By Gretchen Leigh

[The following message was edited and approved by my oldest daughter].

Just because society says my children are adults doesn’t mean I’m finished. Not by a long shot. I remember when my kids were little and I’d think, “When they can talk to me, my life will be better.” Or “When they can use the toilet on their own I’ll be rocking this parenting thing.”

Yes, those milestones did indeed make the girls easier to handle, but they were a lot of work physically. Then I thought, “When they become teens, it will make all our lives simpler.” But teens become harder still. In those years, it’s not what they say that you have to worry about, it’s what they don’t say.

My internal mantra changed to — “Once they’re out of high school and officially adults, parenting will surely get less difficult.” And it has in some ways, but it hasn’t in others. They still need a lot of help navigating this world and with my oldest, who has attention deficit disorder, she needs a bit more direction at 21 years old than a non-ADD child would. It could just be me, but the magical ages of “adulthood” don’t feel like I’m doing less parenting.

This past week my oldest did a drawing assignment on perspective for her college class. The finished product looked a bit wonky to me. She explained it away, “It’s art, you don’t know art.” She then pointed out everything she could have done better. I think she expected I would drop the subject. I tried, I really did.

But her father and I are financially responsible for her, we embraced her back into the safety net of home after her fireball college year in 2015. We’ve got this much invested in her and we deserve her best work going forward.

So I informed her if school was cancelled the next day due to snow, she should consider it a gift. So when she arose that snow day I urged her to get going immediately and fix the assignment or start over. She took a nap with the cat.

Since I’m adulter than her, I put my biggest parenting panties on and let her have it; my mouth flying off every which way. It wasn’t one of my finest moments, though I thought we finally came to a mutual understanding about my expectations for that assignment. But when I went into her room to see if she was making progress, she was a puddle.

“I feel like you don’t have confidence in me,” she wailed.

Well, I didn’t. Because she hadn’t shown me I could, however, there’s a difference between being unsure of her motivation and knowing her abilities. I had plenty of confidence that she was capable of doing her best on the piece. But at that moment she was unable to recover from my wrath.

What she didn’t know was that I ruined my own day because I felt bad at getting after her. It was a tough love maneuver for sure, but my delivery wasn’t exactly stellar. So we talked it out. I told her to get mad at me if she was angry at my response. She was incapable of such behavior, which made me feel better about her character but made me feel worse about my own. Then I pulled out her drawing and we broke it down. We talked about how she could make it better and what it needed to look right.

Then she finally said, “I hate to admit it, but you’re right. I need to do it over again.”

And really, that’s what all parents live to hear.

Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Covington. You can read more of her writing and her blog on her website livingwithgleigh.com, on Facebook at “Living with Gleigh.” Or follow her on Twitter @livewithgleigh. Her column is also available at maplevalleyreporter.com under the Life section.