The Chorus: Teenagers
We are flooded with choices and starved for connection. Always and never alone. We change minds by sharing stories. We fight alone, together. Empathy is a victory. Seven billion solo songs, and I want to start a Chorus. - Amy Grace
The thing about teenagers is that they lie. And want you to know it, as they cover it with everything they’ve collected, everything you’ve given them. It will sit under piles of dirty laundry and borrowed boyfriend shirts, ticket stubs and dried flowers and stuffed bunnies they got at six months old. It will glow bright and warm, and your mother radar will seek it out in infrared gut feelings. You will have a choice. To open your arms and shut up. Or to release the fear in a stream of words that will sound like airhorns to them. They lie to protect a world so big and immediate and alive, we’ve forgotten the animal pull of it. (Maybe that’s a lie, too. It’s what makes chemistry dangerous, still. What could temp us away from everything solid and responsible for holding life.) Teenagers lie and it breaks their hearts and grows guilt like kudzu. They need us, to see that the tangles only bind us together in the same space. They need to hear, “I’m here” and know we choose this mess of a place over any other, because they are here, too.
I need you is the echo of leave me alone.
Teenagers are learning the wild. They navigate like sailors, following a compass and the wind, but have to do it hyper-connected, at light speed. Making a record of each trip up, sexual regret, blood rise comment, the thirst they’re all taught to crave and cover up. This is the intersection of no fear and barbed wire, NC-17 and the harshest inner censors. One long take of confusing, zigzagged, shapeshifting tenderness. They need our most updated satellite, with our strongest softest deepest reserves. They need us to say ‘no’ and ‘yes’, clearly, honestly. To help them know when to do the same. When I hear older people railing on their tender bud lives or judgement, I never bite my lip. They need defenders and mediums. They need everything they won’t ask for. Our best psychic powers. Our rearview vision. Our deepest memories of our most unflattering moments. Shared without blinking, pause, or filter.
They are reminders, to live. Now. Not to go quietly into any night, dawn, consolation, or acceptance. My daughter mirrors my feral parts, and my stillest. The howling at moons our bodies needed to do all along. The thirty years surviving on scraps before I made a bed for it. The teenage remnant in each of us is our hungriest part. Freudian oral and lit up like Christmas, brave and skittish, joyous and full of friction. Needing to drink blood from what you love, be devoured and wanted and wanting. Stripped down and opened up like full bloom orchids about to wilt. Last drop thirsty, first time hungry. Discovering words written exactly for you. Turning the key in the ignition of whatever used or borrowed car is your palace, the evening has an on switch. Pushing the lighter on the dash, firing up your solar plexus. Ready and willing as you’ll ever be to do anything; , always and never enough. Believers in whatever kind of becoming the quick of you still wishes for. We are them, they are us. We are worlds knotted, connected by an umbilical cord. Middle age and young adult share a common center of gravity. A cross section of yearning that could power a city at night. Immediate and too late and now or never. It’s a time travel movie, two stories parallel and faraway, crossing over, separate and alive together. Their future, our past, under a trance. Teenagers move into celebration as dangerous as wartime. Their hormones hypnotize.
Having a teenager means you’ve probably overslept the alarm. Past seeing what’s there to scare the innocence from you, yet again. What is this thing we do as grownups? Forgetting how it was, who we are because of it, the shredding, the bliss. Adults love to cover up. (As much as our almost adults do.) And cover ups can be life and death. Denial is a generational curse we can choke out with smoke, as we burn it. Let them be our wake up calls and interventions. For our own habits and autopilot. For their survival. They need us to stop soft focusing our families and frailties, and start telling the brutal, still beautiful truth. So that they will too. What we don’t understand, we can’t protect. When we won’t look, they’re lost. My daughter doesn’t drink, since someone’s drinking tore a hole through her life. The fallout kills the fun. With this she’s cursed and gifted. Tells her little brother he’s ‘allergic’ in the hope he won’t find out. “That isn’t your story”, I tell them both.
My girl lost a friend last week. Sweet bright wild-haired wide-smiled boy, tried mushrooms and saw what wasn’t there, but called him to play. He jumped off his deck and died on an ordinary Friday night. Whole worlds end. Possibility snaps. We get those calls we can’t believe could be true. Shoes drop infinitely, unfairly. We get sad, lost, and go under. They hold pressures gone exponential in a world on fire, and know it. They carry their babyhood into middle of the night sneak outs. They carry our fears, dripping with sweat, without knowing, everywhere. We cannot bear it, either side of the fence, and yet we do. We cry separately about the same things, on different sides of closed doors. We court each other like strained couples, anticipate and learn new, what seemed permanently bound. We mourn innocence and control at once, as the map dissolves more each year. Emotional contortionists, method actors, soldiers in the dark without night vision - trying becomes winning. Motherhood is love and terror, braided together, soaked in blood that never dries. This is when we feel it like a waterfall. This is our karma. This is our luck. To love them, to find grace for the parts of ourselves that still flounder and spill and search. The kind of togetherness we couldn’t have predicted in those sweet humid baby nights. The many little girl mornings the two of us listened to ‘Baba O’Reilly’ in the car. “It’s only teenage wasteland,” we’d sing, suspended from time. Before we knew the depths of exhaustion and love that would carry us all away.
by Amy Grace
I recently took a deep dive into the old “baby blog,” you know the one I religiously updated throughout the early years of parenting, chock full of adorable updates for the east coast grandparents, and local friends who couldn’t get enough of my chunky ginger baby. The blog was titled with my child’s name, and oddly, his gender: girl. I remember the day the ultrasound revealed that I was pregnant with a female-bodied baby. I took the afternoon off work and went to the mall with a girlfriend to buy every last adorable pink ruffled ridiculous item. When I think back to that time I barely know who I was. What I do know is I like who I am now much better, nearly 13 years later. I’m not sure there’s any way to prepare for how much your children will teach you about yourself, yes, but more so about who they are separate from you. And all the ways in which we walk through the world with ideas in our heads that are just plain wrong.
By the time my kiddo told me on the cusp of his 12th birthday, that he was, indeed, a boy, I wasn’t exactly surprised. He was expressing opinions about his clothing before his second birthday, had changed the spelling of his gender-neutral name to the male version at 7, had given up wearing dresses entirely by second grade, and had stomped on any and all gender norms that came across his path. (He once argued with a boy at the playground who had dismissed him presuming he played with “girl stuff” -as if that is a bad thing- by shouting: I like dinosaurs, and dragons, and OUTER SPACE IS FOR EVERYONE!) But I had forgotten, until revisiting the baby blog, that his childhood imaginary friend was “a girl who looks like a boy,” and something about that fact made me wonder what other clues I’d missed along the way. But that’s just it I guess, we can’t possibly know all of the bits and pieces that make our children who they are, because they are not us. They wholly consume us, they are made of us, and we want to think of them as extensions of ourselves, but in truth, they are their own people and we are just here to hold space for them until they can manage their own.
Like anything in life, true growth comes in the struggles & discomfort & down in the trenches.
Those long, deep talks matter. Giving them the opportunities to fail matter. Loving them
unconditionally with no judgement, shame or guilt matters.
Because...
When you catch your teen being brave and sticking up for someone, all the back talk doesn’t matter anymore.
When you witness your teen giving a shit about something & pushing themselves past the point they thought they could go mentally & physically, all the side eye & UGH’s are forgotten about.
When you have those raw talks about what it means to be a man or woman or human & they’re doing the talking & you’re just listening and asking questions & they talk about being a helper, fighting injustice, racism, the patriarchy, or saving the planet all the arguments over screen time seem a lot less significant.
