MindSpinner

My son has a stomach virus which necessitated a doctor’s appointment this morning. In the parking lot at the doctor’s office, I saw a student I taught last year. She had just been thrown out of her house. Seems mother had started sleeping with daughter’s boyfriend, and daughter caught the two of them together in bed this morning. A scene ensued. (Imagine that.) The police were called. Amber (not her real name) presented her mother’s coke pipe to the police, packed up her own stuff, and left to stay with a friend. She guessed that her mother might be in jail. She said her mother was losing it, was keeping her 8-year-old sister out until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. on school nights, and didn’t care about anything. She explained, “I can come or go anytime I want. I can leave at 2:00 a.m., and my mother doesn’t care. My friends tell me they wish they had the freedom I have, but I don’t want freedom. Teenagers think they want freedom, but they don’t want freedom; they want structure. I want my mother to tell me what time to get home. I want to get grounded when I deserve it. At least then I’d know she cared. She doesn’t care anything about me, so I’m finished with her.”

Before we said goodbye, I gave Amber my number and said, “If you need me, call. Call me anyway to let me know how you are doing.” If she does need help or support, I hope she will call. She’s a smart enough girl; she wants to be a nurse and is already taking a nursing class at the vocational school. She deserves, like every other kid, a fair shot and a parent who acts like a parent.

Amber’s spontaneous assessment of what constitutes parental love reminds me of why I persevere with my own two teenagers when teenagers can be, at times, anything but easy, especially for a parent without a partner. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine who designs secure network systems explained to me how he builds redundancy into the systems he oversees such that those systems continue to operate even if part of the network is down. Users never know the difference, though he and others are busy behind the scenes addressing the problem. This is, of course, a wise and widely utilized practice where network failures are unacceptable. Single parenting isn’t like this. There’s no redundancy, no village to help raise a child, no second parent to fall back on when the logistics of being one instead of two don’t work or when there’s too much to do or when one is tired or feeling uncertain or even temporarily defeated. Next time I’m lamenting the challenge, I’m going to come back to this post and read Amber’s words all over again. No doubt she has no idea she gave me an especially relevant gift today, though I would wish that her wisdom had not come at this price.