Adult Children

One of the more pleasant parts of parenting I am discovering is talking with my adult children about their lives. Rather than me needing to direct them, etc. they can now come to me with questions on a more reciprocal level.

Last night I had a most pleasant and wide ranging conversation with my oldest son Bart who is now 24. We discussed his options with getting out of an oppressive cell phone contract, his upcoming surgery for a sports injury and all the pros and cons of when to schedule that. Then we had a long discussion about his passion Ultimate Frisbee and how he might be able to turn his passion into a job coaching and teaching.

I showed him how to blog (amazing that I might be more technologically proficient in something than that generation) and he was extremely appreciative as he wants to start a blog about....., you guessed it Ultimate.

It was so nice to talk comfortably without either of us having an agenda. And I knew that I would not be held responsible for his decisions even if he asked me my opinion!

It was kind of tough negotiating this relationship through his late high school and early college years, but we hung in there with sweet results.

Everybody is in flux

Every last one of the kiddos is in the throes of change, angst, emotional upheaval of some kind, and desperately needing their parents at least to hate on them. DH and I are reeling from the demands.

Some of the change is good, and developmentally appropriate. Bart is moving into a house with a friend and he has needed advice, cleaning supplies and general moral support.

James is flying high as his Ultimate Frisbee team from UC Santa Cruz is going to the nationals this weekend in boulder Colorado. He is happy, excited and really wants some of his family to be there, so even though DH has just flown in this AM from Shreveport, LA and has to drive up to Lansing and Kalamazoo on Sunday evening, he is nonetheless flying out to Boulder tomorrow AM to see the Frisbee tournament. He flies back on Sun noon and leaves for Michigan Sunday at 5 or so. DH is physically exhausted, but James needs one of us there.

Brooke is not dealing well with the transition from school to summer break. She is having some issues in her Supported Community Living placement and as is her way as she becomes upset she is holding her bowels and they are talking about a hospitalization again. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it almost always goes all that way. At least she is kind of used to all the procedures now and she is less frightened of the whole experience. Nonetheless she is calling in tears or angry, demanding that we fix things, or change things or somehow make her life less hard than it is. It is very sad to deal with Brooke as she is just a 4 or 5 year old in a 21 year old body and there are so many things she doesn't understand or deal well with.

Annie has been calling and texting me until I want to scream as she is trying to convince me that she is somehow miraculously cured of all her issues, Traumatic Brain Injury and Borderline Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. See if she has turned her life around and now understands everything she has done wrong and has broken up with her old boyfriend we should know that she is ready to live out on her own and she is going to go live with this new man she met on MySpace because he understands her in every way, unlike us or her therapeutic team. My head just spins when I deal with her and most conversations end with her screaming curses, threats and everything else at me. Thank God she hasn't been able to pull the wool over her new therapist eyes and no one is ready to let her out of the lock down facility just yet. Too often I let her circular thinking get me all wound up and spend way to much of MY time thinking about how to reach her.

Douglass was home this weekend and it was great to see him but he only went back reluctantly to his military school despite the fact that he only has 5 more weeks left. I was feeling very guilty that I had encouraged him to go to this program as he lost the chance to do the one thing that truly makes him happy, be a camp counselor this summer. His military school doesn't end until 2-3 weeks after camp starts and the camp was not willing to keep a counselor slot open for him. He is feeling really bad and rejected. And I am feeling really bad too. He deserves a better deal after working so hard to overcome his issues and get his life in a forward moving direction. I just hope he wont let his anger explode and undo all he has worked so hard to accomplish. It is hard to see your baby hurting and disappointed even when he is a hulking young man who is half a foot taller than you.

Kendra is finishing her freshman year at the magnet school and is feeling all sorts of pressure to get ready for exams, etc. She has been pretty demanding of our time to help her, using homework as an excuse to not help around the house and snappy and emotional. I feel all I do is walk on eggshells around her right now and that all I do is drive her to dance stuff. Typical teenage stuff, nothing bad or unusual, I am just not at the top of my game and it is telling in my dealing with her.

Finally, Dancing Baby Girl is involved in a situation in which I have to sit back and let the professionals do their thing and I have no trust for these particular professionals and I am scared for her, her family and for my continued relationship with her and her family. There are so many ways this could not end well and so few ways to see it go right that I lie awake at night and just shake.

Sometimes I really feel like there is just not enough of me (or DH) to go around at all. I surely don't see how families that are bigger than ours get through the inevitable tough times when everyone is crashing down or just needing parents.

Who Are You? And What Have You done With My Son?

This is my son Bart with his Wangu village family in South Africa. He is the tallest white dude. I love my son and I am so proud of him and all he has accomplished in his life. He is a good man and one that I am honored to know. He was my first birth child and really our tester child, he got all the bad parenting until we learned that method or this method didn't work. Sometimes I feel really bad about that. but he and we have survived.

Occasionally he really surprises me with the things that he does. Most of the time he is a very mellow, laid back kind of guy who puts a lot of time into his friendships and relationships and doesn't sweat some of the other aspects of life, like a "real" job, etc. I have had to really learn to bite my tongue as he goes about living his life in a different fashion than I lived mine. Remember he is the oldest and I am always having to relearn how to let go with him.

Anyway, a helper around the house he is not. Things being messy or needing to be straightened just don't get on his radar. He also doesn't tend to exert effort where it is not needed in his opinion. So if he can get a younger sib to do it, its all good for him.

So, on Sunday he was moving out again, its kind of musical rooms with him, in and out of apartments over the years, in between he comes back to his room here. He and his bud had found a great house to rent and they were moving all his stuff out. After they left I went into the kitchen to takeout the garbage and discovered that it had been taken out and the recycling bucket had also been placed at the curb. Apparently my reaction to this was quite surprised as my wonderfully sarcastic 15 year old said "What do you think? someone stole the garbage?"

Lo and behold, my son saw that the garbage and the recycling were about to over flow and dealt with it with no fanfare, etc. Well, okay one thing out of the ordinary that's okay. Then he comes home and asks if he can cut the lawn for me!! You could have knocked me over with a feather. That is not a task he has ever enjoyed and I had to browbeat him into it any other time. This time he says "I noticed the lawn was getting long and I only work a short shift on Tuesday so I'll be by to cut it if you want me to."

You realize by now I am beginning to suspect alien abduction, maybe strange mind reprogramming like The Stepford Sons, perhaps body snatchers?!? And then to top it off, just so I would know it wasn't really my son walking around in that skin, he told me that he and his bud had tilled half the backyard in their new house to put in a big vegetable garden. He was asking me for some pointers about what vegetables to plant. So I had to ask him "Who are you? and what have you done with my son?"

Of course this is mostly tongue in cheek, I think it is great that he is going to be doing some gardening. And I have noticed other signs of a maturity that hadn't been there before. I really like what I see.

Maybe I haven't made that many mistakes as a parent.