Multiple-Personality Mom

Ten years ago I learned that one key to successful parenting was consistency. When my boys were three and five I found myself completely overwhelmed.  I took a Positive Discipline workshop with other consoling miserable parents, most of whom had teenagers and these parents were really not loving life. 

They told wonderful Afterschool Special-worthy horror stories, but then they would cry. At least my two whirling dervishes were in bed by eight, and I still outweighed them by fifty pounds if things got ugly.

Ten years ago all my fears were homegrown: holding onto the banister, keeping cleaning supplies out of reach, wearing sunscreen, standing up in the tub, jumping off the top bunk, wearing a helmet, asking before you pet a strange dog. 

The controlled substances were sugar and videos.

But now I have teenagers and I feel anything but consistent.  

I am three different mothers.  

I have three kids and each needs their own mom. I am a different mother in my thirteen-year old’s bedroom than I am when I cross the hall into my eight-year olds, and a third when I go downstairs to discuss Driver’s Ed with the fifteen-year old.

With adolescence comes the top-shelf fears: driving with idiots, indulging, enlisting, bailing on college, federal prosecution for illegal file-sharing or tattooing their band’s name on their forearm.

I haven’t even started dealing with the girlfriends yet. 

But if we are consistent, we three moms, it is that we morph like the beach. We receive the gifts and the wreckage from the ebb and flow of each child’s triumphs, insecurities, accomplishments, and frustrations. 

The tsunamis of adolescence can trash us.

We often look like a disheveled wreck even if we’re smiling. 

My mothering will never be mistaken for a balmy beach in paradise, and like that beach, I look better in the soft indirect light of a sunset.

By Mary Allison Tierney