Sunday, October 01, 2006

Continuous Parenting of Teens Makes Me Tired

It’s not even catastrophic. Not even above typical parenting most of the time (well, MIke’s disappearances for days at a time are above and beyond, but most of it is just the typical stuff -- you can’t listen to crappy music in my house, you need a haircut (though we let our kids decide if they want to or not most of the time), you can’t dress like a hoochie mama, you have to be home on time, you need to do your chores, you can’t have the privileges of the family if you aren’t willing to fulfill the responsibilities of a family, yada yada yada.

But it does wear on a person. I remember when our kids were ages 3-13 and a friend asked me, “What are you going to do when they are teenagers????” and I said, “I’m sure we’ll be fine.” What I should have said was, “I’m sure we’ll be tired.”

My mother, who married at age 33, warned me AFTER we adopted 7 or 8 of the kids that teenagers and menopause didn’t mix well. I started adding up numbers and said, “Thanks for telling me NOW!” (BTW, I’m only 43, remember, so I’m not there yet. But we still have 9 more years of teenagers...

I have yet another IEP meeting this morning (we have 10 children. By the end of this quarter, 7 of them will have IEPs. That’s a lot of meetings...

And then back to work for me. I’m putting together a video, which is almost done, to present of one of my families, then it’s endless email (though I did get it down to 14 on Friday, and a couple pretty big projects to do as well...

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