Holding Space :

Parenting Teens

If I had to choose an image to capture parenthood during the teenaged years, this would be it. There is something both strangely lonely, and quietly soothing, in the endless driving and sitting alone in a parked car that characterizes this season of parenting.

No longer needed to help get equipment on before games, there is a period of waiting between the drive and the game starting. Practices are entirely drop off and pick up now. We find new pockets of space emerging as they need us less. Yet it’s a holding space of sorts ….a pause until they need us again – to be in the stands watching or back in the parking lot for the drive home.

We are longer in control of who they socialize with or which activities they gravitate toward, yet still needed to get them to and from. Our schedule is no longer our own and days are experienced as fragmented chunks of time – between drives and waits – the timing of which are usually largely undetermined or communicated in advance. Time takes on a hurry up and wait quality along with an always ready hypervigilance. There is space, but little sense of the shape it will take.

No longer the main feature in their lives, we function as book ends for their experiences – works shifts, sports activities, social events.  Our role becomes dropping off at the beginning and picking up at the end with this empty space in the middle where the action is happening without us. We are given space that we cannot claim as it is not really ours, yet space to be filled just the same.

No longer in bed by 9pm, or even off the ice or the clock from their work shift by then, pulling out of the driveway and into a parking lot to wait for them to emerge late at night begins to feel familiar in both a lonely and soothing way. I see the other parents huddled in their dark cars waiting as well…occupying this strange new space of being both needed, and not, all at once. The holding space between childhood and adulthood seems to look a lot like this. They go and come back. They go and come back. They go and come back. And us? We hold the space that allows them to.