Red, white and not blue about my empty nest
For the last 15 years we’ve been raising teenagers and that era ended today.
Our youngest turned 20. Other than being his golden birthday, baby boy says this birthday is “not significant.” In his mind, 20 is just another year because you can’t do anything new legally. For him it’s just limbo — biding time until the big twenty-one, the big legal drinking hoo hah.
I disagree. I’d argue this birthday is hugely significant — if only for me and my hubby. We have made it out of the teen years alive. We have moved one girl and three boys through the mind baffling era when your children know far more than you do, despite the fact that you have triple the amount of life experience. We made it through the constant and delicate balance of (trying at least) to create an atmosphere that lets open communication and honesty thrive alongside teaching the value of choosing wisely and avoiding the diminishing returns of peer pressure.
#2 turns 19
Birthday pie
If you’re still on the “other side” let me warn you. Just as you start to high-five yourself for having successfully navigated potty training and shoe tying and being able to leave the house in under 30 minutes, the teen years hit when you least expect it. Suddenly you fall off the “little kids, little problems” merry-go-round and find yourself strapped in for a long ride on the “big kids, big problems” roller coaster. It’s the one that takes you for death defying drops, throws a curve when you least expect it and then hangs you upside down for indeterminant amounts of time. Somehow, this ride also manages to make you scream for joy and come skidding breathless into home base, with your heart in your throat and your arms thrown skyward. The teen years gift you with a constant cycle of exhilaration and exhaustion that strangely leaves you wanting more and wanting off all at the same time.
We made it through four sets of college applications, endless sporting events and thousands of large pans of food that disappeared in a fraction of the time they required to prepare. The teen years bring a constant string of increasingly big decisions and little choices where you pray the right ones get made when it counts. We’re not out of the woods yet (did I mention three college years to go?) but we count on the Grace of God to continue to bear us all through.
When my kids were toddlers, I worked with a guy who always talked about how much he enjoyed spending time with his teenagers. I still think of him, standing at the water cooler on a Monday, sharing about their weekend family fun and you could hear the joy — and the positive truth of it — in his stories. I knew I wanted this too and believed half of it was attitude. So I set that as my bar. My goal was to be able to say ‘yes’ more than ‘no’ and to make our home a place where friends would feel welcome and our kids would want to be. Our front door became a revolving one and many mornings I woke up to discover another boy coming down for breakfast. Even funnier, it was not uncommon for a friend to show up solo at my kitchen island, dropping by between soccer practices to grab a nap or a bite — or both.
Those pop ins have diminished and while I enjoyed all the buzz, I am not complaining about the quiet or the lack of things to stumble over. No more is there a trail of clothing dropped like crumbs from the back door to the bedrooms. Even better, there is no more constant pressure to feed the boys who aimless stand, staring at the fridge with it doors flung wide. “I’m hungry” goes the refrain, sometimes before the supper dishes were even done. My boys would come home, eat, eat some more, go to sleep, and somehow wake up six inches taller every morning. I also don’t miss the toilet paper waving in the breeze in my front yard. We’ve been teepee’d so many times in the last decade that people no longer identify our home as the Craftsman, but as the “TP house.”
While the extra clean up has (hopefully) ceased, the giving and the sacrifice still exist, yet now they come in new forms and introduce new rewards. This summer, we spent more than half our vacation helping kids with what felt like major life leaps. One had to find and move into his first apartment, start his first real job and then buy his first truck. It’s been a crash course in budgeting, interest rates and how to set up a 401(k). Our oldest moved out of Chicago and bought her first home in a beautiful part of Michigan just blocks from the big lake. One look at my fingernails is proof we weren’t hanging out at the beach ordering drinks to our cabana. Instead we’ve been wielding hedge trimmers and vacuums and power washing and scrubbing down dirty bathrooms. It felt good to dig in and make a difference, and I felt grateful we had the time and energy to do it (all except the bathroom part). Because after the work comes the reward of knowing you can do for your kids what your parents did for you. And the reward of kids who truly appreciate it. It’s funny, we used to take them out for ice cream as a reward — now we’re the ones getting free ice cream.
I’m not sad to see the teenage years officially come to an end, but I am paying more attention this time. When our daughter was the first to go off to college, I was so caught up in the busy-ness of helping her apply and select and be ready for school that I failed to see how this one “small” move would mark the beginning of a very slippery slope, where the sheer amount of change quickly picked up speed and it felt like overnight all the beds but ours (and the dogs’) were empty.
So, to mark the occasion of a Golden Birthday and our official entrance to a new post-teenage era, we celebrated, of course, with some pie. I didn’t even need to ask what kind — the birthday boy has been begging for our traditional summer favorite — red, white and blue — this time with a full 20 candles on top. This particular pie recipe comes from my mom’s sister who just passed away a few months ago as the first of this trio of sisters and wonderful cooks, to leave this earth. Thank you Aunt Joan for the recipe.
The blue base is Michigan blueberries, topped with a white whippy mix of cream cheese and heavy cream. Then it gets topped with a nice tart layer of red raspberries. With all those layers and messy pans to cook them in, I won’t lie — this pie is a time intensive process that requires patience. But the end result is always better than you imagined and it disappears quickly — just like raising teenagers. Happy 20th Birthday to Ike, the one who has kept us young, who keeps us laughing and remains always ready to play a game of any kind.