Life Outside Is Always More Interesting

The hot dog bought at the baseball game tastes better than the one cooked at home.  The sweater found in the thrift store is more fashionable than any bought by Mom.  Every gift offered is not as valuable to the one who receives it, as the ones they seek themselves.  

No one who is a parent ever gets credit from their kids for any expertise they might have based on degree, profession or even prior experience with prior children.   We can be accomplished as one wishes, but everywhere else is more compelling than anything close to home.   The hard dicotomy of parenting teens and adolescents and being a parent to adults is, they want your help but always and only one their terms, and sometimes, not even then.  

It's not that they're ungrateful, it's that we are the water in which these fish swim.  They expect to breathe. They do not know themselves to be wet.  We've spent their whole lives ensuring they're fed, they're kept warm, they're kept clean and while they know they need and want the whole of the world, they and we don't now if they can endure the ocean.  

Figuring out how to manage and support is a process of determining what they and we will bear, and how to always respond with love even when everything feels tired and worn. It's work but the hardest part of it is knowing everything could be easy but it won't be. 

That's the hardest part of parenting, knowing it will be hard and unnecessarily so.  Parenting not kids, not toddlers, not babies, means loving through the rough spots, when the outside seems always more interesting, and knowing the interior is where the work must be done.