The Secret To Keeping Your Teens Happy

Years ago, my husband and I used to drag all three of our children, including Shale, with all of his medical equipment, to a ball diamond down the road every Friday and play slow pitch in a beer league.

We were the youngsters on the team, surrounded by more seasoned parents and our children were the toddlers and infants in the ball diamond.

These games consisted primarily of me standing in the outfield, picking my nose and wishing someone would hit the ball in my direction as two of my children ran around like wild little heathens and their little brother sat in his carrier freaking out our slightly inebriated team mates with his tubes and medical equipment beeping away.

More than once a game was halted because Shale's oxygen levels dropped or his feeding bump squawked with it's alarm and the people around us panicked in fear that something was wrong with our kid.

Apparently it is not common to drag a wee child who is medically fragile out to the ball diamond but I was always of the opinion that the dude needed to learn to love ball just like every other member of our family. The reality was, I needed a few hours each week to escape the medical drama that surrounded us every minute of the day and I needed to build a support system within the community around me.

It may have been unorthodox, but it worked. People stopped seeing Shale's medical tubes and diagnoses and started seeing my kid. And I learned how to finally catch a grounder without it popping up out of my mitt and bopping me in the nose.

One summer night, after a particularly sweaty game, one which we likely lost, because we lost most of them, my husband was standing at the tailgate of one of the other player's trucks, doing what men do, bullshit and brag, as I herded our small tribe into their car seats and prepared to take them home for the evening. I was hot and sweaty and annoyed with my smalls for being uncooperative little turd nuggets and as I went to fetch my husband, the man he was talking to paused to take note of my now surly demeanour.

He chuckled at the sight of my dirty children squawking in our vehicle, and shook his head, remembering a time when his now grown children were the same age.

"Enjoy this now," he warned me. "It gets harder as they get older."

I snorted and rolled my eyes at him, because I just spent 15 minutes chasing two children around a playground trying to convince them it was time to go home, changed one boy's stinky diaper in the front seat of my van and then tried to buckle all three kids into their car seats as each and every one of them tried to make a mad dash for freedom when I wasn't looking. It simply couldn't get any harder than the last fifteen minutes of parenting had been.

"No, really," he insisted as he tossed back the final swallow of his soda. "When they're young, you have full control of them. You make all their decisions. What they wear, where they play, who they see. You even decide what they eat. When your kids get to my kids age, you lose all of that," he said as he nodded towards his teenaged boys who were standing around some girl's car, flirting with them.

"I have to tell you, it sounds like bliss," I admitted, thinking of a time when diapers were a bygone, purple dinosaurs never blared out of my television and sharing skills were firmly acquired.

"Oh, it's not all bad, but you'll miss them. They will never be around. They'll always want to be somewhere 'cooler' than home and you'll have no way of knowing if your kids are hanging with good kids or punks."

Remembering some of the punks in my past, I shuddered to think of my children falling into a trap of hanging around with a bunch of dumbasses.



"There is a secret though, a weapon you can use to keep your kids close to you. To bring the kids to your house. So that you can still parent and be involved," he whispered as my husband and I leaned in closer to hear the secret of the holy grail of teen parenting.

"It's sandwich meat."

It was so absurd and so not what I was expecting to hear, I burst into laughter as my husband simply nodded along with his friend as though he'd heard this truth before.

"Sandwich meat?" I guffawed.

"No really. Not just sandwich meat but food in general. But sandwich meat is the most important. Teens need to eat. That's all they want to do, besides sleep and play. They eat. Make sure your fridge is always stocked with sandwich meat and your pantry always has munchies in it and I guarantee you, your kids won't be leaving your house to go hang at someone else's. Your house will be the house where all the kids will want to be. As long as you can feed them and generally let them be, you'll never lose your kids. And you'll gain more than a few along the way."

Back then, I couldn't imagine how parenting could be any harder. Nor could I fathom a time when my kids wouldn't always be underfoot or a time when they would want to be anywhere other than next to me. A decade later, and I now understand what he meant about parenting getting harder. Learning to let go, while giving your kids the tools to navigate their path to adulthood, it's hard.

As I survey my house, filled with my teens and their friends who have set up camp in my living room for almost a week now, I can't forget that long ago conversation.

Mostly because I'm going somewhat delirious from sleep deprivation and having to listen to the late night cackles of a group of rowdy teen boys and one teen girl in the small hours of the night, long after I keep yelling at them to get their asses to sleep.

This morning, after I clanged a pot to wake up the crew of slumbering teens, I watched as they all filtered into the kitchen and made themselves breakfast while trying to rub the sleep out of their eyes. As the kids made plans for the day, one of them stood at the refrigerator and surveyed the contents with great intensity.