When you watch your teens love as big as they can or make the right choice all the frustrations & worries & tears & fights about raising little humans that are going to be contributors in the world leave you knowing it’s all worth it.
by Josh Solar
Don’t blink. Just breathe.
Heartbreak is par for the course and it’s nothing like your first major break up or the way you argue with your spouse. Raising teenagers is a different kind of pain. It’s in borrowed time and learning to be unliked more often than not and living with the fear that we aren’t instilling all the necessary tools they need in real life. Not the high school musical version...or the version they have in their mind—because we have made so many of their mistakes and we know better. The kind that teaches them how to provide for themselves. The kind that you can’t teach or coddle into them... like strong work ethic and maybe some common sense. The things that help them maybe survive in the real world.
Because the growing up has a way of sneaking up on us. That is in itself it’s own kind of heartbreak.
And the scariest part of it all is I am often afraid I neglected to do enough or I made a mistake years ago that will have consequences now. I’ve always taught my children that most importantly, we care that they are good humans first and everything else is secondary. But what constitutes a good human? And what constitutes a good mother?
Am I present enough? Do I show how much I care? Because I care in ways they’ll never know. And because teenagers often suffer from feeling like they already have it all figured out already.
But the trying. I guess the trying is where it counts. Tender mercies and acts of love and forgiveness when it’s hard. When you’re the most vulnerable and tired and scared. You spend a lot of time afraid when parenting small adults, after all.
It can feel like a downward spiral.
And I wouldn’t trade it for anything... except the chance to smell their newborn heads and relive it all again for just a little while.
I sort a mound of buried treasures pruned from the basement of your canopy bed
The loam of retired stuffed animals, carnival prizes whose festival sounds buzz lightly in my hands pulling my lips into its music
Neglected night sentinels set in leftover slivers of glitter and steeled bubble gum chunks
Hidden but not yet parted
possessions
Recollection draws my eyes with warm sap spilling
summer
down my face
A salted river of ripe love
fumes of memory dress my fingers shaped for mending and creating
tracing cheeks into sound sleep
The LED lights burn a rainbow on the sky-blue walls cutting the cord of remembering
My legs folded in surrender in the middle ocean of carpet,
Billie Eilish’s triple size face branding the wall as your newest idol, her sultry vocals walk over child’s play in her ‘bad guy’ lyrics
Two faces part ways in your gaze
roundness melting as time molds you in it’s perfection
my chin and nose climbing grooves of your reflection
We laugh at our sameness
inside a dam breaks with release
I am letting g-o
as you step into
becoming
The hallway echoes with bits of FaceTime conversation— remnants of myself imprinting your words break the quiet
Pride warms my insides with your attention,
I think of all the selves we bury in search of the ‘true self’ rippled in contradictions to decipher in the landscape of examined time
Unaware we are an appraised conglomeration of our history meshed with the myth of expectations and fated heartbreak
Teenage tidal waves strung in hormonal change tumbling through 24 hour seasons
A moment split open swallowing your whole world until the next moment arrives in its unexpected thunder
Emerging convictions pool into a stretched body
carrying a bed of lessons
to unlearn the winters the world demands in its limitations
hidden but not yet
parted
“So . . . how would you feel if I got a peace sign tattoo? I’m asking because Eva gave me one last night, but don’t worry--we used all professional materials.”
Raising them now is all guesswork and hope and love. A constant, re-definition of what’s “okay” & who we are--to ourselves and each other. “Growing up is weird, dude.” (My daughter’s boyfriend summed it up perfectly.)
I’m on the outside these days – there are secret worlds I’m not a part of. Group chats. Music Festivals. Being in love. Everything’s “sick bro.” Billie Eilish, Talking Heads, Mac DeMarco, Jimi Hendricks. Flower crowns & air pods, old mixed with new. Déjà vu. The smell of burning incense seeping out from under a closed door.
