Tuesday night. A full table. They’ve run out of chairs. A bar stool is pulled up for a late comer. This family dinner of friends. Laughter, as they struggle to carve steaming chunks of bread baked too late in the day. Flour, salt, yeast, water – left to their own devices. It is magic. Their jousting and joking voices trip over each other like clear water over ancient rocks.
If I could bottle the alchemy of this teen mealtime I’d decant it into two bottles. The first I would hand to the naysayers whose eyebrows migrated towards their hairlines, when I was in the mind-numbing grind of toddlerhood and they sniffed ‘Just you wait ‘til they are teenagers. Now that is hard.’
I’d offer the second bottle to a newish mother swamped in those merciless early trenches. I would say ‘Just you wait ‘til they are teenagers.’ Then I’d tell her ‘That is when it all makes sense. The guessing games of early childhood will be behind you. They will have the words. And you will have had more than a decade to discover exactly who they are.’
I’d choose a day with my teenage children over a day with them as tiny kids every time.
Babies and toddlers might be adorable… in small doses… when you can hand them back to their parent. But as the parent amid baby and toddlerhood, my joy was tinged with claustrophobia. When overwhelm threatened, you might get to leave the room. But not for long. Parenting very young children is a lot of basic problem solving (Hungry? Tired? Wet/dirty? Sick?) and accepting things you cannot change. Repeatedly for long stretches of time.
Warning young parents that everything gets worse in the teenage years is a bit like smugly telling pregnant women birthing horror stories. It doesn’t serve a purpose. And it is NOT a truth universally acknowledged by those who are living through this life stage.
Most teens sleep through the night, can go to the toilet independently, feed themselves, book many of their own appointments, and organise their social lives without parental involvement.
As my children fly towards their own adventures, I don’t feel loss. They are doing what they are meant to do. The snippets of time I get to share with them mean a lot to me. Our conversations play between the silly and the serious.
And they are comfortable enough to share their experience of childhood with me. The good, the imperfect, and the ugly traumas that were borne of challenges even their adult parents had no control over.
They articulate things I was deaf to in the early years. When I was so rigidly set on giving them a great childhood that I was unable to accept that sometimes my best would not be good enough for them. When I couldn’t see that putting in the effort and not intentionally harming them would have to be good enough at the time.
Some of those days remind me of managing a catastrophic abdominal wound. One with organs protruding through ragged edges, open to infection. A good surgeon won’t immediately stuff everything back in and neatly stitch the skin back over the disaster. They will flush everything, control the bleeding, and then they will pack it all with laparotomy sponges. They will dress the wound but leave the abdomen open. It won’t be pretty, but it will be good enough at the time. They will come back when the patient is less critical, when dead tissue can be excised, when it is clean enough to close safely. Their patient may end up with a big scar, but they will have survived.
For me early parenthood was complicated. It included not making it home with my first baby until she was four months old. Post-natal psychosis followed by the beginnings of bipolar 1 disorder meant we spent this time in the mother baby unit of a psychiatric hospital. Since then, bipolar episodes have landed me in hospital for weeks or months every 2-3 years.
Our family is open about mental illness. I have excellent insight into my symptom pattern. We have always had supportive family and friends to help during my hospital stays. My access to good mental health care means that in between episodes my mental health is better than that of many parents without a diagnosis.
I used to think – naively – that doing all of these ‘right things’ meant my children would make it through maybe with skinned knees but never wounds nasty enough to pack at the time and close later.
Yet here I am. At times confronted by the scar tissue my teenagers show me. But I am also deeply grateful to be in a season when they are old enough to have the words and the trust in me to speak their truth.
They bombard me with joy, and noise, and friends around for an impromptu dinner on a Tuesday. They head into the world and return at odd hours. And my heavily medicated sleep is no longer broken by the cries of babies demanding everything of me all of the time.
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