Sunday, January 24, 2016

I am the Mother of Three Humans...

I am the mother of three humans... 
each one of them are in their own stage of life... 
all of them are on the cusp of change... 
J-Bird will be 18 in just two months, she is staring adulthood in the face, determined not to let anyone see her fear or apprehension about becoming an adult.  
D-Fox is 14 and in the throws of puberty, with all the social and emotional strains that come with being a teenager, he wears his teenage boy badge with pride and has the attitude to prove it.  
T-Dog is 10 and staring teenagehood in the face with all the fears and excitement that she should have about moving out of childhood.

As amazing as it is to see my children moving through life, growing and changing, evolving into the mature forms of themselves... 
it is also exhausting... and overwhelming and downright scary. I have never felt so unprepared as I do as a mom to teenagers.

I have to be the same parent to all three of them, yet a different parent to all three at the same time.
They are of course different people, who require different attention and what worked for J-Bird as a young budding teenage girl, with shopping trips, and talks over coffee does not work for D-Fox as he navigates the muddy waters of being a teenage boy, needing a mom who will just give him his space and T-Dog, stuck in that no-mans-land that is tweendome, still needs and wants me to parent her as the child she is, while watching and learning how I parent her teen siblings... 
I am in an ever shifting gears kind of mode and it wears me down from time to time.
I falter... I falter A LOT... I was not ready for this...

These transition years are harder than I ever thought they would be, I somehow was fooled into believing that the older my children got, the easier parenting would become... I have sadly come into the "teen zone" lacking any real knowledge of what I am doing and how I am going to survive. Someone will point out that I have (obviously) been at the parenting a teen thing for awhile since I do have one child on the verge of adulthood... and that is true, although because of J-Bird remaining in Colorado to finish school, parenting her during her teen years has been different. My day to day interaction with her has been different and honestly, I was sheltered from a lot of the craziness that is adolescents because of the separation. She has also been my only teen until this last year, and one teen is much different than 2 teens. Then there is the reality that my kids are all VERY different from each other, and what they require from me as a parent is very different.
I am completely overwhelmed when it comes to navigating my son through adolescents thus far, as my only real experience with teen boys comes from being a teen girl once... and that is not the perspective he needs me to have. Juggling the needs of three personalities at any stage of life can be a chore, but it feels like a daunting task as they don't quiet understand who they are yet and what they need from me.

I did not expect to feel so unprepared, so caught off-guard as my kids blossom into the next stages of their lives. I did not expect to still be sleep deprived, anxious when they are away from me and distracted by worry that I am doing something wrong.
When I thought about my kids becoming teenagers, I did not see temper tantrums still apart of our daily routine, or their belongings still strewn out all over the house. I did not see continuous battles about personal hygiene and personal responsibility.
My vision of teenage years were of friends hanging out, bare cupboards and talking about social issues. I saw the teen years as a time of telling them to turn down their music, making sure they were home by curfew and teaching them how to do their laundry. Maybe I choose not to think about the ugly side of teenagers... Maybe I choose not to think about how difficult any of it would be.
Of course back when they were brand new to me and I thought about these things, I only had my own warped perception of what normal teenagers were like. I had not been an average teen, I had not had average teen years. I fought addiction and mental health issues as a teen, I ran away from home and fought with my mom and had sex... there was no way I was going to use my own teenage years as a guide to how my kids teenage years would go... Looking back though, I probably should have... Not because my kids are doing drugs, running away from home or having sex like I did, but as dysfunctional and non-typical as I thought my teenage years were... turns out that they were closer to normal than I thought. I have a child who suffers from depression and anxiety that leads to intense panic attacks, same as me. I have a child who acts out (although admittedly no where near as bad as I did) and talks back and fights authority, same as I did. I have a child who is stubborn and inquisitive and does not seem to be leery of the world, same as I was.
Even if I would have used my own experiences as a guide, I think I would still feel as lost in this stage of the game as I currently do.

There are these three humans that I have known as children for what feels like an eternity and now I have to get to known them as teenagers and they are not the same as they were as children. I loved everything about their personalities as children, now I have to deal with not liking parts of personalities as teenagers. Now I have to learn how to stop molding them into their future selves and learn how to encourage those selves to continue to grow and mature. My job is no longer to clean up after them, teach them basic skills like eating, talking and wiping their butts and being the go-between, between the and the world. No my job now is to let them experience life more, let them learn how to fend for themselves a little, teach them how to refine their finer skills like self respect, communicating with others and being responsible for themselves and their actions. I am no longer the teacher, more like their coach... as their teacher, I taught them the skills... that is what childhood is for after all right... now as their coach I must show them how to use those skills in the game that is life... and I don't feel very prepared for this new role.

Maybe it is all because I am sad they are all growing up faster than I want them too...
Maybe it is all because I feel there was so much more I should have taught them...
Maybe it is all because I still want more time with them...

I don't have answers right now...
all I know is that I have three teenagers, all in different stages of life... all needing something different from me, yet all still needing me to be the mother they have had their whole lives... and I just hope I have what I need to get them through all this.