I keep flashing back to my own adolescence, remembering my own need for privacy and space. It scares me how easily I can bring myself back there. The restlessness, the rocks thrown at my bedroom window, hand-me-down vinyl collections, fringed leather, my fragile heart. I swear, there’s an 18-year-old in me who still lives. She wants to be at that music festival, too, but this time, to see her daughter take it all in. Maybe just for one song.
There is grief and beauty and heartbreak in watching them get older. That feeling of inevitability. Like trying to catch grains of sand falling through your fingers.
There are days we still fall on the floor, laughing. We pile our bodies up on the couch to watch TV, limbs intertwining, heads resting on shoulders. We have our own private jokes. We discover songs and movies and vintage clothing and art. We turn off the radio in the car to talk. They are still my best friends.
On other days, they dig their heels in, slam doors, refuse to listen, pull away. Sometimes they are much wiser than I am, other times they can’t see beyond next week. I just wish I had more patience.
What I’ll remember most are the car rides. Windows down, hair whipping in the breeze, radio on loud, their crazy teen energy filling up the atmosphere. So full of passion & belief. Creators, dreamers, social justice warriors. If they save this world, it’s because they believe they can.
Sometimes I get the feeling they’re keeping me young. I wonder if I’ll grow old as soon as they leave. I feel like they are an extension of me and yet -- they are not me or mine, really. They are life itself, trying.
I keep trying to remember that.
by Leslie Jones
The freedom in your bare wild feet seems to be no more. The feet that lept forward with such unabashed wildness twist with doubt. Your eyes that once looked upward, always upward, unafraid to climb trees, mountains, buildings even, are clouded. The wild spirit that would battle those much bigger than you on a fallen tree now lies in wait. Your fingers that so deftly wielded knives, knitting and sewing and felting needles, pens, pencils, paintbrushes, fire, are now picked clean of skin.
I have to admit, with your fierce spirit, I did not see this coming.
Your body is now pulled down by the seaweed it once glided over. It is covered in the growing roots of trees you once scaled. You are drowning in the dew of mornings. You twist this way and that pulled in an eternal uncertainty.
Our words are landmines. We should stay quiet, but we never do.
Your life has not been the one I wanted for you. I dreamt of such a different thing. So much uncertainty and loss were not planned. I wish for so much less violent winds and abrupt change occurred. For this, I take full responsibility. We are alone. I am afraid I was not strong enough, but know I tried, even if I failed. For this, I am very sorry.
If I could take it all back, I might. I really might. Except for the fact that I truly believe you are destined for greatness. You have such a spark within you, it will kindle into a fire again.
Once you find yourself again. Once you hug your wild nature. Once you remember that you are loved. Once you remember that you are held. Once you remember that YOU are not alone.
You are a brilliant shining star. Your star will shine out through the darkness once again. I know it. You are still my wild child, full of love for so many things. You are still my wild child, full of love, light, and fearlessness. I see you in there, always.
Remember when
I was your first best friend
Secret keeper
Knower of all things small and large
One bedroom empty most of the time now
Plans made and changed
Quietly accepting
Part of it right?
Their growing pains
My growing pains
(kept silent, because we have to let go)
They have to go
How is it
runs headlong to me at the end of the day stopped?
You needing me more than air changed to you breathing on your own
When?
Mama became mom
When?
How ?
Can we have a little more time
of me being your first
Best friend
Secret keeper
first to know
First to ask on an adventure
Motherhood is hard
These exquisite creatures I’ve watched grow
I’ve tended the row
I’ve nipped, snipped, tucked and
Cut.
I’ve bent, I’ve coaxed ,
I’ve threaded, I’ve woven ,
I’ve pleaded
and at times,
I’ve Forced.
Alas,
forced
seldom worked at all I found.
It made wily wilder
It made delicate hearts wither
It made secretive souls retreat
It made poison spill from our tongues
spoiling everything in its path
It made me learn the meaning of love more than life itself because
our hearts once echoed each other’s beat
I’m surrounded by them.
