I'm having one of those days. One that requires more patience and understanding than I am ready to dole out fueled by only the first cup of coffee in the morning. A morning filled with what appears to be a typical rough time getting kids up and out the door, but is really masking some shifts in the mother-son paradigm of our little world. Either the road is getting bumpier or we're just heading for a curve and my view of what is to come is hidden from view. More likely it's just another bridge, one covered in clouds and fog and we're lost in the middle, are we going backwards or forward?
On the surface, what it looked like was that no one really wanted to get up this morning and my oldest lost track of time and we walked out the door 8 minutes late. That doesn't sound like much, but making two different school drop-offs on two different ends of town so that I can make it back home in time to relieve Scott of Riley-duty and he can leave for work means a pretty tight schedule in the morning. I wasn't pleasant as I encouraged Tyler to grab everything that was supposed to be in his bag and his shoes to put it all together in the car. Especially when I had told him it was time to go while he was still finishing his cheerios and he made no move to get out of his chair and rush. I didn't yell or anything, but I was definitely insistent.
I dug two dollars of change out of my purse and told Tyler to stick it in his pocket so he could buy his lunch since he hadn't made his yet. He wanted me to check the lunch calendar to see what they were having, a fact I tried to explain was moot since he absolutely had no time to make a lunch now, and then argued with me that the items I listed used to always be Thursday lunches, not Fridays. I think I remember how to read a lunch calendar, but judging by my kids attitude this week you would think I had barely managed to graduate high school. By the time I walked out the door with the last 'COME ON TYLER, I MEAN IT' and got Scooter in the car, we were both completely out of sorts. When he walked up to the car it was with some serious, above age level, sarcasm and a comment like 'You don't think I'm being serious?' or something close to it. Whatever he said, I was ticked.
Generally, I give all the kids a little leeway as far as respect and grumbling and complaining goes the first couple of weeks of school. Even if they aren't one of the kids that has to get used to a full day of work and learning, our schedules change pretty drastically from summer hours to school schedule. I try not to correct too harshly, too quickly when I know that I am still not used to getting up with the alarm clock again and all the running and schedule demands so they must not be either. Maybe I'm a little too lax during these weeks, but usually by the third week of school we are getting back into the groove and moving along pretty well. Everyone had a great holiday weekend and a little too much fun so this week was pretty tough too and even though I got a tad more diligent, I still let some stuff go that I normally would have nipped in the bud pretty quickly.
The clock is running out on back-to-school indulgence though and my kids know it. Each day they are asked to do more, be more and complain less. Bad attitudes and less respect are getting way less tolerance from Mom and for the most part, they are snapping back into normal behaviors. Sort of. I do have a pre-teen in the house. Or a tween. Or whatever they are calling it these days. What I have is a son on the cusp of adolescence who is in many ways wise and mature beyond his years and in others is still the little boy who needs reassurance and cuddling and boundaries. It's uncharted territory for both of us and there are days we struggle. I feel bad for him sometimes because, as all first children are, he is my guinea pig. Tyler is the kid I figure everything out on and then I'm better prepared to handle the next child when they get to this stage.
There are wonderful things about Tyler getting older. Our conversations are amazing, watching him figure out who he actually is as a person is enlightening and seeing him blossom into someone with presence and integrity is overwhelmingly gratifying. Some of this getting older stuff is pretty easy, like buying face soap so I can teach him to add a face wash to both morning and evening routine in order to avoid as many pimples as possible while his body begins to change. Some of it is awkward, like talking about 'bodily' response to girls bodies even when his brain isn't ready to acknowledge anything remotely interesting about the opposite sex and the resulting normal behaviors about those responses for every single boy in the world, things that he WILL do eventually. (I think we might have hit the wall on Mom having those conversations though - Scott and Brian are going to have to take them over soon.) I think it's great that Tyler can be left on his own for an hour or more now while I run to the store or soccer practice. I love that he volunteers to watch the boys ride their bikes out front while I make dinner and that I can trust him to be attentive.
And then there is the trickier stuff. Responsibility, self control, confidence without cockiness, truthfulness without rudeness. There are a lot of intangibles that Tyler is in the midst of learning or beginning to discover and teaching those things to him is completely new ground for me too. There are moments that I feel bad about asking him to be so much more than he has been in the past and then there are times that I am not giving him enough chance to show me how much more he can be. With two younger brothers in the house, Tyler often feels I am not being fair when I ask him to do something that I don't ask them for. Like all children, he has forgotten what went before.
The first day of school brought indignation and disbelief that I was making Scooter's lunch for him since Tyler has to make his own. He doesn't remember that he didn't make his own until 2nd grade. Just like Tyler was, Scooter is capable of packing about 80% of his own lunch and sometimes he helps me, but I have to monitor what goes in there or he won't have enough of the protein and carbs that he needs to get through the day with his head on straight. If I don't watch it or make it, Scooter will have a lunch filled with extra juice boxes and dessert and nothing tangible or healthy. He's learning what goes into a proper school lunch and eventually he will handle it himself, just like his big brother. There's a lot of that, complaining about what's fair and unfair, going on and I am constantly reminding Tyler that things were once the same for him but he is older now and can do more, handle more.
