Brotato Salad

and the joys of texting a teenager

Photo by Domingo Alvarez E on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I started seeing the same graph popping up in my various social media feeds, often with the caption that said something like “by the time you are 18, you’ve already spent 90% of the in-person time you’ll ever spend with your parents.”

Given that I am currently the parent of a high school senior who’ll be turning 18 in a few months, this chart felt a lot less like a visual representation of data¹ and a whole lot more like a personal attack.

My son will be leaving for a college in less than six months and I’m honestly starting to have some real regrets about having been foolish enough to raise a human being that I just like so damn much. He’s only going to be about a three hour drive away but I know I’m going to miss him a lot. It would be easier if he sucked, but I’m cursed with an affectionate teenager with a golden retriever personality who tells me he loves me every day.

I know, I feel sorry for me too.

Aside from making me want to rend my garments a little bit, this bastard of a chart also makes me think about how how fast the hands-on years of parenting really go.

I have adult stepsons (whom I adore) so I know experientially that even when you aren’t seeing your kids on a regular basis, you’re never done feeling like a parent. You think about them, you worry about them, you resist (sometimes successfully) the urge to be nosy about what’s going on in their personal lives, you want to help them when they need help… all of that stays the same, but it’s different than the kind of parenting or step-parenting you do when they are younger. It’s less exhausting and less expensive, to be sure, but it’s also more bittersweet. I’m certain that we miss them more than they miss us.

I’m not going to be one of those weird moms who identifies WAY TOO HARD as a “boy mom” and who gets creepy/gross about needing to be the #1 love of her son’s life, future partners be damned. But I will say that I’m aware of a little bit of grief that comes with knowing part of parenting is knowing that the title of “favorite person in the world” is almost always a temporary one. And it should be! I swear, I want these children to have deep friendships and wonderful partners someday. I’m not gonna be sneaking into their house I’ll Love You Forever style when they are middle aged just to claim that title again.

No.

When I think back on the hands-on parenting years, I can vaguely remember the exhaustion of the newborn stage, the “is my child a sociopath or is he just 3?” era, the giddy joys of first words and steps, and the delight of eventually realizing that you don’t know when the last time your child pooped was because you are no longer the supporting cast for that particular endeavor.

I can also remember the worry. I’m not a particularly anxious person, but my list of maternal worries was long. I cried hysterical tears the first time I gave my screaming infant a formula bottle because my milk hadn’t quite come in yet, worried I’d already blown our whole breastfeeding relationship. There were worries about cloth diapers versus disposable, about when to start letting him have solid food, about whether or not to sleep train, and and and and and…

It’s so much easier to see in hindsight how little all of that really mattered.

Case in point: the cell phone question.

Deciding when to let our son have his first cell phone felt like a REALLY big decision and trying to figure out how to limit his ability to make stupid choices with his phone felt even bigger. I worried a lot about all the things: screen time and social media and bullying and expanding his ability to find the grossest corners of the internet (either on accident or on purpose). I worried about it a lot before we got him his first phone and I probably could have reduced my worry level by about 30% if I had realized how entertaining it would eventually be to be on the receiving end of texts from my teenager².

My son, continuing to bravely win the fight against low self-esteem

I mean, yes, sometimes his ability to text me results in reminders that I’m very much a white lady in her 40s.

“Its ok” is the text equivalent of getting patted on the head, I think.

Sometimes texts from my son are just delightfully sweet.

And sometimes they demonstrate that the “mama” to “mommy” to “mom” to “some version of bro” name pipeline is very real.

Occasionally they raise some very real questions about both his spelling prowess and his ability to discern when his mother might require more information. For example, here is a text I received during the Olympics, when he got deeply into speed skating for a week:

And here is a slightly less information text he sent while working as a student manager for his high school’s hockey team:

Sure, son, I definitely don’t need anymore details than that.

Are 37% of his texts just requests for more screen time? Um, duh. But sometimes they come with tantalizing hints about his social life…

Texting also allows me to mildly traumatize him from time to time, like when there is a discussion on Threads about the lack of male understanding of women’s bodies.

Sorry, not sorry, kid. I gotta make sure you’ll be leaving the house with a halfway decent grasp of basic anatomy.

Both of my kids got the flu this week (0/10 stars, do not recommend) which means I’ve been getting regular text updates about his condition.

Did we have to have a brief conversation about why we don’t go on WebMD in the middle of the night when we have a fever? Yes, yes we did.

But did the combo of sickness + ability to text mean that I got to feel like my baby still needed his mom? Yes, yes it did.

I know I’m gonna miss him so much … but at least I’ll have texts to look forward to, right?

1. The research in me does want to note that A) I feel badly putting this in my Substack without attribution, so I don’t actually know if this is accurate and B) it is almost certainly not accurate across all cultures and traditions.

2. Text messages shared with teenager approval