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| May 2020 Tonnage |
Memories are famously unreliable.
In my memory, my days of parenting our children up to their teen years, I was a full time working version of Little Bear's mom: more frazzled and cranky than her on average... but reasonably successful at bonding and very successful at helping our boys develop emotional intelligence and expression. So a solid B. An A if you take into account my other concomitant and simultaneous career accomplishments and marriage to a very busy partner.
165 lbs deadlifts x 5.
I'm pretty sure that my memory of parenting teens is more accurate since more recent. Extremely recent in fact since one of our sons is still one.
I started well grounded. They would say "I hate you" and I would think: "Well, they are expressing themselves, good for them!" Also I was in smug denial: surely, I was reasonably nice and cool and a child and adolescent psychiatrist. That would surely help?
Then I did the math: three sons 2 and half years to 3 years apart. Teenage behaviors emerging at 11 or 12 and going till 20 or so: 16 years or so of scorn, disdain, dysregulation, decreased reciprocity: Aye caramba. After this realization I had a year or so of flunking (including, I confess, fantasies about perhaps moving back to France for a year or two sans enfants) followed by years of an average solid C: not adoring this parenting phase but mastering aspects of it. B + or an A - if you take continued full plate in consideration etc...
185 lbs deadlifts x 5.
I was readying for the parenting young adult phase. This is a consultant phase: you have to accept the relative freedom of your offspring, that you can't closely monitor if there are missiles headed their ways including those they seemingly choose to dance in front of. The nuts and bolts is knowing how to have occasional conversations about hair being on fire without over-reacting as in "oh...you are calling because your hair is on fire? I'm glad to try to help: has this happened before? How did you handle it? Did you think about this? etc...."
Hence the consultant phase label: you consult on the challenges but you don't adopt or solve them. I thought I was going to surf my C into a B.
195 lbs deadlift x 5.
The parenting young adult phase is not meant to be a co-habitating phase. This is a generalization. There are cultures where it is absolutely a co-habitating phase but with explicit or implicit rules that make it easier on parents (and to be fair can be hard on kids where respect of elders is a rigid absolute.)
Enter coronavirus. Parenting one teen and 2 young adults. Two young adults, who expected that their freedom of behaving however they want would survive the close proximity of their mother's brain. Well, what were the odds of that?
205 lbs deadlift x 5.
We're not really going to wash our family laundry in public so to speak but let's just say I am vaguely emerging from a relapsed parenting flunk phase. I can see the outline of a D as in a D in the Distance.
Now all things considered, still an A if one that leaves room for improvement.
Strongly yours,
Anne
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