I’ve written about the ins and outs of my parenting and the antics of my children. I have shared some raw stuff and some funny stuff, but it's my daily grind of my parenting experience. I was having a time tonight with Isaac getting him down. I was thinking of his energy and his restlessness, he is a constant source mischief and mayhem. And I thought it!
“Man, was I like this for my mom?” And I remember all the stories she told me!
“Jenny, you were always into trouble!” As far as my memory serves me, she shared her version of my terrible two’s:
“You broke down the screen door and ran off at nap time. The neighbor found and brought you back. I was so embarrassed I almost didn’t want to admit you were my child.”
“We were laying down for a nap, you got up and got into red paint. Ran all over the house and little red foot prints were everywhere”
“You got out on the balcony and got your head stuck in the rails. We had to call the fire department to get you out!”
“You sat in a fire ant pile, I had to hose you down!”
“You threw the worst tantrums, you’d carry on forever. We’d just stick you in the other room and let you have it out by yourself.”
I chuckled to myself at the stories and thought of Isaac, and how I could see him so easily doing all the same. And then a thought just crept in, “If I were the 16 year old mother my mom was, probably all this would’ve happened to Isaac too!”
And I stopped. I kind of thought about what I just thought. I hadn’t meant it, but indirectly I presume I was a better mom than my mother. And I really had a moment of hardness on myself. How dare I?! I am nearly 37 years old. I do live in and have made entirely different life choices then my mother, but as I look back at the chaos of my mother raising us and the life we led. I don’t look back at a mother that made poor choices. I look back at mother that loved us and literally did the best she knew how. She was sixteen years old when she had me, how dare I compare myself to her.
I don’t share much of how I grew up with many people, but those that know me well know enough. Overall it was very happy and my sister and I were extraordinarily well loved. But I want to reflect now on my hard days of parenting and just look at what my mom took on and conquered.
She was fifteen years old and my father had recently turned eighteen, fresh out of boot camp, when they married. He was a marine stationed at Cherry Point, North Carolina and that is where I was born. They were married in October of 1977 and I came along August of 1978. Nicole, my little sister, popped on the scene April of 1980. My mother had two small children a year and half apart before she was even 18 years old.
She’s told me so many times when she first brought me home, she’d just stare at me. She was home alone with me all day when my father was on base and she’d didn’t know what to do with me. Both my father and my mother have shared many stories with me about what life in North Carolina in the late 70s looked like in the Cohen home. To spare them some judgement, I’ll keep those family stories. Some of the alarming; although, quite frankly, super hilarious. Some of them are not funny and those are their memories, not mine- and I have no right to share them. They were teenagers, trying to play adult. They both made critically wrong decisions that involved substance abuse and wrong paths, but they loved us. And they truly did what they thought was best. And I have no memory of ever feeling unloved.
I won’t write much beyond that of my mother and father’s marriage, as I have nothing to tell. I can’t describe something that is completely unnatural to me. My mother left my father when Nicole was a baby and headed home back to Maine and our family. I have no memory of my parents being together. I never perceived our family as broken and I never thought of divorce as bad. I used to think kids (child or adult) were behaving absurdly or attention seeking when they’d emotionally act out about divorcing parents. I just saw it as normal, and frankly, my parents were completely cool, decent and I’d say friends with each other. My father was a marine and stationed in a few different states as a young man. He was in the prime of his life, it was the 80s and he was immature; fathering wasn’t a real priority. He came around, he loved us, but he didn’t truly grasp his role as dad until I was probably eight or nine. He just wasn’t around much when I was young. I have harbor no resentment on this, its not really worth talking about. Dad and I have talked about it numerous times and I’m not dredging any of it up here. Besides, this is about mom. And how an teenager beat the odds to be a good mom.
I don’t want to share things that hurt her. I just want to illustrate a life that was filled with chaos, alcohol, men, love, structure, perseverance and ultimately friendship. Being raised by a teenage drunk with terrible taste in men, but with a strong maternal instinct and surprising strict structure is hard! How to I wrap up all the good, bad, ugly and beautiful to paint a picture of a mother that overcame and taught her daughters strength. I can do it carefully, I can talk about pain without assaulting her motherhood or my love for her. I can reveal cherished memories I bet she doesn’t even know I still remember and cling to. I can show the hard stuff that doesn’t call her out, but instead show that her daughter at thirty-six years of age can embrace the child that was her mother trying to raise little girls. She was just a child trying and I am now an adult, that can look back with an empathetic heart at her battle.
So, this is how I plan to unfold this. This was just the intro into my blog series “My Teenager Mother: The good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful” I will write 4 different stories of specific memories and time. I pray at the end of it, God can use this as a tool to humble with my thoughts and my mother can walk away never feeling like a failure at motherhood, but a true woman of character who raised a daughter that loves and honors her deeply.
