What do you think that little smirk on my teenage daughter’s face means? I have to admit that I find it very annoying. I see it whenever I am trying to explain something to her, especially if what she did, was not appropriate.

Does it mean that instead of listening to me, she is thinking happy thoughts in her mind? Like the TV commercial with a smiling driver, who can only hear a favorite radio station, while being chewed out by a traffic officer. Perhaps she is thinking, “I’d really like to slap my mom,” and that makes her smile. Maybe she actually appreciates my intervention and she is smiling in pleasure.

More likely than not, I lost her somewhere during my first sentence and by now, she doesn’t have a clue what I’m saying. The smirk is her attempt to feign concentration while looking at me.

Actually, if I could think rationally and not get angry, I would probably shut up, and walk away. After all, I’ve had the exact same conversation with her at least 100 times over the past 10 years, and her behavior hasn’t changed.

Then I start thinking about the spider web theory again. How a child with FAS can know something one minute, then the thoughts just fall through one of the holes, like in the spider web, and the child has lost the knowledge completely. It doesn’t seem like a rational outcome, does it?

Since it isn’t a disability that I see, every time I look at my daughter, it is very difficult for me to keep the concept in my mind, during all of our conversations. On the one hand, she wants to have the privileges and responsibilities of the teenager that she is; on the other hand, she still makes the choices of a seven year old. I need to find a way to balance my decisions and choices for her based on these two incongruent factors, and I really struggle with that.

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