Small Increments

Humbling experience. Call me vain....call me overly confident but now that I'm a part of the "mom's club" I feel fairly confident about my ability to mother. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely times where I feel completely clueless and wonder what the heck I got myself into 17 months + 41 weeks and 26 hours ago. But for the most part, I think I've got a decent handle on the mom thing. I can smell a poopy diaper from across the room even if nobody else can. I don't wake up to jackhammering in my bathroom but will wake at the tiniest peep coming from the nursery. I can successfully cook an entire meal with a 26 pound dead weight squiriming on my hip trying desperately to touch everything in sight with sticky little fingers. I have favorite board books memorized to the point where I can be doing something completely unrelated but still "read" to Ben as he turns pages. Yes.....goodnight moon, goodnight mush, goodnight to the brown bears, yellow ducks, purple cats. Of course each new stage takes some adjustment and getting used to but before long I can don my "supermom" cape and say that I've successfully accomplished the next phase of life.

Well.....I got humbled. All supermom abilities flew out the window along with my cape, and confidence. Over the weekend I got the experience of parenting a middle schooler. My good friends had a long trip to make on Sunday and their 6th grade son didn't want to spend the afternoon sitting in the car, so he came to hang out with us. He's a really cool kid, Ben loves playing with him and we were pumped to have him with us for the afternoon. I quickly realized my own lameness.....I'm way too old to be cool. My house is equipped for a toddler, not a teen. My pantry is stocked with food that no teenager would go near. My taste in movies, TV, books, and music is as foreign to him as disco/neon was to me when I was his age. I'm too old to be cool, and too young to be a "mom" so I was just sitting in a land where my parenting superpowers were naught, and I might as well have had gray hair, no teeth and been huddled under an afghan. I am a technology savvy person for the most part but still had no clue about some of the things he was talking about. The lingo has changed and my "teen talk" is sorely out of date and out of style. I'm not that far out of high school all things considered but I might as well have graduated 30 years ago.

Poor kid....probably thought Brian and I are the lamest bunch of people ever and will probably never want to step foot near our house ever again. To his parents- if you're reading this.....my apologies if you got an earful on the car ride home about why he was left in the boring capitol of the world. We had fun....I bet he did not.

It's a good thing that children grow up slowly and change comes in small increments. I have plenty of time to prepare before Ben hits middle school years. Mom and Dad need all the time they can get.