Teenagers
Last week I made approximately 30 calls to families from our school district. Prior to this, I had been pondering "what would I do if I was parenting right now" and had come to the conclusion that while all ages of children would be stressful in different ways, the one that I feel would've been the hardest is the high school years. The families that I was assigned to call were those with Juniors or Sophomores. I'm not a big fan of making phone calls, the following system streamlines the process: make a pencil and paper table, look up all the numbers at once before starting to call, and keep track when/who you left a message. In this case, I also added each family to my phone contacts.
One mom, in particular, illustrates a theme I came across while visiting with various families -a need to be validated. This mom's son is a member of my HS band, a very active young man who frequently talks often about the several hours a week he spends mowing/landscaping, when he was in JH I knew he would be a track/cc star bc he RAN to lunch every day, he is rarely absent and never late to school and is looking into vocational ed next year because in his words "college isn't for me". When I reached this mom it was Saturday morning and I said I'm calling to check on MD and see how he's doing. She said "he's not here, he's doing ok but he's getting bored, I let him go out and do some mowing..." she went on to explain how he begged and begged her to let him go and all the stipulations she made regarding keeping his distance, etc.
The tone of this mom and others was that of appreciation for the call and a need for conversation and as I said, validation. I appreciated the opportunity to be a listener which validated me right back. I ended the call with "please let MD know how much I miss him" and, somewhat unexpectedly, I had a deeply emotional response as I hung up the phone.
My work BFF has 4 daughters: 2 at home teenagers and 2 college age who are now at home doing "online classes". I coincidentally (is this a God thing?) ran into her at Wal-mart yesterday (BTW: I got TP! the exact brand and size I usually buy --woot woot!). Over the last few days, she and her senior HS daughter had enjoyed some time cooking together (she and said daughter often lock horns), that she was "letting" her girls watch more tv than she usually would, but that she was "making" her straight-A 8th grader do the school projects. All this and then she summed up with " but at least I don't have toddlers at home". Comparative.
Years ago a 30 something coworker of mine lost her mother suddenly. I remember in her deep sadness, relaying how much harder it was on her 19 yo brother whose loss happened at a time when the relationship was not at its best between him and their mom. I've thought about her words a lot the last few months as I processed the loss my husband's cousin experienced last November. A bunch of teens took a silly joy ride on a Sunday evening leaving my cousin-in-law with one the deepest losses imaginable --the loss of her 17 yo son. At the time of the accident mom and son were not on the best of terms as evidenced by her son living with her mom the previous summer. Insurmountable pain. Thankfully she and her husband, and their teenage daughter have sought professional help.
I believe pandemic caregivers have a lot of challenges and while they are in no way at the level of mourning the death of a son they are painful. My work BFF is raising her 3rd HS Senior -- who no doubt had expectations of her senior year -- how it would look like that of her 2 older sisters. She told her mom recently, "I'm going to put on my make-up, do my hair, and wear my prom dress...just to see it all together" --this is her "story" -prom has been canceled.
Thanks for reading.
Stay well,
AmyBH
No comments:
Post a Comment