As a co-worker recently pointed out, being a parent of little
kids is a physical game. But being a parent of teenagers is a
mental game.
Don’t I know it. At one point, we had three girls all under the
age of 6. I’m still recovering from that parental triathlon. If you
think one is hard, try three. As I tell people without kids, it’s
not twice as much work to have two kids, or three times as much
work to have three. It’s exponentially harder, like
earthquakes.
I’m not even talking about childbirth. They give you drugs for
that. They don’t give you drugs while you’re actually raising the
kids. If it were that simple, I’d be ordering my daily epidural
about 7:30 p.m. each night. I’d be feeling good, people. Homework,
fighting, drama — nothing would bother me. Wake me up in the
morning, I’m all good here.
And babies have crazy little internal alarm clocks. They don’t
realize that the hours of 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. are meant for sleep, or
at the very least, quiet time in a nice dark room. Nothing good
ever happened at
2 a.m., and that includes a sleep-deprived mom stumbling to find
the baby in the dark.
As parents of little kids, we end up chasing them around parks,
parking lots, down the street and down sidewalks. When they’re
tired, we pick them up.
We push them on swings, we lift them on our shoulders. We push them
in strollers, carry them in backpacks and tote them on our hips. No
wonder my pants were always baggy when our girls were younger. The
kids were like my personal elliptical system. Have you ever noticed
that moms with a baby usually have great-looking arms? That’s
because she’s lifting that kid like a 20-pound barbell all day
long.
Now that our kids are older, we’re not chasing them down anymore.
We’re not picking them up. They’re teenagers. The game has changed
and whoooheeee, it is so ON.
Your baby, who once ran to you after school, now runs from you once
you get home — into her room, with the door shut.
And when they do come out, or deign to talk to you at all, it’s
because they want something. It usually involves money or a ride
somewhere. But don’t you dare try and figure out their plans. The
life of a teenager is strictly on a need-to-know basis, and what
that means to the teen is that you don’t need to know.
Luckily at our house, they haven’t figured out that mom and dad are
outnumbered. If our three kids ever got their act together and
decided to stage a revolution, we’d be out of luck. They could
literally take over if they weren’t so insistent on sleeping in
until all hours of the morning.
Teens are persistent little buggers. If you don’t give in to what
they want the first time, watch out. They don’t like it when we say
no. It’s like hearing something in a foreign language.
“Hmmmm,” thinks the teen. “That ‘no’ word sounds familiar, but if I
just keep asking, surely I will get a different answer, and one
that sounds more like ‘nnnnnyes.’”
Like some kind of hormonal interrogator, they want you to
surrender, to give up. They want to break you,
Marine-drill-sergeant-style. It is war, man, and you are the enemy.
This makes for some very interesting family mealtimes. A simple
request to pass the ketchup can lead to verbal atomic bombs, or at
the very least, snarky comments about why that person even needs
the condiment to begin with. The North and South Koreans probably
get along better than our teenagers. At least they keep one eye on
each other across the border. Ours avoid eye contact most of the
time.
Give a teenager an inch and they will take 100 miles. They will
look for any “out” to whatever you have asked them to do. They will
drag their heels, hide in the bathroom when it’s time to rake the
leaves, and pretend like they didn’t hear you from 5 feet
away.
But of course, we parents can’t give up. No matter how many times
we say “no,” or insist on knowing about their plans, or repeat the
phrase “don’t talk to me that way,” we must say it again and again
and again like some parental robot.
It’s a battle of the wills.
They won’t stop being teens. And I won’t stop being the mom. Get
used to it, kids, because moms don’t lose.
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