Misstropolis

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The Juggler

by Kirsten Olson

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Predawn, pre-caffeinated I am in the kitchen washing a pan covered with chicken fat someone left in the sink from the night before. My hair is unbrushed, my hands are sheathed in elbow-length orange rubber gloves, and underneath my bathrobe I am wearing old gym shorts and a t-shirt that belonged to a former babysitter. I sometimes wonder what my doctorate was for.

I am the mother of four teenage children. I have been online recently to understand my situation better — Commonweal articles, Mom’s Café, MomsRising — and I know I am not alone in trying to make sense of my life.

I am a juggling mom: partially employed, overeducated, under funded, over busy — and sometimes nearly overcome by the have-to of professional accomplishment and intense maternal love. Attend a child’s basketball game at 3 p.m. or grow your business at an out-of-town meeting? Be there when high schoolers get back in the afternoons, or sacrifice the money you could earn for a full-day’s work? Hang around for those intangible, gossamer moments of teenage parenting, or do what your divorce settlement demands, and try to be “fully” employed? You cannot have it all, but I expected this to get easier after 18 years of motherhood. It hasn’t.

While my children were growing up I got two graduate degrees, believing that when they were teenagers they would “need me less.” Off I would go, I imagined, into a world of professional experiences, travel, and salary commensurate with my age and know-how.

Reentering the workforce at 45, although I had two advanced degrees from a prestigious institution, wasn’t simple. Many of the jobs I was right for in stature and experience, I hadn’t completed the right apprenticeships for. Job descriptions had changed, and youth was highly desirable. I was considered old.

At the same time I discovered that parenting four teenage children is more demanding and time consuming than parenting four infants. Although the emergency room days of early childhood: four car seats, multiple bodies to feed, bathe, read to — seemed onerous at the time, the demands of younger children are more predictable and schedulable than teenage rhythms. Young children go to bed at some point in the early evening. Teenagers don’t.

Young children tend to do things on schedules that parents control, or at least know about. Parenting teenagers defines chaos theory and the unpredictable. You do not schedule time to talk with teenagers about their hopes, dreams, and feelings: you must be accessible within 30 seconds to drive somewhere, to knock on a bedroom door, or to hand over cash. Then you may get a chance to talk. This requires immense adult flexibility and resources.

Why was I living in the illusion — and with a divorce settlement that specified — that parenting duties would drop away in teenager hood? My stepmother, a wise and profoundly competent person in her mid-seventies, told me recently that during her lifelong career as a nurse, the only years she felt she had to leave the hospital and “come home” was when her two boys were teenagers. Who knew?

Behind me in the kitchen questions swirl. “What time is the basketball game today?” “Will someone feed the dogs?” “Are you sure the rice is ALL VEGAN?” Then one son says, “Give me a hug,” and I am pulled into a man-sized embrace before he flies out the door. The pan in the sink happily slips from my hands.