Time

Yesterday my youngest daughter was sitting at the kitchen island eating some unripe, unsatisfying piece of fruit (not an uncommon occurrence in winter) and she said, "I can't wait until peach season."

I gave her a dirty look and said, "Don't say things like that."

Do I have something against peaches?  No.   I love a good ripe, juicy, sun-kissed peach as much as anyone else.

Right now my real beef is with time.   It's passing way too quickly.   If all goes according to plan, at the end of this summer, we will be packing up our oldest daughter and sending her to college.   Peach season, in these parts, is in August.

I'm in no big rush for peaches.

1997

It's January of 1997 and I am five months pregnant with my oldest daughter.   I can't wait for her to be born.   I look at "What to Expect When you are Expecting" about five times a day.  She has grown from the size of a lentil, to a lima bean, to a grapefruit, to a melon (I don't think they ever compared her to a peach).  Why is time going soooo slow??   My husband and I go to the movies and see a preview of a new move coming out in May.   My daughter is due in May.   I am so excited because the showing of this preview must mean that the movie release is imminent.   May is soon.  The movie studios have told me so.

Unfortunately, the few months between January and May seem to drag forever!  The couple weeks before her due date are unbearably slow and the week AFTER her due date, when she has still failed to make an appearance, seems interminable.

1998

I have just found out that I am pregnant with my second child.  I am terrified.   My oldest takes every second of every waking hour and I can't help but think, "How the hell am I going to do this with two kids?  I don't have any more time!"    One day I express my concern to an older, wiser mom who tells me with great assurance, "There are 24 hours in a day.   No more.  No less.  You do the best you can, that's all you can do.   It doesn't matter how many kids you have, the number of hours in day doesn't change."   Unlike my first pregnancy that seemed to take forever, this one flies by at the speed of light.   Before I know it I am the mother of two.

2000

I have a three year old and a one year old.  They are both sick.  They have fevers.  They won't sleep.  The baby just cries incessantly.  I am spending my day cleaning all different types of bodily fluids and I'm not feeling so hot myself.    I call my husband at work for the 13th time and ask him yet again, "When are you coming home?"  and he says, "The usual time.  I'll be home at 6."   The day has already felt like forever, and when I look at the clock, I see that it is only 9 a.m.   How will I survive until 6?

2002-2010

I would like to refer to these years as the "sweet spot" of parenting.   The kids are in school.  They are old enough to do things for themselves, yet still young enough that they want to do things with us.    They are the years of pumpkin and apple picking, birthday parties and sleepovers, trying new sports, learning to dance and sing.   Our calendar is full of activities, mostly fun activities, and we don't even seem to notice as fall turns to winter and winter turns to spring.   There is always something to do, to look forward to, and as we carelessly, thoughtlessly flip the calendar from month to month, it seems like it will stay like this forever.

2011

I am not really sure when the realization first hit me.  I'm pretty sure it was just before my oldest daughter went to high school, but I can't pinpoint the moment.   All I know is that at some point, some kid I knew, some kid I watched grow up, was going to graduate from high school.   How did this happen?  When did this happen?

Suddenly I went from my blissful ignorance of the passage of time, to complete panic mode.   This is going to happen to us too, isn't it?    Let's stop turning the calendar.  Let's stop doing anything.   Maybe if we stop in our tracks, time will stop with us.

2014 - Fall

My daughter is a senior but we are too busy to think about it very much.  There are colleges to visit, applications to fill out, tests to take, etc.  There are lots and lots of arguments,  Is this college too much of a reach?  Did you finish that essay?   Do they give good financial aid?  Did you finish your homework?  Did you look at this college?  Do you want to go to college?  Do you want to take a year off?  Some people say that the whole college application process, and all it's bureaucracy, was created so that parents and children would both be relieved to part company when it was all over.    It is not an easy time to get through, but when that last application is submitted, and the dust settles, we realize that the entire autumn has passed, the trees are bare, and we didn't even take the time to notice as each leaf, and eventually every leaf, fell.   Half the school year is suddenly over.  Wait, really?

2015

It is here.  There is no stopping it.  There are only 24 hours in a day.  That is it, no more or less.  Time is not particular.  It doesn't rush through the trying parts of life, nor does it stop and let us savor some of our favorite moments.  It just keeps going.

