Another parenting challenge you won’t find in any of the how-to books is how to help your 17-year-old firstborn navigate his first heart-break. Apparently helping doesn’t mean hovering, shouldering or swooping in and saving the day, my bad! Believe me when I tell you that there is nothing worse than realizing you’ve been meddling like this right up to your kids’ adulthood.
As a freshly self-identified helicopter parent, I recognize that no one, especially Jake, has asked for my help in this way.
Full disclosure (I’m getting good at those): my first instinct was to memorialize my reaction in a vlog. And in all my well-intentioned emotional “honesty,” I realized while editing, that all of it was best left on the cutting room floor as they say.
So here’s what I got out of this:
I’m lousy with boundaries. Whether it was their first day at kindergarten, or navigating friendships or getting their driver’s license or
having their heart-broken, I have bumbled my way through helping my kids cope, thinking I could “fix things,” truly believing I was an expert. Ironically, this blog is teaching me the flip side of being a so-called mom: that the more I think I know, the more I realize I don’t.
Don’t we all have that mom fix-it impulse? To step in and just take-over?
Well, apparently this So-Called Mom doesn’t just take over and fix, I flat-out hijack any and all rites of passage and then take it upon myself to fix things that aren’t even broken.
So back to where I began: my 17-year-old, Jake. Yesterday he fessed up that the reason he’s been staying home from school isn’t his “migraines,” but because the girl who he’s been crushing on all year-long is moving far away. I spent the day texting with him, while he was in class, about what to do. That’s no-no #1. And then I bawled about it like it was happening to me.
Note to self: Don’t create a false narrative about your kid’s so-called heartbreak like it’s going to create a lifetime of regret over “the one that got away.” Especially over a relationship that never even happened. It’s as if I see the disappointment of a first crush as proof that leaving the bubble of homeschooling was the bad idea I knew it would be.
My problem? I feel my kids pain even more than they do. And then whenever there’s a remote discomfort, I want to “protect” my kids from feeling it—and I do, without realizing that letting them experience these things is essential to building confidence and resiliency.
Look, I want to say it’s not as bad as it sounds, but the truth is that he is transforming into an adult faster than I can keep up with and I just want to be able to say I did OK. Part of that means that I can look back and confirm that I provided an equal balance of support and letting go—that he has been able to find his own path after I showed him the ropes. But I realize now that I haven’t been doing that—and not just with Jake but will all my kids. I’ve been leading the pack too strongly and controlling their emotional responses.
So this next part is going to be hard. It means backing off of my instinctive responses and keeping my pain to myself. I get this about letting them fail. But maybe I’m afraid of failing myself? Do other moms also share that?
Please say yes,
So-Called Mom