If you’ve read my blog with any amount of regularity then you’ll know that I try not to spend too much time gushing about my kids. If you’re tired of hearing me talk about Mallory, then you’ll want to skip this post. But I will be mentioning how I might have ended up a drug addict, so you may want to stick around.
No one in the world has been with me as long as my daughter. She’s not my BFF or anything. In fact, I’m loathe to suggest that she’s even my friend. In every sense of the word she’s been an “easy” child to raise. Obedient, helpful, kind. She talked early, was potty trained at a ridiculously early age, and read before she was in kindergarten. I didn’t know what I was doing, but parenting her felt right and easy. The only hard parts were when I wondered if she’d ever feel good enough. It’s not that I wanted her to be competitive, but she grew up with other kids who seemed lucky or well off and since we started out so poor I was ever conscious of that for her.
Her hardest year was 7th grade. She was quite a pill. All of a sudden she lived in the strange vortex of junior high schooler where she knew everything and questioned everything.
That wasn’t annoying at all.
She had a friend that year named Maggie that I wasn’t fond of because she was a wild child. Maggie got to stay out late and she spent a lot of time away from home. Her mom was also a young parent like I was, but she didn’t set as many boundaries as I had with my daughter. In fact, Maggie’s mom was still trying to be young. Too young, in my opinion. She dressed like her daughter and hung out with her and let Maggie have the lay of the land. Meanwhile, I was setting limits and trying to be more grown than I was in order to be the responsible parent I wanted to be.
“Maggie’s mom let’s HER do that. They’re friends. She’s her best friend.”
If Mallory said that once, she said it 50 times a week. That was important for her at this time in her life and she was like a dog with a bone.
My own teen years were, at best, tumultuous. There was a lot of uncertainty, pregnancy, proms, pregnancy, and doing anything anybody told me to do. Sense a theme here, do you? I didn’t say no to anything new and that path was leading me to the wrong people and the wrong choices. I was a wild child. Couple that with a great sense of being able to lie through my teeth and you have yourself a recipe for disaster.
The only thing that woke me up from making more stupid choices that could have led to getting me killed was the fact that I got pregnant and had to grow up very fast. Those are the things that make a person stop what they’re doing and start paying attention. These are the quiet times when I actually started listening to the voice in my head that said, “Come on. Do the smart thing now.”
Without having the responsibility of raising a kid I would have been on the wrong path for a much longer amount of time. I would be strung out somewhere trying to figure out how I got there. I’d be playing the blame game and pointing my finger at anyone else for ruining everything. You see, I needed Mallory at that very moment. She’s made me laugh and kept me sane. She’s cheered me on and always been on my side. Mallory is why I work so hard.
Honestly, I don’t know what I’d have done without her.
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