When they hand you the baby in the hospital, take off the little LoJack, and tell you to go home, they forget to tell you a bunch of stuff.
Sure, they give you a ton of those blue and white blankets, mostly so the kid fits in the car seat and her little head doesn’t bop from side to side as you do thirty miles an hour down the interstate, confident you will break the child if you go too fast.
But I digress.
They do not tell you what to do next. They do not tell you what to do when the kid is a teenager and is caught in a web of bad decisions. They don’t tell you siblings will keep secrets from you. They don’t tell you that the worrying only gets worse.
Most of all, they do not tell you that the world in which you grew up doesn’t exist any more and that it’s no use trying to do what your parents did because those days are gone and you have to figure it all out by yourself.
If I had to do it over again, I would have chosen a different school when we moved here. I would have delayed technology, maybe forever. I would have protected them from television and movies and other people. I would have interviewed their friends first and asked their parents a hundred questions. I would have, if I could, protected them more from themselves.
The reality is that infants turn into toddlers and toddlers turn into children and children turn into teenagers and it just gets harder with each phase. The world seems to get scarier and less Christian at the same time; the culture is shifting away from the holy and that just makes things harder. The kids have access to excess in their pockets and everything is overly sexualized.
In short, the world is a mess. It’s no wonder that kids suffer from more anxiety and depression and loneliness than any generation in history. How do we keep our children from being dumb when the stare our mothers gave us apparently skipped a generation or at least somehow, this generation seems immune to it. You remember it, don’t you. Your mother could look at you and you could feel the stare go through you like a lightsaber. Either I don’t have the look, or my children just don’t care.
People keep telling us that it will get better, kids will outgrow this, and all will be well because our kids are good kids and every kid goes through this phase.
They better be right. I have all my eggs in this novena-shaped basket and my hopes are high that prayer and positive thinking (with a measured dose of discipline and counseling) will get us through these teenage years so my children become well-informed, well-adjusted, smarter-than-the-average-bear adults.
Because, right now, the internal button marked, “dumb,” seems to be stuck in the on position.
St. Jude, pray for us.