They always say the teen years are hard,
and you nod the same half-hearted nod you did when, as a mother of a tantruming toddler,
they used to tell you to enjoy every moment, because the years would fly by before you even realized what end was up, and where you even are.
You plod along through back to school shopping, and a hundred frustrating quests for new dress shoes, school band concerts, lost lovies, trips to the pharmacy, and late nights up researching remedies and just what you should do,
until one day you lift your eyes up from your whirlwind of sleepless nights and “I thought I told you”s, and hardly recognize the girl standing in front of you.
You don’t know what happened…
Maybe it feels like time moved on without you because,
though over a decade has passed,
Just maybe you’re still in that same old shirt –
But the child you were just holding, bandaging, tickling, asking what’s all over her skirt,
You now have to squint to even recognize her.
She hardly comes out of her room anymore,
But oh, how you miss her.
She doesn’t know you sometimes stand outside her door praying that the fiery spark she was born with still burns, though hidden, somewhere inside of her.
That spark that could warm you or burn entire forests down.
Which one it will be today?
You can’t really ever be sure.
That girl staring at her phone screen,
and lost in her group chat doesn’t know that while she is busy transforming into something new,
you are gathering up memories, and lost moments, and every rare smile or hug that you can, longing for the little round face with straight-cut bangs you once had;
Wishing for just one more day with her dimpled fingers in your hand…
The ratty looking bunny,
That self-portrait she painted,
The way her eyes looked at golden hour that one day;
All kept pieces of her – The girl you had.
You store away things about her she’s placed outside her room.
No one explains to you when your baby is new that one day, while your daughters are busy trading their little girl things, your jewelry box will whisper soft lullabies of days gone by,
filled with lost teeth,
and old Santa letters with backwards ‘E’s, envelopes filled with soft first hair clippings.
They will let go.
You will cling to everything.
These years are lonely, parenting ages 10-16.
God saw it fit for me to have four girls;
None like the other.
Earth, air, fire, and water.
Every element has been traced at night by my fingertips.
These middle years have nearly wrecked me.
I sometimes give myself bathroom mirror pep-talks.
”You’ve done all this before!
You know they’ll come back around.
They’ll seem human once more.”
I sit up nights late, when the whole house is asleep, and I look through old photographs of them smiling with their wrinkled noses and so many missing teeth.
It was all so much easier then…
Why does this all hurt so much?
Without them in my lap, what will happen to me?
One minute you’re in the lead, winning with your kids,
and the next you don’t know where you even are or where you’ll land.
I try to have grace for it, and remember how it felt to be them as I pass their closed doors,
but sometimes I will my own spirit to seep under the door crack;
Invisible. Enveloping.
Suddenly reminding them, with my sheer presence,
of a thing they want back.
My heart longs to fling the closed doors open, and gather them, giggling, in my arms, and take in the scent of their 3 in 1 shampoo, their breath a strawberry cereal bar;
But now it’s all expensive leave-in conditioner, and looks that say,
“Ugh. PLEASE leave my room.”
It’s tears and irritation.
It’s earbuds when you’d give anything for them to just, please, talk to you.
I remember being a teenager and getting in a fight with my own mom.
All I remember of it was that she was begging me to have some understanding for her,
but I couldn’t then.
The distance between us felt vast.
I was in the middle of becoming me,
and she was already all the way her.
I got out of the car in the middle of the fight, and remember rolling my eyes.
My last glimpse of her was her putting her face in her hands and sobbing as I walked away.
The only thing I felt was annoyed at her that day, but that 15 minutes in time has never left my memory.
I sometimes think that image, that moment, is sealed in for the sole purpose of being able to look back on from this side now;
Of reminding me how time marches on and, later, brings you tight into it with so much clarity.
Now I’m the one left in the car with my
chin quivering,
without my daughter responding to my “Hope you have a good day.”
I remind myself that they can come back around because of that one memory.
My mother is now back to top in my heart.
I’m so grateful she forgave me, and persevered even though I
repeatedly broke her heart.
My daughter is still leaping over the cracks in the earth.
When her feet land, I want to be the solid ground underneath.
She is me back then,
and I will try to remember all the ways that
I was her.
We just keep on loving them.
That’s all we can do.
One foot, then the next.
Keep waiting to hear their beckoning from where we wait outside of their room,
We wait up on low-lit sofas,
We wait in car,
We have to believe they will come back to us one day, once they,
just like we once did,
find who they are.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
