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Not "Just Another Trip"
The Truth About Parenting
By Sandra Tarling
Today I look at my children, who are 12 and 15 years old, and they barely resemble how I remember them as newborns. In thinking back to those early days, I remember the softness of their skin, those tiny breaths and the silkiness of their downy heads during the quiet moments. The periods of emotional lows I experienced then seem to recede even further as time goes by. The memories of those initial days now have taken on a golden glow, particularly since they no longer coo and gurgle, don't want to be rocked or grab my fingers, rarely want to be held and cuddled, and they certainly don't smell as sweet. They are still demanding, but in different ways that now require discussing, negotiating and even sometimes arguing about what they want. The emotional territory I traverse is much different from when they were newborns, and I'm not any better prepared now than I was then.
What my hitchhiking buddy and I didn't realize when we thought of having children as "just another trip" is that it's a very long journey made up of many small trips. Just as there's the "newborn trip," there is also the "preschool trip" and the "elementary school years trip," all of which I look back upon nostalgically. Now that my son is in middle school, I have attended my last elementary school holiday music program, chauffeured on the last of the class field trips and cried as my youngest child received his elementary school culmination certificate.
These next years will bring the end of the child-rearing journey with that stretch called the "teenage trip." Raising teenagers, as most parents will readily tell you, is just as intense as those newborn months -- but in a very different way. Instead of struggling to let you know what their basic physical needs are, teenagers wage battles to gain physical and psychological independence. From this perspective, the "newborn trip" takes on an even more idealized glow.
