Tag: lessons learned

Driving with Teens

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I’m going on a drive or two. Why don’t you hop in the car and come along. I’ve written another post about what it’s like to drive with new drivers. Since most parents will likely experience this thrilling adventure eventually, I’d like to take you along on a couple of my experiences. So Buckle up… it’s going to be quite a ride!

 

Drive #1: Pedestrians

We are driving along when I see people walking in the road up ahead. (One might argue that these people should not be walking in the road, but that would be another blog post.) These people are a distance away, but close enough that we should begin to slow down.

“There are people walking in the road up ahead,” I inform the teen driver.

“I see them,” the teen replies. We continue moving at the same rate of speed.

“You should slow down,” I instruct.

“I am,” the teen driver informs me. I feel no difference in the speed we are traveling.

“SLOW DOWN!!” I snap.

“MOM!” the teen replies. “I AM slowing down. I’m not going to HIT them!!”

 

Drive #2: Highways

Highways are always a bit dicey. After all, highway driving requires a consistent high rate of speed, which most people who have only been driving for a month or two are not used to. Add in the occasional need for an evasive maneuver and, well, it’s not always pretty. On this drive, the traffic is fairly heavy. We are driving through a “city,” so vehicles are entering and exiting the highway. We are approaching an entrance ramp, and there is an 18 wheeler getting onto the highway.

“That truck is going to need to merge,” I say to my teen driver. The truck is far bigger than the car we are in.

“I see it,” my teen driver says.

“So… you might want to give him space so he can get in here,” I nudge.

“It’s his job to merge with me,” the teen informs me. This is information learned in driving class.

“I understand that,” I say. “But he is bigger than you.” And coming up fast, I want to add.

“That doesn’t matter, Mom,” the teen states. “I am in this lane, and he has to merge.”

“Yes,” I say, beginning to get impatient. “But he doesn’t seem to be slowing down. He wants to get in this lane, and it doesn’t seem to matter that you are here.”

“He can merge with me,” the teen is emphatic, but I see that the trucker clearly has no intention of “merging” with anyone. He owns the road he is not yet on.

“GIVE HIM ROOM!!” I raise my voice. “He is much bigger than you, and he is NOT stopping!”

“He was supposed to merge with me,” the teen grumbles. “I am in this lane.” While I can’t argue with my teen’s knowledge of the laws and right of way, there is something to be said for “an ounce of prevention….” Especially in the case of a vehicle that is many times bigger than the one you are in.

 

Drive #3: Medians

Sometimes, learning about medians can be an interesting adventure. Pulling out of a shopping plaza with a very new driver means the teen is not yet even paying attention to things like medians. We are at a four-way intersection of several parking lots as we are leaving a restaurant, and my teen is driving.

“Turn left here,” I say, not even thinking that there are two possibilities. My teen does as I say, turning left and completely missing the “keep right” sign. We end up to the left of the median.

“STOP!” I say, and the teen stops the car and looks at me.

“What?”

I am simultaneously breathing a sigh of relief and laughing at the situation. “Back up.” I point to the median out my passenger window. “You need to be on the other side of this median. See those cars?” I point to the intersection up ahead. “They are going to be coming in here.”

“Oh. Well, you told me to turn left, so I did.” Thankfully, everyone in the car thinks this is marginally funny. “You didn’t tell me I had to go to the other side of the median.”

“No, I did not. My bad,” I say, as we readjust into the correct lane and continue on our way.

 

Drive #4: Impatience

We are driving on a two-lane road. We are observing the exact speed limit. I will be the first to admit, the speed limit feels a bit slow on this road, but kudos to the driver for maintaining a consistent and perfect speed.

The car behind us does not appreciate driving the speed limit. It has been on our bumper since we turned on this road. I don’t believe the teen driver has noticed, but I have.

Suddenly, the car behind us pulls out into the other lane and speeds past us. The teen driver slows to allow him easier passage in what is a no passing zone.

“Well, he’s in a hurry!” the teen comments, accelerating back to the speed limit.

 

Hey, thanks for coming along for the ride! These teen drivers, my first two… they have been somewhat easy to teach. My youngest, he’ll be driving in just a few short months (nine to be exact, but who’s counting?) I’m a bit concerned about that one. He is already calculating how fast my car can go without self-destructing….

Knots

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One morning last spring, W was practicing his knots (because Scouts do that kind of thing when they’re bored…). He was using a long length of climbing rope, and somehow, he thought that tying one end to the couch and the other to himself was a good idea. Hold that thought….

