Do you know where the tween mums are right now?
If we’re not sitting at the kitchen table bawling our eyes out, we’re hiding in parked cars, in the bathrooms at work and in shopping centre toilet cubicles. We are behind closed doors in our bedrooms, in the laundry, or way up the backyard. And we’re crying. It’s a different cry to the one we’ve hidden at times over the past 12 or so years. This is a cry of exhaustion and heartbreak. Of exasperation, guilt and annoyance – and mostly of loss and great sadness.
It’s the cry of the tween mum.
Motherhood can seem to be a series of ‘no one tells you’, but why, oh why, didn’t anyone tell us just how soul destroying the tween years can be? Or maybe they did tell us, but we just didn’t hear because we were too focused on the first decade of our children’s lives. You really can’t imagine how bad it is until you arrive at Tween Town, anyway.
No one told us that when you have a tween they will find all your cracks and tear them open.
One day you’re laughing with your best friend, and the next she had disappeared, replaced by a haughty, confidence destroying, conscienceless little 12-year-old. A foe we would have considered inadequate before the tween years hit.
It didn’t take long for our opinion to be dismissed with a laugh. We are told how to improve our makeup, how to apply our mascara (obviously we’ve been doing it wrong all this time) or what wardrobe items should never emerge again. We may be laughed at, or told to stay away because we’re “embarrassing”. Eyes roll, smirks appear. We’re no longer their hero, now we’re their humiliating hand-break. The door to the bedroom has closed and we’re not welcome inside.
Our magic has disappeared and our vulnerability makes us a target.
Our tweens will not do a thing we ask them to, and we don’t know if there’s something wrong with their brain or they’re just being a-holes. The rudeness and dismissiveness hurts so much because we’re really disappointed in them and it feels like we’ve failed.
Apparently, tween years are a complete disaster because of the hormones. And so, tweens are excused. All the parenting experts tell you so, that’s all everyone talks about.
It’s not their fault. It’s the hormones.
Their brains don’t know what they’re doing.
They don’t understand tone.
It’s such a scary time for them.
They’re trying to find their space.
Okay fine. But what about the tween mums? Does anyone care about our hormones? About how this daily turmoil effects us?
I want to know – who is holding space for us?
By the time our kids reach the tween years, us mums have had at least 10 years of child-rearing. A decade of no sleep, of days and nights with sick babies, years of biting toddlers, of arguing, throwing, screaming, kicking and crying.
Years of nappies and teething and soft food and solids, of car seats and booster seats, swimming school and playgroup. Years of defiance, playground battles, food wars. Of mummy judgement, of school runs and sports runs. Of working in the home and working out of the home. Of trying to balance employment with being a “good mum”. Of housework, and being the emotional support, and the one who reminds everyone of everything. Of lifting up, counselling, providing, and always doing everything possible to grow them into good little humans, all while cooking, cleaning, gardening, sweeping, and managing the never-endingness of it all.
We were already exhausted, but instead of a year or two of ease where we could regroup and gather the pieces of us back together, a blaze of tween hormones signals the beginning of a new challenge.
The Everest of child rearing is here, but we don’t even have the energy to get to Base Camp.
We are not okay. Many of us have not been okay for a while and the tween years have tipped us over the edge.
So, spare a thought for the tween mums as we attempt to navigate this new adventure through the tweens and teens. Give us a supportive smile if you see us walking around with tears in our eyes and a sullen tween beside us, or if you hear us crying in the toilets or see us bawling in the car.
We are not okay. But we are mums, so we will keep trying.