The Young Raising the Young

On being a young father raising a young woman.

Where do I even begin? I remember when my daughter was two and three years old running around terrorizing the house. She didn’t want to sleep, would mysteriously escape through the front door, and I would literally pray for the day she was a teenager so I didn’t have to be on guard duty 24/7.

Talk about being careful what you ask for.

My daughter is 14 now, more than halfway through her first year of high school. Now all she wants to do is sleep and spends most of her time doing God knows what in her bedroom. Looking back at her three year old self, I’m starting to think that it wasn’t so bad.

But that’s not really what this is about. This is about dealing with a teenager when in many ways I feel like I’ve just matured, myself. As you’ve probably guessed by now — and if you’ve been following my blog — I was a teenage parent. Two weeks after I turned 19, my daughter came kicking and screaming into this world. I still can’t think of a scarier moment in my life, although thinking of being a single father raising an adolescent girl is quickly gaining some ground.

I can list all the things that make me nervous. Everything from dating to drug use, bad friends to bad behaviour. These are regular parental concerns. What’s increasingly hard for me is separating our bond as father and daughter from our friendship as two young people. It’s making sure that although we share so many similarities, I maintain enough distance that she continues to respect me as her parent.

I’m not sure if any other parents go through this. I honestly don’t know any other single fathers close to my age who have full custody of their child. That’s rare in our community, and I imagine rare in general. On top of that, my daughter and I genuinely like each other. We don’t get into arguments, and the odd time we do, it’s fairly mild compared to the shouting matches I got into with my own mother.

We listen to a lot of the same music, laugh at the same Instagram posts, and don’t seem to have any of that weird teenager/authority figure tension stuff that other kids show towards their parents.

My daughter still asks me to go to the movies with her. Just us two. No need to coax her at all. Even though I think it’s a little odd sometimes, I take it. All of this is actually what makes it difficult to parent. Saying no or disciplining her when the occasion presents itself is excruciating.

I wanted to say yes when she asked me to go to a hotel party. I want to let her stay late at the mall because “my friends get to stay late and it’s not fair I have to leave early.” I fight myself not to swear in casual conversation because I know it’s just not appropriate for a father to be speaking to his 14 year old daughter like she’s grown. She isn’t. Over and over again, I remind myself that she is not a grown up and it takes real effort.

No matter how mature her teachers tell me she is in class. No matter how well she does in school or how independent she may seem, the plain truth of the matter is that she’s a 14 year old girl. The world is still new to her. So many experiences are still foreign. She still sits with her legs wide open in public and eats with her hands. My daughter is a kid.

My struggle then becomes to not only be a parent, but to be appropriate. Maybe we shouldn’t be laughing at that meme that references a woman’s breast. Maybe it’s not cool to be repeating vulgar lyrics of rap songs together. These things have an impact. Whether I recognize it now or not, she is at her most impressionable, so it definitely has an impact. I can’t be so naive.

But I also can’t lie, It’s a struggle. It’s a struggle because those are the type of things that I would laugh at or enjoy on my own. But I’m not on my own. My daughter and I are together, and the fact that I’m with her full time means my influence is amplified. I don’t have room for many mistakes, or at least that’s how it feels.

So the battle continues. The young raising the young. Friends but not really, or maybe that’s exactly what we are. At least partially. At this point, I’ve reserved myself to the fact that I’m just doing this parenting thing on the fly and making up the rules as I see fit. Right or wrong, it will just have to work.

Here I am again talking about all the “fun” we parents have. No complaints, just thoughts and experiences. Feel free to express your own.

If you want a more complete story on parenting, read my novella Thoughts of a Fractured Soul.