It isn’t from lack of sleep, or the one million loads of laundry I just completed. It is from love. The love I dispense on a daily basis is beautiful and exhausting.
Each day as I sit to write, my heart tells me who to encourage. I have some unusual categories in my life, which can help me relate to others. I am a single parent. I homeschool my two youngest while managing a career. I have adult children and a grandchild. At home I have three teenagers and a nine-year-old. I am not bragging, but making a point. I know there are millions of other moms/dads out there who fall under one of those categories or more. For myself, I need encouragement in each area daily. Some days one category stands out. Today it is teenagers. They scare me.
I always joke that I may not have had so many children had I known the worries get so very intense as they get older! When you only have little ones, you worry they will fall when they are running, choke on a new food they are trying, or not make any friends in kindergarten. Then they hit 16 and you have to start giving them the car keys, and suddenly you remember how to pray. Rather than teaching them how to eat properly, you teach them not to use drugs or drink alcohol, and worry sick every Friday night as you wait for them to get home. They’ll never understand the wave of relief that falls over you when you hear the garage door open at midnight. And those friends they did indeed make in kindergarten? Now you watch them closer to make sure they are all making wise decisions and staying out of danger. It is a constant battle of wanting these years to last, yet wanting them to hurry up and pass so you can stop worrying. Sure – the worrying never stops, but it gets better. I have raised six children and now have a very wide age range. The teenage years are by far the toughest.
My kids are great. Of course! They are perfect, right? In my eyes they are. I wouldn’t trade those moody, sleepy, sometimes selfish, always hungry, glued to their phones, still let me hug them, and still say “I love you, mom,” creatures for anything.
Being an empathetic person has helped me in parenting. When my teenage son is exasperated because he can’t see his girlfriend on a school night, I put myself in his shoes. That stuff was hard when we were young! Being in love at 16 isn’t beautiful. It’s awful and painful! We’d talk on the phone as long as we could before we got caught at 1:00 in the morning. Kids today don’t know that pain. We actually had to sneak the shared, family phone. At least kids of the 80s eventually had cordless! And the times I snuck out at night….if my mother reads this I am sure to not get a Christmas gift this year. To my adult children…if you ever snuck out, I don’t want to know.
