I thought it was supposed to get easier.
Raising kids that is.
I remember when I was pregnant with my oldest and I would babble on about how I just couldn’t wait to see her and hold her, couldn’t wait for her to be born. People would advise me to enjoy this time, that the months of pregnancy were the easiest. After she was born there would be things to carry, bottles to make, diapers to change. Everything was all contained in one neat little round tummy, they said.
When the kids were babies, I anxiously awaiting the time when they would walk and talk, when they could respond to me. Don’t hurry this time, those same people said. This is the easy time, they said.
You spend the first two years teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their life telling them to sit down and shut up, they said.
I see a pattern here. At each stage of childhood, someone would counsel me that the next stage would be harder. I stubbornly believed it would someday get easier.
The oldest child just recently asked me to help her get on birth control pills. I’m glad of that actually, protection is great! I’m all for avoiding pregnancies. I can’t even complain about her age, really. She’s 15 (and a half, Mom!), the same age I was when I branched away from the incestuous family I lived with. I can’t accurately say I lost my virginity at 15, but only to differentiate between those I wanted to have sex with and those I didn’t.
Anyway, she’s 15, she wants to have sex with her boyfriend, she’s asking for the pill first. This is a victory, yes? It doesn’t feel like a victory. Victory would be… a nun. Yes, she should be a nun.
I keep thinking of everything that comes after sex. The whole list of “nexts”. I’d give anything to go back to the easy days of childhood. I know she has to go and find herself and live her own experiences, but I desperately want to protect her from all of them. Can I do that please, God?
The middle child. She’s stuck right now in peer pressure HELL. Her once-best-friend very recently got busted for smoking dope. Just last night, Am had gone to spend the night with another could-have-been-best-friend. She called home at midnight, the whole group of kids she was with were drinking and smoking, they were at a public park well past curfew, they were pressuring her to drink. She was scared, crying. And angry. We went and picked her up, praising her for “doing the right thing” and telling her “she can always call us, anytime she’s in a situation she’s not comfortable with”. After we got home, she asked me, “what’s wrong with all my friends, Mom? I feel like I’m missing something. Something they feel that I don’t.”
Am is vehemently against drinking or smoking or doing drugs. I LOVE this about her. Last night was the first time she’s ever wavered on that conviction. It was the first time she’s ever said to me “I don’t like being the odd-man out. I don’t want to be known as a goody-two-shoes.” I hate her “friends” for making her feel that way. “What do I do,” she asked me, “when I go to school on Monday and they shun me because I’m a loser?”
I know that no amount of encouragement is going to lessen that pain. Nothing I say will make up for being the “un-cool kid”. I was one of those teenagers who didn’t have the courage to say no. I let peer pressure sweep me up into drinking and experimenting and sleeping around. I could not stand my ground in the face of my “friends” and I was several years older than her before any of us started being “bad”. I don’t know what to tell her. She’s a very “young” 14 year old.
I tell her what I think sounds right. I hug her and tell her I’m proud of her. And then I sit back and wonder what happened to the easy days. I wonder how long she can hold out when pot is being dealt out of lockers in her school and her so-called “BFF”‘s are waving it under her nose. I wonder what to do when she caves. IF she caves.
I caved. Could I really blame her if she does?
Then there is B-man. A perfectly normal 12 year old boy. Completely tuning the world out with the exception of Star Wars and video games. He’s easy. He’s easy *right now* and I have a new appreciation for that. And a much healthier fear of what’s coming.
No parenting book has prepared me for having to advise one child on birth control pills and sex, while also having to find another crying and terrified child at midnight on a Saturday, all within one 24 hour period.
It gets easier from here, right?
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Uncategorized | kaya | 
Sunday April 29th, 2007 12:53pm | 
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