I Am A Mother of a Teenage Daughter...and I Love It.

Aleathia says:

Holy Hannah!  It has been over a month since I posted, but not without great reason.  Life has been happening people, lots and lots of life.  I have been taking online courses to further my education at work.  They aren't official classes in the sense I get credit for them, but what does that matter anyway if I learn and retain the knowledge?  Does it only count if I have a piece of paper?  Wouldn't it count more if I could actually use the knowledge at work and share it with others?

I am still running, or what I call running, despite a few muscle strains.  I run when I tell myself I can't.  I run when I want to and when I need to.  I don't go more than 2 miles most of the time, but each time I run more of that 2 miles is running rather than walking which I find to be an accomplishment.

We have been having dog problems of the worst kind.  Diarrhea in the house...repeatedly, which leads to anger which leads to the ugliest part of me pushing to the surface.  It really has showed me how easy it is to lose my compassion in the face of samsara.  I can hear myself yelling over things the dog cannot control.  I feel myself have guilt, but still not shut my mouth.  I had to go running the one day to think about things.  Marshall was abandoned and then imprisoned and we saved him.  It took him a long time to really trust that we were going to keep him.  It took a long time to show the physical extent of his separation anxiety which in the beginning was howling and a bit of pacing.  It is now full on loss of bodily functions.  Part of me wanted to take the easy road and take him back to the pound.  The other part of me understands what it is like to be abandoned and yelled at all the time for things you don't understand.  All he knows is that we are his pack and he is lonely when we aren't here.  I get that.  I am lonely when my family isn't around either.  So, we (more me) have come up with a plan: more activity, probiotics, and less vocalization one way or the other about good and bad. Bad attention is still attention as far as he is concerned.  It has been a journey...a messy, stinky journey.

I have been filling my life with work and sewing and reading and crafts.  It seems like there is not enough time in the day to squeeze all this life in.  In addition to that I am still trying to be a great girlfriend and a great mom.  I'm trying to not burn out at work, but feeling less successful at that then all the rest.  I have been doing the same thing for the last 8 years with the only change being it is getting busier and more stressful.  People are leaving and moving on.  I just don't want to get bitter in my job.  I love what I do, it is just overwhelming most of the time.

Which brings me to the topic of conversation....teenage daughter.  I have to tell you that through all the years I have heard mothers bitch about teenagers and how horrible it is to parent them.  I tried my best when I was a teenager to be good.  I am sure I added a few gray hairs to my mother's head, but for the most part I was good.  I worked, got good grades, didn't drink or do drugs, was involved in plays and choirs and sports, and I did volunteer work.  I had a messy room, but I did chores and at one point was a caregiver to my infirmed mother at the age of 14 when no one else would help.  In essence, I didn't have time to be a teenager.  I went from kid to adult, but it suited me for the most part.  I was always older and quieter in my heart.

I have spent all of Chloe's life trying to raise her with respect, honesty, kindness, and individuality. These were things not given to me as a child.  I was given fear, authority, loneliness, and a be like everyone else attitude.  I never had a voice or an opinion.  Chloe is different from the other kids at school.  She knows she is and in the beginning I thought she may have had a social disorder.  She had all the signs on paper, but in the end it was a case of late blooming.  She is turning into this wonderful young lady who is respectful, kind, smart, funny, and sometimes eager to move on to bigger and better things.  Michael has been a great influence on the shaping of my little girl.  He was and always will be the "cool kid" that I never was and has such a way of presenting the world that makes Chloe take notice.  She looks up to him and I love that.

I love this time in her life where she is blooming and growing and discovering what it is she wants out of life when she leaves here.  In history class, she has to pick current event topics and the things she chooses makes me proud...makes me know that she is listening when we have our dinner talks about what is going on in the world.  Most of all I am happy that she loves talking to me and sharing her world with me honestly and openly.  She gives me the opportunity to share my life experiences with her in a way that might influence how she makes decisions for her own future.  I have always been brutally honest with her and in my heart I feel like she respects me for that.

In a time when so many of my friends are having horror stories to share about their teenagers, I feel lucky and blessed and so happy that I made the choices I did when she was younger.  It is always a risk.  You never know if how your captain the ship will end in stormy weather or not.  I hope we stay the course and keep moving forward in positive ways.  Life isn't perfect and she makes mistakes, but I always tell her that it is the mistakes we make that give us the best opportunity to learn if we have the courage to look at it that way.  We are not perfect.  That is such an unattainable idea, but we do have in us the ability to give the best we can do right now.  Life is an ever changing journey.  There is a rotation between ups and downs and we have to not get too lost in either of them so that we see the wonder there is in both.

3/25/2015 Parenting Surprises

Aleathia says:

Yesterday the sun was shining and it was actually warm enough where I didn't have to wear a coat, hat and scarf.  It has been a damn long winter and any flash of light is pretty pleasing.

I picked up my kid from her Robotics Club after school and she was abuzz about how they learned to program the dance moves that the robot would do and how they had picked a portion of the 1812 Overture as well as some new music from Imagine Dragons to splice together.  Next week they will learn how to program their dance moves together to sync up with the music and make that robot get funky.

We laughed together as we were both clacking....me from espresso and her from sugar.  We had a full on squirrel moment and couldn't stop laughing.  I have to say all those people who said that having a teenager would suck, lied.  Maybe they just can't remember what it was like to be a teenager.  That, my friends, is sad.

When I went to the local coffee shop to get my espresso I saw several of Chloe's classmates there.  They were in a gaggle which is typical for teenage girls and all had their smart phones and Vera Bradley bags and trendy clothes.  For a minute my heart sort of sunk.  I had a huge amount of doubt about what kind of life my daughter was leading.  She didn't have friends like this.  She doesn't go to coffee shops and talk about boys or clothes or shoes.  In some way I felt like a parenting failure because she seems so outside the box.

That changed when I picked her up from Robotics.  That changed when she asked me to go for a walk with her and we talked about real life and dreams and our plans for a fun summer.  Half way through the walk I told her about what I had seen at the coffee shop (leaving out the doubt and guilt part) and she stopped me in my tracks.  She told me that she felt I was a really cool mom even though I had to punish her sometimes and make rules.  She said at least she knows that I support her in her own identity and style and that I am nice to her and listen to what she has to say.

I really had to keep myself from crying.  It is a rare moment that a mother gets a validation like this with no strings attached.  She didn't want anything from me except my company on a fine spring day.

I love that all these years of talking to her like a human being instead of a little kid has paid off.  She is growing up into a wonderful, very outside the box, young lady.  She is kind and artistic and funny.  She is sensitive, but also learning to thicken up her skin so she doesn't get hurt by the evil that lingers in middle school and high school.

I thanked her for being patient with me as I learn to let go of control of everything and deal with her need for independence and freedom.  She knows it is the hardest thing in the world for me to do and she could have rebelled and cut me to the quick with meanness and hatred, but instead, she waited until I was ready to deal with it in my own time.  It feels really good to be a mother and to see that all the long, hard years spent expressing morals and values have rooted to make a great base for my child as she moves forward in the world.

Cherish the great days as well as the hard days.  There are lessons in each of them and joys within the sorrows if you look at them right.