Today our first baby girl turned thirteen. We are the parents of a teenager. I find myself wondering how on earth this could havehappened, considering that she was four, yesterday. Parenting is such an all consuming process that the days and years slip by almost unnoticed. That is, until the reality of having a child in your house who is officially closer to adulthood than childhood, is staring at you and you have been caught unaware.
I am looking back and trying to figure out just where those years went. I can see her as a newborn, a precocious toddler, a kindergartner, a tween. Millions of images are etched in my mind and caught on film. I have been there for nearly everyday of her life, for thirteen years. I knew this was coming, I just thought I had more time....Life has a way of being endless and instantaneous, at the same time. Those thirteen years flew by in a sea of bottles and diapers, thousands of dance classes, a million homework sessions, rushing to the next time slot on the schedule, dinners on the fly and the host of other demands that press upon us daily in the life of a family. Without us realizing, our babies grow up.
Sitting here in the relative quiet, I am wondering if we have done enough, said all the right things, punished the right way....after all, she is a child no more and will sooner, rather than later, be leaving our nest. When she flies off, her progress will be a direct reflection of our raising. No pressure. You can't even check out of the grocery store without having a mini parenting quiz. The magazines shriek at you to play more, add this to the schedule for college admittance, eliminate these foods. They are the devil's handiwork. None of us, even super moms, can live up to the unrealistic expectations of society, let alone those of ourselves. But, we sure do try....I am hopeful that I have done my job to the best of my abilities and that over the course of the next five years I will have the time to correct what, according to those magazines, are my many mistakes.
Reality check! I will not have the time to correct my "mistakes". I will be busy trying to raise her and the other three with minimal bloodshed and harm to their psyches. To be honest, they aren't mistakes. I look at my baby, who is so not a baby and I am proud. We have raised a kind, capable, smart and generous girl. She is also volatile, messy and completely scatterbrained. She is human. So are her parents. Everyday we get up and try to give our best to our kids, some days our best is better than others. I don't want to have the time I have left with my TEENAGER to fly by any faster than it already will because I am not only caught up in life, but hung up on all the ways I am doing it wrong.
Five years from now when she is eighteen(just typing that makes me nauseous), I will be wondering where it all went and I know it will be a blur of prom dresses and drivers license classes and broken hearts and more homework. I will have millions more pictures in my head and thousands of moments that slip by me unnoticed. They just keep growing up and it is so hard to keep up! So, I will hug on her a little extra today and pray that the little ones just stay little.
