The High School Years, and Beyond

Blogging with Littles is easy. They're funny and quirky and sweet. They don't particularly care if you share their stories. Blogging with teens is a little trickier. (Stick with me, here. This isn't going where it looks like it's going, but I have an idea and I need to flesh it out. Lucky you!)

They're still funny and quirky and sweet, but even when you've tried to be thoughtful about your children's stories in the early years, you realize they're old enough to tell their own, now... also, that you've probably botched it many times over the years, anyway. Most bloggers stop writing. I get that. (Heck, I've done that!)

But for people who found encouragement or camaraderie or support in the writings of others, that full stop leaves a weird gap. There are moms out there who've followed bloggers with children a little older than their own*, and they were taking notes. (This, too, I get. I have notebooks, a few stray envelopes, and receipt scraps, filled with the words of wisdom and recipes from women whose children are now in their 20's.) We're left dangling.

"Wait! What about... and then... but... nooooo!" We wail as our tribe disappears into the fog. "How will we find the trail?"

The reality is that everyone's in the fog. Every mother you know who has an eldest child is brand spanking new at whatever she's doing right now. She's got no idea what she's doing. She desperately wants to do it well (just as soon as she can figure out what "it" is), and she mostly doesn't want the follies she's pretty sure she's stumbling into to become a template for anyone else. So she gets quiet. Pulls in. Takes the same conversations once held on a more public forum into private messaging and emails. For her children's sake, she takes it private; for her sanity's sake, she keeps her tribe.

But it's good to encourage others in whatever way you can. Whatever way you are comfortable with. I have one friend who managed to blog through her children's teen years. It was about six years of blogging the word "weird" in all its various forms. I didn't get it until about three years ago. Ohhh, yeah, "weird" about sums it up. She is a rock star, as far as I'm concerned.

Some people like to take it to the street, to make eye contact with weary mothers and give them a thumbs up or whisper, "You've got this." These people are making a difference on the front lines.

Some manage to write, conveying the salmon-like struggle upstream with grace and humor, while honoring their adultish offspring and still ringing true to others. I can't claim to be able to offer that, but it's the direction I'd like to go. I'd also like to revamp my sidebar of blogs with active blogs that are in that stage. An in-the-fog series of beacons, if you will. One of my favorites over the last two years has been Grown and Flown. What are some of yours?

Be encouraged!
~ Dy

* Yes, that part of the sentence is a grammatical nightmare, but the more I worked on it, the more tangled it became. So, the women are technically stealing other people's older children and then following yet other women around the world with the children in tow as they make everyone take notes. The visual's a little whimsical, at least, but I could feel the English language slipping away from my grasp the longer I dinked around with it. So as long as you can figure out what I meant, yay you! Just run with it.