Choose Your Battles Wisely...Especially With Teens

I was going to let you try to guess WHICH bed room wasn't in MY house but I guess the pictures of Massey in them gives it away. Her room looks pretty much like the room I down loaded from Google images...minus the ladder. Although there MAY be a ladder somewhere in Massey's room and it just hasn't been uncovered yet.

The picture she took of herself is her room on a good day (there aren't many of those.)

Zach came upstairs to go to bed and I had the overhead light on in Massey's room taking these pictures.

He said in that sweet way he has "That would tick me off."

Well, "tick' wasn't the exact word he used but that's another battle completely.

I really have no room to talk (small pun intended.) When I was younger my room made Massey's look like a ' Better Homes and Garden' shoot .

I lived in squalor from the age of ten until I left for college. My mother would walk by my room when I was a kid during the summer and say "Clean your room or you can't go to the pool."

If you grew up in East Point in the 60's and 70's...not being able to go to the swimming pool was like a death sentence. My parents bought a family pass every summer...$15 for the entire family of five...and that was a big deal back then.

Every morning we would wake up and walk with our friends to the pool, about a mile away ... get there as swimming lessons ended and stay until the pool closed at six.

If my mom had 'one of those mornings' and demanded I clean my room before leaving, I did just that. To a ten year old girl, that means taking every thing and shoving it under the bed.

What wouldn't fit under the bed got pushed into my closet. I'd think to myself "She'll NEVER look under the bed or open the closet door.

She always just said "Okay, go" and after I left looked under my bed and in my closest and just decided to have a Kool Mild and a glass of iced tea and talk on the phone with her best friend complaining about what a slob I was for an hour or so.

HEY! At least I was out of her hair for the entire day.

That's pretty much the reason I let Massey get away with it.

I did, why shouldn't she?

She makes good grades has a huge heart...and like her mama an even bigger mouth.

Zach on the other hand has turned my short hair gray with worry but keeps his room neat as a pin...whereas Massey's is a "Pen.'

I remember when Zach was in middle school and grew his hair out longer than Cousin It on the Addams Family.
He went from that to a Mohawk with liberty spikes. I brought it up to his pediatrician at the time and the wise doctor told me something that has helped me maintain what little sanity I have left. "When raising teens, choose your battles wisely."

When it comes to my kids, that is the mantra I now live by.

Zach grew out of the Mohawk stage pretty quickly (another pun) and has finally realized he is his own worst enemy in school. His grades have shot up and yesterday got the highest grade on the final exam in his Geometry class. He is on his way to graduating on time and finally utilizing the intelligence he has been blessed with (maybe there was a baby swap at the hospital...but he's MINE now.)

Massey is a train wreck in the house keeping department but has blossomed into a wonderful young woman that makes my heart full every time I see her face. I don't care that her room looks like the DEA just tossed it looking for a shipment or that her closest looks like Katrina blew through.

"Choose your battles wisely."

Long stringy hair can be cut.

A room can be cleaned (and fumigated.)

To have teens love and respect you is worth that and MUCH more.

It's nothing that a blower, garbage bag and shop vac can't take care of...and as far as Zach is concerned, I always have those clippers charged for when he decides on that 'buzz cut.'

They both still love me...granted it is hard to feel sometimes. With teens a tiny glimpse of hope is like a huge open window to a Mother .

I love my kids. I make them mad a lot of the time...but even if I make them mad for the next two years...they will thank me for it when they are thirty.

It's like what my mother told me two weeks before she died when I was seventeen.

"The older you get, the smarter I will seem."

Til next time..."waiting for them to get older" COTTON

PS You gotta click on the pics to get the jest of THIS blog!