He is fifteen now.
He is fifteen now, and I am upping the ante. For your birthday present, I grin, I will be teaching you to do your own laundry. He snorts: Some birthday present.
But I am not joking. Oh, sure, I’ll wait a few weeks, but this teen will be washing, drying, and folding his own laundry by the end of the calendar year. In college I saw boys utterly inequipped to manage their personal belongings, and I scorned them. Even then I conjured up this bit of future time and vowed that no child of mine would arrive at university unable to fend for himself in the most basic of ways.
(I’d meant to train him sooner, but time did that parabolic magic trick it’s wont to do. In my mind he is only five years old, or maybe eight, but in reality he has only a few years left living with me.)
The laundry is the easy part. Fifteen is also time for other, more troubling, more troublesome things.
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In the car he and I are discussing how my parenting style differs from his father’s. And then, suddenly, he has moved on to his grandparents. I haven’t moved on. I don’t want any part of moving on to this particular topic. But here we are nonetheless. He’s a canny child who understands that there must be some relationship between how we parent and how we were ourselves parented.
I sigh, unprepared and unwilling to chip away at his child’s version of who my mother was.
But I start talking, because he is fifteen, and he is ready, even if I am not and may never be so.
I talk and talk. Every now and then I check the rear view mirror to see where my words are taking him. He is sitting up, listening, and nodding every now and then. I tell him that my mother couldn’t parent very well because she was ill. I share some of my tamer memories: of being nine and writing out checks to pay the family bills, of coming home in the afternoon from middle school and having to wake up my mother, still in bed, still in her nightgown.
And oddly we are back at the laundry, as I inform my son that I was taking care of my own laundry (and, sometimes, my mother’s) before I turned ten years old.
I am not proud of these facts, I add. They are meant to be explanatory. I wasn’t allowed to be a child, so if I have erred as a parent, it has been to coddle too much rather than too little.
And now I stop. There is so much more that I could say, but I think I’ve said enough for now.
Does all of this surprise you, about grandma, about me?, I whisper. I’m not sure what I wish his answer to be.
Not at all, he replies, gruff and aiming for confident. Yet his face is red, and his voice is trembling.
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On some of my bitter days, I fear that parenting is the biggest sham of all. We tell our babies pretty little packaged half-truths, or outright lies, and then spend the rest of their childhoods ever so slowly unwrapping them, one strip of tape here, one flap of paper there. And what do our older children finally discover in the boxes? Presents like doing one’s one laundry, which appear to take away just as much as they give.
Today, needless to say, counts as a bitter day.
Don’t forget “putting it away.” That’s the one that drives me nuts!
I never can believe that my children are not terrified of my father the way that I was at their age. It’s an effort not to gape or flutter my hands when their behavior strays into territory where I would never veer, like unabashed hugging, or reiterating a point my father had already dismissed.
I think that at fifteen, competence and independence are gifts your son can appreciate. He has been prepared as you never were.
This was so poignant, and as always, thought-provoking and beautifully written. Leave it to you, Sarah, to write a post about laundry that could make me cry!
Too close to home.
Brilliant post. I have a sixteen year old – it’s a difficult age for communication and empathy. I have yet to start him on independent living training. Since his sister went to university last month he’s conscious that all my focus is on him now – I worry that he is withdrawing. Were gonna make it thru this! :)
You know, though. I was in my twenties and thirties before I figured out some things about my family. My parents sheltered me from a lot. There’s a lot I wish I knew more about, because then it would help explain their own parenting decisions. So I think you’re doing the exact right thing.
And the laundry! Gah. My older brother, I don’t think, ever did the laundry.
those presents are wrapped with love even if, at some level, the contents are painful. i taught myself how to do laundry as my mother just never really showed me. i figured it out pretty damn fast when i moved out. i also figured out how to jerry-rig a coin washing machine ti get it to turn on for free,
that is how I met my husband — teaching him to cheat the machines in college :) dental floss was the secret
*hug* You’re amazing.
And the full laundry process is critically important.
You should be proud for teaching him how to deal with the physical and the metaphorical dirty laundry.
Parenting is a sham for all of us. We fake it till we make it. But you’re at the making it stage.
The present of childhood IS a gift, even as we slowly gift them the skills they will need to be independent. Both gift in their own way and time.
Even with a model childhood to reflect on, I still tend to do too much. I am determined that my 18yo does her own laundry in preparation for her leaving us for college. My 13yo, however, can’t even manage to get his clean clothes from the hamper to the drawers. Sigh….but he CAN cook! At least that is something.
I’m sad it was a bitter day for you. I think it was a gift you gave him. I’ve been thinking a lot about the parenting of older children, and I feel I’m quite at a loss. While I now have a rather good relationship with my mother, I can’t recall much of one during my teens. We didn’t talk, not really about anything of consequence. There are still times I don’t really think I know who she was as a younger woman. I know that your son will have no such gaps of memory. You have gifted him with your true self.
After all you have endured, yours is, I believe, the sanest, most sensitive and most honest voice I hear. A gift to your boys that is absolutely priceless. I thought I had taught my college kid how to do laundry until I went to help her one day and found she was stuffing the washer and packing it. Too cheap to pay for two machines.
The division between bitter and sweet is so narrow. I heard both. It seems that he did too. You are an awesome mom.