Parenting a 2-year-old is tough, but at least it only lasts one year. Parenting a teenager takes seven years of patience.
Seven years! That’s so long that if you run 1 mile every day your child is a teenager, you will complete 97 marathons by the time he or she is 20. Can you run 97 marathons in a row? I certainly can’t.
If you’re the parent of more than one child, the teen years add up. My kids are four years apart. That means my husband and I will have a teenager living in the house for 11 years straight.
There are lots of great things about having teenagers in the house. They can cook, clean and mow the grass — sometimes without complaining. They can be left on their own without worrying that they’ll choke on grapes or roll into the fireplace. They provide tech support, like when your subscription to Microsoft Office expires and you can’t figure out how to edit a Word document.
But most important of all, having teenagers in the house gives you one last chance to live under the same roof together before they take off into the world. That’s 2,555 days of hugs.
Still, it’s tempting — really tempting — to look back fondly on the days when your children couldn’t talk about politics. Or when they were so portable, that you could literally strap them to your body and take them to their flu shot, whether they wanted to go or not.
You never worried about where they were, who they were with or what they were doing, because they were either sitting on a blanket right in front of you, or else being carefully monitored by trained professionals.
Last year when my husband and I were facing the first of a combined 11 years of parenting teenagers, we made an important decision for our mental health: We purchased a massage chair.
Actually, I made the decision, and then relentlessly campaigned until my husband gave in. Isn’t that how marriage works? “This is how we survive the teen years,” I told him. “Look at the math. For the same price as a carton of ice cream and a six-pack of beer each week, we could own a massage chair.”
The trouble was finding a place to put it. Our massage chair is tiny — it’s not one of the ritzy models they sell at Brookstone, but it does take up space. I made room for it behind the couch and plugged it in.
Now, when it’s been a stressful day and I find myself opening up a package of cookies, I stop, put the cookies back, and go to the massage chair instead. It’s a lot easier to think about being the mother of a high school student when I’m in the middle of the chair’s “stress relief” cycle.
Maybe parenting a teen isn’t so different than parenting a 2-year-old after all. A time-out is still the answer — especially in the best seat in the house.
Jennifer Bardsley publishes books under her own name and the pseudonym Louise Cypress. Find her online on Instagram @the_ya_gal, on Twitter @jennbardsley or on Facebook as The YA Gal. Email her at teachingmybabytoread@gmail.com.
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