Many parents lament
preadolescent hygiene, homework, and honesty. Our middle grade youngsters
continue to be notorious for skipping baths, battling books, and buffeting
themselves against any bulwark of the straight and narrow. Their slightly older
siblings, likewise, deserve the press they get about interpersonal goings on.
Family dynamics are never static when high school sons and daughters
experiment, especially when they fool around with the very wayward behaviors
and substances against which we warn them.
As for our emerging
adult children, we heed them too little. Somewhere en route to potty training
and to weaning from the breast, we mothers and fathers failed to accept that
when our offspring become legal adults, they might not simultaneously become
functional ones. Im referring to those independent souls, who
work at differentiating themselves from us, those children that have little
trouble asking for money, for car keys, for money, for tolerance with their
continuing experimentation, for money, for acceptance, and for
money.
Our soldiers, on
furlough, feel no compunction about eating leftovers meant for their dads
lunches, our collegiate daughters, on break, seek compassionate leave from
household chores given menstrual cramps, but remain fit enough to go out with
the post-teens they havent seen for entire hours. Similarly,
our young marrieds want none of our help (except money), yet, call the day
after we drive two hours in each direction, to deliver food, to ask if we can
make that drive again, the following week, with packets of money.
At such junctures, we
burrow like hedgehogs, declare that wine is fine midday, or eat enough
chocolate-covered raisins to nod dully in agreement that cramps excuse duties
but not dates. The intrepid among us, in balance, stupidly stare, for long
spans, at pictures taken of our kids when those boys and girls were not digging
through parental birth control supplies or petty cash, but were occupying
themselves with fishtail braids or major league baseball shirts.
Sure, we can and do
regard our post-teens through the lens of therapists, our own BFFs, and our
spouses, especially those spouses we wake after midnight to vent. We tell
ourselves we did okay as parents; the post-teen years are just another stage
through which we must learn to breathe. Sooner or later, well adjust to
hearing: our sons list all of the ways the army trains them to kill, our
daughters describe the street people they invited home, and our marrieds
explain that visiting our first grandchildren more than once a day is
disrespectful. Well continue to accept the abandoned pets our kids
adopted and then left with us, too. After all, our emerging adult children
cant grow up too quickly.