“All parents who survived the adolescence of their offspring will tell you this or almost: they “made” adolescence. Like we did Southeast Asia, New York or the Algarve out of season.” In The Kidpublished on March 27 by Grasset, journalist Nadia Daam dissects the mother-daughter relationship in what is sweetest and cruelest at the same time.
In the form of laugh-out-loud fragments, she highlights her contradictions as a feminist mother and analyzes the painful initiatory path that adolescence represents for a youth educated in the new post-MeToo semantics. Nadia Daam chronicles with irresistible honesty her educational failures, her inner conflicts and her slightly shameful little habits. Meeting a perfectly imperfect mother.
Why write this book? What did you miss as a mother in raising a teenager?
I started writing these texts at a time when my relationship with my daughter was very complicated. I like to document my life and, rather than complaining on Instagram, I preferred to write to gain perspective. At first, it wasn’t intended to be published and when I started talking about it around me, I realized that my texts could resonate with other people. Particularly on this question of feminist education from a feminist. There are so many resources out there on how to raise boys in a gender-neutral environment; how to deconstruct them from an early age. That’s great. But I don’t feel at all supported in this process. In the collective imagination, we say that a woman knows, that she does well. And a fortiori, a feminist woman only has to model her political values on her education. There is obviously nothing more complicated than that.
You talk about the anxiety of raising a girl who can be attacked unlike a boy who just needs to be educated. What is the experience of a teenage daughter like today compared to previous generations?
Seeing that things don’t change is the most demoralizing thing. All women have a clear memory of the first time they were harassed or attacked in the street. When I was young, an exhibitionist came to the front of the school. We were used to seeing his penis every morning on the way to class, it was part of the landscape. I remember very well the first time a man masturbated in front of me on the bus, I was 11 years old. And it turns out that the first time it happened to my daughter on the subway, she was 11 years old too. We keep saying that a lot of things have happened since MeToo. In reality, I had almost the same adolescence as my daughter. Afterwards, things changed. The girls’ relationship with each other is very different. Girls of our generation were encouraged to compete against each other, to step on each other to gain the good graces of men. Today’s girls have completely rejected this principle, and, observing them, I tell myself that sorority is not an empty word. They don’t theorize it, but it wouldn’t occur to them to throw themselves under the bus to get the boys’ favors. Their slogan is “ Sistas before mistas » [sur le modèle de « Bro before hoes », les sœurs devant les mecs]. It’s the reversal of the stigma.
Does having a daughter make you a better feminist?
If anything, my feminism was put to the test. I had my little specifications for a feminist mother: I forbade myself from calling her “princess”, I avoided pink, I signed her up for football rather than dance. I thought I was on target and I realized that I, too, had spread stereotypes to my daughter without realizing it. For example, telling her very often that I find her beautiful. If I had a boy, would I have told him, “Your hair looks amazing today”? It’s not nice to say it, but I made my daughter a sort of narcissistic support, particularly because I was not a very pretty or very flirtatious kid. I made it an extension of my femininity. When people compliment her, I feel flattered.
You address the issue of complexes, yours and those of your daughter. Is it impossible to escape the injunctions to beauty?
I have the impression. With Instagram, the models that are offered today are even crueler than in my time. As a teenager, I measured myself against celebrities. I wanted to be Brenda in Beverly Hills and I knew I would never be that girl because I was Nadia from Strasbourg. At the height of her adolescence, she showed me girls on the Internet, knowing that they used filters, but it gave her a deplorable image of herself. The girls who made her dream were girls from another high school that she didn’t know but that she followed on Instagram. These models are more within their reach. I can’t be a star, but why can’t I be the girl who lives two blocks from me?
When we think of adolescence, we think of entry into sexuality. However, you do not mention this question at all. Why did you leave it silent?
It is the terrain of the intimate. I didn’t want my daughter to be disturbed while reading the book. I note that the imagination of the first time is less present among adolescents. Losing your virginity doesn’t exist in their minds. I remember a discussion where I was talking to her about my first times and she replied: “I have two lesbian friends in relationships. They will never sleep with a boy, does that mean they will never have a first time because they have never been penetrated? » They deconstructed this myth of virginity. The wording is not insignificant: you lose something along the way while boys gain something in the first sexual act. What fascinates them is the fact of sharing intimacy. They are more evolved than us on these questions of penetrative sexuality.
You approach global warming from the perspective of menopause. This part is very funny. For you, was it important to tackle all the areas of femininity that remain taboo?
When you are in your forties, like me, and a teenager, the trajectories in relation to the feminine and the body separate. Adolescence is the age of your first period, the age when you embrace your femininity. I’m getting dangerously close to menopause and it’s important to say that. It’s a word I haven’t heard for a very long time. When you enter menopause, it’s like adolescence. You are not in control of your emotions, your body is doing weird things. When you’re a teenager, you don’t like being taken back to your puberty and your physiology. When you’re menopausal, I imagine you don’t want to hear: “She’s boring, she’s menopausal”, after having heard for thirty years: “She’s annoying, she’s on her period.” It’s as if you were experiencing the same upheavals at the same time. Backwards.
You experienced extremely violent cyberharassment after a column on Europe 1 about the jeuxvideo.com 18-25 forum. How did your daughter experience this threat?
I was cyberbullied in 2017, 2018 and 2019, we moved three times. She experienced it very concretely and I felt a lot of guilt. She couldn’t leave and enter the college at the same time as her classmates, she had to be exfiltrated, because they found her college. The threats were taken seriously by the police. They broke down my door and ransacked my apartment which was two blocks away. They trampled his room, his stuffed animals. We were so terrified that we slept in a hotel for three weeks. So young, she tried to protect me by saying she was fine even though she was terrified. They found his father’s address and the name of the café he went to every morning. He was still alive, he died a few months later. Everything happened at once. It was very hard.