How can my life swing so rapidly? One day I am fine, just fine, juggling work and parenting and emotion and recovery from my marriage and other days, things just fall apart. It feels sometimes like I am juggling and if I drop one ball, the rest are soon to follow. I’m learning though..to keep juggling while retrieving, to JUGGLE LESS BALLS at once. But still. One day I am strong as a bull, immoveable, ready to face this new world I have chosen, and others, I want to curl into a ball and sleep.  Can I just say? Parenting teenagers is really hard. You know how our own children know just how to get to us? Know if its whining that makes our skin crawl, or mocking, or know how many times to repeat a word and with such succinct timing  that we throw our hands up and yell, or give in, or smoke emerges from our skin? Well. Take that, my dear friends, with a teenager and times it 1000. Just remember that they can articulate much, much better now, they have a large and looming vocabulary that incidentally, WE encouraged by reading them so god damn many books from day one onward. They are 5′6″, six foot TWO, and they KNOW we can not pick them up when they misbehave and move them to the timeout chair. Having a teenager in the house is like living with a friendly baracuda. Hmmm. And here I stand, wondering how to out-manuver, how to teach, how to help, but still allow them their own consequences, how to love when they insist that what I give them for love is, in fact, not love at all, but control, intrusion, annoyance. Was I really like this, at 16?  I was, I was. So here it is folks, back in spades.

Patience, detachment, less identity as mom, more identity as self, water, good food, exercise, sleep. Oooohhh, Nelly.