Brandon and I also took a page out of my parents’ handbook and decided to have fun with our bigs. We laugh, we tease, we joke, we tell funny stories, we send ridiculous memes. Determined to be the destination for teen fun, when parks and children’s museums ran their course, we bought a used boat and guaranteed ten more years of loyalty. We virtually never say no to their friends coming over. Loving your teens means loving their friends, and the formula is easy: feed them constantly and ask good questions about their lives. The end. Be the home where the teen tribe is welcomed, and you’ll rack up credits quicker than expanding their data plan.
We permanently opened the yes valve on teen shenanigans that hover north of dumb but south of harmful. Fill up the back of your truck with an inflatable swimming pool and drive around the neighborhood? Sure. Host a mancathalon in the backyard with events like Eating Hot Peppers and Trampoline Volleyball? We have insurance. Unless we have a strong reason otherwise, we say yes, thrilled they are mudding in a pasture instead of sneaking out of a super-restrictive home. Can they ruin this freedom? You bet, and they have to earn it back over time, but our relationship thrives better when the reins are clearly in place but not pulled too tight.
Perhaps no parenting stage requires levity more than raising young adults. If you can, at every turn, in any circumstance possible, lighten up. This season is a blink, a tiny bitty handful of years in an entire lifetime in which our children have lost their ever-lovin’ minds (to be more exact, their minds are underdeveloped and impaired; it’s the puberties). It is a millisecond and then it is over, and we surely don’t want to damage our relationships beyond repair during these few years our kids struggle through the painful process of growing up. We can hold the line knowing full well they will not always roll their eyes, come home late, lie to our faces, or sulk like it is their job. In a New York minute they will be grown-ups, and just like we did, they will look back on these years with laughter and plenty of face palms, remembering parents who stuck by them and with them, daresay even enjoyed them despite it all.
Expect to love these years, and even when they are hard, you will.
I, for one, was hanging on to my son’s ankles, barely believing his time under our roof was over. It went so fast. Everyone was right. After moving him into his dorm, I clung to that boy at the airport curb and thought I might never breathe a full, deep breath again. Launching the baby that made me a mother sliced our story in half: when I raised him and when he left. I cried the whole way home. Why do they have to go to college right when they get the most awesome? Why can’t we send our kids to college between fourth and seventh grade? (Kidding. Well, I’m mostly kidding.)
These are the kids of my dreams, and I like them so much. I cannot believe we got to raise them. Their teen years have brought me more joy than I dared imagine. These hooligans are both exactly what I expected and beyond what I hoped for, because who really knew what kind of humans they would turn into? I had an inkling, but then they develop into these amazing, nuanced, better versions of your early caricature, and you realize that they are whole, complete people with bits of you and lots of them and, as it turns out, they belong to God after all. When they were little, I said, “They are on loan from God,” but I didn’t really mean it because it seemed like they actually belonged to me and would forever, but then one enrolls in college seven hours away and it becomes painfully and awesomely clear: Oh my gosh. There he actually goes. Bye, baby.
They are going after all, mamas. Let’s send them off adored, believed in, enjoyed, treasured, lest they forget that until our last breath, our doors are always open, our tables will always be full of food, their people are welcomed with open arms, and no matter what they say, they will always be ours.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.1
— HELEN KELLER
CHAPTER 23
REWOVEN
Matching my mother-in-law’s comprehensive skill set is a thing that will happen to me never. She can do pretty much anything: garden, cook, fish, cross-stitch, golf. She started a food pantry. She knows everything about accounting. She knows everything about holistic oncology. She knows everything about tax codes. She lived in Europe. She lived in Hawaii. Perhaps this simple sentence will help you understand: Jacki once went on a four-day elk hunt in the Rocky Mountains in the dead of winter, shot an elk, then skinned, quartered (is this the word?), and packed the animal down the mountain alone on her horse. She also made my sister-in-law’s wedding dress by hand, because don’t all horseback elk hunters also sew?
In addition to doing everything, she crocheted custom baby blankets for all her grandchildren. These are heirlooms that we all cherish. Jacki made a particularly complicated and elaborate blanket for my daughter Sydney, and when she was still little, our dog at the time, Satan’s own mongrel, went absolutely Tasmanian devil on it and tried to bury it in the backyard. The blanket was destroyed.
I was beside myself. I picked up the tattered yarn and sobbed at the dog, “THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!” I delivered the pile of slobbery, filthy yarn shreds to Jacki to see if anything could be done, because sure, she could make a replacement replica, but these were the threads that covered my sleeping baby girl. I didn’t want a new blanket; I wanted the old one put back together.
Jacki washed the shredded yarn pile by hand, sorted out all the tangles and knots, and slowly, tenderly, over weeks and weeks, put the blanket back together, slightly different than before but using all the same threads. “Bonus,” she told me, “it’s actually sturdier than it originally was, so you can wash it in the machine now!”
Put a pin in that story. We’ll come back to it.
God’s sovereignty. (I know. Where is this little narrative going? Stick with me for three more minutes.) I have a thorny relationship with the concept of God’s sovereignty, this spiritual idea that God is entirely controlling all things at all times in all circumstances, that nothing happens without His say-so, nothing occurs outside of His decree. This discussion in spiritual circles often confuses me. Maybe it is just the semantics, primarily a function of the language used or perhaps the words left out. It probably has something to do with living longer, seeing more, and diversifying my exposure, which challenges my doctrine.