One of my (many, many) weirdnesses in parenting my teens has been the fact that every. Single. One of mine is opinionated and fairly strong in personality.
This is weird for me because I was totally the opposite. I was an I-excel-in-being-a-doormat-and-pleasing-the-world teenager.
A couple of my kids have recently joined the other two in pursuing some personal fitness goals.
So y’know, that’s cool.
So guess what I got in the mail this week?
It’s real, folks. After a long…long path here, Permanent Markers releases October 5. (Grab the first chapter free via the right-hand sidebar of my blog, if you’re game.)
I still recall with vividness my son’s drawing, proclaiming my anger issues to the world.
It was in red marker (his favorite color). Chunky hands rested on wonderfully slim, stick-figure hips. “I made you look mad, but you’re not mad in this picture,” he explained.
My husband and I recently slipped through the mountains on the way home from a soccer game, the sun at our foreheads. The conversation meandered toward politics, then toward economic issues.
I confessed to him that as a buyer, correcting ethical issues through my purchases feels challenging without shifting some of my life priorities. (Yikes. Maybe I’ll make you overwhelmed with me.)
My father is the broad-shouldered, strong, internal teddy bear type, with fingers like sausages. In my childhood, he was a Midwestern farmer. In his spare time, he donates his mad skills to car repairs of missionaries, single moms, people like that. He’s that kind of guy.
And it’s common for him to come back into the house with blood zigzagging down his leg or seeping through his shirt.
So like it or not, we’re all homeschooling now, right?
I personally was World’s Most Reluctant Homeschooler…until surprisingly, I ended up loving it. I even learned some things about my own strengths and passions I wouldn’t have known. (My kids eventually transferred with relative smoothness to public school.)
That very well may not be you. You might just be looking for ideas so your child, the walls, and the permanent markers stay socially distanced.
I admit to being comfortably removed from a lot of social media’s ANGRY CAPITALIZATION and #%$^& words for longer than is normal.
An overseas cocoon, removed from a lot of news, swaddled me. It was a happy place where celebs were just famous people. Where yet to come was the U.S. 2016 election–when it would feel like the whole country was getting a nasty divorce.
Around his birthday last year, I mentioned to my husband the number of people who’d wished him a warm HBD on Facebook. My daughter, listening, asked if he’d received a lot of cards. “I used to get a lot. But people don’t do that much anymore,” he shrugged.
We’ve all got more than enough to do–and plenty of “shoulds”, right? I’m truly not wanting to add more. But I’ve found writing notes actually makes me…happier.
Ever feel like you need a “cultural translator” just to get through to your kids?
Yeah. Me, too.
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
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