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When your kid gets
old enough to leave the house, it’s a bittersweet moment. On one hand, the
child that you’ve raised and housed and fed for all of their entire life is
leaving. On the other hand, you get to have that craft/exercise/ceramic llama collectible
room that you’ve always wanted. So you wish them well, lose sleep over their
learning curve of how to adult, and eventually settle into your new normal. And
that new normal becomes nice, in a different sort of way.
Except sometimes…sometimes
they come back.
When your fledgling
bird returns to the nest, (and you now have to find room to store 276 llama
figurines) know that this is also not easy on them. Not only have they been
able to live away from the eagle eyes of mom and pop, but they have had the
luxury of not having to make their bed, pick up their socks, or live anything
remotely close to anything that resembles a human. (Though this may possibly
only be the male of the species. Or perhaps just specific to this one male
child. Or specific to this one, slobby, male, grown-ish child.) They have been
able to become their own person, which is great, except they’ve brought that
person with them and that person has forgotten how to live in civilized-governed-by-parents
society.
As their parent,
you’ve told them their whole lives that you were their safe harbor, so it’s not
like you can recant now. You can’t take back 23 years of love and security.
Well, you could, but then you’d just have sleepless nights imagining what might
be happening. (Mom-magination is basically just moms thinking of every worst
case scenario that could happen and doing their best to prevent it. We can’t
help it. It’s like hardwired into the nurturing gene. Or maybe it’s the over protective
gene. I forget which. It’s why we have such a hard time trying to parent adult
children who are capable of making their own decisions and mistakes, knowing
that we can’t Mom swoop and fix everything like we could back when they were 5.)
So back to the mom-magination. You’re lying there. The brain is working overtime. If you don’t let them come back and get themselves together again they might end up couch surfing. Or worse, homeless. And what if they’re homeless, minding their own business sleeping under a park bench, when they’re violently abducted and stolen for organ harvesting? They wake up in some seedy motel bathtub filled with ice and a very important organ has vanished, to be sold on some secret black market. (Though that’s not politically correct anymore so maybe it’s the absence of all light market now?)
Or worse, maybe they took ALL the organs
and you’re left with basically a pod person. Just an empty skin shell that
resembles the son that you used to know. and it’s not like you can just make
another one of those lickety split. For one, that baby making factory is CLOSED
FOR BUSINESS. It’s been foreclosed on. The weeds have overtaken the place and
it’s a ramshackle, run down old factory that’s rumored to be haunted. And even
if it wasn’t closed, and I even knew where to find a brand spanking new baby
on the absence of all light market, do you know how long I had to work on that
one to train him on the art of being a human being? Granted, seeing how he
lives these last 2 weeks, I apparently didn’t do as well as I thought, but still,
there is A LOT of time invested in that kid. Plus, he was the FIRST one. The
one where I was too young and too stupid but I had a lot of good intentions and
energy so it made up for it. Now I don’t even have any good intentions. And forget about the energy because that ship
has sailed baby. This is why the last kid is the way they are, parents are just
phoning it in because they are exhausted and need a nap 24/7. Or in the very lease
a Zoloft because parenting doesn’t stop when they leave the house, as I have
been so eloquently explaining in this last paragraph.
Fortunately, I
have gained enough wisdom and experience to deal with this situation
gracefully, or at least with minimal screaming and hair pulling. (Yours AND
theirs.) So you make adjustments to feed another mouth, which as it turns out
is fairly easy since you can’t seem to cook small meals anyway, find places to
store another person’s belongings, and shuffle furniture to squeeze them in.
This usually is accompanied by nagging them because that also seems to be a
predominant mom gene that I’ve been honing with his siblings.
Muah ha ha ha ha,
my mom arsenal is complete!
For now I’ll try
to enjoy this “bonus time” with a kid who will be gone again in a few short
weeks because yeah, he’s a pain in the ass. But he’s my pain in the ass and I’m
keeping him. Unless he becomes a Cowboys fan. Then I’m putting him up for
adoption.
Need more mayhem? Find me on
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Want to share your stories, dirty
limericks, funny observations, or just say hi? Send me an email to:
modernmommayhem@gmail.com.