Literally.
They tower over me.
And it's two against one in our house.
The realization that I could no longer physically pick up my son to comfort him fully seeped in as I sat next to all 6 feet of him curled up on the floor in the midst of a panic attack turned migraine. You think you’d know this when your kid is six feet tall but the speed of that growth was so quick that fact had yet to settle. I gasped the other day when I realized I only have 4 summers left with him and only a couple more than that with my girl. My whole life oriented around parenting them and how swiftly that will change. The metamorphosis of a human from baby to child to teen to adult so swift and fast that I’m still back here processing elementary school. What do you mean this isn’t forever?
I sit squarely in the midst of extroverted and introverted so understand both of my kids even though they exist in opposite realms. My daughter comes filing out of school at the end of the day with her friends swarming around her. Their hands intertwined. They look like an advertisement for a school. They are a group so tightly knit that you feel a bit like you’ve stepped into an alternate world and you are an alien when they are talking. You may understand about 20 percent of what they talk about. One thing that is abundantly clear is that they love each other and revel in the connection. A connection that is beyond their families. Their first set of chosen family. I sometimes wonder if they are the “Heathers” to the other girls. Unintentionally, of course. She walks around saying “Madre, you’re so cute.” I think she’s picked up this phrase as a defense mechanism to keep me calm. I look down at my mud caked boots, oversized sweatshirt, unkempt hair and think to myself “Probably but, damn, I don’t care.”
My introverted son has a vastly different school experience. Are the differences personality based or does he not want/need to fit as much as her? These are the things I think about constantly. In the outskirts, he’s learning empathy, kindness, not so much patience for people but a heck of a lot of humor. He thinks he yields great power over me because he can help his sister with her homework and I can’t.
In these teen years so far they’ve taught me some important lessons. The illusion of control is just that. As they step into their more mature selves, I have to give them room for growth and their own experience. Growth can be hard and scary but it also is glorious and full of expansion. I hope to be their safe place but I also realize I will never ever, ever always be the safe place. Unfortunately, sometimes that joke you made hits the wrong way and suddenly you are the enemy. You tread so carefully over/around and through their feelings only to realize finally as you head to bed that there was literally nothing else you could say. You were just being a person and they were, well, TEENAGERS.
They are not you and you are not them. They will make sure to drive that point home over and over again (as they should… It’s completely developmentally appropriate). It still sucks. They currently think they know all the things. They do actually know A LOT. They think you know nothing and are not sure why you keep acting like you do. Their version of the world is colored with less conditioning than ours but is so much more confusing without that breadth of experience behind it. Watching them becoming is an amazing and sometimes heart-wrenching thing to witness. I keep just holding my breath and hoping it’ll all work out. These are my favorite people after all. Fingers crossed.
Magnets, Magnetism
We are drawn together and then repelled apart by unseen magnetic forces
The natural forces of nature and I want to honor that
I love the ebb and flow of our relationship as I do the phases of the moon
We are fish in the same school
Birds in the same flock
Wolves in the same pack
Peas in the same pod
You have my eyes, strength, and independence and I have yours and more
Before I had kids, when I would imagine myself as a mother, it was never as the mother of a teenager. For some reason, when I pictured myself parenting children, these kids were always younger than ten years old. I mean, I could see myself very clearly as a mom with babies and toddlers. I had an idea in my head what that would be like which somehow made it easier—even when it was the complete opposite of what I pictured. I had some frame of reference. But, as my kids got older, the picture of what I thought parenthood was like got blurrier and blurrier. I had never considered what kind of mom I would be to teenagers. Even though, I clearly remembered being a teenager myself….for some reason, I could not picture my kids being that age. And, because of that, the idea of having teenagers scared the crap out of me. To make things worse, there were support systems in place when my kids were small. I had a moms group. There were books and websites and discussions about potty training, but as my kids got older those things all seemed to kind of fall away. My mom friends went back to work and, between extra curricular activities, school and work commitments, there just didn’t seem time to touch base. Raising teenagers it turns out was lonelier than raising toddlers. But, it all worked out somehow. As it does. I mean there have been challenges that I didn’t anticipate and we came through the other side of them. Lessons have been learned, but these lessons have been more about me than about them. Which I REALLY never anticipated…I never guessed that they would so clearly show me what I wanted from life. That they would somehow be my anchor to ground me so that I could go forward with more direction than ever before. Maybe not more direction…maybe just more focus on what’s important and a deeper understanding that there are seasons in a life and you aren’t meant to be in control and THAT’S OKAY. That raising in a child is in many ways a long lesson in letting go. Letting go so that you can find yourself once again.
