Stages & Seasons: From Diapers to Dissatisfaction

There was the season of diapers.

Remember that?

It was almost an ENTIRE DECADE at my house.

I cannot even believe that.

For nearly ten years of my life I was in charge of checking for poop, wiping poop, cleaning poop et cetera ad nausem.

Now I live in a frat teen house.

Teens are everywhere. More accurately, the teens are often difficult to find but their STUFF is everywhere. (I’ll warn you, I might use an excessive amount of capital letters in this post. YES IT IS NECESSARY.)

Bergen collects jackets. Thick jackets. Sherpa lined coats. Denim jackets. A pea coat just joined the family. He routinely scours thrift stores. I bet he has a Members Only jacket. I know I’ve seen Wrangler and Levi and Carhart. He’s a good thrifter. He is not a good Jacket Putter Upper. Even if he was, his closet could not contain all of his jacket bounty.

Mosely is a collector of art pens. Pencils. Markers. Sharpies. One bazillion gel pens. Copic markers that cost too much to get lost behind the sofa. Her bags overflow with pens. She will never run out.

For Otto it is lures. Tackle boxes. Rocks. I find rocks in the laundry. In the console of the car. On shelves. On window sills. Rocks. Rocks. Rocks. (Despite some geology class I took in college because I thought it would be easier than chemistry, they all look like gravel to me.)

Piper has been a hoarder since toddlerhood. Remember how we enabled her by purchasing the most adorable teeny toddler real grocery cart? Everything carries value for her. Notes. Wrappers. Shoes. Sweatshirts. Ripped up pieces of notebook paper with a couple words on them.

Aside from the STUFF all over every flat surface of our home, instead of spending a decade carrying wipes and changing diapers, this teen decade is a lot more like knowing that someone in this house is probably angry with me for ten years.

But actually.

I’d say that at any given hour of any given day of any given week for YEARS, some member of my family has been disappointed in me, irritated at me, frustrated with me, believes me to be a gatekeeper of fun, the NO machine, a roadblock to their pleasurable activity.

That’s what parenting teens is like – can I get an amen?

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