They were so cute when they were tiny. No mess. No problems. And then they became teenagers. A lot of mess. A lot of problems. They outgrew the heat lamp. They outgrew the box. They outgrew us. So we gave them away.

“They were so much easier when they were little,” Scott said awhile back as we watched the ducks swim around in their baby pool on our back porch as the sun went down. Scott wasn’t talking about our growing ducks. He was talking about our older kids.

I’ve shed a lot of tears and lost a lot sleep raising teenagers. Teens should come with a manual. We just got a new tractor. The operator’s manual weighs more than my purse. My purse could kill a man with one blow. That’s why I carry it. Not because it has everything I need, but because it’s more deadly than the knife I always carry too.

When I was a little girl my dad gave me a pocket knife. “You may need this to save your horse’s life someday.” He was serious, so I seriously carried that lifesaving pocket knife while riding my pony. And then my horse after I outgrew ponies. I still carry a knife when I ride. Sometimes horses get tangled in a rope. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve used my knife. And all my boys know I have a knife. “Mom, can I use your knife,” I’ve heard again and again in the car while we’re driving. “Put it back in my purse when you’re done,” I always say.

Finally, I gave up and let the boys carry their own pocket knives. Yes, I know this isn’t politically correct these days, but John saved G2 with his pocket knife one day, cutting his little brother out of a rope that tangled around his neck in the yard so the Bicknells carry knives. But not to school. We don’t need any more Bicknell boys kicked out of school. The first one having to leave his private Christian high school two years ago was painful enough.

But back to that tractor’s manual. It’s massive. Everything you need to know about that tractor is in that manual. Why can’t teenagers come with a parenting manual? A very large, very detailed, tell me exactly what to do manual.

Can I just be honest? I don’t know what the heck I’m doing raising teenagers. We are on our third teen and it feels like the stork just dropped him off on our porch yesterday. Nearly grown. “He’s getting too big to be pooping in our nest,” Scott said after we came home from a weekend at the ocean to find our 18 year old son had a “gathering” at our house. I call it a “gathering” because our son says it wasn’t a party. I cleaned up vomit spattered on the wall of our laundry room bathroom. I hate cleaning my own kids’ vomit. The last thing I want to do is clean up some other kid’s vomit.

Luke was apologetic. I knew we had a problem when I found a load of towels in the dryer. Luke doesn’t wash laundry. Why did he wash all those towels while we were gone?

When I found a Corona bottle cap beside my cutting board in the kitchen between the salt and pepper shaker, I knew. This was before I found the vomit spattered on the wall in the bathroom. “Did you have a party while we were gone?” I asked Luke.

“Dad said I could have some of the guys over,” Luke said.

“Who threw up in the bathroom?”

“How do you know someone threw up in the bathroom?” Luke’s eyes widened.

“I had to scrub the walls,” I told Luke. I was a little pissed.

Actually I stewed and pouted for a couple of days. Not about cleaning up the vomit, but that Luke had broken his promise to us. He said he would never have a party here. “If you have a party here, I will kill you,” Scott tells Luke each time we walk out the door for a few days. “Luke always answers, “I’m afraid Jesus might strike me dead. I promise I won’t have a party.”

I guess Luke isn’t afraid of Jesus anymore, which upsets me the most. I really don’t know what happened in our home while we were at the ocean, but I found one of our kitchen chairs in our bedroom when we arrived home a few weeks ago. The mystery of the chair still bothers me. I asked Luke about it and he said he has no idea how the chair ended up there. I guess chairs just walk down the hall on their own now.

Can I just confess how much I love my teenage son? Even though Luke has broken my heart several times in the past few years, I adore this boy. He hugs me every morning after I make him toast before he goes to school. If his little brothers are sassing me, Luke brings the hammer down. “Don’t you disrespect my mom,” he sternly warns his brothers, and they always listen to him. 

Luke never speaks harshly to me. Most of the time, he’s very tender with me. I know he can cuss like a trucker, I’ve heard him on the soccer field, but he never uses a bad word in front of his mommy. He keeps his upstairs bathroom neat, and always puts his dirty laundry in the basket each morning and carries it back up to his room every afternoon and puts it away. At night, he always gives me a hug before he walks out the door to head for the gym.

“At least he’s not as bad as I was at that age,” Scott said the other day. “You should have seen our senior trip to Spain…”

“Please don’t tell me about Spain,” I interrupted. Years ago, I heard enough of the debauchery of a bus-full of seniors in Spain. Scott graduated high school in Germany. Teenagers are allowed to drink in Europe and prostitution is legal there in certain places. Not that my husband needed any help in this department. When I met him, girls would walk into his apartment and head for the bedrooms. Four good-looking college guys lived there. I’m not kidding. It horrified me. I was still in high school. I know! Why was I there?!

“If we are going to measure our teenagers against ourselves as teenagers, I’m done being a parent,” I told Scott. We were teenagers when we fell in love. I was younger than Luke is right now and Scott was barely older than our son. I’ll spare you the rest of the details of our teenage love affair.

I’m not sure I know how to be anything but honest here. I don’t know what the heck I’m doing raising a teenager. I’m not sure Scott is any more equipped than I am at this, though he’s a high school history teacher and a good father. He really is, but it’s still really hard. Scott and I pray a lot for our kids. I mean a lot. Did I say, “A lot!” I’m counting on God to meet us in every mess, every problem, every challenge with our teens and walk us through the hard stuff. One thing we are learning is to let our kids pay for their mistakes. When Luke participated in senior skip day, he did Saturday school to make it up. Excuses help no one.

I’m not going to make excuses for my mistakes as a parent. I’ve learned plenty from raising three kids so far. Hopefully our four younger boys will benefit from the hard lessons. The biggest lesson I learned from our teenage ducks is that I just enjoyed watching them be ducks. This has reminded me to enjoy watching our teenagers just be teenagers. Not when they are doing something stupid, but the ninety percent of the time they are doing something right.