Parenting doesn't come with a road map
But the State of Illinois wants you to ask for directions.
Driving through Illinois last month on a road trip with my kids, I kept seeing these highways saying: “It’s OK to ask for directions.”
I was the only driver on this 3,500 mile road trip through the Midwest, a “vacation” I’d concocted that was really an excuse to have a week of uninterrupted time with my teenagers.
As they get older, their attention is always somewhere else. My oldest isn’t really home any more. My youngest is somehow becoming more rooted in his absence, his attention fixed on his favorite video game, yes, but also his budding hobbies (skateboarding, thrift shopping with friends).
Having a week of what a client of mine calls quantity time. Not to be confused with quality time, quantity time is built on copious amounts of time where you’re not really doing much other than being in each other’s presence.
All. That. Time means that at some point, the natural touchstones arise. Those conversations that lead to connection, those jokes that lead to belly laughs, those observations that make you say quietly to yourself, as to not embarrass the easily embarrassed, “Well, I’ll be.”
We watched the scenery change as slowly as the minutes on a clock. We passed many hundreds of miles, one blurry fencepost at a time. The beautiful vistas and the construction zones. The billboards announcing the rapture and the highways signs telling us that it’s OK to ask for help.
We noticed this form of free public therapy during a key moment in our trip. (OK, it could be a PSA about distracted driving, but I’m taking the philosophical route.)
We had just left Missouri, where we spent a few days with my mom, and we were truly on our own for the first time. Just the three of us, just like it was all those years ago when I was a single parent trying to navigate this ship through uncertain waters, keeping the boat clean, the hull off the rocks, and the crew in order at the same time.
Now, I was navigating a car that would smell like french fries for the next week with two teenagers, one of whom I hadn’t seen for more than 24 consecutive hours since the last trip we took in January.
We have been on a passage together for a long time, even when we’re apart. This trip was a chance for us to sync up again, if for a few days.
“It happened,” Julian said, after a long quiet stretch where I was listening to a book on tape and they were watching shows on their phones.
“What happened?” I shot a look at him.
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