The Hardest Thing About Being a Parent
A Letter to My Daughter That She Will Never See
I always thought the hardest time was going to be when you were little.
You were this little premature baby —my baby— and it seemed like if I jostled you too much that you would break into a million pieces, lay shattered all over the floor.
You screamed all night for the first five months, I didn’t know if I would survive. I felt a little crazy from exhaustion and I couldn’t figure out how to get you to stop screaming.
You almost died when you were eighteen months. All the books said to not be too concerned about croup. It sounds worse than it it. I danced around a steamy bathroom until you beat on your head with your little hands because you couldn’t breath. Then I knew. I felt the danger lapping at my feet. A quick rush to the ER and the next thing I knew, you were admitted to the PICU. You almost died. It was my fault.
I was sure I had passed the parenting test. Things had gotten as bad as they were going to get and you had survived and I had survived. The rest of our time together was going to be smooth sailing.
I hadn’t counted on the teen years.
They haven’t been that bad. I mean, we fight like cats and dogs sometimes. I am not the kind of mom that responds calmly when goaded. You are not the kind of girl to go down without a fight. I suspect you wear the drama queen badge proudly at home. You’d never admit it though.
But yesterday I was reminded just how hard it is to be the mother to a sixteen-year-old girl.
Your friends did something over social media to make you feel bad about yourself. It was a slight that no one from the outside would see, but it was a flashing neon sign in your face.
You cried. And this time, it was my heart that broke into a million pieces and laid shattered all over the floor.
I would like to tell you I had an adult reaction to this. I want to say that I was Mrs. Calm, Cool, and Collected.
But I would be lying. I wanted to rip those girls’s hearts out. I wanted to make an anonymous Instagram account and call them all the most horrible, shitty names that I could think of. I wanted to send their mothers a collective email and tell them that their daughters were complete and total bitches.
I couldn’t and can’t do any of this. It’s killing me. The funny thing is that you feel better today. I’m still mad as hell.
I keep telling myself that this will pass and everything will fall back into place. And I’m right, this will pass, but there will be something new to take it’s place. Because teenage girls are mean.
But you will become an adult and everything will be fine. Except it won’t. Because here’s the thing. Adults are mean, nasty jerks too. Not all of them. But as Guns N’ Roses so succinctly put it, “Welcome to the Jungle.”
This very fact —the truth that your life will be full of dealing with shitty people —is the main reason that I can’t step in to save you now. Well, also the fact that you may die of embarrassment, but that’s just a sidebar.
I can’t jump in and pull you out of that class with the craptastic teacher because you are going to spend your life coming face-to-face with a bunch of craptastic bosses that you have to deal with if you want to keep your job.
I can’t save the day and get you out of an unrealistic homework assignment that will keep you up all night because you are going to be faced with a lot of situations where you will be convinced you won’t be able to weather through.
But then you will.
And you will be a little stronger each time you realize that you, and you alone, have the power to do this, and maybe just about anything else they put in front of you.
I want to be one of those helicopter parents who swoops into save you. But I can’t do it. You’re in high school and being forced to develop that tougher skin that will get you through life.
I want you to be that small child who sits humming in my ear as I rock you to sleep.
But you’re not anymore. I have to handcuff myself to the wall and let you grow into the person you’re meant to be.
And this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
