Parenting is the hardest life test you’ll ever take and
never truly know whether or not you passed.
Sure, there may be sections of the test you may find out how well you
did, but truly getting a pass or fail score probably won’t ever come. Blindly, we go through the struggle of
attempting to pass a test with no right or wrong answers. We may try to “cheat” by asking our
classmates for the answers, but they’re taking a totally different test! Basically, we’re screwed. The time we have before we take the test to
study is brief. It almost feels like we
get only a few minutes to glance at the curriculum before we’re head first in
the exam. What makes this test so
significantly important is that the outcome of our performance weighs heavily
on our entire “life” grade. Ugh.
When I first held my daughter in my hands I won’t deny the
level of arrogance that I had in being a great mother. At the stupid and immature age of 18, there
was this sense of confidence that was so wildly misplaced that it could have
been clinically diagnosed. Nevertheless,
I stepped into my role, as a mother with what I felt was precision and
determination. Looking at the first
months as a mother now, I have no emotional reaction except maniacal
laughter. It wasn’t until the age of 30
that I felt I had the justification to feel confident as a mom. I realized that prior to Alex, I wasn’t
passing this test as well as I thought I would.
I almost treated my daughter’s early years as a practice test. Epic.
Fail.
My kids are spread apart in age. I have an 18 year old, a six year old, and a
two year old. In between my first and
second, I had my sweet Connor who would have turned 8 this last June. When I tell people the ages of my kids, I’m
met with wide eyes. It’s just the way it
turned out. I get a little piece of
entertainment when I elaborate on the reality of my life with my kids when I
inform them that my oldest is married and in the Army. I have a son who still poops his pants and a
kid who is probably pooping her pants as she navigates the real world as a
private in basic training. My test feels
somehow rigged. But, I digress. There is nothing more polarizing when
evaluating your skills as a parent when you have such a gap in ages.
I recently posted a status on Facebook asking how you define
whether or not you have successfully parented.
What characteristics are there in your kids to either validate or
invalidate your performance as a parent?
The answers were very much what you would think. If your kids are happy, healthy, and good
contributors to society: WINNING! There was a huge part of my life’s story that
prompted such a query of my fellow parenting colleagues. My daughter had recently gotten married
despite significant protest from her dad and I.
I was devastated. I’m still
devastated.
There has been trepidation as to writing this blog. I nearly NEVER air out “dirty laundry”
online. I make a concerted effort to
protect the more intimate details of my life.
I try to share my experiences without getting to specific as to the
roots of the topics I tend to write about.
Even more so when people provoke those emotional experiences. I’m sure one could read between the lines,
I’m not that brilliant a writer.
However, this time I’m not feeling so delicate.
There is absolutely no regret at all when making the choices
I did when I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. The magnitude of such a responsibility was
easy for me to accept. I had no problem
getting married and “doing the right thing.”
I had plans. I wanted to go to
school and be an English major with a minor in journalism. I wanted to get the hell out of Sierra Vista
and find out who I was the traditional and hard way. There was so much I wanted to do. I wanted to travel as much as I could. I wanted to meet as many people as possible
and sponge on the experiences of others.
My bucket list was healthily long and achievable. Peeing on a stick instantly changed every
single idea I had of my life. Suddenly,
she was the only person in the world I cared about.
As she came to an age where she started to fantasize about
what her life would look like, I took the opportunities to impart my knowledge
and dreams onto her. I made very
selective choices with my words when telling her what I didn’t want for her. What I didn’t want for her was violently
obvious to me. I wanted better for her
than what ended up happening for me. I
remember talking to friends about this.
How can I tell my daughter to not short change herself without her
feeling or thinking for even a second that I regretted her? This test question was worth a LOT of
points. The way I handled this part of
parenting her would substantially impact her life. This wasn’t a moment where I could just spout
off the answers I thought I had without worry for consequence. There had to be a poetry in which I tried to
lead with a massive aura of hypocrisy.
Whoa.
When my mother informed my father of my pregnancy, I will
never forget overhearing their conversation.
Through the tears he graphically cried, he asked over and over one
simple question: How did we fail
her? He asked me that to my face. I cried, too, as I answered that he hadn’t. He explained to me that he had done so much
to try and prevent this kind of circumstance from ever coming into my
life. He wept as he sat on the living
room floor, with his head in his hands, in total shock as a section of the test
he was taking was given a failing grade.
It wasn’t until we spoke during his dying days that he discovered, he
hadn’t failed at all.
