Parenting In Denial
Having been a parent now for over 16 years, the minute details of parenting adolescent children shouldn’t come as a surprise to me. I always knew there would be milestones the kids would reach and anticipated the emotional roller coaster each achievement would bring. However, my role as parent in guiding my children through these phases of growth remains hidden in the peripheries of the glory in the big moments of achievement. The sudden realization of the expected parental participation hits me with a who me? knee-jerk reaction. Followed quickly with: Who can I pay to do it for me?
The awareness of my naïveté began as a ripple in my subconscious the moment Jacob walked out of the RMV, driving permit in hand.
Yay! Good for you buddy! Wait, what? You want to drive home now?
And then. That ripple quickly became a tidal wave crashing over me.
Are you freakin’ kidding me? Shit! Now I have to drive with him??!!! I can’t let him drive… I just can’t.
Here are 5 “Who Me?” instances of my 16 years of parenting experience:
Parental Responsibility Denial #1: Teaching My Child to Drive
It is inevitable. As a parent, you will find yourself in the passenger side of your family vehicle with your sweet child in your seat – DRIVING!!!!. This is the very child who once needed you to do absolutely everything for them. And let’s be honest, still does. Yet, here he/she is making decisions and thinking he/she knows all the rules of the road from a classroom drivers ed class. He/she will sit behind the wheel, adjusting your mirrors, resetting your radio station and actually moving the gear from P to D and backing out of your driveway on his own recourse. You will grip the handle of that automobile until your knuckles turn white. You will squeeze your legs together as if the tension will assist in the control of the car. He/she will roll their eyes at you. He/she will veer so close to the cars parked on the side of the road that you mentally begin writing the accident report in your head. You WILL tell him/her to slow down, watch out and insist they pull over. And YOU WILL get through it.
Sure, I knew Jake would drive someday. I just never really thought this one through. In my happy fairy parent world, someone else would teach him and then I would hop in the car and be amazed at how well of a driver he was. He would then get his license and cart his siblings around for eternity. The end. We all live happily ever after.
I successfully avoided the whole thing for a bit; “I don’t have the right car seats”, “traffic is too bad today”, “it’s raining”, “it’s sunny”, “we are in a rush”… the excuses too quickly, ran dry. I half expected to push the responsibility off on Rich, just like I did with the whole learning to ride a bike thing. And what about that driving school we pay so much to? Can’t they do all the teaching? They are the professionals, after all!
Eventually I had to give up the keys, plant myself next to my “baby” and guide him the 2.5 miles to work. To my surprise, it didn’t take long before I loosened my grip on the door handle and relaxed into the seat. But it is still very strange to give up that control. I can’t imagine the day he pulls out of my driveway… alone… as a licensed driver. (shiver)
Parental Responsibility Denial #2: Pressing Snooze on the Family Time Machine
I am feeling this one and I am feeling this one hard. Out of my 4 kids, 2 will be in high school this year. A junior and a freshman. I feel like within the last year someone has set a timer for when the Andrews family, as I know it, blows up in my face. There is a sudden urgency to things I had always wanted to do as a family. This (along with quarantine and too much time exploring trips in my downtime) is what led me to book a big Andrews Walt Disney World family vacation for February. Our trip will be the first to Disney as a family of 6 and the final big vacation before Jacob goes to college. There is so much weight to that statement – the last trip before Jacob goes to college. The year following this trip will revolve around researching colleges, college tours (please Lord, let these be in person by then and not virtual), SATs, high school events and more. This trip is more than a first and last. This trip is a let’s slow the heck down for 6 days and just be us before the clock goes into warp speed.
Time flies. There are so many times I look across the dining table at my 2 older children and think “what the heck happened!”. They are taller than me, hold very educated adult conversations, don’t need me to get through homework (nor could I help them if they did), they make their own plans and have their own opinions. Every parent in the history of parenthood marvels at the time machine of parenthood. One moment they are teething and skipping naps. The next they are driving out your driveway and heading to college. Although expected, the processing of this as a parent is indescribable and impossible to understand until you go through it yourself. It makes me wonder how it will be perceived when Jackson is exiting high school and Carolyn is entering. Our true home-stretch. Will we be excited that we are actually reaching the finish line or will we still be clawing for the past? Will the 4th time around still feel like a countdown to an ending?
