If you have become my friend within the last five years, then it’s a good chance you’ve never seen my blog. For the past half decade I have struggled to find a reason to write. Gone are the days of cute baby noises and toddler tantrums. No more funny preschooler stories or Kindergarten pictures. Our days at home have turned into weeks that fly by into months filled with our children’s activities and demands of our jobs. Puberty, sports, difficult classes, cell phone management, teen drivers, laundry, curfews, arguments, aging parents, our own aging bodies, late bedtimes, elite expensive sports, college prep, and nothing worth writing about. Nothing that I felt anyone could benefit from reading.
Then one day I read someone’s comment on a Facebook post about how lonely they were as a parent of a teen. The comments kept coming of those who felt the same sentiments. “Our mistakes as parents are bigger and more serious than when we made mistakes as a young parent,” one poster said. Others agreed that society always has a judging eye on how our older kids behave, perform, and belong. It’s as if by the time we’ve been doing this parenting gig for 14 or 15 years, there is no room for mistakes.
Let me tell ya from my current view in the teen trenches; my view from the preteen trenches, and my view from the sassy grade-school girl trenches: mistakes will be made every day.
My 40th birthday was the last normal Wednesday of 2020. By Friday, schools had closed indefinitely and people were asked to stay home. As everyone here knows, our world has still not returned to what it was on March 11, 2020. I’m also not ever going to be the same as I was on my 40th.
What a world we have become.
And in the midst of all of this chaos, my family has changed so much.
My view is from a different side of this mountain. My view is from this other side of forty.
It’s tired, it’s stinky, it’s filled with pimples and deep voices, morning arguments in the bathroom, and sometimes happiness that depends on a game win.
I know there’s readers out there who need this blog. Probably the same readers who needed this blog 10 years ago when it was filled with baby spit up, diaper changes in the parking lot, and t-ball.
Welcome to this side of forty. Join me if you will!
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