"Is something the matter? Looking for something in particular kid, or are you just trying to air condition my kitchen with the fridge?" I teased.

He blushed and shut the door and then said, "Nope, I was just checking out the lunch meat."

Turns out, my friend from all those years ago was right. Lunch meat is the key to keeping your kids close, and every other kid in the neighbourhood even closer.

All hail the power of some honey ham.

 

Love Harder

On the surface, I look normal. Healthy even. My past, it's invisible to most. You'd have to look close to see the cracks in my facade and most people don't bother.

But I can't escape those cracks. There are reminders, flashing like a neon sign on a dark city street, reminding me I'll never escape this path I'm on. A single white stretch mark beneath my belly button. A tattoo on my back with a scar running through the center.

The crows' feet at the corner of my eyes, less from aging gracefully and more from being thrust into a vortex of pain. My nose ring, a reminder of the numbness I carried and a desperate desire to feel anything once more.

Yesterday, a lady asked me how I cope on the rough days.

The day before I received an email asking how I survived.

The week before, a tweet exclaiming surprise and astonishment that I had a deceased child. They didn't know.

My wounds are no longer on my surface, festering with the rage of raw grief. They've scabbed over from time and endurance and the million tears I've cried. They're hiding under the surface of what you see, threatening to rise to again with a sudden memory or a sad song on the radio.

I wear a skin that is too small most days, fitting tightly to leave no room for the pain that follows me around. It is painful to live with a lost child. To hear of your child's antics. To see another four year old thrive. To watch a five year old blow out their birthday candles. To watch other's children live. It cuts sharp like a knife through the jello of protection I've managed to scab around my heart. I wonder, sincerely, if it will ever not hurt to see everyone else's children grow up, when my child did not.

Love harder.

Losing Shale was the most violent experience of my life. His death was sudden, swift and cruel. We were shredded in moments we never knew to anticipate, left alone in the carnage of death, our lives ripped violently apart with the quiet passing of a small child.

I haven't quite figured out how I survived that moment, or how I continue to walk around in various states of zombification. I can't think of that night, or the days that followed without clutching my chest and having to remind myself to draw breath.

But there are moments, more now than ever before, where the pain is pushed aside, hidden behind the clouds of joy I've peppered into my landscape. Like chasing butterflies, I've chased joy because it has been the only thing that has kept the monster of grief at bay.

Laughter rings in my ears now, and happiness is no longer a fiction to wonder about. It is real and it coexists with the stark reality that death is final.

Most people don't see the quiet moments anymore, the ones where grief sneaks up on me and shatters my joy. It doesn't take much. Shale is everywhere with me, imprinted in me as much as the freckles on my nose.

Small moments of wondering what he'd be like now. He'd be ten. Would he be tall? Would his hair still curl into soft ringlets when it grew out? Would he be able to say Mom? Would he look like his brother Frac? Would he like his brother Jumby? Would he walk?

Those questions torment me, haunting me with their answers held silent, and it burns my soul with a physical pain I would once have told you was impossible. Imaginary. But it is as real as the pain of getting kicked in the groin by a little boy on a playground. This pain exists. And worse, it seems to endure. Nothing stops it.

So I've learned to live with it, like a bad limp, or an eye that keeps watering. It is simply part of what makes me Tanis, whether I like it or not. I'm tired of fighting the fact I carry an inescapable pain with me that no one can see. I'm tired of being sad that others no longer grieve for the child that once shined so brightly with the love he shared.

It hurts to see my kids remember their little brother and cobble together their memories of him, hoarding them close in fear they'll forget the love they once shared with him. It hurts almost as much losing my son all over again.

So yes, I have a son you never knew I lost.

And no, I don't really know how I cope on the rough days. Mostly, because I don't cope. There is no real coping in the face of such loss. There is simply existing through the violence of the pain.

My great secret for learning how to survive this unthinkable loss is that I don't have a secret. I've survived and I hope I will continue to, always because it's a choice I've made. To survive this. For myself, for my existing children, for my son who never had the luxury of survival.

But more than survive, I choose to live and to love. Everyday, with great passion and forethought, because I never know if today is the last day I'm going to be able to hold my loved ones.

Death changed me.

It made me love harder.

Which, I guess, is the real secret to how I survive, how I cope.

I love. Even as it hurts to do so.

I hope you will too.

How To Teach Your Kid To Drive. Old School Style

One morning, during a spring school holiday, my father walked into my bedroom while I was still sleeping, tossed a shirt onto my head and told me to get my arse out of bed and get ready to leave the house in fifteen minutes because he had plans for me.

I remember having just enough time to jump into the shower and get dressed and jump into his truck while moaning about the fact my hair was still wet and I wasn't wearing any makeup and I was hungry and oh God Dad, where are you taking me?

