Now we are dealing with sex, porn, social media, young adulthood, college, financial solvency, deep questions of faith, the puberties. Good times! It is so real up in here. Our oldest just finished his first year at Texas Tech University and the second leaves next fall, so we are not messing around anymore. The entire thing happened just like the people said it would. Every year on their birthdays, they actually turn a whole year older; string eighteen parties together, and they move into a college dorm. It’s absurd.
Parenting teens is exactly what I thought it would be and nothing like I thought it would be. I was prepared for parts of it, and may I begin with those, specifically for my young mamas still in the twilight zone of wishing your children would just go pee-pee on the freaking potty while simultaneously dreading the end of early childhood. It is a strange dichotomy, the trying to “enjoy every moment” while sometimes locking yourself in the bathroom with old Halloween candy and pretending you can’t hear them. Add to that dissociative disorder the older mamas insisting you enjoy toddlerhood because it is all crap from here: “Oh, you think a temper tantrum is hard? Wait until your junior throws a kegger while you are at a sales convention.” Um. Thank you?
In my experience, parenting teens is easily the best phase of motherhood yet. To be fair, I’m geared toward older kids, and my parents loved having teenagers (which made us love being their teenagers), so I had a precedent to enjoy this stage. But all that withstanding, big kids are fun. They really are. Yours will be too. Text with my oldest:
ME: Where are you?
HIM: Doing drugs with gangs.
ME: Don’t share needles.
Teens are hilarious and interesting and smart; plus, I was made to nurture independence, which they want so bad they can taste it. I’m not a natural hoverer or worrier, so pushing them toward maturity is not where I struggle. I have no problem letting the chips fall where they may, letting them feel the sting of their own choices or the gut punch of failure, because those are the very best teachers. The flip side is owning their own successes, forging their own path, and let me tell you: when your kid handles every last scrap of paperwork, applications, interviews, and scholarship entries and lands his college acceptance letters singlehandedly, he confidently steps toward adulthood, and you love this for him.
I planned on adoring the teen years, so I do.
Watching your kids grow into young adults in front of your eyes is truly breathtaking. Mostly good, sometimes not. They have big-time issues now, some you never saw coming, others you were positively insulated from except that you weren’t, some that will break your heart right alongside theirs. They fall in love, they put their vulnerable souls in the hands of untrustworthy people, they worry more than they let on, they mess up epically, dramatically, shockingly. They lie and then act wounded when you double-check: Hand over that phone, Miss Hurt Feelings. I was sixteen once. My mom thought I was at Stacy’s.
So don’t hear me say the teenage years are always a dreamy dream or, heaven forbid, that I love these years because my teens are all well-mannered missionaries-in-training. For the love, mine are pastor’s kids, so they are predisposed to, say, for instance, “vape” with a friend in the bathroom at a football game and land two days of detention. (My girlfriend: “Vaping? Ugh. I’d be less concerned that he was an addict and more concerned he is just an ass.”)
Side note: it is incredibly helpful to have girlfriends who aren’t too precious about this phase. If your friends clutch their pearls at every teen wobble, it is like booking yourself a first-class ticket on the Failure Train. Trust me: you want truth-telling friends raising normal teens in the real world. If another mom tells you she is certain her teenage son has never even considered porn (oh dear), you may want to de-board because this might not be a safe or honest place for real life. Yes, we maintain solid expectations for our teens, but they are normal kids just like we were, and they will screw up just like we did, and our tribe needs to handle this stage with solidarity and grace, not shock and superiority. If you want judgment, call your mom.
The Hatmakers have real stuff going on well beyond e-cigarettes, and we’ve failed each other more than I thought possible these last few years, but I am here to tell you the teen years are not to be feared or approached with dread. Even better, face them with joy! There is no formula for sailing through this parenting stage. No template works in every family, no list of rules will prevent catastrophe, no one story is exactly like the next. But I can tell you a tiny handful of truths that have carried the Hatmaker clan thus far and still left us liking each other.
We promised our kids early and often: You can tell us anything. We won’t freak out. You can’t shock us. Nothing is a deal breaker, and everything is up for discussion. We primed the pump by broaching plenty of sticky conversations ourselves:
? Who is already having sex in your grade?
? What about God do you have trouble believing?
? How do you and your gay friends talk about sexuality?
? What do you struggle with?
? What have you heard lately that you don’t understand?
? What questions do you have about your own body?
Obviously these questions are met with deer-in-the-headlights paralysis sometimes, but our kids have no doubt we meant what we said; we clearly aren’t afraid of any conversation, any subject, any issue. We removed the cloak of silence that often suffocates hard topics, and with it went much of the corollary angst. For many teens, the hardest thing imaginable is even talking to their parents about real life, so once they do and discover that no one dies, it paves the road for all sorts of dialogue. Don’t wait for them to make the first move here, because teens are notoriously secretive and weird.
Then is the follow-up of actually not freaking out. If you could hear the things our ears have heard in this house while managing to not fall out of our chairs, you would nominate us for awards and prizes and parades. Sometimes your brain has to tell your face to pull it together while your adrenaline loses its crap invisibly. You want to shut down communication? Fall apart, scream, overreact, shun. When you have no earthly idea how to respond yet, just say: “Tell me more about that,” or “I’m listening and need a bit of time to think about this,” or “I’m glad you told me, and we will work this out together.” Keep it open, keep it mutual, stay on the same team instead of isolating your kid. Our teens need to know that we are for them and with them, not just when they are performing well but in struggle, failure, calamity. This is, after all, exactly how God loves us.