The Morning Wake-Up
As the days get shorter and the nights get longer, I find myself waking my kids for school before the sun has come up. I am bleary eyed, stumbling through a dark house when I head towards their rooms, praying I don’t trip over a backpack or errant shoe on my way. Each of them has requested a different wake-up time — my daughter slightly earlier because it takes her longer to get going, my youngest slightly later because he’s (for now) a morning person and my second, the oldest one living at home, sets his alarm, so I don’t even go in.
On a recent morning, as I moved from room to room I was struck, not only by their different time requests, but also the different ways they like to be woken. For my daughter, it’s a more drawn out process — first, a quiet whispering of her name while she stirs, then a gentle nudge, then a harder nudge and a loud bark of her name. The dog circles me throughout this ritual, licking my leg and whining for pats. Still my daughter burrows deeper into her bed, until I rip off her duvet and turn on her lights.
My youngest is completely still when I walk into his room and all it takes is a whisper of his name and a light pat on the arm for him to wake up. He immediately reaches for his glasses, turns to me and orders his light switched on. The dog has followed me into his room, so he gives her a few words of affection, a perfunctory scratch and then he’s up.
My second kid abhors being woken up by someone else. He told me recently it makes him angry (which is no easy feat with this kid.) So he sets his own alarm and about 5 minutes after it is meant to have gone off, I shout toward the general vicinity of his room to make sure he’s awake. I can tell by the way he answers whether or not he’s actually gotten out of bed.
When I used to wake up my oldest, who is now off at college, no matter how early it was, while still sprawled across his too-small bed, he would chirp up with a “Hi, Mama” when I came in to wake him. And that was all he needed.
The morning journey from bedroom to bedroom has me thinking about what it means to parent different kids living in the same house. On a recent episode of The Puberty Podcast, my co-host, Cara Natterson, and I were discussing how to have the TALK, or really a million little talks, about puberty with different kinds of kids. We created a cast list, both for the adults characters and the kid characters, in considering how to have complex conversations about puberty, sex, drugs, you name it. Some characters on the cast list are more eager, some more reticent, some more anxious and others fairly relaxed.
The essence of the episode is that we need to be aware of who each of our kids is and who we are as adults in order to have constructive conversations with them. Where they are coming from? Why did they ask that particular question? Why are they asking no questions at all? Are we giving them too much information? Are we not quenching their curiosity for more? And we need to recognize where we are. Are we sharing stories from our past that are best shared with a friend? Are we answering the wrong question? Are we giving the kids more detail than they can handle? Are we so caught up with our own worries that we’re not meeting their needs?
I realized that my pre-dawn circuits to wake up my slumbering tweens and teens was so similar to the emotional perambulations inherent in this time in their lives. Just as each kid has their own preferred method of a wake-up routine, so too do they have their own take on the roller coaster ride of middle school and high school. Some are perky and want to dive right into a topic, others need a slower process and maybe a nudge to be ready to chat. One kid needs time than the others to slowly emerge before anyone even talks to him from outside the bedroom door.
Then I think about where I am. Am I cranky from a bad night’s sleep? Am I well rested and excited for the day ahead? Does the dog get under my feet and piss me off? Each of these little elements inform how I am when I wake up my kids. So too does my larger sense of self inform our interactions during these complex years. Each time I enter into a small or large conversation with one of them my mood and my lived experience informs how well I am able to talk to them. When I’m frustrated with what’s going on in my day, I am much less able to meet them where they are. When I am optimistic about my own path, I have so much more ability to take the time to figure out where their questions or worries are coming from. When they bring up topics that surface happy recollections from my teen years I handle the conversations well, when their questions dredge up harder memories, it’s more of a struggle for me to feel confident as we talk.
More often than not, I am impatient and cranky and fail to talk to my kids the way it would best suit them. I usually realize it almost as soon as we’ve finished our conversation. Maybe I snap because I’m rushing or maybe I am impatient because they are simply annoying. Perhaps they ask a question I don’t feel prepared to answer because it’s a tricky topic or I simply haven’t given it any thought. Or even hardest for me, my kids are complaining about an issue that I honestly think is no big deal and I’d like them to be quiet about it.
Whatever the reason I fall short, I am trying my hardest to go back and acknowledge to them that I didn’t have the conversation the way I wanted to. Sometimes I apologize if I was particularly unkind and I know the failure of the conversation was more about my mood than my kid’s question. Sometimes, however, I don’t apologize because they were truly being irritating. In that case, I simply say that I wished they’d entered the conversation differently. I truly believe it is OK to tell your teens when they are being annoying — they certainly tell us!
These years raising tweens and teens can feel like we are stumbling around in the dark, tripping on unexpected obstacles, aiming for soothing words but ending up with an irritated bark. We try to respect the customized approach our kids have asked for or we intuit they need, but so often we fail, instead demanding they be where we want them to be. Somedays we do everything right — the right tone of voice, the right questions, the right body language. But it feels like just when we crack the code, everything changes again. The way we woke them yesterday is no longer the way they want us to wake them today. Our (finally) well-honed routine has been upended yet again and we have to start over, a little disheartened and a lot confused, in order to find a new way in.
If we’re lucky, they’ll tell us what the new way looks like — wake me up like this, don’t do this anymore, come in 5 minutes earlier or 5 minutes later. But so often, they don’t know what the new way should be. We need to help them figure it out by asking subtle and not-so-subtle questions and then parsing their responses. Our job is to do the hard work of clarifying their murky answers, often being told we’re not getting it at all but persevering anyway. Each morning, the experiment begins again, to either be rewarded with a sleepy smile or grumbled at beneath lumpy covers.
These days, I remind myself on the mornings that don’t go so smoothly that each day is a fresh start, a new dawn, another opportunity to wake my kids up the way they want and meet them where they are.