Parenting is a Journey

I probably should be writing something about the upcoming holiday's, especially since Thanksgiving is only a few days away.  However, I am not a person that enjoys the holiday season.  In fact the only appreciation I have for the holidays are the days off of school and work that I enjoy.  So please don't look for any Christmas cheer on this blog.  Instead, I want to tell you about teaching my 16 year old son to drive.  Yesterday, Jason unexpectedly had the day off of school.  Monday was a scheduled half day for his school that was cancelled due to fog.  I guess it was something like a snow day only with fog instead.  I have been teaching Jason to drive for a long time, due to the fact that he is not allowed to take his driving test until his grades are all in the passing range.  He has finally reached this milestone and the test will happen sometime in December.  He is very excited about it and proud of his efforts.  I had a busy day scheduled with work and preparing for company in the evening but I decided to take advantage of the unexpected time with my son instead.  The other kids in my family go to different school districts or go to work so Jason and I found ourselves alone with each other, which is very rare.  We happily jumped in the car and headed to WalMart to buy him some much needed clothes and necessities.

Parenting is often a skill that happens in very quick moments.  We do not have a lot time to prepare for the big moments in life.  I often just hope and pray that I say the right thing at the right time.  It might surprise you to hear that my husband and I do not feel like successful parents.  We cannot point to a child that we have raised who has become something spectacular like a doctor or a successful athlete.  Parenting has brought our goals for our children down to rock bottom.  We hope and pray they graduate from high school and become a successful adults, and that is about it.   That is not to say that I am not proud of my kids or that my kids have not achieved anything in life.  It means that my kids are defining their own futures and taking life paths that I could not have imagined when I first became a parent.

I believe that a good parent is someone who never gives up.  A good parent is someone who keeps trying every day to reach a child who seems unreachable.  Jason is my biological son.  I say that because I want to remind foster and adoptive parents that all children are difficult regardless of how they arrived in your family. He has had trouble in school most of his life.  He went through a difficult (and scary) period of experimenting with drugs.  I have tried out a million ideas on this child to help him reach some positive goals.  I think my husband would agree with me when I say that most parenting techniques have failed on this child.  Love and support were useless.  Tough love only sent him running in the other direction.  Rewards and punishments were largely ignored as he plowed through life.  The only technique that seemed to accomplish anything was never giving up.  We found him a new school (an alternative high school) that he helped to choose.  He is experiencing some academic success there for the  first time in his life.  He is thinking ahead to career choices.  I am so proud of his small successes that I could burst with joy!  I understand now that it is not the big events in life that matter, just the slow and steady steps toward happiness that matter.

To return to my fog day story, Jason and I went down to the local school to practice parallel parking af.  ter shopping.  This was a new thing for him and I knew it was going to difficult.  He does not have a lot of patience (or attention span) and we are driving a minivan.  A minivan is the hardest vehicle on the planet to parallel park.  I will drive around the block 15 times before I will attempt to parallel park my vehicle.  I have been through the parking process with three previous teenagers and I was ready for the fireworks ahead.  The school has a practice area set up with cones that is identical to the official testing area.  Sure enough, before we even finished the first run through, he was ready to throw in the towel.  I convinced him to try a few more times and then let him off the hook.  All the way home, I was inwardly laughing at his tirade about how unfair this test was.  "This kind of parking was not a real life situation and he needed a different car to pass this test," he said.  It went on all the way home.  The funny part about this is that I have heard it all before.  His brother and sister had already covered this ground with me many times before.  I could have written down all the things he was ranting about before he opened his mouth.  It is moments like these when I enjoy being a parent because I already know exactly what to do and say.  I love it when my kids go through a phase that I have seen and handled before.  It makes me feel like an accomplished parent!

With my first child, parking the car was a huge drama.  I worried that he would never be able to do it.  I worried that he would not pass the test.  Looking back it seems very funny to me now.  Maybe parenting is less about skill and more about staying in the game long enough to get it right.  I have had kids fail the driving test and the world didn't end.  I have had a child drop out of high school.  The world didn't end and she has signed up for night school.  My kids are not the perfect darlings that I envisioned when they were born or arrived on my doorstep.  I am not the parent that I thought I would be either.  I have finally learned to roll with all situations and  just keep trying something new.  My favorite quote from the movie "Galaxy Quest" says it all, "Never give up, never surrender!"