My friend and I have a few years of conversation behind us. We’ve talked about motherhood — we’ve both spent a large part of our time as a single parent — and its relationship to writing. We’ve talked about the problems and pleasures of honoring reality, in life and in art. She has never upheld the shadowless account of parenthood; and perhaps consequently, nor does she now allude to her teenage son as a kind of vandal who has ruined the lovely picture. We talk about our own teenage years, and the hostility of our parents’ generation to any form of disagreement with their children. Any system of authority based on control fears dissidence more than anything else, she says. You two don’t realize how lucky you are, and the lions roll their eyes. What is being controlled, she says, is the story. By disagreeing with it, you create the illusion of victimhood in those who have the capacity to be oppressors. From outside, the dissident is the victim, but the people inside the story can’t attain that distance, for they are defending something whose relationship to truth has somewhere along the line been compromised. I don’t doubt that my parents saw themselves as my hapless victims, as many parents of adolescents do (“You have this lovely child,” a friend of mine said, “and then one day God replaces it with a monster”), but to me at the time such an idea would have been unthinkable. In disagreeing with them, I was merely trying to re-establish a relationship with truth that I thought was lost. I may even have believed that my assertions were helpful, as though we were on a journey somewhere and I was trying to point out that we had taken a wrong turn. And this, I realize, is where the feelings of powerlessness came from: Disagreement only and ever drew reprisal, not for what was said but for the fact alone of saying it, as if I were telling the residents of a Carmelite convent that the building was on fire and was merely criticized for breaking the vow of silence.

In my class at school there was a girl, a sophisticated creature, clever and sharp-tongued, well dressed, worldly, mature for her age in body and mind. She spoke of her mother, with whom she lived, with extraordinary contempt. Her mother was pathetic, a housewife, a drudge. She nagged her daughter to do this or that; on occasion she overstepped the mark so far as to obstruct her in the fulfillment of her own plans and desires. Stupid cow, she would say, arriving at school. Guess what the bitch has done now? She made these remarks so often that a kind of story took root in them, with its concomitant sense of tension that would grow toward some dark climax. She would come to class with the latest installment of the drama, and would relay the details with scathing laughter. Increasingly her own role was becoming more active, as though to show us that she was no victim, that she was about deeds as well as words. Her mother had berated her for the untidiness of her room, so she had opened her closet and, in front of her mother, carefully taken everything out and thrown it on the floor before walking out of the house to school. Her mother had made some unacceptable remark over dinner, so she got up from the table with her plate and emptied the entirety of her meal into the trash. Her open hatred of this woman mesmerized me. I was frightened of my own mother, a tense, interior fear that expressed itself in extreme self-criticism and doubt, as though she lived inside me and could see everything that went on there. I could barely see my schoolmate’s mother as a mother at all. Instead I saw her as something I could not see my own mother as: A woman, a woman in a kitchen having abuse hurled at her by this formidable child. And what I remember most clearly is that this difference — the ability to see her as a woman — enabled me to pity her.

One day the girl came to school with a slightly wild and breathless look about her and a glint of triumph in her eye. On her way out of the house that morning, her mother had confronted her about something — I don’t remember what — and had blocked her passage down the hall to the front door, wanting an answer. She had asked her to get out of the way. The mother had refused, so her daughter had punched her in the stomach, stepped over her body where it now lay in agony on the floor and made her way out of the house.

This, in any case, is what the girl said. An adolescent suddenly finds herself capable of breaking down the twin fortresses — verbal and physical superiority — of adult control. She can no longer be physically commandeered, be picked up or constrained; and with that defense she succeeds in wresting the story of life away from its authors, or at least in violating the principles of that story and turning them on their head. Adults can no longer touch her; she can say what she likes. When my children were small, I realize now, I routinely used my greater physical strength as a form of authority. If they wouldn’t come when I asked them to, I could simply go and pick them up. If they wouldn’t sit still, I could hold them still. It all seemed normal and innocent enough, but these days I look back on it with growing amazement. If I had never had access to that brute form of authority, I ask myself, what better authority might I have learned? If I had lacked the arms to pick them up and set them down against their will, to coerce them, would some more platonic parent-child relationship have emerged?

I grew up in a large family where children were treated with all the sensitivity and respect of a herd of animals being corralled by a testy farmer. Respect is something I have had to learn, like French. It feels good to talk in French; the more I speak it the more I improve. But I am also more prone to make mistakes, and to criticize myself for them. When my children reached the first wild shores of adolescence, I felt distinctly the loss of old forms of control: Suddenly we had moved into the subjunctive, the past historic, the conditional future. One day, having lunch with my brother, my daughter reached out to take a piece of bread before the meal. I told her to put it back — I wanted her to eat proper food, not bread — and she did, but shortly afterward she got angry about something else and stormed away from the table. You shouldn’t have done that, he said to me. Done what? I asked. You can’t tell her not to eat bread, he said. But I have to. It’s my responsibility. No, it’s not, he said. Would you tell a stranger sitting at the table not to eat bread? He was right: He speaks better French than I. If she’d been smaller, I realized, I’d simply have taken the bread out of her hands. But because of her age — that invisible wall that gradually rises around a person, forbidding trespass — I could no longer do so. However wrong or right it was, all that remained of me from that outdated version of authority were words.

Once, visiting a friend of mine, I watched as he, too, reached the impasse of that physical authority before my eyes: Sitting down to lunch, he asked his 11-year-old daughter to remove her coat and she refused. I’m cold, she said. Take it off, he said. You can’t sit at the table in your coat. No, she said. I’m cold, I want to keep it on. He asked her again, and then again, with increasing anger. She wouldn’t budge. What was he going to do — strip the coat from her body with his own hands?