J and I were in the kitchen having a conversation about the day. We were preparing to do some community service, and we were reminiscing about previous experiences at this same site in years past. I had started my breakfast, but as usual, I had twenty-five different projects I was also tending, including the laundry in the basement.

W kept calling to me, wanting me to know just how far (or not) he was able to stray from the couch. He was, quite literally, on a relatively short leash.

I popped a bagel in the toaster, cracked two eggs in a pan, and took a quick trip upstairs to gather laundry. When I returned, the bagel popped up, and I removed it from the toaster. However, because the bagel was frozen when I put it in, one particular part just didn’t seem to be done, so I pushed it back down. I didn’t plan to leave it for the entire toasting cycle. I flipped the eggs and went down to drop the sheets in the laundry room. I started the washing machine, poured in the detergent, and added the sheets.

When I got to the top of the stairs, W made sure I saw his knots as I walked through the living room. “Nice!” I complimented as I gave him the thumbs up.

The acrid smell of burning toast hit my nose just as the smoke detector screamed a piercing bleep. Darn! My first thought came through the screaming of the smoke detector. A good bagel, ruined!

But then from the other room, interspersed with the beeps, I heard a small, pathetic, voice. “Help? Help me!”

And then a splay of laughter erupted from the child who had tied himself to the couch. Clearly, he had approached this knot-tying activity with a false sense of security. Because after all, what if…?

I looked at J and tipped my head, indicating our escape through the door. She smiled in conspiracy. We took off running out the front door (safety first, you know) where we stood on the front walkway laughing so hard we were doubled over. The bleeping of the smoke detector stopped as abruptly as it had begun. We were deeply amused with ourselves and the situation.

Back in the house, W remained in the living room, expertly tied to the leg of the couch. He, too, was laughing. Of all the times that the smoke detector could have gone off, it happened when he was unable to leave his spot in the living room.

Of course, if it had been a real emergency, I would have grabbed the scissors and cut him free from the couch before I ran out the door. He would have been mad, initially, that I had ruined his rope, but he would have been grateful that I had saved his life.

Burnt toast, however, does not constitute a real emergency, but a valuable lesson was learned that day. The thought of tying oneself to the couch to practice knots… maybe that’s not such a good idea.

The Door

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My son stood in front of the open refrigerator, door wide open, staring at the contents. The light spilled out onto the floor, where it turned the tile a brighter shade of white. The cold air cascaded from the opening in a mist of fog that quickly dissipated in the summer heat. My son was transfixed, as if waiting—I suppose—for something appealing to suddenly materialize on the shelf in front of him.

“Close the refrigerator!” I scolded. “Figure out what you want before you open the door. Don’t browse.” I have yet to figure out why I have to say this so often….

He closed the door. “There’s nothing to eat in this house.”

I don’t know how that can be. Before I went to the grocery store yesterday, I asked him if there was anything he wanted me to get. All he said was sub rolls. I got the sub rolls, so he really has nothing to complain about.

But that is neither here nor there. I’d rather take a step back and examine the habit of standing in front of the open refrigerator door.

From the kid perspective, I can understand the disappointment of opening to fridge with the expectation of something great only to find nothing that you want to eat. I can almost understand the need to wait and hope for something appetizing to appear. Because really, if you stand there long enough, staring at the available options, something may eventually inspire the palate, right? A combination that wasn’t previously realized might become evident. Something worth eating must be contained in the refrigerator somewhere, mustn’t it? Search long and search hard, and eventually you will find it.

From the parent perspective, particularly the single parent perspective, I see the cost of standing in front of the open fridge—the energy wasted. I see the food that was purchased only yesterday being cast aside as inedible simply because the teen might have been eating that food last week (with great fondness), but the same teen doesn’t care for that particular food item this week–and won’t care for it until well after it spoils.

Yes, there are two perspectives to this problem, both justified, and I am in search of the win-win solution. The solution would be a refrigerator in which amazingly appealing food will appear, as if by magic, when you open it. That would solve this problem once and for all. And it might solve another problem or two, as well….

“What’s for dinner, Mom?”

“I don’t know. Open the refrigerator and see.”

Blooming

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At my son’s high school graduation, each of the graduates was given a white rose before the ceremony began. Each student—all 300-something—walked in carrying his or her rose, though it seemed instruction as to the best way to carry that item in a procession was missing. It was, however, a nice touch.

After a two-hour ceremony in weather that alternated between cool, hot (for about 5 minutes), and windy, the rose that was handed to me by my graduate was limp and wilted. It seemed as though it might not be salvageable, especially after we spent another half hour or more taking pictures and further ignoring it. I had a vague thought that if I put it in water, the bud would continue to droop on a stem grown weak from mistreatment.

