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In mother/daughter interactions, the meanings invoked are often rooted in a girl’s past responses. A mother asks a checking-up question, and the daughter feels like a little girl again. “Do you have your keys?” or “Do you have  bus money?” may seem like neutral questions to a mother, but to daughter the implication is “you are not able to look after yourself.” These questions could be easily tolerated if uttered  by a caring friend, but from a mother they pinch on a girl’s own doubts. She knows she sometimes forgets things. She knows these small lapses in forward planning can lead to enormous inconvenience – when she has to walk home, or get a lift from someone she’d rather not be in a car with, or when she has to wake her mother to open the door. Feeling threatened by the girl who can’t remember to pack her lunch, take her keys, or put money aside for the bus ride home, she blames her mother for reminding her of her child-self.

Charmaine, Vera, and Anna are proud of their newly acquired life skills. Yet there is no crucial area in which girls their age have not yet developed, an area in which they may in fact be less well equipped to find their way than they were as 10 years old who trusted others to guide them. In her newfound intellectual confidence, a teenage girl lacks the ability to assess her own weaknesses. The area in which she flounders most is that of assessing risk. It is this weakness, and her blindness to it, that terrifies and territories a parent.

Adolescents can argue well. They are capable of complex and abstract thinking. They are good  at applying general principles to particular cases. They have splendid imaginations. But they are inept at assessing risk, especially when they themselves are involved. Youth feels immortal. With its energy, certainty and its love for its own promise. A teen often doesn’t see the risk she is taking because her  imagination is not yet equipped to conceive of her own death. Her sense of self is so acute that she cannot conceive it being obliterated.

We all, at any time of life, have trouble taking on board the fact that inevitably we will die, but as we mature, we live with this fact. At least we know we can die, even if the reality of that fact evades us in our day-to-day thoughts and plans. The mothers experience of this conflict can be read as a version of Little Red Riding Hood: The carefree girl in the forest cannot gauge the evils that beset her; she overestimates her own ability to judge others and is, therefore, easy prey for wolves.

Excerpted  from ’You don’t really know me’ by Terry Apter.