There’s nothing worse than thinking you alone are raising the spawn of Satan. When I lived in Brooklyn, New York with my two toddler boys, there was nothing I liked more than hanging out at the playground with other moms and their kids and realizing that my sons could have been a lot worse. At least my older son wasn’t biting other kids or standing by the monkey bars and peeing. At least my baby boy didn’t crawl on the black top and eat cigarette butts. Us moms would commiserate together and prop each other up by sharing our ugliest parenting moments.
Then I could go home and cuddle with my kids, grateful that their unique “bad habits” – like throwing their stuffed animals into dirty puddles on the street or drawing on lampshades – weren’t getting me banned from mommy group. Perspective was everything. I realized that my kids’ issues fell well within the realm of normal and maybe I was even a little bit lucky. I therefore made it a habit to commune with other moms as much as possible to make sure I always knew that the things my boys were doing were totally normal.
Fast forward ten years and those mischievous toddlers are now gigantic teenagers. They’re not really gigantic, but since I’m only 5’4″, they seem huge to me, but I digress.
Hugeness aside, my teenagers are a major challenge. Please note, there are many things I love about my boys, but their terrible teen parts seem to dominate our daily interactions. They’re messy, one of them hates showering, they’re rude, and the older one is hella moody. And that’s just our regular day-to-day drama. Then there are their other peculiar bad habits that I won’t write about here because they can both read and I don’t need to give them one more reason to be mad at me. Add to all this, all those teen lessons I’m trying to stuff into their heads before I run out of time with them, lessons about life and love and respecting women. Lessons about race and identity and the violence that permeates our culture, especially around young men of color. Lessons about what real success looks like and learning to love themselves and not being defined by society’s narrow definitions of who a man should be. The list is so long but I can barely get to those important things because I’m always hollering at somebody to take a shower!
Unlike my days on the playground in Brooklyn, I don’t have any perspective because nobody talks about raising a teenager. My kids aren’t doing drugs and they’re not in jail or somebody’s baby’s daddy, so I could be grateful for that, but that doesn’t give me the same sense of camaraderie and perspective that my playground days did.
I recently read this great post by Janelle Hanchett on Renegade Mothering that puts all of my feelings into words, so you should just go over there and read what she wrote, but this sentence gets to the meat of the issue: ” Parenting a teenager is the hardest, loneliest, most emotionally trying phase I’ve ever experienced as a mother, and by far puts the biggest strain on my marriage, and our family as a whole“. And I have two of them.
So, my new parenting goal is to start a new mommy group, like the one I had in Brooklyn, for mothers of teens (not teen mothers). Maybe we should meet on a playground, or in a bar, or better yet, at IHOP so we can drown our sorrows in pancakes and syrup. Regardless, I just want parents to start talking about how hard it is to raise a teenager. We need to know that we’re not alone. We need perspective. We need camaraderie to shoulder this stress together. We need tips to help each other get through this…without pancakes. I know I’ll feel better.
Dear readers, do you have any tips for raising teens without going crazy? I am totally listening and taking copious notes.
Peace!
