Lamentations of an Exhausted Parent

Written and performed by Kim Christesen

CLC Speech Showcase

Spring 2023

I’m a parent of two amazing kids. And like most parents, one moment I’m bragging about their accomplishments, and the next, I’m contemplating where I can hide the bodies.

Raising kids is like herding cats onto a moving bus during a rainstorm. Someone will end up drenched, scratched, and likely flattened. And we’re left asking ourselves three important questions: Who’s driving the bus? Why is the interior such a disaster? And what's that awful smell?

Make no mistake, parenting is a road trip with a destination, but no map.

When our kids turn 16, it's a milestone for them and a “Come to Jesus” moment for us. Despite giving up our Uber credentials, there are other things parents need in addition to divine intervention.

It’s best to ensure you have a kid-friendly used car, one that can survive a few bumps. In fact, when your daughter eventually backs into a garbage can, the neighbor's mailbox, a school bus, and sideswipes her favorite art teacher in a valiant attempt at a 3 point turn while parking on a narrow side street during a meet up for a community service project, remember that when you added her to your insurance policy, at least the price increase was only a fraction of the gray hairs you get every time she pulls out of the driveway.

If the driving doesn’t freak you out, the sheer chaos of daily life certainly will. From school and sports schedules to work and family commitments, you will be stretched to your limit on your best days.

On your worst days, it will rain in your kitchen.

One random Tuesday night, you’ll be alerted to the weather event happening out of the light fixture above your table. You'll go upstairs to investigate, since your teenage son was bathing at the time, but you’ll find the bathroom floor dry. The only evidence he washed himself will be the wet towel on the floor of his room.

However, when it rains in your kitchen for the third time in less than two weeks, and the only common factor is your son’s bath time, you’ll finally put it all together. The fact that your high school son cannot stand to be separated from his YouTube watching to the point where he’s still taking baths, not showers. And since this idiot is unaware of how tubs and water displacement work with his new, growth-spurt inspired larger size, he sent the excess water past the overflow valve into the compromised 20 year old plumbing system of your home, and cascading down onto your kitchen table.

As a loving parent attempting to raise a responsible teenager, you’ll obviously yank his sorry naked butt unceremoniously from his warm bath and force him to clean up the mess.

And once the patching and painting are done, a “NO BATH” order will be issued, and your son will be forced to put down the iPad long enough to shower. For a few months, it will work. But like any immature teenage boy with no sense of self-preservation and an avid addiction to watching 20 year-olds play Grand Theft Auto on Twitch, he’ll try to sneak in a bath, which will lead to another wet kitchen table and a death notice placed upon his head.

You see, part of parenting is coming up with new and creative ways to deal with the chaos our children create. Rest assured, my son’s piggy bank paid for the latest ceiling repair. And if he ever takes a bath again in our home, I’ll dismantle his gaming computer, rip out the insides, and hide the components in places even the four horsemen of the apocalypse will never find.

Of course, the other part of parenting is investigating the source of certain smells. When our kids are little, the diaper is the obvious culprit. A bit later on, it's a toss up between the uneaten lunch left in the backpack, gym clothes that didn’t come home for an entire semester, and/or any sports gear or socks in general.

Once puberty hits, a pungent body odor tends to emanate from their general direction, surrounding these kids like a heavenly aura. Except this smell is not of heaven or lilacs on a fresh spring day. This odor reeks of death, destruction, and ruin. It’s the back alley behind a hole-in-the-wall bar that sells cheap beer. It’s the smell of rotting garbage sitting stagnant and decomposing in the 100 degree heat of a late August day. It’s the rancid toxic lake within a landfill, where rats search for week-old pizza slices, and a family of skunks stumbles upon a family of raccoons, causing a rumble of epic proportions.

As a parent, you are shocked that no friend or teacher has said anything to your child about the smell, likely because they are too kind to publicly embarrass them or too afraid of instant death. Even worse is that your child cannot seem to smell their own disastrous odor, meaning they either have no sense of smell or care not for the loss of human life left in their wake.

Even so, this journey we take as parents is unique. From birth to now, we’ve helped shape our children as best we can. Running after these kids has tested us in ways we never thought possible, brought each of us joy and pain, laughter and sorrow.

Your last chapter, high school, is a joy ride, roller coaster, and the saddest movie you’ll ever watch all rolled into one. These days, I’m trying to focus more on what little time I have left with my two teenagers, as I know my days are numbered. The oldest is heading to college in the fall, the youngest just two years behind. Emotionally, I’m nowhere near ready to pass by a clean, fresh-smelling room or not see the Nissan with the matching dents in the back end parked in my driveway.

One thing I know for sure is that the journey, for all its ups and downs, has been worth it, will be worth it, in the end. When my house is empty and quiet, when I’m not constantly yelling at my son to wear his retainer after we just paid $6,000 to fix his crooked teeth, or cursing my daughter for waiting until the last minute to let us know about a change in plans that means I have to reschedule 5 other things, I know the tears will come. My car insurance bills might be more bearable, my life less chaotic, my home may smell a bit fresher, but there will be an emptiness inside me that I won’t know how to explain.

Of all the frustrations parenthood causes us, of all the joys raising children can bring, there is also immense satisfaction. One day, you’ll look back at herding those cats onto that speeding school bus during a driving rainstorm, and think to yourself, “I did it. I got them where they needed to go, without an owner's manual or solid instructions.” Sure, you broke an arm and had to amputate your left foot to do it, but you did it.

And the good news is that when they drive off into life, they will have roommates.

Karma will come for these children. And when it does, they will sink or swim–and we’ll be there to make sure they learn from the experience. Because unconditional love means never letting them drown.