While I would love to say that our family life is often filled with laughter, smiles, and happy teens, I am too transparent to leave you in a sugar-coated impression of my life. In total reality, this captured moment is an exception—an exception that I will desperately grieve because it expresses the norm I had hoped for, yet only experience in tiny, fragmented doses.
This year of growing into a house half-filled with teens has been a journey of wrestling with my expectations and facing the fear of it all slipping away.
I do too much out of expectation and fear. I try too hard to be that mom who says, “I love the teenage years,” when I have never felt anything harder on my heart and my insecurity than I have felt while raising teens. I am afraid that every missed moment of joy because of a battle of wills only piles failure on me and resentment on them. I am afraid of stepping into the empty nest that looms ahead with regret and heartache.
Fear and expectation. My two constant companions.
Yet, I am ever thankful for my friends who affirm the very real hardship of parenting a teen. And I am also thankful for my friends who remind me that my teens are pretty great people. Their risks are flaunting their independence and opinions, not partaking in dangerous dares (for the most part 🤪). They don’t seek attention by reckless behavior (for the most part 🙃), but they resist any advice or opinion with an eye roll, and agitate their siblings every.single.moment. Typical? I know. But because I have grounded my stubborn self in the expectation of perfectly parenting of teens, I am constantly mortified by each failed encounter, each relational disaster with their siblings, with me.
And above all else, I am devastated that we only have a short time left for these exceptional moments that really are just an exception.
I have to choose to enjoy these “Kodak” moments (showing my age here) in the very present. I need to realize that the journey isn’t an easy stroll down a sweet winding river, but a turbulent course with precious breathers along the way. Hopefully, I will capture each and every joy that’s left. And at the end of the course, I pray all the dread of bad memories haunting the chance of keeping any good ones will fall away, forgotten and settled with some calm.
If I am truly honest, I can ay least declare I am confident in one thing that lies ahead—I know I will become the mom of some amazing young men. And hopefully, they’ll return home every once in a while to make more regular joyful moments.
