Teens taking charge
I’m taking the summer off from writing. This is a huge luxury, I know, to be able to say, “I’m taking some time off so I can focus on things I really want to do, like fixing broken goggles, cajoling my kids into weeding the flower beds, tripping over everyone’s flip-flops, breaking up fights about who body-slammed who on the trampoline, and making cheese quesadillas at all hours of the day. If you can’t tell, I’m very excited for what awaits me once I step away from this computer.
Summertime is always an adjustment. I go from having my quiet house all to myself from 8:30 in the morning to 2:30 in the afternoon, to having a non-stop circus act raging in every room from sunup to midnight. Quiet moments are few and far between. Boredom runs rampant. The grocery bill is astronomical.
This summer feels different than those we’ve had in the past. When my kids were smaller, we did things as one communal blob. I would come up with a plan for the day, and everyone would do it. Scavenger hunt at the mall. Going to the pool with friends. Playing at the park and stopping for an ice cream cone afterwards. It was exhausting to be in charge all the time, but still, I was in charge. I was running the show.
Now that the majority of my kids are teenagers, I am most definitely NOT running the show. They are. They work whenever their boss schedules them to work. They go to bed however late they want. They make plans with friends and then ask if they can go, with the understanding that if I say no, I am lame and their life is ruined.
One of them, my back-from-college daughter, Lucy, doesn’t really even ask anymore. She just tells me her plans, assuming that because she’s technically an “adult” who’s been more or less “on her own” for the past year, she can be in charge of herself. I’d like to formally lodge a complaint with the Department of Childrearing on that, please.
“My friends and I are leaving in a couple days for our backpacking trip,” she told me one day last week.
“Wait, what?” I said. “You’re going backpacking? Where? With which friends? What will you eat? Is it going to rain? What’s your plan for not getting murdered? How am I just now hearing about this?”
“I swear I talked to you about it weeks ago,” she replied.
“Um, no, I think I would remember if my daughter had told me she and her friends were going to wander around in the wilderness as walking bear bait.”
She looked at me with a challenging glint in her eye. She wasn’t asking me if she could go; she was telling me. She didn’t need my permission, and we both knew it.
It was weird, I’m not gonna lie. But as a mom, it was actually kind of cool. She was doing this on her own. I didn’t need to micromanage it or do anything to make it happen. Gone were the days where I had to print her out a packing list before every trip or ask her a million questions to make sure she’d thought through the logistics.
I did facilitate the giving to her of bear spray, which I urged Logan to dig out of his camping gear and hand to her before he left for work on the day of her hike.
“Do you really think there will be bears?” Lucy asked him.
“You’re hiking in the woods, right?” he replied. “Not the middle of a city? Yes, there might be bears.”
“Oh,” she replied. “Should we put our food in a bag and do the whole hang-it-from-a-tree thing?”
“Absolutely,” Logan said.
She seemed undeterred. Unlike her mother, such realities don’t faze her much, and she went off in search of some rope to add to her pack, so she could hang her food from a tree like a pro – like her dad had taught her to do on hikes they’d gone on throughout the years.
I guess all the years of planning things and dragging them out of the house for activities were leading up to something after all. They were leading to them being able to do it on their own someday. My, how summers have changed.