It’s a time of learning to let go.
The trick, as a parent, is to know when to release… to release my grip, a reverse squeeze, relax my fingers and watch your teenage palm slip out.
To let you figure it out and to trust you and to be ok with your mistakes, that your mistakes are the feature, not the bug.
To provide some very loose and slightly distant guidance; you believe you have space and you’re on your own – and you are, yeah, in the way a very long extension cord creates a certain kind of opportunity –
– but also to be there, lovingly, in the space between, when you out of nowhere feel like snuggling on my lap; you can. Or you feel like being a little kid for a minute.
Before everything breaks out into the insanity that is adulthood.
Sixteen, I can’t believe it, but there’s no time for that, the clock is ticking, your teudat zehut is freshly printed and your tzav giyus is only a semblance of potential, to-be bytes hovering around the motherboard of some government-issued computer somewhere, but it’s also a shiver between the vibration of your mother’s heartbeat when she pauses long enough to think about it.
Whadya got: