“Can we go to the park today?” I’d been hearing the same question for over a week, but schedules and weather conspired against the plan until this afternoon. They ran and played. I sat and read. It was a lovely two hours. We came home tired, but happy.
Many parents of young children dread the thought of having teenagers. I never did. Now that I’m here, I find that I continue to like it. I enjoy having adult conversations with my kids and they are just cool people to be around. That said, I’ve definitely noticed some developmental quirks. Sometimes these quirks catch me unawares and I realize that though they are adult sized and often speak like adults, they still have growing up to do.
Link is 13, so are most of his friends. This has given me the chance to observe groups of boys en masse. They all clomp. They clomp into my house, they flop on the sofa. Everywhere they go they are noisy without ever meaning to be. I suspect this is part of adapting to their rapidly changing body size. Some of it may simply be physiological loosening of joints to adjust for growth. They aren’t clumsy, they just sound like they are.
The other big thing I’ve noticed about 13 year old boys is that they have no tact whatsoever. It is as if the tact circuit has been disconnected. They say the most appallingly mean things to each other without ever intending to be mean. Link grumps at his younger siblings and then is surprised when he is scolded. One time Link hurt his younger brother’s feelings while trying not to. I explained three times why Link should have used different words, he still didn’t get it. The thing is, I know that Link and his friends are good people. They used to be much more socially adept than this. It is a stage and they’ll grow out of it. In the meantime I just pull Link aside for frequent whispered instructions.
Kiki is almost 16. In the past year she has quite frequently dissolved into overwhelmed tears. I remember 15 as an awful year for me, so it makes sense. Unfortunately weathering these storms of emotion is quite draining for me. I have to sort through her wild statements to figure out which ones are of actual concern and which are hyperbole. I have to figure out when to trust that good sense will rule the emotion and when I need to reign her in because she lost touch with rationality. I have to try to stand back because helping too much only ensures we get to have this same meltdown again a few weeks later after I’ve stopped helping.
So I weather the chaos and mutter to myself about teenage girls. Then I go to Howard…and half the things which come out of my mouth sound exactly like my daughter. I knew someday I would be concerned about sounding like my mother. I did not expect to be embarrassed to discover myself parroting a 15 year old girl. In the end I have to admit that the emotionalism may be a human thing rather than a teenage thing. We all have our turn to say “This is too much. I can’t do it.” I just hope my daughter can find the strength to stand up and try again the next day even when I’m not there to haul her to her feet. When I’m feeling calm, I know that she will. When I’m feeling stressed, I can’t see how she’ll ever learn it.
Even as I ponder the implications of developmental stages upon my teenage children, I have to acknowledge that I am also in a developmental stage. I’m not sure which one, they’re hard to identify from the middle. At 38 I suppose I could be due for a mid-life crisis. That would make sense with the emotional arcs I’ve been identifying lately. Whatever the stages and how they affect who we are, my kids and I will continue onward helping each other and muddling through.
I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.
-Samwise Gamgee
That quote comes from my very favorite moment in the Lord of the Rings Films. Frodo can’t go on and Samwise carries him up the last slope. It is a moment in time when the quiet assistant character gets to be a hero. It is when the audience sees that without support failure is imminent. Every time I see the scene, I cry.
I thought of the scene this morning when my daughter was frantically typing away at a homework paper and remembered that she needed to bring treats to class. Cheesecake, she declared. She had promised cheesecake. I dropped what I was doing and began making a quick batch of cookies. I couldn’t run to the store for cheescake and return in time, but I could bake cookies. My daughter was not pleased with the substitution. Then she was surprised and contrite when I got upset about her ingratitude. Only in the face of my tears did it occur to her that me dropping work to make cookies was a gift rather than something to be expected.
Carrying someone else is beautiful and heroic. Carrying the same person over and over is exhausting. How many times could Samwise have carried Frodo up the same slope if Frodo kept slipping back down? And what if there were three Frodos or five? At what point would Samwise collapse and need to be carried himself? There are times when carrying another person is the best and only solution. However it is not the only possible solution for most things. Sometimes Frodo just needs to realize that Samwise is tired too and offer to carry his pack for awhile.
There are times when a friend asks me how I’m doing. I inhale to answer and I have no words. This is not a sign of nothing to tell, but a sign of “I don’t know where to start.” This past week is one of those times. When describing last week I previously used the metaphor of a flood, but today a sinkhole seems a more apt comparison, at least to start. I may very well jump metaphors before I finish typing. I do that sometimes. Sinkholes develop slowly and invisibly as water seeps far below the surface. The ground is eroded until it all collapses inward. I did that the second half of last week. Then I spent the weekend figuring out where all the water was coming from and how to go forward.
The core of the issue is this: I am the scheduler of our family. I was consistently scheduling everything to maximize Howard’s creative output and to maximize the growth of the children. These are good things. I like them and think they are quite worthwhile. Unfortunately I was also structuring our lives so that the only way to maintain the system was for me to consistently give up things that I wanted. I tried very hard to stop wanting things without consciously realizing I was doing it. It didn’t work and I collapsed.
As usual, Howard was there to pick up the pieces. He hugged me a lot. He listened to me ramble and fished out the important bits so that I could make sense of them later. He told me I should take a vacation. This last piece was the first step I took toward changing the structure. I’ve booked a flight to Baycon. I’ll be going by myself and it will be terribly inconvenient for everyone. The inconvenience is the point. I am allowed to want inconvenient things and get them sometimes.
Today I saw the second structural change I need. Our house was a mess. It has been a mess for months because I have not had the time to clean it nor had the energy to make the kids clean. I realized that anytime a challenge arises in our family I assume that I am part of the solution. So instead of a cross connected web where everyone was helping each other, all the threads led to me. We had a family meeting tonight to point this out. Everyone nodded and agreed with me. Then we scattered through the house with assignments to make a room clean. Thirty minutes later the chaos level was greatly reduced. I don’t expect them to turn over new leafs and be exemplary from now on, but at least we have tonight’s lesson and cleaning to point to when we need to remind them.
Also included in tonight’s meeting was a little lecture on “Thou shalt not ignore your mother when she speaks to you.” I feel like I’ve been saying it for weeks, but it might have sunk in more tonight. I hope so. I’m tired of feeling disregarded and invisible.
Further adjustments may be necessary, but I figure they’ll become apparent when we are ready for them. Honestly I am my own worst enemy in keeping these changes. It is going to take concerted effort for me to not let things slide back to the way they were. I’ve long known that the only person I can truly change is myself. Now I need to learn that it is okay to ask others to do some of the changing. It is harder for me. Doing most of the work myself is easier day to day than requiring my kids to step up. The hope is that they will someday step up without me having to goad them into it. If I can just get them helping each other I would not feel so over-burdened.
Right now I’m just glad that I can feel energetic and interested again. I wear out before the end of the day, but it is still better than all-worn-out all the time. Onward.
Today is Mother’s Day. Mostly I am ignoring this fact because I don’t want to be required to have a good day. I also have no desire to require my family to provide me with one. If the day happens to be good, I will be glad of it. If otherwise, then additional guilt does no one any good. The deep irony of Mother’s Day is that a day has a better chance of being good if it is not overburdened with expectations.
That said, I’ll be calling my mother and Grandmother. I have no idea if they’ve adopted the same zen attitude toward the holiday that I have this year. (Some years I do care, others meh.) It is a small effort from me to call them, I know it will make them happy, and I love to talk to them anyway.
Up side of the day: I actually worked on some of my projects.
Down side: My evening has been stomped upon by my child’s poor homework planning. The emotional stew has chased away all the blog thoughts which I hoped to spin into something interesting.
Sigh.
I am not trained in psychology or the techniques of therapy. These things are interesting to me and I have done a significant amount of reading on the topics, but I can not claim true expertise. And yet I play the part of therapist on an almost daily basis. I talk Kiki through a resarch paper, not only the work itself, but also the behaviors and feelings she exhibits as she tries to deflect and avoid. Kiki is champion at fomenting arguments between us when she has work she does not want to do. Yet at 15 she is able to see herself doing it and often stops herself. This self awareness is a skill she has developed over years of self-analytic conversations with both Howard and me.