Even so,

I don't want to go to the movies and see a preview for a movie coming out in May, or August, or even, perish the thought, September.

And I most definitely am not looking forward to eating a perfectly ripe, freshly picked, juices dripping down your arm peach.

The Epic Teenage Journey

Occasionally a friend will post on Facebook that his/her child has just turned thirteen.  Frequently, the comments below the post will read like, "Oh, I'm so sorry" or "My condolences" or "time to lock up the liquor".    While I will admit that I sometime smile at these threads, as time goes on, I'm more likely to sigh and feel a tinge of sadness.

Teenagers get a bad rap.

Being a teenager is hard.   It was hard for us, it's hard for them, and it will be hard for future generations.   Every person must go through the transition/transformation from being a child to being an adult and it is a bumpy road for almost everyone.

So many religions and cultures have rites of passage for teenagers and there is a reason for this.   When you are a child, you are taken care of, as an adult you have to take care of yourself, and this takes practice.  Sometimes lots of practice.

In some cultures, a young teenage boy is sent into the wild on his own to learn to survive.  The lesson is pretty simple, "Kill or be killed", "Eat or Be Eaten", "Survive or……….don't".

In other cultures, kids are sent to public high school.   The same lessons are learned.

A few years ago I attended the Bar Mitzvah of a family friend's son.   My friend and I looked at him in his fine suit and marveled at what a fine young man he had become.  Now we both chuckle at the idea that he was "all grown up" at that moment in time.   Yes, physically he had matured into a young man.   He filled out a man's suit quite nicely.   But, in retrospect, he still had a lot of growing up to do emotionally.   But that kind of thing is harder to see.

Most of the hardest lessons in life have to be learned through experience.   There is really no way around it.   We can lecture our kids all we want saying, "don't drink, don't smoke, and don't text and drive!"   Unfortunately, our words are often not as effective as a hangover, or a dented car.
This is a universal truth.  It was true for us, it is true for them.

Last September I listened to two teenage girls in my kitchen mooning (is mooning still a word?) over the same boy.  I told them, "don't let him come between you two.  Boys will come and go, but girlfriends are forever."  They listened to me and lived happily every after.  No.  As if.   Within 48 hours of that conversation they were at each others throats and the next few months were filled with brutal conversations and horrific texts that quickly tore apart a dear friendship with much collateral damage in their wake.   Nine months later they are slowly nursing the bruised friendship back together, but it will never be the same.   BTW, neither of them "has" the guy. I wish I could say it won't happen again.   I wish.

These days social media makes being a teenager even harder.   When I was a teenager, I spent many hours on the phone with my closest friends and we would share our deepest secrets, crushes, and yes, we might even gossip a bit about our mutual friends and classmates.  But, when we hung up the phone the conversation was over.   Now kids text each other, and those words live forever.   One kid takes a screen shot of someone else's text and suddenly the whole world is seeing it.  Secret crushes are quickly revealed, as are thoughtless catty remarks.    Of course, we all tell our kids, "be careful what you text" but they don't listen until they are crying in their rooms because no one is talking or texting them because of some idiotic words they thoughtlessly threw into cyberspace.  Even then they might not listen.  

Eventually, they do learn the lessons, one by one, inch by inch, bruise by bruise.   As parents, much of the time we observe with white knuckles, and hope these lessons are learned without any serious ramifications.   When you teach your kid to drive it is just a metaphor for raising a teenager.   You grab hold of the seat, press the "invisible" brake and pray that you don't hit a tree.

And, as hard as it is, sometimes you get brief glimpses of the adult that your child is becoming.   You hear your child say, "You know, I am kind of upset with X but I think I'll talk to her in person instead of texting her."  good idea.   You come home from work to find that your child has put all the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and started the laundry and you didn't even have to yell at anyone!  Bonus!  Your child comes up to you and says, "Hey Mom!  Will you proof read my English paper?"  Haha!  As if that would ever happen!  (just some wishful thinking here).   But slowly you do start to see the insides matching the outside that fills out that man's suit so nicely.

Perhaps instead of treating the teenage years like the plague, we should acknowledge the tremendous journey that it is.   And, instead of offering our condolences when someone hits this momentous milestone, we should offer our support as the child sets off into the wild with only the crudest of tools in his hand.

And please, always remember, we look forward to your safe return.