by Dana Pugh
Teenagers always seemed like a foreign word to me until I had them. I began to resist them even before they came. When they were 8, 9, 10, childhood at full speed, my babies growing up, by 14 my kids no longer kids, by 18 my firstborn a grown man. I mourned the passing of my young children, my heart hung on tight until it finally let go. With letting go there was much more beauty and so much less fear. Awareness and presence fill my days now instead of looking back or forward, it makes the times when we bounce off each other easier to bear. As the separating moves forward, the people they are unfolding before me, the lessons I once tried to teach them have shifted into a knowing I still have so much to learn. We are each other’s teachers, and as I continue to help them grow, they continue to shape the person I’ve become.
Wearing your Dad’s hockey jersey, doing homework in this position, you are half marvel, half madness. . I tell you to sit at your desk; this can’t be good for your neck.
You tune me out.
When you are not looking, I try out this pose and my arms cannot reach the ground.
Strip, 2017
these two. moving out of my orbit, into bright lights, and casting shadows of their own.
I take comfort knowing they have each other's backs.
past. present. future.
In some ways, it is one of the loneliest roads in parenting, parenting a teen or multiple teens at once. When they’re young, all the moms are sharing photos of their cute babies, funny toddlers, smiling little girls and boys, trading stories, asking for help, bearing witness. But then your kids hit a certain age, maybe it’s 7 or 9 or 11, depending on the child, and they no longer want to be the subject of your stories or the source of your “likes” on IG.
They want agency over their image and agency over what you say about them.
And so it is that the best photos, the best stories, often hit the cutting room floor. So be it.
It is here that perhaps is the greatest knot of all — at a time when a child, soon to be tween or teenager, wants to come into more of “their own,” to control their image and what gets communicated and shared, a parent probably needs more support than ever.
Stakes are higher.
And the parent network starts shifting under your feet and feeling less and less available as an option. To share private details of your children’s lives with your friends (absolutely forget the internet and social media) might now breach the delicate parent-child trust, and that is a risk too big to take. As a result, most of what is calling to be shared or compared or asked about… is left unsaid.
Unlike the new parenting section at the bookstore, which is long and filled with books about babies and what to expect, the shelves for books about parenting teens are sparse. And even if you can find a book, it’s not the same as those conversations with your mom friends who are right there in it with you. Those conversations become more a thing of the past, more guarded and circumspect.
There are certain things, certain details, that just can’t be shared.
(Or, maybe only shared with tried and trusted true friends whom you’ve known for your lifetime, not since you last moved. Finding the ones to trust is it’s own fraught.)
So, as the teens grow tighter amongst other teens, building their own community, finding a source of friendship and support,
the parents are left on their own a bit, not able to fully (honestly) communicate with their friends on parenting matters, not as they once did.
And yet.
And yet, despite circumstances creating a bit of an island of yourself, somewhat alone in parenting, you and your tween/teenager have each other, and that is perhaps the best of all. And maybe that’s as it should be.
