The Wild, Wild West of Parenting

Parenting is hard.

Anyone who is telling the truth will tell you that (unless they aren't parents.  Or unless they are parents, but they aren't spending enough time with their kids).

Don't get me wrong--it's worth it.  1000% worth it.  And sometimes it is easy, and sometimes everything is wonderful.

But just as often, as a mom, I'm faced with decisions I don't know how to make.  I'm stuck questioning myself after I've made a choice.  I'm wondering if I'm messing it all up most of the time.

But I've written about that before.  And in case you missed it, my great big takeaway has been that if you are trying your best for your child, then that is enough.  It has to be.

Our children don't need perfect parents--they just need parents who love them, and give themselves to their kids day after day.  Of course we're going to make mistakes along the way.  But if we're willing to admit them and learn from them, that's really all we can ask of ourselves.  Since there are no perfect people, there are no perfect parents (even if that mom down the street bakes gluten-free everything that still tastes delicious, and even if her bod looks rockin' in her yoga pants, and even if her kids are well-behaved in church each Sunday, and each child has mastered a different specialty in sports, music, and/or academics by age 12.  No perfect moms or dads out there--none.  They don't exist).

But that's not what I wanted to write about today.

Today, I want to be honest about parenting a teenager.  Because that's a topic I haven't tackled before.  But before I get started:

Full disclosure, my teenager is amazing.  She is goodhearted, sweet, and earns grades that are higher than both mine and her father's ever were throughout middle school.  She is a talented musician, an extremely gifted artist, and a helpful big sister.  She cares about people and loves animals.

Despite all her wonderful qualities, I still feel like there are times we are living on completely different planets, and I have no idea how to relate to her anymore.  You know the saying, Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars? 

They should add Teenagers are from Pluto.  Because that's how far away from her I feel sometimes.

When I became a parent at the relatively young age of 22, almost 23, I worried about the immediate:  I'd never changed a diaper.  I didn't know how I'd adjust to having a kid and trying to finish graduate school.  I worried about how my relationship with my husband (then boyfriend) would change.  I analyzed my own spiritual life, recognizing how messed up I was in terms of my life priorities, and I started rearranging my life to try to better honor God, knowing that I had the biggest task of my life ahead of me:  to be a role model for someone else.

But that last part, the role model part--somehow, somewhere along the way, when my oldest daughter was just a sweet little girl who worshiped me, who thought I could do no wrong--somehow I found myself believing that lie along with her.  I'm not saying your best isn't good enough--it absolutely is!  But for me, so much of my oldest's childhood was spent in a haze of innocence, with her not questioning or pushing me, that when it finally started happening around the cusp of adolescence, I found myself completely unprepared.

It's the Wild Wild West of parenting.

Because practically overnight, your adorable little angel who has placed you on a pedestal has realized that you're a real person who makes real mistakes and you might not belong up there.

And of course, children should still respect their parents. But as they get older and form a more complete view of who we are, with all their front row seats of the mistakes we sometimes keep confined to our own homes, I'm guessing most of them begin to realize exactly how far from perfect we are.

And this realization comes amid the new boundaries teens want to test.  It comes amid a sea of hormone changes and raging emotions.  It comes with wanting to date.  With buckling down in school because college is on the horizon.  It comes with body issues and self-esteem concerns.

It comes with freaking technology!!

I guess every parent ever has always felt that the world was changing, that they grew up in a different world than their children are being raised in, because, let's face it--it has been!  And we do all experience a different world than the generation before us.  My parents struggled to keep up with computers and the danger of the internet the same way my husband and I fret over smart phones and apps and social media.  And even before technology took over the world, talk to your grandparents:  Didn't they distrust the changes in music, in fashion, in the way young people viewed society and their role within it?

The opportunities are endless, but the dangers and missteps real.  And when I became a parent, my worry about being a role model was secondary to my worries about how do I feed my baby--breast or bottle?  How do I make sure I keep her safe from SIDS, and how do I baby proof the apartment, and what do I need to do to make sure she eats a healthy diet as a toddler?  And I'm not saying that these aren't important concerns.  I'm saying that in my naivety, I figured they would be the biggest issues.  That once I got her safely through early childhood, we would sail through adolescence and into adulthood in a smooth, sitcom-worthy way, with every conflict happily resolved inside thirty minutes.

I was and still am completely unprepared to navigate teenage life. 

And I am doing my best--I talk with my teenager daily.  I express my concerns when I have them.  I monitor her technology use, and try to stay on top of the influences that I know I can't eliminate, but should at least be aware of.

But it's hard in the Wild, Wild West.

I pray about it a lot.  I try to be a good role model, and I also try to be honest.

I'm also pulled in a quite opposite direction in daily life, as my youngest daughter is only three.  So my days are divided, schizophrenic almost, in the sense that I'm balancing the older child's hurt feelings from a teenage argument with the younger one's need to learn to share.  I'm in between conflicts over how often to practice the clarinet and guilt over whether or not my younger one is being read to enough (because she does love her iPad, and technology influences tiny children, too).  I'm taking turns playing the fashion police and negotiating with a toddler regarding administrating antibiotics.

I sometimes want to laugh at how clueless I was as to how hard this stage would be.  I think my relationship with my own mother, always close, set a false precedent for me, helped me to form an idealized view of what all mother-daughter relationships should be.  I should have known from my time teaching middle school that my own relationship with my mom was an exception, and not a norm.

And even though we were close, I was still far from a perfect teenager, just like I am far from perfect as a woman, wife, mother, and person.

So as I give myself grace for the motherhood journey, I need to remember to do the same for my daughter throughout her teenage voyage.  I need to realize she is going to make mistakes, just like I did, just like we all do.  I need to try to instill values in her to guide her away from the biggest temptations, the most dangerous choices.  But I also need to recognize that she needs space.  She needs to not feel unrealistic expectations from me.  How hypocritical it is, so often, when we realize our own imperfections but force our children to adhere to a higher standard.

I'm working on me.  Far more than I ever thought I would have to as a parent.  When I became a mom, I thought it would be all about growing up another person.

Turns out, it's about growing us both up.  And though I was young when that little voice first called me mommy, I don't think this is a lesson I would have or could have learned any differently, no matter how old I might have been before entering motherhood.

The Wild West is always going to be unknown, until you step into it.