Stories and Sturdiness

The world feels a little dark today. It’s summer and the sun is shining and my kids are home for the summer after the longest school year ever and still, it feels dark. One of my kids said yesterday, “I thought once school was over and I wasn’t so tired and stressed that everything would feel easier and it doesn’t.”

“I guess it wasn’t school then, was it?” I said. This wasn’t new to me. I knew that school got blamed for a lot of the storm and stress, but I was twelve once. Middle school is rough, but it’s not the source of all adolescent angst.

“No, and that’s worse.”

She’s not wrong. This is a hard stage. It’s a hard stage for them, and it’s a hard stage to parent them through. There’s a joke that’s been going around the millennial circles. “My kids asked what they get to have now that we didn’t have back in the 80s. The answer was ‘feelings’.”

It’s funny because it’s true. Back in my day, when you felt angsty, you listened to loud music and talked back and maybe snuck out at night. These days, the kids just talk. They talk and talk and talk. They say things like, "I don’t have enough impulse control; can you help me with strategies to save money?,” and “I wish I could tell my younger self how things were going to be,” and “I want to be nice, but she crossed my boundaries and I’m not sure if I can trust her anymore.”

It’s not just my kids, either. I spent a wonderful week with some of my nieces and nephew and I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear more honest expression of emotions in that week than I did throughout my entire childhood. If I were older, less far along on my own journey, I might scoff at it as faddish pseudo-science. But they really are kinder, more rational, less impulsive and more thoughtful than I ever was.

And that’s what makes it hard to parent. Because my impulses don’t make sense anymore. Forrest and I often talk about how differently things were handled when we were kids. If a kid was mean to you, you got back at them - maybe physically, maybe verbally - but you certainly didn’t tell them that they hurt your feelings. If a teacher acted unfairly, you glowered and glared and committed small mutinies - we didn’t have a conversation about how a lot of adults are unhappy with their lives and how that might come out with power trips and arbitrary rules.

I often find myself offering advice and realizing that it no longer applies. And instead, I’m looking at them and wishing that I knew then what they seem to know now. They seem sturdier, somehow, than the brittle teenager I was.

A few weeks ago, my girls and I were walking through the mall and we walked past a store. I mentioned that it existed back when I was a teen but that I had never shopped there.

“Why not?” they asked.

I explained that when I was a teen, you sort of decided what kind of person you wanted to be and what group you wanted to fit into and then you dressed the part. And the girls who shopped from that store were part of a wilder, more risque group. And if you wore clothes from there, then people would assume that you drank, you smoked, you dated around.

They couldn’t comprehend it. Why would teenage Serenity care? I knew that I didn’t do any of those things. If I wore a pair of jeans from the ‘wrong’ store and someone judged me, what did it matter? They could think what they wanted about my morality. I knew the truth.

My kids couldn’t understand and I couldn’t explain it. Why did we care so much? Why do I still care so much? I know who I am. I know the kinds of choices I make. I should be more sure of myself. I should remember all the times I did the right thing, lived up to my values.

I wish it were that simple, but a lifetime of people pleasing doesn’t disappear in a day. And while I am sturdier than them in terms of day to day mood swings, I have a sneaking suspicion that it won’t be long before they’re the ones setting a good example for me, while I lag behind, trying to keep up.

I can’t wait.