I love my new firm. I love it so much. I had dinner with our Global managing partner last week, an amazing woman, and we talked about so many things - mentoring, being an attorney in the growing age of AI, loving our work, loving our families, and so much more. I hosted a dinner for our women's initiative group that I'm now leading in Dallas at my house the next night and what a great bookend to the week that was.
During last week we also had James and Landon away on a recruiting trip to Indiana University (who just placed THIRD at the mens' NCAA swimming champsionships and they want our little Landon!), Cora balancing her GT schedule, volleyball, swimming, and soccer, and Claire babysitting, killing it on a chemistry test after so much work, and getting her swimming letter jacket. Over the weekend, Landon had a meet, Cora had volleyball and soccer games, Claire had swim practice, and I tried valiently to bargain shop for a dress for my upcoming partner retreat in San Diego, but after spending hours at my consignment store, the clearance Dillards, and Marshall's, I ended up at Trina Turk and bought a completely insane dress at full price that I love with all of my heart. This will be my first partner retreat at the new firm and I suppose they might as well see all of me. Like a tropical bird. In radiant rainbow colors.
I've been thinking a lot about the transition to being a parent of older children. For the first time in our nearly 19 years of co-parenting, James and I have found ourselves with pretty different views on it and that's been fascinating to me after we've pretty smoothly parented through 3 different infancies, toddlerhoods, and little/big kid times together.
I have always felt that parenting is mostly navigating yourself between your two rails - towards what you remember as a child from your parents of what you want to do and away from what you don't. It's about charting the path in between - the path that is yours - and it can be hard even when you have good and bad examples to sail between.
When our kids were little, we found that the approach that led to the greatest sense of peace in our home was unconditional love (giving apologies when due, being open and vocal in our love and praise, being present, genuinely enjoying time spent with our children and making sure they felt that joy) paired with firm, clear, consistent boundaries (every SINGLE time we bent a rule, I swear it ruined our childrens' lives for 2 weeks; they wanted consitency, they wanted to know that they could push and we wouldn't bend. We would always explain, we would always include them in decision making when we could, but we were also firm. This seemed to be a source of comfort).
That no longer works. Or at least, it works differently. The unconditional love is still true, but it's informed love. It's love that knows each other, that talks through choices, that shares past experiences... it's love hand in hand with the fact that boundaries are now less about our own rules and more about real life consequences and helping to warn about and navigate them. It's less about our boundaries and more about what our 18-year-old can expect from the world and how his actions affect people in it. All actions have consequences and while we've always let natural consequences follow behavior, his actions are bigger and so is his world and so are potential ramifications. And it's less our job to protect or insulate from them and more our job to become a partner in navigating them. To be a resource. An example. A place of trust and safety.
In the last few years my parenting has shifted from "don't do X,Y,Z" to "look, don't do X,Y,Z, but when you do, I'm you're first phone call. There is nothing you can't make worse by going it alone after a bad decision and nothing we can't make better. Bring us in. We love you always."
Has he made any bad choices yet? Not really. Will he? For sure. Hopefully they're small. Regardless, my biggest fear is not that he'll screw up, it's that he'll think he needs to protect us from it. Or think he needs to protect our love from it. That is one of the few things that really scares me in this phase of life.
Meanwhile we also have a 12-year-old who needs to be reminded 1600 times to put her laundry away and still finds any movie where a character dies to be so terrifying she can't sleep alone.
So it's an interesting, wonderful, exciting, exhausting time to be a parent.
And maybe it's always exactly that?
I have truly deeply loved every phase of parenting. Not necessarily every single phase with every child - Landon's newborn phase was hard. Claire's was a dream. Cora only exists because we accidentally had a Claire. But with each child I have found enormous joy within every era, even the hard ones. I feel so much joy in this phase too, even as I see my influence waning. Because now every bit of sharing, of being read in, of being sought out for counsel is a choice. Three-year-old Claire told me every thought in her adorable little head. 15-year-old Claire shares what she wants to. And every bit that I get to hear is a show of respect and love that I don't ever minimize or take for granted.
In the next 6 weeks Landon will graduate high school and Claire will turn 16. We are hosting his graduation party and her Sweet 16 party at our house 7 days apart. Depending on where he goes to school, Landon has anywhere from 2-4 months left of living in our house. It is the most exquisitely painful thing to know that your time as the sun and moon in his world is setting. And it's supposed to. And you'll always be important, but your time to shape or mold or do whatever we can do with these fully formed little humans we bring into the world is ending. And you're so proud of who he is, but how can we possibly sit down to dinner in 6 months time and it's just four of us? Claire and Cora might be even more upset about it than James and I are. I was an oldest child. James was an only. Neither of us ever lived at home again after we left for college- that's Division I athlete life and Landon will be the same. I never felt a nest that was missing a duckling. It seems impossible that we'll just continue on day-to-day without him here.
And yet, I know we will absolutely be fine. And life will adapt again, and it will be wonderful and fun and fulfilling. But it's hard anyway.
Frankly James has struggled more with the transition from parent (God-like figure) to parent (peer) more than I have, but in our late night musings with each other I think it's because he's been parent + coach while I've always been parent + lawyer. Every day involves me talking to another adult I'm trying to convince to listen to me. To convey that I know what I'm talking about. That I understand where they're coming from and I have something to contribute to their considerations. That I am trustworthy and reasonable and steadfast. Coaching is about being a supreme figure: do what I say and you'll succeed and there's not much negotiation involved.
Lawyering has never been like that. My advice is only good to the extent clients will actually listen to it. It has to be practical, personal, and real. This is parenting teens. They have to be bought in to the idea that you are worth listening to. You have to earn it in small daily ways.
When Claire was really struggling in the hellscape that was middle school for her, I remember thinking, I am so glad I have a job. My day could have so easily risen and fallen based on her own experiences and that would be the worst thing I could do for her. I am steadfast. I am solid, and I exist outside our house and outside of her. I genuinely believe this lightened her mental load. I read once that teens are less stressed about being popular and included than they are about their parents will worry that they aren't popular or included. Having just moved to a new city, it would have been hard to separate my own success-and my own emotions- from hers. I'm so glad I've always had my own yardstick. In truth, I have never been more thankful to be a fulltime working mom than I've been in the teen years.
And that's where I am, at 36,000 feet, at 10:41 pm on Monday night, flying back to Dallas from Philadelphia on a day I billed 2x the number of hours I got to sleep.
