Watch out -- I'm about to drop a universal truth on you.
Are you sitting down?
Ready?
Did you take your high blood pressure meds?
Do you need your inhaler nearby? Go grab it.
Ok. Ready?
Here we go:
Parenting is hard.
I KNOW, right?
One of the more challenging elements of raising kids, in my twenty-eight years of parenting experience, is finding out who your kid IS. (Yeah, I know it should be whom but that just seems pedantic. Sue me.) We've usually spent a number of decades just trying to figure out who we are, (ditto) only then to realize we need to start the process over with the small, loud, smelly, and generally unhappy naked mole rat to whom we've just given birth. We all pretty much have some preconceived notions of what our new child will be like, whether we realize it or not. We assume our kiddo basically will be like us, with a generous sprinkling of our SO. And generally our child takes the shortest amount of time possible to disabuse us of our assumption, usually an amount requiring complex math to define exactly how small it is.
Lemme give you an example. My mother was a competitive swimmer as a youth. It just came naturally to her and she loved the feel of the water. Fast forward a couple of decades or so and she found herself a young mom of three kiddos within three years. (This would swell to seven kiddos eventually, but there were only three of us at the time of this story.) One evening, my parents decided to take us all swimming for a fun family night. We went to the local community pool and donned our adorable, homemade swimsuits. Mine was pink gingham checked and had a little skirt. It was the best of what early 1970's fashion had to offer, which, we all know, was truly quite limited.
I think I was about five at the time, easily old enough to begin learning the rudiments of the Dog Paddle. My parents perched each one of us on the edge of the pool and tossed us back and forth to help us get used to the water, and then supported us from underneath as we gleefully kicked our little legs like mad in the chlorine-dense water. After a few go-rounds, it was time to give each of us our first attempt at solo swimming.
One after the other, we all sank like lead rocks. Over and over and over. I went straight to the bottom -- I actually remember looking up from the pool floor and thinking "wait a minute, this isn't right,"-- while my sister refused to get anywhere near water deeper than the bathtub. For years. My mother was floored. She LOVED swimming, her genetic offspring were supposed to love it too. And even if they didn't love it, they should at least be good, or even capable, of it. But no. She had a little pod of anchors, not guppies. We were, in this aspect at any rate, not the people my mother expected to know.
In one way or another, every parent goes through this process. And in one way or another, every parent has to manage the ancillary process of figuring out which elements of his or her child's personality is something to love and accept or something to change. Going back to my mother's experience as an example, she first had to acknowledge that her children did not naturally take to swimming as she had. However, being a wise parent raising children in the Pacific Northwest where we were surrounded by water of all shapes and sizes, she knew she had to change at least part of our natural inclinations and teach us to swim. In the case of my sister, this would be a very long and arduous process -- I think she was friggin' EIGHT before she would willingly dog paddle -- but she did it. This does not mean she forced us to like swimming, I will still avoid putting my face in the water if given the option, but she did need to force a partial change in us as part of being a responsible parent. We needed to know how to swim.
And this is what was on my mind the other day when I had my 9,467,583rd argument of the week with current teen #2.
Me: "This isn't acceptable."
Teen #2: "It's fine."
Me: "This is not what God intended."
Teen #2: "God made me this way."
Me: "And sent you to me so I could fix this."
Teen #2: "I don't need fixing."
Me: "Yes, you do."
Teen #2: "No, I don't. Accept me as I am!"
Me: "No."
Teen #2: "Just accept it, Mom! I'M A SLOB!"
I bet you're thinking I made up this argument. And you'd be halfway right because honestly I don't remember what all we said to each other before he stood in the doorway of his smelly closet and took his stand on his pile of gangrenous socks and rancid gym shorts. But boy howdy I remember the last line.
To be fair to him, he has been loudly proclaiming his citizenship of Slobdom ever since he was old enough to toddle over to a bookcase and remove every item from every shelf he could reach. He has purposefully dumped out toy boxes and Lego tubs and lay down on the piles to relax. He has screamed at and kicked in the shin of anyone who has attempted to clean his room. He has hidden so many snacks in his bed, he contracted ants. He has worn shirts and socks so long without washing actual decomposition was occurring before they could be forcibly removed from his body.
I thought it was a stage. I thought he would grow out of it. I thought it would end when he discovered girls.
I was wrong, so very, very wrong.
But now we have reached the full-blown terror that is hormonal adolescence and teenagery. Truth: you can smell his upstairs room from the downstairs front entry if he leaves his door open. The other day he had to bring his football gear home and I thought I was going to die. Or at least vomit all over everything. Have you ever been in a place where you could actually SEE the smell? It's true, this can happen. I'm here to testify that the odor of my son's sports gear was a yellow-green-brown with horrible little specks of putressence and death. Flies flew too close and died mid-flight plan. The leaves on the front yard shrubbery turned first to gray and then to ash and fell in to nothingness as he walked past. The sun dimmed a little.
And this is where I must make a stand. As a responsible parent, I am morally required to turn the hose on him. With the jet nozzle attachment. For sake of all this is light and good, I must request that his older brothers threaten willing and violent harm on his person if he does not shower. AND USE SOAP. AND SHAMPOO. AND I WILL CHECK. In the name of public health and safety, I will don my Level 4 BioHazard suit and double wash all his laundry even though he told me I was "not allowed in his room for any reason whatever and leave my clothes alone they're just fine nobody cares if there's food on them and it's pointless to wash them because they'll just get dirty again anyway and do not expect him to fold or put away anything because he didn't ask for them to get washed."
This sacrifice I will make for my child because NO.
It's not always easy to know which elements of our child's nature need redirection and which need to be allowed to develop on their own. But sometimes it is. You don't have to like soap, but you will damn well use it.
