TheBanyanTree: pushing the baby bird from the nest

[Julie Anna Teague]

Good grief, have we been awash in Teen Angst this week.  The baby bird has clung
so closely and helplessly to the mother bird that the mother bird is swinging
from her last nerve.  I know these phases come and they go, and often I just
ride them out, give the extra attention and go the extra mile to make him feel
secure and loved and big and brave again.  But this time I feel in my parental
bones that he needs a shove in the other direction.  

The big shove of the week is coming this afternoon.  Due to a scheduling
conflict (our life is often one big scheduling conflict) he has to find his own
way, on his bike, from his school in the burbs to the place downtown where he
has an appointment to get his hair cut.  He kept asking, couldn't I just
re-arrrange my whole schedule to accommodate his activities (which I'd only just
heard about) and his desire for a hair cut at a particular place?  No, I could
not.  Finally he resigned himself to figuring out how to get there on his own. 
It's only 4 miles (we had to drive it last night because he was such a nervous
wreck about it).  I drew him a map.  I gave him the cell phone.  I told him he
would be just fine.  Despite the fact that he's lived in this town his entire
life, there have been other times when I've turned him loose downtown while I
was at work nearby, and he got totally bumfuzzled and turned around and called
me from various streetcorners without a clue as to where he was.  But that is
the way you learn, right?  The kid will be driving in a year.  It's time he got
lost and figured out how to get unlost, at least in a relatively controlled
situation.  

It is time he stopped with the helpless routine in general.  It is not
attractive in an almost 15 year old.  I have not raised him to be helpless.  But
he's the kind of kid who needs to be forced into figuring out his own solutions
to his own problems.  I was a strange kid.  I never asked my parents for help if
I could absolutely help it.  If I did ask, I was often disappointed.  Not
because they were mean or uncaring, but just because they were, for one reason
and another, unable.  My brother, on the other hand, asked for and received help
all the time.  That seemed to be the nature of his relationship with my mother,
especially.  She still has the general attitude that "James needs me and you
don't."  Maybe I don't, and maybe he does.  I don't know.  There have been times
when I could've used a hand.  I walk a line between letting my sons know that
I'll always be there for them, but I'm not going to fix everything for them. 
I'll give them some general directions, but I'm not going to draw them all the
maps they need to get through life.

Julie