I nudge and prod Link into awareness about the social consequences of choices he makes. We talk about friends and frustrations. I watch Gleek run fast and frantic, quick to anger. Then I find a quiet time when we can talk through the buried fears and sadnesses which drive her forward. Gleek likes talking about feelings, she’ll stay up for hours rehashing the same things over and over. Then I need to disengage and let her sleep. (It is almost always at bedtime.) Some of the emotions will still be there in the morning, most will not.
And then there is Patch. In the past couple of years he has gotten less focused attention from me because most of his emotional needs fit so smoothly into our standard operating procedures. It was easy to know when he needed time to talk, he’d start crawling into bed with us at night. He’s older now and things are different. He doesn’t react in the same ways that he used to do. He’s started feeling sick at school and calling to come home, except he’s not sick. I believe that he is being honest in his description of symptoms, but there is no infection involved. The truth is that he has buried feelings which need to be sorted. Having an upset stomach at school may be the new form of crawl into bed with mom and dad. I need to find a quiet time when we can dig into his thoughts to figure out what is unsettling him. I’ve already got a laundry list of probable causes. His best friend is moving. He’s going to switch schools next year. The school work is boring and he’s figured out how to skate by on it. The culture at the school is not ideal for him. And he’s just turned 8 which coincides with certain brain developments. All of my 8 year old kids ended up sitting in my lap and talking through fear of growing up/death. A good therapist knows where to dig.
Then of course there are Howard and I. Between us we have a boat load of fun anxieties and neruoses which can provide hours of fun self analysis. I spend a significant amount of time watching my own brain processes and trying to figure out what is going on in there.
I once had a friend pose the question “If you didn’t have the job you do now, what do you think you would be?” Therapist is on my list of possible answers.
Kiki is having her first close encounter with an MLA formatted research paper. In traditional student fashion she read piles of interesting sources and kept track of none of them. Then she discovered upon writing the paper that half of her research was not applicable and needed to be replaced by completely different research which branched off of the applicable research. Unfortunately she was out of time, so instead of making a beautiful and well-supported paper, she had to cobble together what she could from the pieces she had. All of this went with a sound track of “This is hard, and boring, and I don’t like it.” Yes honey. I know. Get it done anyway.
On one level it was highly amusing to watch Kiki wrestle with the strict structures of an academic research paper. I remember those struggles so well. I made the same mistakes. Unfortunately when I tried to help Kiki jump ahead to the cobble-together stage of essay production she kept getting frustrated with me. She was angry and frustrated with the format because she did not understand it or the reasons for it. I look at her assignment and the shape of it is so clear, so simple. I can comprehend it whole. For Kiki the assignment is all muddled and confusing. Not surprising really. I was near the end of college before I really comprehended how to research and why research papers mattered.
A part of me looks at Kiki’s assignment and thinks what an amazing research paper I could write now. I would draft early, go back to my research, draft again, and dig far down for primary sources. The beauty of the form and the importance of correct citations seem clear to me now. I’m unlikely ever to do it. I do not need more projects. Also I suspect I would discover that at their heart most research papers have far more muddle-through and cobble-together than academic researchers would wish.
In the end Kiki learned valuable lessons about research format. She learned that when she goes off the beaten path for a topic, she makes more work for herself as she tries to figure out how to make that topic fit the assignment. She learned that sometimes getting things done takes precedence over making them perfect. Most of all she learned how to get the thing done even though much of the work is tedious. And she has begun learning all of these things at a much younger age than I did. I call that a win.
On the Sunday after Prom, many of the young men and women who attended wear their formal attire to church. I love this tradition. It lets the clothing be worn more than once. More importantly, it lets me have the chance to look closely at the beautiful dresses. Kiki paid more attention this year because she is two weeks away from being 16. In the not-too-distant future she may be one of the girls in a gorgeous dress. I think she was also primed to pay attention because I’ve been asking her opinion on the dresses that I am altering. A long-buried part of me is very glad that my life now contains excuses for me to wear formal dresses. The first of these events will arrive on Saturday when Howard and I will attend the Whitney awards gala. The Whitney awards will be quite relaxing since we’re attending to be able to applaud our friends.
It feels like I have more profound thoughts on deliberately dressy clothing, but my thoughts keep slipping away from me. This probably means I should stop trying to write and instead put children to bed.