Catch Your Kids While You Can: Car Ride Lectures

So, now it is time for the next confession: I am a professional child-trapped car lecturer and I am not alone. You may laugh, but it is a low-down, dirty trick I have learned from other moms to converse with my not-so-little little people. As children enter the teen years, those car trips formerly filled with conversation about “how was your day” and the generously shared, latest scope on their friends, teachers, and social life morph into a series of mom mini-lectures on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness/college/friendship/good grades. Hopefully they respond. If not, the click of the car door lock and whirling scenery ensure they at least pretend to listen; after all, they cannot escape.

Having a full-fledged teen, a new teen, and a tween (yes, these are real designations for adolescent stages), I have plunged into the world of teen communication. It is defined by its two extremes: no communication (a series of grunts, mumbled words, sighs, eye-rolling, or Mandarin words) and way-too-much-information. The daily chitchat consuming our days does not tell me much about the state of my children’s minds and lives and so I resort to car lectures whenever possible. The feast or famine reality of teen conversation does not meet my needs and, quite honestly, coercive car lectures assuage some of my feelings of being an inadequate mother.

 Sometimes it works and we progress from polite mumbling that really means “leave me alone” to real conversations about issues they face in school, with friends, with the future. More often than not, it feels like a college lecture by me, the fumbling professor who emerges from the musty office once in a blue moon, imparting why the price of milk is so, and about as useful. But I keep trying. At this point, I can only share my stories and hard-won knowledge with my daughters and hope they glean something of use from it all. The dividends are often in the future and I am learning to be patient. And also not to say “I told you so” if they happen to come around to my way of thinking. That’s a hard one, since I am so tired of being wrong and knowing nothing of the world in their eyes that I want to jump up and down when they admit I am right. Just this once, of course.

Looking back, I have romanticized how conversations with my daughters were so easy when they were little. They delighted me with engaging conversations about the strangest things. The 4-year-old diatribe against slavery (overhearing a conversation about the Civil War) with references to Moses already freeing the slaves (from a Sunday School lesson) was pure enjoyment. Watching children make the connections and form their own opinions is a wonder, especially when they talk you through the connection process. Conveniently, I have blocked from my consciousness the memories of threatening to change my name from “Mommy” to something else and not telling them so they couldn’t talk to me; of losing my voice while driving across country by reminding them repeatedly that Mommy couldn’t talk now; and of driving away in the blessed quiet when my husband got home from work so I didn’t have to talk to anyone.

For many years, I felt they talked too much and I wanted peace and quiet; now they talk much less and I have the quiet at least. But not the peace, because their talking less is not a comfortable place to be. This in-between land between childhood and adulthood is a scary place, fraught with many perils and my vivid imagination can place my children in most of those perils. So I talk, to provide them information about tools and resources, to connect and let them know I care and worry about them, to show them they are not alone, but mostly to lessen my fears. Words can accomplish only so much, but words are all I have at this stage in the game.  How about you?

Confessions of the Evil Mother Lady…it’s all about the real woman hidden behind the “mom” title.  I hope to shine a light on the invisible lives mothers lead, starting with me, the Evil Mother Lady.  Let’s continue our conversation about how our tenure as “mom” hides much of the woman behind the title.  Please join in – your stories are relevant, amazing, and interesting and should be heard.

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