After tussling with teens this week—and feeling pretty sad about it, I’ve come to realize a couple of things. First off, despite all, we actually do like each other—the teens and their parents. Not all teens like their parents (and not all adults like their parents, either), but ours do. I decided this because the elder teen was really interested to pick apart the show he worked on when he got home from being the master of the snow (the show was Santacide, which was, for the record, wickedly funny). I decided this too because while in the midst of conflict with the younger teen, after the show, he climbed into our bed, “hating” me. Um, why be in my bed if you can’t stand me? Ding-ding-ding, because you actually don’t hate me—and in fact, want this struggle to resolve with my telling you how much I love you.
Before he went to sleep, I told him, “I do love you.” His response was this: “I love you most days.”
Ah, right.
One thing that happens when you write even about the hard parts of parenting is other parents tell you they got through it—and that you will, too. It’s incredibly reassuring. I have felt absolutely buoyed by other people’s responses in the last few days.
I also realized—another of those a-ha moments—that as a parent for sixteen years, I’ve been practicing compassion and kindness and putting others first in an intensive way for a very long time. Trying to have that course meet teenagers’ “me first” way of being, that’s a collision. It’s not really a generation gap it’s an experience chasm.
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I feel a bunch calmer today, not out of any woods, still muddling and in deep, but I realized again that I’m okay, and we’re okay and they’re okay.
Everything was beautiful at the Winter Market in the morning. I like the shot of Ben’s torso and my vegetables on the scale. I love the haul of Honeycrisp apples I got, and the seconds, too. I know they will turn into applesauce, sweeter and softer for the attention I bring to them.
Then, because I want to ‘fess up to really how very discombobulated I’d been, I brought Saskia to a birthday party an entire day early. She’d been asking every fifteen minutes since she got up, “Is it afternoon?” Saturday was a more convenient party day, for me. Amazingly, after all that waiting, she was content to go to town with me and do some errands and walk on the moving snowflakes at Thornes and of course, have a chocolate ice cream cone, you know, since we were in town and everything.