He never did tell me where our destination was; instead preferring to ignore my questions and yammer on about how one drives a stick shift. He prattled on and explained the basic mechanics of how a standard engine works and demonstrated shifting gears and braking for over an hour until I realized he was taking me to his best friend's house out in the country.

The house where Boo lived.

When I realized I was being chauffeured to the place where a hot teenaged boy lived while I was wearing a sloppy green sweater and my hair had dried into a natural frizzy state I was less interested in listening to instructions on how to operate a vehicle and more panicked about how to make myself presentable given the lack of a hair brush, make up and cute clothes at my disposal.

Priorities. I had them.

Instead of pulling into Boo's family driveway, he drove into their hay field and parked the truck upon a hill and then got out of the truck.

Realizing my father was about to let me drive, I suddenly forgot about cute boys and eagerly slid into the driver's seat and waited for my father to get into the passenger seat to begin my very first driver's lesson.

He never did. He turned his back on his truck and me and started lumbering to the house where Boo's father was watching from the window.

Dumbstruck, I rolled down the window and yelled after him, "Wait! Aren't you going to teach me how to drive?"

My dad turned around and hollered back, "I just spent the last hour teaching you how to drive. If you were too dumb to pay attention it's your own damn fault. You'll figure it out. Don't hit anything." And then he strolled (while laughing) out of site and into the house where he and my future father-in-law laughed their arses off at my flummoxed attempts to start a stick shift with virtually no knowledge.

This shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did seeing as how my father decided to teach me to swim. His brother and him took my brother Stretch and I out to go fishing, and once we were in the boat they tied ropes around both my brother and I and tossed us into the lake. Every time we started to sink they'd haul us up by the rope for us to sputter for air and then tell us to figure it out.

Eventually we did. After swallowing darn near half the lake.

Parenting old school style, before laws and shit.

Needless to say, sitting in that truck, trying to get it to start was not something I'll ever forget. Nor was the feeling of finally figuring it out and then subsequently bunny hopping all over Boo's dad's hay field. I was triumphant that afternoon.

That was also the day Boo's and my romance started. But that's a story for another day.

I eventually learned to drive off the hayfield and on actual roads but it had less to do with my father and more to do with Boo, his brother and my big brother, all taking me under their wings and teaching me the skills I needed to attempt to get my driver's license. Something I was in no real hurry to do.

I lived in the city, had public transportation and taxicabs at my disposal, plus a plethora of friends who were all happily willing to squire my arse around. The idea of having to get both a learners permit then a driver's license was not one that thrilled me. So I put it off. And off. And off.

It wasn't until I was 18 that I decided to get my learner's permit to drive. Only because I needed official identification to get into the bar. I then put off getting my driver's license until I was 19 and only then did I bother because my boss told me I wouldn't be promoted with out a license to drive.

Well, that and the fact I really, really wanted to be able to see Boo whenever I wanted to. Young love is a great motivator.

My daughter, however, is not like me. She harbors no fear of driving, feels no anxiety about it and as such, spent all of last summer studying the driver's training manual so that on her 14th birthday she could take her learner's permit test.

Of course she passed.

And of course I wouldn't let her drive.

Because she's fourteen and I don't have a death wish to die beside her in the passenger seat as she drives us off the road.

Instead, I passed that responsibility on to her father, so that one day, she too could have the curious memory of how her daddy tried to teach her to drive. The only problem with this is, her father is never home. Now my daughter is closing in on fifteen, whining every chance she gets about how all the other kids with their learners get to drive with their parents, Mom you are such a big meanie and oh God, my life is so unfair.

(And yes, my daughter will actually be taking certified driver's training lessons nearer to her 16th birthday, just as I did when I finally decided to get my license, but this does not appease a 14 year old who holds a permit to get behind the wheel.)

So in a moment of sheer craziness, I walked into my daughter's room and told her to get her arse out to the car in fifteen minutes because we had places to be.

She bitched to me that she wasn't ready to go anywhere, her hair wasn't combed, she didn't have any make up on and where are we going and I ignored her and explained how standard engine worked and how one shifts gears and stops and avoids bunny hopping and back sliding down a hill.

And then I pulled into her grandmother's hayfield, where 20 years ago I once sat and tossed her the keys.

My knees were actually shaking and a million butterflies threatened to eat through my stomach lining as I watched her slid into the driver's seat very excitedly and then I turned around and walked away.

"Wait Mom! Where are you going? Aren't you going to teach me to drive?" she called.

"I just did. You'll figure it out. Don't hit any trees." I called back as I walked to the house, towards my past, my present and her future.

She survived. As did the trees. As I did. Once more.

The beginning of her future as my own personal chauffeur. Payback is a mother's right.