The day my daughter got married, I had a hint as to the
level of disappointment my own parents endured during my own nuptials. For years, I have hated looking at pictures
of my wedding because the camera captured the very essence of how both my
ex-husband’s and my own parents really felt about the path their children were
taking. Even though they wanted us to
get married, they knew that staying married would be a fight, being married
would challenge the core of our personalities, and the success rate was not in
our favor. The catch 22 was so evident,
but it was the lesser of two evils. Not
unlike this year’s election.
The reason I only had a hint into the minds of my parents
was because of very uncomfortable difference. She is not pregnant. There was no sense of urgency for her
marry. The tip of the iceberg of her
life has only started to show above the ocean she has to navigate. I still cannot wrap my mind around the choice
she made to complicate such a delicate period of her life. It’s hard enough to be 18 and embarking on
your own journey but to add the responsibility of another person’s needs and
desires? It makes no sense to me at all! Needless to say, I expressed my lack of
approval with my over-inflated-sense-of-self teenage daughter. It didn’t go well. It didn’t matter that I had intimate
experience with how hard it is to “grow up” with the responsibility of other
people at risk if she failed.
This whole story has an asterisk next to it with a very long
back-story. I’m not going to go into
that whole thing right now. But, I will summarize,
as it does matter to how my parenting test is going. My daughter and I have not had a healthy
relationship since the divorce. In fact,
before I found out she was getting married, we had not spoken in nearly three
months. I had only seen her twice in
that period of time and no speaking was actually conducted. Her opinion of me is so low that she has
literally adopted another person as her “mother.” I may, in the near future elaborate on
this. For the sake of story telling,
this piece of information is instrumental in understanding part of why our
conversation about her decision to marry went so horrifically wrong.
As a parent, we have a job to coach our kids through the big
stuff. For a while, we have to simply
place bumpers around them until they’re ready to take things on their own. Letting our kids go screw themselves up is
hands down one of the most gut wrenching experiences of mother/fatherhood. I hope that one day, my daughter will see
that me sort of yelling at her that there’s a cliff up ahead will not be
thought of as controlling and/or manipulating but as truly loving her. She told me, “I’m an adult and can make my
own choices.” I was so amply prepared for
that statement. As if reading from the
script of life, I said, “I’m not speaking to you as a child. I’m speaking to you as an adult. If you think for one minute that adults don’t
give counsel and guidance to each other, you’ll figure it out soon enough. Mature grown ups know when something is too
much to do alone and find other grown-ups to help them through it. Why do you think I spend so much time on the
phone with my best friend?”
I didn’t see her again until she was standing in front of
the courthouse. She wore a red prom
dress that showed entirely too much cleavage to be considered classy. Her to-be husband did not shake her father’s
hand, or mine, nor did he even acknowledge our existence. Those who came to “support” the wedding
gathered around them. Her father and I
were treated as no more than an afterthought and the air of annoyance was
ripe. We were passively greeted and even
more blatantly ignored. I watched as my
daughter prepared for her ceremony with what felt like teenagers gathering
before the homecoming dance. The women
my daughter has replaced me with, fawned over her and complimented her detailed
look. She had a bouquet. Her hair was done. There was detail given to the event and I
wasn’t part of a single second of it. I
couldn’t breathe.
Each moment I had to endure by attending this major event of
my daughter’s was wrought with nausea, faintness, a lumped throat, and finally
(thank God) numbness. I wasn’t invited
to any of the after ceremony activities.
I went home and cried like an infant with colic. I was grateful I wasn’t on my week with the
boys. The myriad of hysterical emotions
I had to endure would have been too much to handle with the needs of small
people impeding the intense need to have a meltdown. I had a hint of what it felt like to be my
parents. For the first time in a long
time, I felt such grief for their absence that I worried for a few days that my
depression was going to take a muscle man’s grip to my life.
Today, my daughter is in training for a career in the
Army. I don’t have a single idea as to
how she is doing. The details of her
enlistment are a mystery to me. I have
no idea if she is happily married or not.
My only daughter has disowned me and has had no qualms in expressing her
disapproval of me. So, I have no choice
but to evaluate how my test has gone so far.
Right now, with the status of my relationship with my daughter being so
strained, I can feel nothing less than failure with her. I have made the hardest decision in my life
when it comes to my motherhood. I have
stepped back and I’m giving it to God. I
am giving it to time. I am giving it to
hope. I just pray earnestly that taking
a step back and giving her space to grow and develop will end with her coming
back to me and maybe getting the chance to get some extra credit to help
improve the grade I’ve been given in the test of parenting my first child.
