My eldest child just turned 17. There have been certain ages throughout his life that have seemed like huge jumps forward to me, and 17 is one of them. To me, a 17 year old boy just sounds a lot older than a 16 year old boy. And then there is the fact that in less than 12 months from today, he will legally be an adult. At that point, he can do whatever the heck he wants and there won't be a darn thing I can do about it. Some days that sounds like heaven, while other days it sounds like hell.
But before the heaven or hell that will come with his legal emancipation next year comes the period we are in now - a period that I find to be an awful lot like parenting purgatory. He is neither adult nor child.
For the next 11 months, I still get to tell him what to do, but I am experimenting with how much to loosen the apron strings - how much to let him begin to really own the consequences of his personal decisions and actions. And when it comes to mothering my complicated, brilliant, lazy, sweet, kind, thoughtless, shy, musical 17-year-old firstborn, figuring out when to push, when to pull and when to let go entirely is a tricky, tricky thing.
I have already watched my son make some mistakes during his adolescence. Some of them have been very painful for me to observe, but none has yet been life altering. They have all been trial and error missteps - relatively minor blips along his journey. Now, though, we are entering a period where he will begin to face choices that can ripple out through his adulthood. Less and less can I rescue him from his own screw-ups, or make his good decisions for him.
For the past three years, I have nearly driven myself insane trying to force him to study - to get him to understand that his decision to slack his way through high school would eventually limit him in ways he would find unpleasant. However, I can now tell you through hard-won parenting experience that you can lead a stubborn teenage boy to the library but you can't make him work. You can punish, cajole, threaten, argue, cry, holler and stomp your feet, but ultimately, either he will decide to take high school academics seriously or he won't.
And now that he's 17, I've decided to hand that responsibility and worry back over to my nearly-grown son. I will no longer shed any tears over his chosen academic path. He knows I am here to cheer him on, to pay for tutors, to drive him to the bookstore, or do whatever else he needs to support his academic endeavors, but the decision as to whether he will make As or Fs for the remainder of high school belongs to him. And yes, the decision as to whether he will go directly to college at age 18, something I always expected with 100% certainty that all of my children would do - or take some years off before college to travel, go live on The Farm, or even work at McDonald's - is also his decision to make, and to own.
On the other hand, I struggle with not wanting to baby him in other ways, like continuing to do his laundry, or to pay for the extras he should be paying for himself at this point. Old habits die hard, and it just seems like yesterday that I was tying his shoes and patting his back to get him to sleep. Sometimes I dream that he is still 4-years-old and he's climbing higher and higher on the monkey bars, and if I don't position myself just perfectly under him, he'll plummet to the ground in a pile of broken bones when he falls, which he surely will. I always wake from the dream in a panic. And then I remember that he's now nearly six feet tall.
Some parents end up with a child who makes this fundamentally disruptive transition period of late adolescence easy on them. I have not. I do have complete confidence he'll emerge from this purgatory period as the good and honorable man I have raised him to be, but I suspect we are in for a few more bumps along the way as he learns how to be an adult, and I learn how to let him be one.
SUBSCRIBE TO THIS BLOG
FOLLOW KATIE'S BLOGGING ON TWITTER OR FACEBOOK
READ MORE OF KATIE'S BLOGGING
