Age 1 to 18 - Where was my manual?

OK, so your beautiful bundle of joy is born, all is right with the world! You learn how to be a mother on the fly, with eager advice from your entire family, all your friends and even strangers in the grocery store. Reality sets in and motherhood becomes your new mantra. But, you get it right. So much so, that you decide you'd like to have another little bundle of joy. And three years later, you are blessed with your second child. This is my story of raising my two children; first with a husband, then without, and all the while without a "how-to" manual.



So my son turns 4 months old and I'm back to work. My precious babies are at daycare for 9 hours a day. I go through all the woes of being a working mother - all of them! I breast fed both of my children until they were 8 months old (and got teeth) and would pump at night to be able to send my milk in bottles with the baby to daycare. After the 8 months, and they were eating more solid foods, I would puree whatever my husband and I had for meals for the baby, freeze it in ice trays and send those little food cubes with the breast milk to daycare. A lot of work, but I'm told it will ensure that the little ones will be good eaters when they grow up. I tended to do a lot of things others suggested early on. Wish I knew then what I know now...



Fast forward a few years, my daughter is the most picky eater on the planet and my son, who got more Gerbers than home pureed food, eats anything. OK, that particular suggestion didn't work. Anyone else have similar stories? I'm sure you do.



When my daughter was 5 and son was 2, my husband and I divorced. Relatively amicably, but it was a huge change for the children. I read, and re-read all the suggested reading on how to help children through the stress and change of divorce. I ended up just doing what my internal manual told me was the best for my kids. As it turned out, sharing custody one week on, one week off, was the perfect thing for both the children and parents. Actually, my daughter was the one who got us to do the week on/off deal. She was doing a project on emergency exits in the home in her kindergarten class, and couldn't figure out which house to do the drawing of. So by living a whole week with each parent it made homework much easier for her.



Since my son was so young, he's grown up thinking that it's normal to have two homes, two bedrooms, two bicycles, etc. The situation didn't bother him at all. Both he and my daughter became very well rounded, happy, grounded children and excelled in school.



Fast forwarding again to high school. Daughter sets her sights on going to a 4-year college immediately out of high school, and succeeds. The emotional roller coaster of having your first born leave the nest was disastrous! Add to that the fact that I became engaged to be married at the same time, and well, yeah. Kinda crazy. Then I get a phone call from her two months before I was to be married "Mom, I've just been arrested." WHAT? Cannot even begin to process that information. She hadn't exhibited any signs whatsoever of being a wild child while at home. Come to find out she had hidden it very, very well. She was arrested for having marijuana. She's 7 hours away from home. I can't be there. I'm going out of my mind. We get an attorney, she gets kicked out of school for a semester, is on probation and eventually clears everything up, well almost. Still working toward getting charges reduced to misdemeanor...


My son enters high school a brilliant young man, interested in football, basketball, track and girls. His first year is a good one. Then he found the wrong crowd, went down the wrong path, and had been on that path for months before I even knew it. Ever since then it's been an uphill battle with him. My incredibly brilliant, sweet, sensitive and caring son had turned into a mystery. We did not recognize him anymore. He was getting into trouble at school, with the law, with us, and just didn't care. It finally reached a boiling point when we found out he was doing many different drugs and skipping school. We tried many different things; counseling, sending him to visit family overseas, working with his teachers, begging his friends to help - you name it. He had one whole leg firmly planted in the netherworld. BUT, I could still see one leg in our world and kept trying to pull him back. What I didn't realize was that I was enabling him and his habits by my actions. Duhhh...man I felt dumb! He had become such an accomplished liar that I would believe him. Let's face it, I wanted to believe him. I didn't want to believe that my little boy, my precious little boy, was doing what he was doing. Many court appearances and court appointed classes later, he was still messing up. Stopped going to high school. Is a drop out. And two days after his 18th birthday, now an adult, he was arrested for a drug possession charge. Wow, that was a slap in the face for me!! He is an adult now, that's a whole different ballgame.


Where is my manual? Where is the "how-to" manual on what to do in this instance? OMG! I'm a complete failure as a parent! If anyone would have told me that my children would end up in trouble with the law, I'd have laughed in their face. Well, I'm here to tell you that no matter how well you read that manual, your children will do their own thing. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes not. Now, I do know that I have done absolutely everything right; my children had good homes, wonderful caring parents and family, were raised with good morals, are very polite and social young people (when they want to be) and were given every opportunity to excel. Why then do I still feel like a failure? Arrrgh!

Next up will be the ongoing saga, now that I've got you up to current day...