The Grief of Adolescing
Jan 17, 2024- I sat with my client, mom to a just-turned 12-year-old. We were talking about the challenges she faces as a mom who dearly loves her kid and the challenges that her child is already facing on their way through adolescence. This week it was a broken heart and beginning to learn the hard lessons about relationships, boundaries, self-abandonment, integrity, and respect—for self and for the other. She described how her gangly teenager leaned on her and cried. This mom observed how hard it was to see her child with heartache, knowing that there was much more ahead. She said, with a great deal of insight, wisdom, and sadness, “There’s a lot of grief growing up, isn’t there.”
Adolescence is imbued with grief. The child both knows and feels this “farewell to childhood,” as Louise Kaplan phrases it. I remember so much of this from my own adolescence, and I was reminded of it oh so poignantly when I met Lorelei.
Lorelei was a beautiful, intelligent 17-year-old creative with a wicked and irreverent sense of humor. She was enthralled equally with online gaming algorithms and Arthurian legend. One day, she told me that she needed to talk with me about something that had been bothering her, though she wanted to brush it off as silly. It was “kind of stupid,” she said. The last book in the Harry Potter series had been released that year, and she had just finished it. She and Harry had essentially grown up together. As she talked about finishing the book, tears sprang to her eyes. Finishing the series symbolized in some way the ending of her childhood, and she was incredibly sad about it.
We spoke of many things during those brief moments, ranging wide, deep, and into heartbreak. We cried and laughed, sometimes at the same time. Lorelei expressed the sense of time passing so quickly, of her friends galloping ahead into the adult world, and she, reluctant to move so quickly, hung back, yet knowing she could not stay forever.
At the end of the Harry Potter series, we get a brief glimpse of Harry and his friends as adults, with families and children of their own. Lorelei could see her approaching adulthood in those pages. She knew that as much as she loved her childhood, she had no choice but to grow up. She did not want to stay a child forever, and she did not want to leave childhood, even though one foot was already out of the door. She wanted to be an adult, and she did not want to leave childhood, though she felt the push toward and the pull back.
This is the paradox of adolescence, this liminal space and time, with its inexorable push/pull towards what is to be and the poignancy of leaving what was. Lorelei knew intuitively that she was in a place, a state of being, where time was no longer linear, and she wanted to linger there. This is a wise knowing, and so many of the adolescents I work with know this.
The philosopher Merleau-Ponty says of a moment such as this: “With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change: I still have it in hand and it is still there, but already it is sinking away below the level of the present; in order to retain it, I need to reach through a thin layer of time.”
Is it possible that every time, no matter our age, when we have an embodied knowing of this moment in hand that requires a simultaneous reaching “through a thin layer of time” that we are entertaining the Adolescent within? Evoking a poignant and meaningful grief? Allow me to venture further into the existential and the philosophical, if you will.
The root word of adolescence is the verb to adolesce, meaning to become. From this etymology, we can entertain the idea that as we live past the chronological age of our teen years we are still and always becoming. Life does that, doesn’t it? I can honestly say I’ve lived more than several lifetimes over these last six decades. Working with young people over the arc of their adolescence, from the onset of puberty all the way through to their young adulthood, I can attest that in those 10 years or so, they also have lived several lives already. Who they are at age 21 bears a resemblance, but a resemblance only, of who they were at age 11.
I met Leo when he was 11 years old, undone by the grief of too many losses at such a young age. It’s more than ten years later now and we’re still working together, primarily doing more social work than therapy as he continues to navigate adulthood. Recently we were reminiscing about his young adolescent years and how all he would eat were bags of Cheetohs. He rolled his eyes and commented on his younger self. Like so many young people I talk with, his insightful observations sometimes take my breath away. On this occasion he said, “You know, being a teenager is a slurry of emotion. It’s like you’re gazing into the cocoon of a caterpillar as it’s turning into a butterfly—it’s all breaking down, disgusting, liquefying your way into adulthood.” For those of you who have read my previous blogs or have heard me talk, you know that this is the metaphor I use all the time to describe the experience of adolescence. Its accuracy was confirmed by Leo’s remembering his own adolescence, having just begun the process of exiting it.
Every time we learn some kind of transformative life lesson, experience some pivotal moments when we know without a doubt that our life will never be the same again, if we’re paying attention, we know that now there is a before and an after. Sometimes we call it nostalgia, a feeling of yearning or longing. Sometimes there is the sorrowful ache that all has changed. Other times we may feel the sharp edge of grief.
Recently, Lee, one of The Shiftless Wanderer’s invaluable team members, shared this piece of wisdom, “Life is what happens to us as time is passing by.” Oof! When I sit with this one, I feel it. Time passes. Everything changes. People come and go. They grow up. The world changes. Our childhood fades further and further into the foggy yesteryears. And yet. And yet. . . .
. . . . It is my adolescence that often comes into crystal clear focus. The memory is more than memory but lived-experience-again. Again I am 13 years old, standing on North Mountain watching the sunrise and feeling as if I were watching the first sunrise ever. Again I am a junior in high school, sitting in my car, the day of high school graduation, the rain pouring down, listening to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance”, knowing that the boy I had loved from afar for the last 5 years was graduating and I would, most likely, never see him again. Again I am 12 years old, in the car and weeping (again), because my father has disappointed me beyond belief. He has become unbearably human and flawed, and I don’t even know what to do with the pain and the anger
My client, in the midst of her journey of becoming, recognizes and resonates with her child’s heartache, remembering her own adolescence. This is a gift for her child if she honors and tends to her Inner Adolescent and her grief. Our Inner Teenage parts are still here with us—burdened or unburdened, as they say in IFS. They are still here with us because we are forever becoming, forever adolescing. All the way to the very last breath. When there is yet one more farewell, a grief yet again.
Image by: sezer66