Raising Teenagers
29 Oct 2008
When you first become pregnant you often hear untold horror stories of sleepless nights, constant crying and how bringing a newborn baby home means your life will never be the same again. While for the most part that is true, my kids were generally pretty good sleepers and really only put on a crying perfomance if they felt their basic needs weren’t being met. However…
No one warned me that having three teenage children under the same roof also means sleepless nights, constant crying and whining and that often I feel like I’ve stepped into an alertnate reality as my life certainly isn’t the same as what it used to be. I’m sure I was never that bad during my teen years.
While my three are really pretty good (they don’t get into too much trouble, they play a lot of sport etc so they are incredibly active, which also means less time for them to do things a lot of teenagers do) but when they decide to turn it on I often wonder where I can escape to.
Teenagers, bless their feral little hearts, are a breed of their own. Once those hormones start flying, and it doesn’t matter if they are male or female, they truly become different people to those loving, caring, thoughtful kids of a few years prior. No longer as a mum are you light of their lives, instead you’re just the person that can get them from a to b, provide them with enough food to fill the bottomless pits that are their stomaches and make room for them and their similarliy homonally challenged friends to take over your house.
Of course in between all those fights over not having time to drop them off at X, telling them you can’t afford Y even if their friends do have it, explaining that z is just not possible at this time, if you’re really lucky you may actually be able to have a conversation with them, and it’s at this point you realise your child of yesterday is growing up and you’ll see glimpses of the adult they will soon become.
) I will not only get my creative juices flowing to help with other things I do online but I may also be able to help/advise other single parents, offer a bit of humour (no matter how old your kids are - they can still sometimes do or say the strangest of things) or show that being a single mum (or dad) doesn’t mean your life has to stop; while for the most part my life does revolve around my children I still get some time to have at least a bit of a life for myself.