Dear ones, when contact with the children changes, things remain uncertain and we can always ask ourselves: Am I missing something? Sometimes I come home and no one is there, and every now and then I look at the Snapmap to see who is roughly where. Oh, one of them is out and about around the Köln Arcaden shopping centre in Kalk, the other two are meeting their loved ones. Okay, so I think at least two of the three are safe.
The other day I asked my son what he thought was the most important thing for parents when accompanying their teenage children and he said: FREEDOM. The word trust and being there also came up. Meanwhile, the other child thanked us for accompanying him to sleep for so long, he REALLY needed it.
It was also about situations that haunted them for months. Once, as children, they watched parts of a documentary about the Gladbeck drama and the kidnapping, after which they would have been terrified for months. We only found out about it now. Years later. And of course that should give us pause for thought.
Am I missing something? Even right now?
What might be happening right now that they won’t tell us about until later? Is the lack of drive after the exam phase a minor burn-out or really just a brief exhaustion after the stress? Has the new player in the team really found a better club or has there been bullying? Is everything really going so well at school or are we just not realising that some teachers are worried? Do we know?
We can only guess at some things, we are no longer so close. We surrender and trust and build on the good, hope that they don’t sit in lowered BMWs with novice drivers too often, don’t necessarily join anyone on a motorbike in the autumn leaves and don’t use vapes because of their sporting ambitions, but do we know? We hope and believe so.
We trust that we will somehow find out if something goes wrong, we hope that they will tell us what’s on their mind – or that the clique might turn to us. We wish them good friends with whom they can discuss things without their parents, we wish them little pressure and a lot of ease.
We suspect that one person is burdened by different things than another, but who knows what will turn out to be difficult or a breakthrough for whom later on? Which life happens to whom. In the end, they can blame us if we always sent them to piano lessons („I never wanted to, you forced me“). AND they can blame us if we let them get away with not going („You should have pushed me a lot more, then I would have become a pianist“).
How we do it can be the right thing for one child and the wrong thing for another. In the end, we have to see for ourselves which decisions we feel comfortable with and which we don’t, so that we can explain ourselves later. To be able to give reasons when questions arise. To have a clear conscience.
When I tell people that we currently have a pretty good relationship with all three children (at least that’s how I feel), they often say: „You’ve done everything right“. However, this sentence triggers an inner resistance in me, because no: nobody does everything right.
What kind of superhumans would we be if we always did everything right? But that doesn’t have to be the claim. We do our best. And we still reach our limits. We can convey this to our children. We’re not heroes or heroines, we’re just people like them.And yes, we try to be and stay in touch with each other, we give a lot of love and receive an infinite amount of love in return. But we all make mistakes. The little ones as well as the big ones. And especially now that the big one has moved out, all of us who are still at home together realise very clearly that our time in a shared household is limited – and enjoy it even more.
Life is for learning. And we’ve learnt an incredible amount from and about each other. I will be eternally grateful for being able to carry this around with us as a treasure, despite or precisely because we are not superhuman, but rather are true to our quirks and edges. Isn’t that ultimately the greatest thing that can happen to us?