But I am a sucker for beauty and for living (and once-living) things. So when I arrived home, I gave the rose a bit of TLC. I clipped the bottom of the stem, stuck it in a vase of water, and placed it in the center of my kitchen table. In the next hour, it began to take on new life. First, it grew a bit less droopy. The petals stuck out in awkward directions as the bud began to right itself while it took in nourishment. It wasn’t long before the bud seemed much happier.

I left the house for a while to attend a graduation party, and when I returned, there were bits of torn leaves littering the table around the base of the vase. “Which one of you has been eating the leaves off the rose?” I scolded the cats. “Knock it off!” I moved the vase to the kitchen counter because I am delusional enough to believe my cats do not frequent the counter tops.

In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a thunk and an additional strange noise and then nothing. I fell back to sleep and quickly forgot about the disturbance. When I went downstairs in the morning, the vase lay on its side on the counter, and the rose was on the floor beneath, lying in a puddle of water.

Sighing, I clipped a smidge more off the stem, and once again placed it in the water. This time, I snipped off the leaves since that was the part the cats found most appetizing.

Since then, my son’s rose has bloomed beautifully, even growing shoots with fresh new leaves where the old ones had been snipped off the stem. This rose has become a fitting symbol for the life to come for my graduate. Sometimes, things don’t go smoothly. We may be weakened by the experiences we withstand. We may face adversity. We may be torn down by those around us. But through it all, we learn that we are stronger than we might have thought. We learn to gain strength from our trials. We learn that growing in new directions is always a possibility. And we learn how to let our inner beauty shine through it all.

Cookies

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I picked up my son from the eighth grade class trip (very) late on Friday night (technically, the wee hours of Saturday morning). On the drive home, there was a tired, train-of-thought conversation that involved discussion of the things my deep thinker had been churning in his mind on the 12-hour bus ride home.

“You know, the Capitol dome was constructed of cast iron,” he told me. “In the 1850s and 60s,” he added. “That must have been quite a feat of engineering.” He stared out the window as the darkness passed by while he thought. “I wonder how they had the technology to get that up there back then.”

Nearly nine million pounds of ironwork, I have learned. My son thinks about the process of construction: how they created this immense structure. How they managed to move it to the top of the Capitol building. Meanwhile, my mother-mind wonders about the safety of the building on which that weight is resting and the lives of the people within that building. That’s a lot of weight for the walls and foundation to hold.

“And you know,” he continued, breaking me our of my reverie and revealing the randomness of his reflection. “The National Archives are much harder to get into than Nicolas Cage makes it seem.” I chuckled as my mind drifted to thoughts of the movie, National Treasure.

“Of course,” I told him. “That’s Hollywood. They had to make it possible, or the story line wouldn’t have worked.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I just wanted to point that out. It’s really hard to get in there.”

“I’m sure it is. Think about what’s in there.” I paused to see if he had anything else to add. The silence stretched until I asked, ”Did you finish all the cookies I sent?”

“Oh, I finished those a long time ago… on the bus ride down on Tuesday.”

“Did you share them?”

“I tried.”

“What do you mean, ‘you tried’?” I asked.

“Nobody wanted any,” he stated, as if teenagers don’t get hungry.

I puzzled over this one for a minute. Eighth grade boys and homemade cookies. This didn’t seem right to me. “No one wanted any? Did you offer them one?”

“Well,” he hedged. “I probably could have done better with that.”

“You didn’t offer one to anyone, did you?”

“Yes, I did.” he said.

“And….”

“Well, when I offered one to Jon, he was wearing ear buds.” He paused here before he said, “He didn’t answer.”

“So you ate them all?”

Even in the darkness of the car, I could see the smirk on his face.

Yesterday…

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Yesterday… I held my first child in my arms—all six pounds of him—as he wiggled his feet and studied my face, searching for recognition and committing my features to his brand new memory.

Yesterday, my first-born said good-bye to his childhood, adulthood dawning the next morning despite the fact that his birthday wouldn’t be official until late in the day.

Yesterday… I held my fingers out for two chubby hands to grasp, and I bent over to toddler level to “walk” him up and down, up and down, up and down the hall while he smiled his gleeful smile.

Yesterday, I stood on tippy toes to hug my son good-bye before school. The morning good-byes are now bittersweet, and I (at least) am holding on to each and every precious one.

Yesterday… I sat with my son at preschool because he didn’t want me to leave him behind. I sat in the classroom for several of the first few days, quietly watching, until he grew comfortable with the idea of me leaving.

