how to love your teenager

if you had told me back in my days of diapers and sippie cups that having a teenager could be just as demanding as having a newborn, i would have laughed you back into last week. but i am here to say people, walking someone through puberty is no joke.

now before you recently post-partumed ladies get your knickers all in a twist, let me say that while my shoe-tying, bottom-wiping, nap-time days are behind me, they are not so far in the distant past that i don’t remember the energy-draining, tear-inspiring, hair-pulling madness of infants and toddlers. the demands of early motherhood have no rival. navy seals should be required to serve a tour of duty searching for pacifiers and listening to “wheels on the bus” a million times a day.

while young children may be an undeveloped weapon of war, as the mother of a thirteen year old who seems to grow an inch every time i turn around, there are other demands, emotional and mental, that weren’t nearly as complex back when barney was cool. isn’t it just like kids to go and change their list of demands just about the time we feel capable of meeting them? just as i celebrated the end of pack and plays and diaper bags, i get blindsided by new needs i didn’t see coming.

through years of interrupted sleep and endlessly monotonous days, a part of me retreated deep inside. it’s like a  part of my emotional, intellectual self was hibernating. sure, i laughed and cried with my babies. i answered their questions about the nature of space and humanity, but i also shut off a place in my head that was reserved for coffee dates with the hubby or girls’ night chatter.

i wasn’t aware of just how far i had retreated into myself until my maturing kids started to invade that space. they are no longer satisfied with superficial conversation or half-listening head nods. i took them all to the children’s museum, ready to lose myself in a book for a few hours while they discovered the wonders of dinosaurs and soil erosion. instead, my oldest sat beside me the whole time and had the audacity to wish to speak to me! can you believe his cheeky nerve? i found myself irritated at the intrusion and have to confess, i repelled his attempts at conversation with more annoyance than tact.

it has taken me a good part of the summer to realize what is going on and to start to do something about it. it’s like being woken up from a deep sleep and taking a few minutes to orient yourself. now that i am finally waking up to this new phase of parenting, i am actually starting to enjoy myself. i am shaking off the bed covers of my brain and starting to share more of myself with these emerging people known as my children. after years of feeling lonely and isolated by my role as a stay-at-home mom, i am enjoying our new found companionship. i have a feeling, like their time as infants and toddlers, this won’t last forever and is best treasured while it lasts. thank goodness their personal maintenance skills are lagging behind their conversational skills. once they conquer the kitchen and the laundry room, i will be totally obsolete.

Square Peg

for the last several months, i have been wanting to write a post on being a square peg in a round hole. i have been counting down the days still school was done for the year and i could confess what a long academic road it has been. it was my first year teaching four kids at once. first year with a new and much more demanding curriculum. it was overwhelming and there were honesty days when i didn’t think we were going to make it.

i wanted to confess to feeling out of my depth, over my head. i wanted to say that i felt like God brought me to this place where i needed to do something that i just couldn’t do. i kept thinking if i prayed harder or worked harder, He would wave His magic wand and suddenly i would be transformed into the serine, unflappable mom who always keeps her cool or the fun mom who says “the heck with the laundry! let’s play monopoly.” instead, i was the overwhelmed mom hiding in her room watching “antique roadshow” cause she just couldn’t take it anymore.

when i went to write this post about how God obviously mis-assigned me, i couldn’t quite do it. it sounded whiny and ungrateful. ungrateful for all the amazing times we had this year. ungrateful for the experiences i got to share with my kids this year. we laughed, we cried, we conquered pre-alegebra.

when i was preparing to have our first baby, jim used to tell me that trying to get away from the pain only made things worse. if you focused on, looked it right in the eye and called its bluff, it wasn’t as bad. it still hurt but you didn’t get lost in it; you didn’t let it win. i think that’s what i did this year. i kept trying to wiggle out from under the discomfort i was in, trying to reorganize my way out of it rather than accepting it as a natural part of the process.

i often hear people talk about how moms need to make time for themselves because if they are happy and fulfilled then it will trickle down to their kids. i am not so sure that happiness should really be our end goal. what if i am called to be happy in the pain rather than looking for ways to kill the pain altogether? what if God doesn’t give us the luxury of happiness but calls us to something higher? maybe all this time i was making the pain worse by not accepting it as what it really is, God’s hand molding me to His own purpose, the smoothing out of my sharp corners. after all, who is the pot to tell the Potter what shape best fits His purpose?

don’t take this as “therefore, we should be at home full-time, making ourselves (and our children) as miserable as we possibly can. i think God calls moms to all sorts of uncomfortable places, in and out of the home. in an imperfect world there are no perfect choices. only faith in a perfect Creator who we can trust to work on those rough spots out in our ultimate favor.