Peeling Back the Bubble Wrap

It must be a strange thing to be a parent.  To be handed a squirming eight pound mass and sign your life off in exchange for theirs.  It must be strange because it reduces thirty year olds to making cooing noises and crawling around on the floor holding stuffed caterpillars with their six month olds.  It causes a parent to use every single ingredient in the pantry to bake a cake just to see what it would taste like with their curious three year old.  But even stranger than that is the fact that while watching your teenage daughter talk to you and defend passionately her point of view as to why she shouldn't have to do the dishes ever, you can see yourself.  It's mesmerizing, this mirror within your child.  And if you try hard enough, you can remember the anguish and confusion, and you swear to yourself that you won't let your child make your same mistakes.  You foolishly think that if you can bubble wrap every square inch of their world, that somehow nothing will ever hurt them.  You push out of your mind that sometimes, the real trouble lies tucked beneath their own skin, or within the folds of your family, or in the hallways of the school they spend 40 hours a week in.  And by the time they have become a teen, you have become so preoccupied with bubble wrapping any possible danger that you forget that sometimes, it's necessary to fall, in order to learn how to get back up again.     

Walking through the halls of a highschool, the layers of social strata are obvious.  There are the kids that walk as close to the wall as they can, as if invisibility is a gift rather than a drawback, there are the kids that make their life mission to stand out with dyed hair and piercings, then there are the kids that seem to succeed in every single thing they do without even seeming to try.  But despite the external differences, we are all the same underneath the surface.  We are all  trying to find just exactly what we want to live for.  It doesn't matter how much guidance and directions we are given from family and friends, at some point as a teen we will question everything we have ever stood for and believed in.

This period of uncertainty is nothing to lose sleep over-it happens to everyone, but it seems that parents within the Muslim community live their lives studiously trying to avoid the period of turmoil that their teen is bound to go through.  It's this reason that Islamic Schools seem to be overflowing with kids despite the gross bathrooms, ugly uniforms, and saucy students.  Parents feel that if their kid is surrounded by other Muslims that maybe they will keep the same values (as if values could be transmitted by osmosis) and the fact that the happenings at an Islamic School are the exact same as they would be at a public school seem to slip their minds.  From what I have seen and the long-drawn complaints/stories/rants of my American Muslim friends, Muslim parents are their own breed of overprotective.  And while many parents would argue that there is no such thing as being too safe, let me tell you: there is.  In my high school alone there are dozens of cases of the American Muslim kids that just needed to find a way to vent and deal with their parents stiffling rules.  There is the girl who sneaks mini skirts and tank tops in her backpack to change into in the school bathroom because her parents monitor EVERYTHING she wears, there is the boy who smokes pot behind the school on late starts so he can cope with his overly demanding parents, and the girl who drinks and puts an alarm on her phone so she can sober up before she gets picked up by her parents.  There are dozens more scenarios like these, and that's in my school alone.

So by now, you're probably wondering why you even had kids in the first place, and the answer to that is so that you could spend 100 grand on college, another 50 grand on their wedding, and  of course, the three in the morning calls when they really need you.  What a joy.  But if I could give any advice to parents, it would be this: let us fall on our faces once in a while-early.  As teens, sometimes we do need to touch the fire to know that it's hot.  I'm not saying that letting your kid fall on their face will work in your favor everytime, but I can tell you right now, I learned more from my mistakes than the three million groundings and lectures I ever got from my parents.  It's when you hold your kid back from making any mistakes that they go wild.  I can promise you, that with many crazy teens you see, it's not because they were born that way.  It's because at some point in time, they began to feel like they couldn't meet their parents expectations.  And although watching your kid reach for the flame may well be the hardest thing you have ever done, it may also be the most beneficial for your child.

For me, the most important thing my parents ever did was to have a relationship with me in conjunction to "parenting" me.  Through the yellings and fights and all of the emails that landed in my mom's inbox (she now reads them for entertainment), we had a relationship.  We truly lived.  Me and my mom had wrestling matches on the kitchen floor (okay we still do), and me and my dad danced in the middle of the road to Boom Boom Pow on New Years Eve, and we went out to breakfast at two in the morning just because.  It was the laughter we shared and the optimistic attitudes with which we all went about our lives that has made me able to respect the guidelines my parents set out for me.  They let me fall on my face and get hurt in order to realize that the path they had set out for me was probably the best path out there for me anyways despite all the "fun" other kids seemed to be having.  Although I'm not so sure my dad will have the whole "let you stumble and fall" approach when it comes to being behind the wheel...

Parenting, I would imagine, is like a huge balancing act.  You find somewhere on the spectrum between psychotic overprotectiveness and indifference, and try your hardest to be there.  And as hard as it may seem, sometimes the best thing you can do for your child is to pull back some of that bubble wrap so that they can learn how to deal with life when things get rough.

Samar