For all of it’s challenges, parenting a teen (or multiple teens at once), is a space for growth — emotionally, relationally, intellectually. It’s a place to be curious, a place to live your values, to teach them, to adjust your expectations, to learn something new, to listen, to be pliable and to be steadfast, all at the same time, all over one issue, all in one night, all in just one conversation.
And you get to do that over and over and over again across many years.
And hope (pray?) that they listen more than 50% of the time.
And, finally, you can do all that 100% correctly and still not make a darn bit of difference.
They are 100% their own person.
The teenagers, if you haven’t figured this out yet, well, they help release you of any idea that you have any control over anything or any person whatsoever.
What else offers that kind of magic space?
It’s a gift with glimmers (and dents), the full value of which isn’t seen until the other side, called “The Twenties.”
Carry on friends. Know that though you may feel alone, we are all right here with you, staying awake till midnight until everyone is home, having conversations with our teens, checking for glassy eyes, slurred speech, laughs that are too loud, watching the walk, and saying a prayer of gratitude that another night brought everyone home safely.
And the rest of it? We’ll deal with it in the morning.
Aileen Reilly, mom of 4 (ages 13, 16, 18, 20)
A note to my son Jimmy, 13.
No one stops to tell you these are the last few days of your adolescence and tomorrow you will be a man, however there are signs all along. It doesn’t happen over night but also it does. Because one day I held you in my arms as my baby not knowing it was the last day I was doing so. And I know for a fact that when I did all that love and warmth I felt in my heart is sustaining me now and I know it will for eternity, so that is comforting I suppose. It has been a gut wrenching transformation right before my eyes that I’m not really sure were open, all my fears are coming to be, that you wouldn’t be little forever. That days are long and years are short and I only have a few left with you here under the same roof before you are off on your own adventures and life. Please don’t resist when I still want to hold you. Here’s to the next 5 years of your boyhood, and know that I miss these days while they’re happening. I love you.
14
threading some narrow needle towards belonging.
longing, like,
—heart, bump!
on screen, on reflection,
on risking —me to be.
waking to, so what —
like, why?
literally,
my eyes locked
— online —
post, snap, see that!
emerging, up ‘n comer —
punk in my hyper try-hard swag.
i am who now, ’til I’m found?
except —
you’re not like them!
by Cate Wnek
I'm standing in the kitchen,
no shoes,
wearing my pyjamas,
as I cook brunch.
It's no ordinary brunch,
it's a sweet 16 birthday brunch.
I'm flipping pancakes, tossing fruit salad,
stirring overnight oats, plus frying bacon and eggs.
It's a birthday feast.
Honestly, I'm not concentrating on what I'm cooking. I'm on auto-pilot.
I'm listening to the conversation around the table.
The jokes.
the banter,
the laughter,
the sassiness,
and their stories.
My husband whispers to me "listen to the kids".
I smile at him, tears in my eyes. He is feeling it too.
We both couldn't be more proud of the teenagers we are raising.
Do you remember that time you danced for hours, barefoot, under the stars...the air and the ground still warm from the August sun? Your hair and skin, salty from the ocean mixed with sweat. Dirt stained feet. Head tilted back in laughter, singing along to the songs, off key but with such confidence. You danced and sang with such joy...for a moment it seemed you had no cares. And when the crowd thinned out, you ran to the ocean and jumped in. Cool water and phosphorescence swirling all around you. Light in the darkness.
My hope for you, my darling, is that you keep collecting these beautiful moments and that they will sustain you as you walk deeper and deeper into the world. You and I both know that life is not always this innocent and carefree, but rather at times, lonely, and sad and even awful.
And God knows, we have made so many mistakes, and wrong turns and harsh words have left us both raw and cracked and aimless. It was so much easier when you were tiny, and I just held you close and whispered in your ear how much I loved you and that was enough. But don't they say, we learn from our mistakes and that we all fall apart? Let's just keep breathing in the amazing and fill our pockets with beautiful moments...there is always light somewhere beating in the darkness.
by Bee Chalmers