My Mom Era

Motherhood never ends, and parenting teens may be the most challenging thing I've done so far, but I'm doing the best I can

I remember walking in the woods with my dad. We were in Michigan visiting my grandparents while on our family vacation from Wyoming. I was sixteen years and one day old when he dropped the bomb that blew up my teenage existence.

We were moving to Michigan.

And I spent the next two years clawing my way out of a vortex that threatened to completely pull me under.¹

When my husband and I made the sudden decision to move back to Indiana two and a half years ago, my dad’s words on that fateful day echoed in my ears: “I don’t want to lose you.”

Our kids were ten and twelve. They had survived a year of living through a global pandemic, their foundations had been rattled when we told them that mom had lost her job and we didn’t know what that meant, and now we were ripping them away from everything they knew and loved to return to a state that was a distant memory.

As parents, we desperately want to protect our kids from the monsters. We wanted them to live peaceful lives, to grow and thrive and experience the least amount of pain. We know that at some point, they will see the world for what it is. We want them to be prepared, but we also want to put off those realities for as long as we possibly can.

But what do we do when we are at least partially responsible for their pain?

From the moment we brought our newborn daughter home, I wanted nothing more than to protect her. I wanted her to know that I was in her corner and that I loved her unconditionally. My relationship with my mom is loving but complicated. I wanted my relationship with my daughter to be different.

That first year of motherhood challenged that desire. My loving husband helplessly stood by as he watched his crying wife and daughter fail through attempts at breastfeeding. A few months later, even though I wasn’t directing the fall play at my high school, drama with the production still pulled me away from my infant daughter. And as the curtain closed on my last-ever musical production as a teacher, my husband sat at home alone with a crying, feverish one-year-old who we would discover had a urinary tract infection.² Two months later we moved to another city and I fell apart, emotionally and mentally scrambling to pick up the pieces and hold it all together for her, attempts that became all the more futile when I discovered I was pregnant with our son.

We can dream that we will be the perfect parents, that we will fix the mistakes of our parents and this time, it will be different. We will break toxic family cycles and raise a generation stronger than us. This is true, even for those of us who grew up in loving families, because family is complicated.

But we’ll still make new mistakes. Sometimes we may even make old mistakes. Despite all of the parenting books and “experts” giving us their advice, parenting is not a science.

So what do we do when we know that no matter how hard we try, we are still imperfect human beings raising imperfect human beings who are going to fight us as they grow to independence and into the people they were created to be?

We fight like hell to make sure they know that we set boundaries because we love them, that we love them unconditionally, and that we will be there for them even when they want to hold us at arm’s length.

What has that looked like for me as a girl mom?

We read books aloud until she was eleven, and then when she was done sharing her reading time with me, we still read together in bed, side-by-side, until it was time for her to go to sleep.

She inherited my love for writing and we go on occasional writing dates, both of us sitting in Starbucks with our drinks next to us and computers on our laps, typing away until the words are done for the day.

When the boys are gone, we’ve watched classic movies from when I was a teenager and young adult, most recently My Big Fat Greek Wedding. And she’s the one I can count on to go to the high school where I teach to watch musicals and then listen to the professional soundtracks in the car.

Over the years we’ve talked about the mundane and the hard while going on hikes or late at night as I still brush her hair before she goes to sleep.

And last night Taylor Swift bridged the generation gap when I took her and a friend to see the Eras tour movie, mesmerized by a show that we could not get tickets to. I listened to my little girl sing nearly every song, gleefully shaking off another exhausting week of high school for a night with her mom and one of her besties.

Parenting is the hardest job I’ve chosen, but it’s hard because human beings are hard. We’ve fought over clothes and going out with friends and everything in between. But I also love these teen years. I love watching my daughter and son grow into the young adults that they are going to be. I love the deep conversations and seeing them become more complete people, full of hopes and dreams and goals they are determined to achieve.

I’m fully immersed in my Mom era, but I also know the days are ticking. I’m already making a countdown of the number of vacations we have left before we are down to one kid at home and I’m dreading it.

But I’m going to fully embrace nights like last night, because I know that this era won’t last forever.

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1. This story is far more complicated and I’ll tell it to my paid subscribers when I have the time to dedicate to to telling it right.

2. I directed four fall plays and five spring musicals in my years of teaching the first time we lived in Indianapolis.