A short History of Life with Girl Child

published in Still Here Magazine, Mar 5, 2026

For most of her 20-plus years, my daughter has elicited – at least in me - - one of two responses: the yoke of love or the desire to throttle.

This is unusual for me since I’ve always avoided conflict, walking away from people, jobs, relationships, even dialogue. Like the guy I left waiting outside the jewelry store the day we were to pick out wedding rings, while I drove to the US border. The note I left on the kitchen counter read: Feed the dogs. I’ve gone away and won’t be back.

My biological clock eventually intervened because I married – not that guy but a different one who had some of the same commitment issues as me. After much back and forth, we decided to venture into parenthood.

Our first child, Aidan, was easy after resolving a few sleep issues. No desire to run from this responsibility, quickly falling in love with his little round person, the bobbing head, alert eyes, clutching hands. He was compliant and eager to please, and our lives proceeded in a calm and predictable way. So, we ventured into parenthood a second time.

And then along came Anna. No cherubim this one. Even though she looked the part -- rosebud lips, halo of fuzzy blond hair, and cerulean eyes – she arrived with yowling fanfare, a foreshadowing of things to come; pushing her way to the centre of every conversation, laughing hysterically one minute (or making others do so), sobbing the next.

She affected all of us – in one photo she’s held aloft by her father, legs flailing, mouth wide open, tears streaming, outraged that she cannot blow out the candles on her brother’s cake.

At three, during a violent scene in Lord of the Rings, she declared she “be cutting someone’s head off when I be grown up.” Thrusting her head towards the floor like an overwrought opera diva when she didn’t get her way or rocking back and forth and howling like an injured Italian soccer player over a scrape on her finger.

The months leading up to Grade One were punctuated by emotional outbursts once having a temper tantrum so severe I had to pin her arms to her body to control the eruption. My elderly father used to say of her: Life is either one big joke, or a vale of tears.

He was right -- when I wasn't tearing my hair out, I was laughing: at five, she tromped around a department store in size 10 boots with 4-inch heels, prompting a friend of mine to say she was a 40-year-old French woman trapped in a child’s body; waving like the queen from the backseat of the car at stoplights (people always waved back); wondering aloud if a girl had to be a princess in order to get married, then asked if I had ever been a princess.

At six, furious with me over something, she whispered to her dad at the dinner table: “Mommy is such a bad cook, I really hate the things she makes, these hamburgers are disgusting.” And when he told her he’d made them, she replied: “These are yummy Daddy.”

Once when I forgot to pay the promised 50 bucks for each A on her end-of-year report, she told me not to bother coming to parents’ visiting day at camp. But she could flip the other way too.

At seven, she walked into the store where I’d admired something in the window and asked if she could put it on hold until she was old enough to buy it for me. When the 50-something protagonist died in a movie we were watching, she started to sob and asked what if that happened to me. (I was 56 at the time.)

When she turned 13, I jokingly told a friend I was going to blog The Year of Living Dangerously: My Life with a Teenage Girl. Once she turned 14, I realized the blog had at least a four-year shelf life. In retrospect, I could have made an online career out of it.

As a teenager, her complicated personality converged with hormones and a not-yet-matured prefrontal cortex to predictable results, which often left me emotionally spent. She was so adept at circular conversations that I would fume and sputter, losing track of what it was about.

The fighting escalated. One time I broke down in tears, asking her how we got to this point. She said: “Mom, you need to relax -- all mothers and daughters fight.” Yes, I fought with my own mother, but blinded by her mental illness and drug addictions, I never turned the mirror on myself. I was a conscientious mom, read the books, and yet the conflict raged on.

There were days it felt like my daughter was seizing power – and succeeding – and I wondered if we’d forever be caught in this cycle. I mean who is this kid, and what am I supposed to do with her? She could reduce me to tears and shouting, our voices escalating until nobody could hear the last salvo even if they wanted to.

Is it any surprise that international peace talks so often fail when we have a hard time managing family discord? One thing that sustained me was introducing physical mementoes – like the pictures I put up all over the house to remind myself just how much I did love her.

I also took to re-reading the journal I’d kept on her since infancy. We had become so joined at the hip it provided me a much-needed long view of our God-given Otherness – not just hers, but mine as well. This allowed me to see in more sanguine moments that the intense behaviour was her way of punching through the walls of the baby cocoon in order to emerge one long limb at a time, into adolescence and then ultimately into adulthood. And to see through the drama to her inner subtext: don’t be mad at me; I’m trying to be grown up and will cleanmy room eventually; those friends stick by me, and that makes me happy.

Even so, plenty of times I wanted to walk away. Never far from my lips was the suggestion my daughter go live with her father (and his girlfriend and her two kids). But I swallowed it because no one should feel unwanted, especially one whom I love to the bone.

Eventually, Anna left home for uni, then returned, then left again. Because that’s what children do as they grow up and figure things out.

Her intensity has never changed, though – her passionate cries against injustice (often tested out on me) are tempered equally by her many kindnesses: carrying cash to shell out to the homeless guy outside the grocery store, running the marathon in aid of Gaza, volunteering long hours with sexual abuse survivors.

My daughter has managed to do what nobody else has been able to – helped me to embrace responsibility but know when to let go. She once told me that when her father is mad at her he scowls and walks off. I remind her that I have done the same. “Yeah, but I know you’re coming back,” she says.