Karen Stabiner’s new book ‘My Girl’ is a Baby Book under glass. The author/ journalist who seriously studied the thicket of questions, changes and puzzles surrounding female adolescence in ‘All Girls: Single Sex Education and Why It Matters’ has turned her attention this time to homegrown research. She writes about her own daughter, Sarah, and by necessity also about her own childhood and teenage years with frank, diary-like honesty. ”Stabiner will talk about the book and answer questions on Wednesday, May 11, 7:30 p.m. at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore. ”By her own admission, Stabiner was a reluctant mom. For her and her husband, Larry, ‘life was going to be one long, fascinating, adults-only dinner party.’ ”But then her dog and her father died within six months of one another, and she began to think about making a new family. ”At 38, and being a pragmatic working woman, Karen assessed the pros and cons of having a baby. She and Larry weighed the guilt of bringing a baby into ‘this world’ against the blissful notion of a new life. Love carried the day. ”Stabiner wonders in the first few pages of ‘My Girl’ if her little girl, her adored daughter about whom she was writing, would molt into something unrecognizable’a pouty, rebellious adolescent. ”Stubborn in her disbelief and curious to find out for herself just how her relationship with Sarah would evolve, Stabiner decided to focus her book on their relationship. ”She determined that alarming stories about teenage girls made headlines, but skewed the picture of what really must be the truth in most mother/daughter relationships. ”’The most popular books on troubled girls are based on interviews with fewer than a thousand of them [girls], all told,’ she writes. ‘And these were not random samplings, which might have had statistical credibility: These were girls in therapy or girls who had responded to researchers’ requests for subjects who had a particular problem; happy girls need not apply.’ ”When Stabiner begins the journey, Sarah is 10, and by the epilogue she is 14 and entering the seventh grade at a new all-girls secondary school. ”Stabiner is a Santa Monica resident, whose social world is decidedly Westside, and her concerns often seem luxurious, certainly when compared to most mothers in America. ”For Sarah’s 11th birthday party, Stabiner runs around town snapping black-and-white photos of the 10 girls who would be coming to the party. She has them printed on special paper and hires a woman who runs a photo lab to teach the kids how to hand tint the portraits. ”The exercise is a disaster out the door’all the girls are crippled by their own portrait and jump immediately into self-loathing. ‘I look terrible,’ ‘I can’t stand my hair.’ ”There is a lesson, here, and Stabiner is smart enough to detour from making any attempts to comment on the girls’ self-assessment. ”She tries another option, and rewrites the script. ”’I fell back on my job skills and asked questions,’ she writes. ‘Which color would Julia pick for her shirt, how did Sarah mix the skin tone, who needed another Q-tip? No judgment, no firm opinions, just curiosity. They perked right up.’ ”While Stabiner peppers her book with the specter of the horrors of her daughter’s inevitable change, she makes decisions and choices as they come and learns lessons every day. ”’I had hope that raising Sarah the adolescent would become clearer as we went along, but so far it felt like cleaning out the closet. ” ”’The only way to survive the process was to endure it. Try something on, looking like an idiot, tossing it into the discard pile; try something else. Feel right, fold and stack. ”With diligence and patience, a new order emerged, but not for a while.’ ”Perhaps because Stabiner’s own childhood was so completely different from Sarah’s, she often comes across as excessively insecure and supercilious. She cites, for example a lunch with her friend Carolyn See and Sarah. Carolyn and Sarah enjoyed a discussion of Dick Francis mysteries, which left Karen out, simply by virtue of the fact that she didn’t read mysteries. ”She’s miffed but tries to concentrate on all the ‘interesting things they had to say to one another.’ ”But once again, Stabiner steps back into oblique light to observe the lesson. ”’A girl needs to push off from the side of the pool, that’s all it is but a mom can get irritable and respond in kind, which is a very bad idea. She can take evolution personally. She can make the fundamental error of wanting attention when it is not her turn.’ ”The challenges that are portrayed in ‘My Girl’ are rarefied, indeed, but they are reality in Brentwood and the Palisades. Anxiety over a class trip to Yosemite, being separated from a spouse while touring Italy with her child, the responsibilities of owning and caring for a horse or acceptance into an elite private school illustrate real feelings and provide opportunities for wise behavior. ”In the end, Stabiner understands that it’s all about growing up. ‘We had no choice about what was happening, but it seemed to me that we had a profound choice about how it happened, and I was determined to think the best unless I had cold evidence to the contrary.’
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