Teenage Prayer + Adoption Photo Shoot, My Messy Beautiful

I have a confession, a shocking admission from a liberal, semi-socialist, formerly shacked-up, now single-mothering girl like me…I listen to Dr. Laura. She’s unreasonable and dismissive and wildly hypocritical. I mostly listen because of the morbid curiosity of other people’s problems, but I get very rage-y at her. The last few times I’ve listened, she’s had the poor twisted Mothers of Teenage Sons From Broken Homes who are lashing out and behaving abusively towards the mothers. Dr. Laura’s advice is always to pack their bags and boxes and send them to live with their erstwhile fathers, asserting that the mother needs to Take a Stand and show the sons that they cannot treat women this way without consequences. To show the sons that Mom Is Not Going to Take This Sh*t Anymore and they should not expect their future wives to tolerate such jackassery either.

Thinking of my relationship with my sons and my control in my home declining so much that I would give them away to their father gives me flop sweat. I cannot bear the thought. I would never publicly criticize their father’s role and participation in their lives. Their is absolutely no lack of adoration between father and sons. Children stay with their mothers for a reason.
 

We are confined by these small walls with a boy who will, in just four short weeks, become a teenager. A child to whom I said last week “Your teenage sh*thead is on full blast right now, and I need for you to TURN. IT. DOWN.” This boy has done a 180 and brought home As and Bs on his last report card. He joined the track team at school. He earned all his privileges back. He had two ragers in 2014 the week of school vacation. He’s developed a reputation for being quite the dancer. He misses the call to dinner because his headphones are too loud. When we are reunited after any period of time - couple hours, couple days - he charges and hugs me. He pats my head and tells me he loves me.

But the Terrifying Teenager is creeping in. He is a sporadically psychotic individual who can turn into a red-eyed, smoke-breathing monster in .02 seconds and then, .05 seconds after that, is friendly and sound. This is entirely different from Hulk Jake, whose fits last hours and who destroys objects with force and souls with words. The Teenager is cutthroat and vicious and dismissive and superior to the rest of us.

He responds to me with “okaaayyyy,” with the end tilted up, a mild question posed when there is not enough care to invest in an actual inquiry. More to set the tone that he is really unsure what I would like for him to do with the information I have just given him about an attitude that needs to be corrected or an act that needs to be completed. He covers his eyes with his hands when I make declarative statements. So far, my unconditional favorite is “ugh, have you ever heard of ________?” Have you ever heard of religion class? Have you ever heard of the phone? Have you ever heard of a whisper? Have you ever heard of my pocket? After he called me a jerk on Saturday, I demanded an apology. Okaaayyy...I'm sorry you're being a jerk.

Y’all. We have no physical changes. No growth spurts. No mature interests. But this attitude that was never there before seemed to wash in when the relief came over schoolwork and family participation. There is a teenager tiptoeing among us. And a sequel storming in right behind him.

And the thought that this sweet, gentle-hearted boy could, as the sons of Dr. Laura’s callers have, turn on his mother and treat her with constant disrespect and borderline abuse so destructive that the solution is to send him away is anguish for me.

She always describes these mothers – single mothers, remarried mothers, mothers stuck in marriages just for the kids – as weak, and rails about how these boys are responding with anger to the weakness they have historically experienced with their mothers. Here is where I have hope.

My kids have witnessed my devastation, fear, and vulnerability. They know there were a couple weeks when my mom and sister had to care for them while I struggled to keep myself showered. I drug them through a year of wistful holidays. They’ve seen me slide to the floor in tears. They’ve been sent up to their room to close the door while their parents argued below. It has not gone unnoticed when their father and I barely spoke to each other.

These boys barely remember my mom living with us for two weeks, but they remember that there was no interruption to their schedule and life went on as if nothing was wrong. They sat on the floor with me until the crying stopped and the laughter resumed. They have noticed that the fighting dissipated months ago and their parents are rarely unfriendly to each other (in their company.)

I hope that makes us different, that my boys will not be teenage sneering and rebelling against a mother they see as weak. They will know their attitude, while necessary to their development, will be called down with all their mother’s might, because she is strong, not weak. She showed strength when she choose to keep them; when she worked and kept their schedules; when she spent six months selling their house; when she built them another one; when she never missed a football game or taekwondo test or pep rally or class program; when people kept wanting her to work for them; when she moved them to the outskirts and declared bike riding the new family activity; when everything got better and everybody felt better and life roared favorably and ferociously onward, no matter what.

For my birthday last year, I asked a friend for a portrait session with her cousin, an exquisitely talented documentary photographer, who does not take portraits, but captures milliseconds of your personality or your relationship on camera. I wanted the adoptive mother’s equivalent to the newborn photo shoot.
 

Who we are is in these proofs. We are better together. I am strong enough to let go of the marriage I always coveted to the boy I’ve always loved and the home and family I knew I would build for a different vision of my life that has not yet been revealed to me. And I am stubborn enough to battle heredity and experience and teach these boys what family is and does for each other. I am looking forward to whatever our next chapter is. God willing, teenage exile will not be part of our story. 

Check out Jeannie Frey Rhodes on the photography. 

This essay and I are part of the Messy, Beautiful Warrior Project on Momastery.com.