Generation Gulch

This week I reached a milestone. As of Monday, I have officially been a mother for 20 years. Here is proof:

No longer teenagers- Caleb's 20th birthday was Jan. 11, Bailey's 20th was Jan. 12. After the kids had been in elementary school together for several years we figured out that her mom and I had been in the same hospital at the same time.

The proof is not 20 candles on the cake, because I didn't have that many. The proof is my son, Caleb, showing two fingers while his long-time school friend, Bailey, is making a "0."

And the wisdom that I've gleaned after two decades of mothership?

It's not a generation gap. It's bigger. It's a gulch.

The distance doesn't seem so far when I look back. After all, I can remember high school and the nearly 30 years after. I can still relate.

But I also remember being in high school and looking at my parents, who 30 years ahead of me had three kids, jobs, and mortgage payments. I couldn't relate.

I thought I would know my kids. After all, I changed their diapers, read them bedtime stories, sat through parent-teacher conferences. When they could drive, I tried to keep track of where they were going, and with whom. I told them moms never can sleep until they know their kids are safely back home, but I think they knew I was lying. I can be sound asleep by 10:30 p.m., whether they are in or not.

Somewhere along the way, they became their own persons and forgot to tell me. No, they purposely didn't tell me. And all of my questions, driven from both my need to know as a mother and my need for the facts as a reporter, get answered with as little detail as possible and they move on.

When they were little, when we spent our days at the zoo watching the otters and the gorillas, I couldn't imagine a day when I didn't know what was going through their little blond heads. But things got busy, and then they were teenagers, and the gap that I thought wouldn't happen to us appeared and widened into a gulch.

Yet when I remember certain things I went through in high school, I know my parents had no clue. When I got engaged in college, my parents were unsure how I felt about David Franklin, because I hadn't told them.

Why did I think my relationship with my kids would be different?

Today I was remembering when I was 16 and I drove three of my girlfriends to Wichita to see WhiteHeart, our favorite Christian band. A summer thunderstorm was in the forecast so the outdoor location was changed to indoor, but we out-of-towners managed to make it to the new location. The rain was in full force for our supposed-to-be-an-hour drive home, but I really can't blame the weather conditions for my taking the exit to Hutch (apparently there is a Highway 50 west AND a 50 that goes east. Never mind that I'd been to Wichita nearly every month for most of my life, I certainly hadn't paid attention to the directions. I'm sure I was reading a book in the back seat). At any rate, after seeing an unfamiliar flashing yellow light through the driving rain we finally determined that we'd taken a wrong exit and turned the car around.

After dropping off my friends at their respective houses, it was close to 3 a.m. when I drove onto our farmyard. The rain had stopped. I parked in the shed that served as our garage and hiked my boom box (fitted with four new D-cell batteries, just for this occasion) onto my shoulder, still playing WhiteHeart's latest album. Mom met me at the back door. She was less than impressed. I was shocked to realize she was upset with me. It had honestly never occurred to me that she might be worried.

So if I was that self-absorbed, so clueless when it came to viewing things from my parents' perspective, can I blame my kids for being the same way?

I remember Dave and his siblings reminiscing about their youthful escapades one Christmas. Dave's mom kept saying, "That didn't happen! You're making that up!" I thought she was in denial. Now I suspect she hadn't known until then.

I guess I have some stories to look forward to.