Worries and Walks
Yesterday was a self-doubt kind of day around here. Not just for me, either. Since one of the parenting tasks these days is to be a sounding board for every feeling that passes through the three middle-schoolers’ brains, I got to hear about the big projects and friend drama and general feelings of inadequacy. At the same time, my own brain was looking at a task list a mile long and wondering how I’m ever going to get it all done.
It’s weird, simultaneously entering middle age and parenting adolescents. I’m working hard to try to view both as a time of re-creation - of learning new ways and adjusting to new realities. But there’s still the old “storm and stress” thing going on, and some days are worse than others. I can feel it, like a miasma of sullenness that settles over the house, which gradually coalesces with snarky comments and eye rolls, into a final tornado of door slams and screams of “I hate you!”
It’s exhausting when it happens, but the most annoying part is that if we take the right steps at the first signs of sullenness, before the eye rolls, before the screams, then it all comes to nothing. Figuring out what those right steps are is the hard part. These days, it looks like lots of one-on-one time with a parent and a kid, wading through all the crap that middle school throws at them.
Things like:
Why does the school treat all the kids like they’re delinquents when most kids are just trying to get by and the kids that misbehave need a lot more help than they’re getting?
What do you do when you want to share your thoughts with some new friends but you’re not sure how they’ll react?
How do you square the reality of doing just fine in school with the ever-present fear that maybe you’re just not up to it?
The worst part of all of it is that my answer is usually something like, “Hell if I know.” I’m still working out the answers to those things myself. I’ll admit this - there was a time in my 20s when I would have had all the answers to those questions. Of course, those answers would have been wrong and short-sighted, but they made me feel better. And maybe my kids will get to that place in a decade or so. But these days, I’m asking very similar questions:
How do you build a world worth living in when some people will always try to knock it down? When they can’t help but see something and figure out how that goodness is personally offensive to them?
How to you change and grow in relationships when your friends became friends with the old you and you’re not sure if they’ll like the new you?
How do you square the reality of doing just fine in life with the ever-present fear that maybe you’re one stupid misstep away from screwing it all up?
So when my self-doubt and their self-doubt start to turn into eyerolls and snippy comments, we go on walks. “Stop being spiky,” someone will say. “We need to get the cobwebs out of our brains,” another person declares. And all of a sudden, I find myself traveling the same sidewalks again and again, with a rotating cast of tweens. At the end, none of us have answers to our questions, but we feel a little better for it, I guess. The to-do list is still just as long, and their homework is no closer to being done, either. But maybe it reminds us that we’re not alone in our self-doubt, in our questioning, in our frustrations.
That seems to make all the difference.
