C's, or when your fifteen-year-old daughter, the chess prodigy, decides slide guitar is more her thing, you may feel as though the ground has splintered under your feet and your chances of climbing back onto a happy, grassy knoll are nil. But underneath the Mohawk is a kid with whom you may still have much in common; in fact, recognizing that your teenager is quite separate and different from you is a gift. It spares you the curse of unrealistic expectations, of trying to force your teenager into a mold defined by your fantasies, not by hers, of sending the destructive message "If you will bury the parts I don't like, then I will love you." We all know parents who send this insidious message, who wear their children's accomplishments like a designer blouse. One mother I know actually called me recently to say, "We got into Yale!" Her narcissistic boast is the extreme of our natural tendency to overidentify with our teens. Of course, as the title of this stage implies, by the time you've figured it all out, they fly away. Phyllis Theroux wrote about the end of her kids' adolescence: "It is leaving me. The power I once held absolutely over my children's lives. I no longer hold a fat ball of twine in my hand but a fistful of string from the end of the skein." As you trace the course of that ball of string, stretching back as it does through eighteen years of motherhood, you'll see tangles and tapestries and, one hopes, sense the strong, generous net you have woven for your children. That net will never go away; it will support them when you're not around and draw your children back to you in the years to come. What's hard is learning to stop weaving that net yourself and letting your kids mend it themselves. And, at the same time, to imagine and plan for a life that will be as dramatically different as your years were before you became a mother. Just as we had to prepare ourselves for the tremendous impact our children's arrival would have on our identities and on our relationships, the end of this stage of motherhood requires an equally dramatic and far more heart-wrenching adjustment. These days Steve is as likely to tear up about his adored daughter's imminent departure as I am. We're both stunned to have reached this place along the path and to sense the even scarier transition that lies ahead when Nick goes off to college. "I just can't believe it," I whisper across our pillows in the dark, and when Steve sighs like a lovesick teenager, I know he's heard me. I'm extremely grateful that we're on a similar emotional page, at least right now. For some mothers, saying good-bye to their grown children seems to shine a harsh light on their marriages. "I know Bruce is sad to see Rob go," the mother of an only son confessed, "but when he talks about the fun we'll have in our soon-to-be empty nest, the trips we'll be able to take, and the kind of freedom we'll have next year, I feel as though we're shouting at each other across an ocean. I'm feeling miserable. And he just doesn't get it."

As is true during other phases of motherhood, the need to believe that your husband is feeling your pain, that you're in step during this last difficult adjustment, can lead to disappointment and anger. Which may explain in part why, despite an overall decline in divorce rates, there has been a 16 percent increase in the number of divorces among couples who have been married thirty or more years. But it's unrealistic and unfair to expect your husband to "get it." His relationship with your children, his sense of himself as a father, and the degree to which that image is central to his identity are vastly different from yours. More important, he's not the man you married just as you are dramatically different at this stage of your relationship than you were twenty or so years ago.

Moms Need Friends at This Time

If your husband can't come through for you or if you happen to be single or divorced, don't try to go it alone during the teen years, especially when the going gets tough. Long before your teenager heads out the door, you will have experienced acute loneliness and a need for someone – anyone - to pull up a chair, make you a cup of tea, and listen to you vent. Just as it may have been the mothers you met in your Lamaze class who understood you best when you were together in the postpartum trenches, it may be the mom of another college-bound kid who looks you in the eye and lets you see yourself. If you're fortunate enough to have a band of empty-nesting friends, seek them out. There's actual scientific evidence that suggests our instinct to "tend and befriend" when we're stressed is highly adaptive and beneficial. These days I don't need a neuroscientist to inspire me to pick up the phone and confess to my friend Val or Patty or Maxine that I'm already mourning Maddie's absence from my life, that I wish there was a way to reclaim my heart, mind, and soul from hers because it feels as though they're being wrenched out from somewhere very deep inside me. They never preach or try too hard to placate, but when I finally pause long enough to ask, "How's your life?" they inevitably shine a light into the dark. Having watched each of them and many others - my older sister, colleagues, cousins, and, of course, my own mother - find a way to redefine who they are during this last stage of motherhood, I am reminded of how resilient, powerful, creative, patient, and blessed mothers are. And how proud I am to be one.

Read chapter one of The 7 Stages of Motherhood, Click Here.

Excerpted from The 7 Stages of Motherhood by Ann Pleshette Murphy. Copyright© 2004 by Ann Pleshette Murphy. Excerpted by permission of Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

For more information on parenting, go to www.annpleshettemurphy.com