Yesterday, my son walked out the door—too rushed for a decent breakfast—in his need to pick up his girlfriend and consult with this friend and that group adviser before the school day was underway.

Yesterday… my son spent hours at the kitchen table with paper, scissors, glue, stickers, ribbon, clay, etc. crafting some of the most impressive art projects seen in the past few decades. His eyes would be bright with ideas and possibilities as paper shards scattered across the floor where they would stay until the vacuum came through to gobble them up.

Yesterday, my son finished assembling the high school literary magazine. As with his projects of old, he was excited to watch it come together. To move from individual pieces of writing and artwork to a finished compilation, bound into a single, cohesive whole that will be distributed to the student body.

Yesterday… my son graduated from kindergarten. It was a warm, sunny day, and the room was sticky from little kid use. When the ceremony was over, we celebrated with ice cream sundaes, pictures with the teacher, and some playtime on the playground before we left the tiny “campus” to move on to a bigger school and a full day program.

Yesterday, my son’s graduation announcements arrived in the mail. The paper was stiff and fresh and official and embossed with the school seal and His. Full. Name. He promptly reported that his name was misspelled, compelling me look more closely. The glint in his eye and his sense of fun have not changed or faded over time.

Yesterday, when I was talking to my daughter about her brother’s birthday, I accidentally referenced it as his 13th birthday rather than his 18th birthday. Because in my mind, he will always be some combination of ages that is far less than his actual years. And because…

Time. It’s like that. It bends and warps and does crazy things to our brains, making us think that moments have stood still when years have passed.

Yesterday. So many yesterdays.

 

*Image is a photo taken yesterday by my talented daughter and used with her very gracious permission

Emotions

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I have always been the type of person to cry at things that I find particularly moving, movies mostly—happy, sad, it doesn’t matter. I will cry. When I was pregnant with my children, I was particularly prone to crying at any little thing. I figured it was the hormones.

This past weekend, I was driving my daughter to a sports competition two hours from home. She was in the seat beside me dozing off. Despite her presence in the passenger seat, essentially I was on this drive alone with my thoughts.

Spring has landed with full force here in New England, and the hills are fluffed with an intense range of spring greens—pale green, bright green, pinkish green, yellow green. Even some flowering trees are sprinkled in, as well. As I drove, I was struck by the beauty, and my heart was full; I started tearing up.

Wait, what? I am crying at the vibrant spring greenery on the hillsides? Who cries at that??

Admittedly, it is an emotional time. The previous night, my son went off to the prom, and we are preparing for high school graduation. The emotions that I feel are in some ways exactly what I expected, and in some ways so much more intense than I could have imagined. On any given day, I will cycle from nostalgic to proud mom to happy to sad. I will run through years’ worth of memories all the way through now and to the future.

For now, it seems, I am once again particularly prone to crying. Apparently, those times come and go. This bout will stick with me, at least through the next month. Perhaps, I will keep my sunglasses handy—a good way to hide my tearing eyes—and pray for lots of sunny days so I can wear them without question.

Then again, does anyone really care if I let my emotions show?

Editorial

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“I don’t know how to write an editorial,” W told me when I arrive home from work one day this week. “And I need to write one for language arts.”

I was rushing around to get dinner started before I had to run out again to pick up J from theater practice. “Why don’t you Google it, look at a couple examples, and I can help you when I get back from picking up your sister?” I acknowledged his statement, though I didn’t completely register what he was saying.

When I returned, he tried again. “I have to write an editorial from the point of view of a character in our book, and it has to be ‘historically accurate.’ Can you help me?”

“What do you need help with?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to write one.”

“Didn’t your teacher go over it in class? She must have given you some examples,” I queried, hoping he would think back to the class and remember what he was supposed to do.

“Not really. She never told us how to do it.”

“I’ll bet she did, but you shut off,” I stated, probably more bluntly than I should have.

“What?” he asked, unsure of my meaning.

“You shut off,” I repeated. “Your teacher was talking about it, and you decided it was information you would never need. So you shut off.” A smirk of recognition crept across his face.

“She never talked about it. She gave us newspapers, but she never said we’d need to know it.” Imagine that!

I stifled a groan, and I hoped he couldn’t hear my eyes rolling….

Teens and Hints of Adulthood

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Twice in the past week, I have heard about a teen who has been kicked out of his or her home at 16 or 17 years old, essentially (in the parents’ mind) “aging out” of the need to be sheltered, nurtured, and—no doubt—financed. In one case, the individual came home from school on his sixteenth birthday to find his belongings outside the house, the locks changed, and a note on the door saying, “You’re 16. Get your own d**n place.” Happy birthday. In the other case, the mother decided she needed space for her newest project, so she told her daughter, “You need to leave as soon as possible.”