Tyler's had a lot on his plate this year, emotionally. There have been so many changes in his world and he has been faced with realities and situations that I would have been content to not have intrude on him until he was much, much older. Isn't that what we all want? To protect our children as long as we can from the harshness of life while we prepare them to handle it all? Sometimes life doesn't work that way though and Tyler has definitely had to start handling things this year that I would have hoped he never would or at least not until he was an adult. We've asked him to accept a lot and deal with it on terms like a much older person than his short 11 years. He can come home and fall apart and cry if he needs to and he sometimes does, but he often chooses to muscle through and find the best in every situation.
One minute I am asking Tyler to be more adult and the next I expect him to just be a child, a little boy. One minute Tyler expects to be treated as someone already half grown and others he still wants me to take care of everything like he was only 5 years old. This morning, after his sarcastic outburst, I told him my patience was running out and the attitude needed to improve - quickly. Being disappointed that we are out of waffles is one thing, being mad and complaining about it like the whole world let him down is another, for example. And then I found myself having a conversation with him that I was sure was at least 4 years away. Or at least, I was having a version of the conversation.
It went something like this: "Tyler, you are in kind of one of those in-between places of life right now. In some ways you are ready to be more grown-up and in others you still want to be a little boy and have things taken care of for you. You don't want me to remind you to do everything and keep you on schedule, but you also don't want to take full responsibility for your own schedule and commitments either. If I don't ask you to make sure your backpack is ready to go and then you forget, you get mad at me because it's not done, I didn't tell you and you forgot and it's not your fault. If I do remind you and try to keep you on task, you act like I am nagging you and not taking you seriously or respecting that you know what needs to be done. You are going to have to decide which way it's going to be. You know what time we leave every day and you know what needs to be done before we walk out the door. Most days you have all of that down and are ready to go. Today, you were sitting right in front of a clock while you dawdled over your breakfast. You knew that you hadn't packed your lunch yet, didn't have shoes & socks on, and hadn't packed your backpack last night like I asked you to - you knew all that and could easily look at the clock and see that you were out of time. Instead, when I told you for the fourth time that we needed to be in the car and on the way, you complained about a solution I gave you to the lunch issue, grumbled while you scrambled to pick up backpack items that were laying all around your floor and then told me you hadn't heard me the first time that it was time to go so you stayed at the table to finish your breakfast. Which way do you want it? Do you want to be fully responsible for all of it and I won't say a word to you and then you take all the consequences for what is or is not done? Or do you want me to remind you of the time and keep you on schedule and then you WILL lose ALL the attitude and sarcasm while I am doing it? You are going to have to make the decision."
It was vaguely reminiscent of the 'If you want to be treated like an adult, you need to act like an adult' conversations I had with my parents during my teenage years. I felt kind of bad about it when he wouldn't speak to me and got out of the car pouting. I am a firm believer in natural consequences and letting my kids figure stuff out on their own, even if I don't always know how to implement that kind of discipline. I mean, should the natural consequence of the lunch thing have been no lunch at all instead of a bought lunch? Probably, but I also know that Tyler would have tried to 'rush' a lunch packing and made us more late and it's also important to me that they eat a decent lunch during the day, regardless. He wasn't happy about buying today though, so I think he got the point.
I've heard and read that the way this is supposed to work is that when kids are small, parents make all the rules and kids get almost no freedom or choices. As they get older, the responsibility increases and the rules decrease. That's very generalized and actually not really the truth. The rules just change. We don't have rules anymore like 'You can't go out in the front yard without a parent', but in it's place we add three new, less definable rules like "Yes, you need to be honest at all times, but that doesn't mean we say everything we think when we think it. You don't come right out and tell someone that they are stupid or fat or clueless, even if they are." (Okay, the crossing guard told me off on Wednesday, I am still kind of mad and I think my attitude might be bleeding through.)
Tyler is a super responsible kid and really, the times that he forgets something are a lot less than with other kids. So, am I pushing him too hard? I sometimes think we ask a lot of our children too early. For example, I am trying to teach Scooter and Riley proper guest/host/friend etiquette (and by example a couple of his friends). "No, honey, you can't go knock on his door and tell him you want to play IN his house. You can invite him to play and then y'all can figure it out together where you are going to do that. If he invites you in, then let me know you will be there and that is fine." But why are we in a hurry to teach our kids those lessons? Isn't the brutal honesty of 'I'm done playing, you can go home now' a tad more healthy for all of us than teaching our kids to be so polite that they are hiding what they truly are?
The flip side, of course, is that we don't ask as much of our children as in generations past. We coddle our kids and become helicopter moms (because we 'hover', love that term) and work very hard at building their self-esteem and self-confidence and self-awareness in ways that were never even considered 2 generations ago. It could be said that we don't do enough to let our kids fall, fail and flounder in a safe place so that they are better prepared to handle real life. I know I am guilty of this in a lot of ways, especially with Scooter. I tend to ask more of Tyler, but give Scooter more space because of his personality. And honestly, I think I am the hardest on Riley, but he also tests and pushes me more than the other two combined.
Wow. It's a conundrum. It's a big question. How much do I push and when? How much can they handle and when should I give? Tyler is definitely in an in-between place, figuring out if he's ready to grow up or he still wants to be a kid. But, I am in an in-between place too. I'm trying to figure out what he's ready for and what he needs as well and it isn't always clear cut or easy going. It's one of those cloudy places and I can't see the other side of the bridge we're crossing until I get through. Are we already half way across and risking turning around and going backwards? Are we almost to the end of it and we'll see clearly again with just one or two more steps? Or have we just barely started, taking only one uncertain step towards more confusion?
Hmmm. I have no answers. If you have some, send them my way - I am always listening!
Thanks and God Bless
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