Musings on Life with Teenagers...

I've been dealing with some stuff of late.

Waves that threaten to rock the boat of family life. I've been in the grip of the squid-like tentacles of anxious parenting...

This is my Grizz's last year in school. He's finding it difficult to stick to his plans. Note, his plans, not ours... We're not that kind of pushy parents.

We try to be supportive as best we can, but he is eighteen and no longer a child.

My man-child.

And we know that life is tough and that sometimes you feel that you can't go on.

But sometimes going on is all that we can do.

The equilibrium tips. The seas roughen and then calm once more.

How do we explain that this too will pass... When he won't listen to us... How do we explain that even if he fails, it isn't the end. That we'll be there for him, no matter what?

There are always options in life, don't you find?!

Grizz found on Friday that he could no longer play the drums. He's been quite the performer since he was eleven... And performance anxiety gripped him during an exam day...

It got hold of us too, my husband and I, for the day, the week, this month in fact.

And we waited, outside the church hall where his performance was being recorded. Performances were running late - We could hear a variety of instruments being struck, beaten and blown as we sat in the car on a warm spring day, to wait patiently for him, at the door to whence we had delivered him... Hoping that he would go in, and go on...

We even checked the back door once he had stepped inside... Just to make sure he wouldn't scarper.

Finally, we could take little more of the anxiety of waiting in the car, listening for false notes, and we took ourselves off for a run in the countryside...

We returned to town over half an hour later, to traffic delays and police running through the streets. In high-vis jackets, towards the church hall. The roof of my mouth went instantly dry.

My husband asked me to get out of the car, to walk in the direction of the two sirens we had heard... I wondered, of course, had he left the hall and thoughtlessly run into the path of a car?

He had been so desperate when we left him... He had joked about ending his life.

Nope, he was still inside the hall. I could hear him playing, faltering, far from his usual excellent, straining through the open stained glass windows.

But someone's son had been hit a glancing blow by a car. And there he sat, propped up, holding his leg, lying against the church wall opposite... Surrounded by coppers with notebooks and sticky pencils... Witnesses clamoured.

More police cars arrived. Traffic was diverted. We waited for Grizz, hovering in the flower garden beside the church, trying not to gawp at the unfolding drama. The young lad wasn't seriously injured, thankfully, but he was taken off in the ambulance for treatment...

And so, our lives moved on and we waited once more, spared, reprieved from that torment at least...

Free to fight Teen Terrorism another day...

ArT bY ANn-JuliE AubReY onCE AgAin... GlorIOuS...