“I feel like a stranger, I find myself wistfully hoping for some kind of relationship with my teenager. But over the past months they have changed completely. I see tiny glimmers of the who they used to be, but it is as if some one took my child and swapped it for someone else. I feel heartbroken, I miss them so much. Is anyone else feeling this way?”
This message was left by a mum on a private Facebook group for parents of teens and twenty somethings, and it really struck a chord with me. When your children head into adolescence there is a little lonely ‘living loss’ isn’t there? It came as a surprise to me at first, this feeling. But now, 4 teens later, I know it is a something most of us parents feel.
I really missed the children they used to be: I remember crying my eyes out one morning after a row when the sight of glitter between the cracks of our kitchen floorboards sent me into a spiral of melancholy sadness. We’d spent so many happy times painting, sticking and glittering together and yet it now felt as if my daughter had changed so completely I hardly knew her. I had lost the precious joy of hugs any time and kisses on tap. The glitter days were gone and there must have been a ‘last’ time we sat together doing it and I hadn’t known it.
So at times. despite the mess and the mayhem, and all the giant trainers in the hall it can feel lonely being the parent of a teenager can’t it? We don’t talk about this enough. We don’t acknowledge it may happen at some point and plan for it so it isn’t so much of a shock. If you’re feeling this way now, then I am here to say (as a mum of four aged 15-23) it does get better, you just move into a different rhythmn of being together.
Adolescence is not like the baby days filled with friendly new mums in the same exhausted state, or the toddler years when advice on huge meltdowns is freely available in the local playground as well as all over the internet.
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The teenage years feel more solitary. Often you can’t tell anyone about your teens confusing or bad behaviour because it isn’t as funny and relatable as the day your three-year-old went to the loo behind a curtain on a play date. And some times you may feel too ashamed to share the teen tales with the group. Parenting adolescents feels more personal, I feel much more of a failure when ruptures occur with my teens than at any other parenting moment, I feel shame too which is illogical because how they are is not a reflection of me, adolescence is about them building their own identity and testing new ones along the way, but parental shame and critical self-judgment seems to sneak into the room unexpectedly.
And some times we may feel as if we have ‘lost’ them while they go through these transitions, they are unrecogniseable in comparison to the children they were and they are pushing us away as they separate, all this is normal but it can be hard to deal with as a mum, dad or caregiver.
Adolescents can sometimes be agents of chaos too and the architects of all sorts of unpredictable situations, some of which you just don’t dare mention out loud for fear of others judgment or simply because you find them so confusing. You may stay isolated in dealing with it sometimes.
The fallout from parties, the illogical testing of boundaries, the desperation of the random “Mum, rescue me” phone calls; it’s all more tricky to cope with. And at this stage, there are no NCT classes for you, no school gate catch-ups.
Most parents of teens are either fire-fighting crises or catastrophising about diabolical hypothetical scenarios that suddenly seem within the realms of possibility. It’s all so intense and this loneliness has been a bit of a surprise for me. There have been moments
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