Parental Responsibility Denial #3: Mood Control
No one told me that every bad mood a parent has seeps into the walls and hangs in the air of the entire house. The negative energy is inhaled by each and every member of the family and is thrown back at you ten-fold. YOU are the one who sets the tone of the house. And FYI… reciprocated bad vibes from the littles do not help you recoup from whatever cloud you are under. As unfair as this is and how much you want to believe it isn’t true… it is what it is. For years I tried to fight this notion on pure principle – that just backfired to a whole lot of bad mojo. Somehow, we parents have been given the super power of setting the bar level for how everyone is feeling in the house. God forbid one of them tries to get you out of the funk. Nope. On you. So, when one of us is PMSing… we are all PMSing. Awesome-sauce.
Parental Responsibility Denial #4: Being Interested in their Interests – Even When You are Not
Jackson lives, breaths and sleeps football. A cousin recently called him the “Rain man of football” and that is the absolute best way to describe my Jack-Jack. I love football. It is my favorite sport to watch. Rich and I formed our relationship by going to New England Patriots games together during the rise of the Brady/Belichick empire. We know pretty much all there is to know about the Pats. Jackson though, he schools us on the subject. He knows stats on every team – present and past. He knows players from years ago, what team(s) they were on and the position they played. He watches every sports YouTuber that we allow him to. He plays Madden 20 24/7 and announces the game as if he was a trained sports announcer. He wants to talk football all day long and our car rides usually consist of him comparing 2 players and asking which one I think would win if facing each other. His knowledge amazes me and drives me insane all at once. I don’t want to be a football expert; I just want to watch the game.
In all those pregnancy books, not once did they say I would be required to become an expert on all things my kids loved. Not once did I read that dinosaurs were going to be the topic of every dinner conversation from the ages 5-7. There wasn’t an inkling about having to learn to navigate Roblox to get your child to the next level. And damn it, nobody told me that my kids would one day make me feel stupid with all their knowledge they learned from TikTok.
Parental Responsibility Denial #5: Navigating Through Disappointment
I really thought I would be a tough mom. In my heart, I have always believed I would refrain from giving my children everything they want and in turn, it would make them stronger, hardworking individuals. At the same time, I want them to have everything they have ever wanted. It is such a complex set of beliefs and I am fully aware of how they contradict each other. I find myself justifying why they should have this or that. How they deserve it and what we can go without in order to give it to them. I want them to go to other countries on school trips they want to go on – even when they cost as much as taking our family of 6 away. I love that they want to do these adventures regardless of which friends are going. My kids know what they want and I admire that in them.
Inevitably, every child is going to face disappointment from one time to another. And not just in the form of being told no to trips or the latest iPhone. I am talking deep dark disappointments. Such as, not making a team, being excluded by friends, losing a big game… those right there are big feels and they are contagious. When one of my children experiences something that brings their eyes and shoulders downward. When they feel that raw loss of something they really wanted – I can’t help but absorb some of the darkness. Whether we do it in the attempt to take some of the pain from them or we are just that disappointed too… I am not sure. All I know is I am surprised by how much I take those feelings into my own emotional state.
These past 4 months of COVID has provided an unexpected series of disappointments that each of my children has had to face – and I had no choice but guide them through them instead of fixing it for them. It wasn’t on me to say yes or no but it was up to me to gauge their reactions and teach them how to cope. The proms, school trips, out of state competitions and internships they were looking forward to had been suddenly taken away without warning. That level of disappointment I once thought would break the kids was something that none of us could control and they handled it like champs. It didn’t break them. Sure, there was a ton of disappointment and a few very mopey moments. But in all honesty, I think they showed more resilience than many of the adults.
I could go on and on with the parental surprises I didn’t see past the sleepless nights and potty training at the beginning. Guilt, nagging, learning disabilities, physical disabilities and how many more expenses are acquired beyond the diaper phase. There are also the roles we acquire as advocates, finance specialists and even mirror images of our own parents to help us along the way. I take the new hats handed to me in stride and try to avoid stumbling over my feet as much as possible. The whole time, I keep a smile on my face so shit doesn’t hit the fan. Because when mama is in a foul mood, we are all in a foul mood (see Mood Control above).