Driving Miss Cranky

I have to confess that I’ve wasted a great deal of time, as a mother, worrying. When my kids were little (which, I have to admit, was before the internet), I constantly had my head buried in a copy of Doctor Mom. Every cry, sneeze, stomach ache or earache made me flip through the dog-eared pages in fear of evidence of a dreaded disease. (It’s a blessing that WebMD didn’t exist back then.)

When my kids reached school-age, I concerned about them hitting developmental milestones. I obsessed over words mispronounced or misspelled, math problems misunderstood or their inability to write a cohesive sentence. (Their parents are both journalism majors! Shouldn’t writing be part of their genetic code?!)

As middle-school approached, I worried about social issues. Who were they hanging around with? Why aren’t they going out more? Why do they want to go out so much? Why are they obsessed with how they look? Why aren’t they obsessed with how they look?

Then came high school. Because I was not the head cheerleader, prom queen or valedictorian, I had my share of high school issues. And, because I’m not a Stepford mom, I worry about my kids encountering those same issues. My philosophy is I’m here and I’ll help them make better choices, right? Wrong. The issues are totally different and so I worry even more. In fact, I worry because I don’t even know what to worry about.

College is a whole other ball of worry wax! Will my kids get into a good college? Will they like college? Will they excel in college or fade into the woodwork and barely graduate? What if they get a freaky roommate who stays up all night or brings “overnight guests?”

Can you see why this is exhausting?

So here’s what I do. Sometimes, because there seems to be no end to the worry, I focus on one thing: my kids, at home, safe and sound. Now that they drive, this is a bigger deal than you think.

And so, this Thanksgiving week, I’m thankful to have my kids at home with me.

What, me worry?

Growing up, I was taught by nuns…lots and lots of nuns. If you ever had a nun as a teacher, you know that they are/were sticklers for grammar, spelling and penmanship. If you dangled a modifier or a participle or spelled something incorrectly or wrote it sloppily, they’d nail you for it every time. Sometimes they seemed mean or vindictive, but I like to think I learned a lot from them.

I think today’s kids are still being taught the basics of grammar, spelling and penmanship, but they have far fewer opportunities to use those skills in their daily lives. I’m pretty sure that cell phones and computers are, ironically, going to be the cause of the dumbing down of an entire generation.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a high school child and a college child. Both of them are voracious “texters.” They can BTW and BRB faster than the blink of an eye. They’ve also grown up in a world of computers. They type faster than I ever could. With the exception of taking notes during class, I think it’s almost rare that they put a pen to paper.

Their daily communications are filled with acronyms and emoticons and abbreviations. When they write a paper, Microsoft Word highlights mistakes and can usually correct them. It’s as if they hardly need to engage their brains to communicate. It’s bad enough that virtually all of their contact with the outside world is passive, but that’s another post for another time.

I just think that communicating “old school” (a handwritten letter or a face-to-face chat)  might be good for them once in a while.

I realize that most of you have kids that are younger than mine, but it’s probably a safe bet that you also have school age children. Here’s what I think we have in common right now – your kids (and mine) have hit the Mid-Fall Brick Wall.

Here in our house, I’m dealing with a high school daughter. At the beginning of the school year she was (surprisingly) excited to go back to school. She said she missed being on a regular schedule and was anxious to get back and see her friends. She decorated her binders and made her annual vow to make the honor roll. Like all good things, I knew this wouldn’t last.

She’s into the performing arts and had committed to be in her school musical and two school choirs. Pretty quickly, rehearsals started happening fast and furious. And, because it’s high school, the homework increased too. Then, one of several bouts with the common cold started. The icing on the cake was the drop in temperatures and the onset of dark evenings.

Pretty soon, I think it was mid-October, I had to scrape her daily motivation and energy off the floor. Mornings started becoming a battle of wills and a struggle for both of us. A simple request of: “Mom, would you mind waking me up tomorrow morning?” soon turned into me begging, cajoling and bribing with a morning hot chocolate laced with a shot of coffee.

You think the Terrible Twos are bad? Try the Surly Sixteens. They’re not for the faint of heart.

I’m not sure what I expected motherhood to be like, but this is just another on a long list of things that I’m glad nobody warned me about. If I had known that my days would revolve around a mercurial adolescent, perhaps I would have chosen pets?

Right now, the school burnout level is at an all-time high. I’m getting information on a need-to-know basis (barely), the tension level is all over the place and my maternal mojo is way out of whack. I long for those days when a hug and a juice box would fix everything.

How about you? Are your kids losing their beginning of the school year excitement and enthusiasm? Is everyone getting a little cranky at this time of the year?