In both cases, the understandable response of the teen in question was to cry. No doubt, these tears originated from an array of emotions: grief for the loss of a “parent,” sadness and self-doubt at the depth of such rejection, fear and anxiety over the completely overwhelming thoughts involved in, what happens next? And in both cases, even though I do not know either of these individuals, my heart breaks for the young adults who are not yet ready to fly, but are being pushed out of the nest.

I have worked with teenagers for thirty years [which definitely makes me sound old…]. I have worked with teens in classrooms, in dormitories, on the playing field; I have worked with teens in large groups, small groups, and one-on-one. I have been a teacher, a coach, an advisor, a dorm parent, and a parent. From my [somewhat extensive] experience, I will say, it is a rare kid who—at 16, 17, or even 18—is ready to be self-sufficient. It is an even rarer kid who can pick him or herself up from such devastating total parental rejection and move forward unscathed.

As I look at my children, I can see the hints of adulthood emerging from their more-adult-than-child physical selves. I see responsibility coming through in more areas of their lives each day. I see them beginning to take the lead in situations in which they might have been followers in the past. I see glimpses of the adults they are becoming.

But their “formative years” are not over just because they are teens or they reach the age of majority. As they begin to navigate some of the biggest decisions of their lives to date, the groundwork may have been laid early in their lives, but the direction, the guidance… these things are such an important part of the parenting process. Guidance in these big decisions will help my children to learn to be better decision makers as they proceed through their lives. My willingness to be available as a shoulder, an ear, a sounding board will help my teens to grow their self-confidence and learn how to consider all sides of an issue. And it will let them know that they are not alone. If they stumble, I will be here as a safety net.

Leave my kids to their own devices and kick them out of the house? No friends, my job here is far from done. I only hope there is someone to pick up the pieces left by the parents who are done.

 

[Image is a picture drawn by my daughter and used with her gracious permission.]

Lyme Awareness #1

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I recently learned that May is Lyme Disease awareness month. Most likely, May was chosen because this is the month when nymph ticks are most active—from May to July. And because nymph ticks are so very tiny, they are extremely hard to detect….

I was feeling pretty good the day I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. I was tired, but I had been traveling with my daughter. Under the circumstances, that was normal fatigue, right? Then again, as a single mother, I am not sure I have any idea what “normal fatigue” is since I seldom get more than five or six hours of sleep at night. I scheduled a visit with the doctor because I had a strange rash—large blotches covered my torso and had begun to spread down my left arm.

I had first noticed the blotches in the hotel bathroom mirror.  The first day, I had a couple of spots. Strange, I thought, examining what appeared to be a welt with an odd grayish color at the center. I touched it. It didn’t itch, and there was no pain. Huh, I pulled on my pajama top, dismissing the spot from my mind, as if covering it up would make it go away.

The next morning, the spot had faded (though it hadn’t disappeared), and I dressed quickly to get to our morning commitment. We were attending an athletic competition that kept us busy and away from the hotel for the majority of the day. We also spent long hours sitting around—in stadium seats and on the floor of the field house.

Back at the hotel at the end of a long day, I stumbled into the bathroom, exhausted. As I lifted my shirt, I caught my reflection in the mirror. My heart skipped a beat. The two spots had multiplied, and now covered my torso in angry pink and grey blobs that wound across my side and on to my back. The sight was startling. I took a deep breath and tried to compose myself as I dressed. My brain was reeling while I consciously tried to calm myself enough to go back into the room without alerting my daughter to anything unusual. Funny how deep-rooted our mom instincts are.

It’s nothing, I told myself.  I probably picked up some nasty fungus or something from the field house floor or the hotel or….  I breathed slowly, deliberately. My thoughts were convincing enough that by the time I was ready for bed, my mind had moved on to other things.

The spots remained through the following day, Thursday, and when I finally arrived home on Friday, I was able to schedule an appointment with the doctor for that afternoon. By this point, I had convinced myself that it was something I had picked up from one of the many unclean surfaces I had come in contact with on my trip.

The doctor took one look and immediately said, “That’s Lyme.” I was shocked. But then again… Suddenly, all the other symptoms I had been experiencing over the previous months came together. A series of odd, unexplained viruses? Not at all. One diagnosis and everything made sense.

I consider myself lucky that I had that rash. I was lucky that I didn’t brush it off as nothing and wait for it to go away on its own. I very well may have contracted Lyme in my house from a tick that hitched a ride on my cat. But I was lucky. I am lucky.

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