Sometimes we’re up, sometimes we’re down, sometimes we’re all around. When you’re raising teenagers, life is a teeter totter. I used to get upset about the downs, but I don’t anymore. At least not like I used to. That’s the thing about having lots of kids. You learn and you grow along with them. And it doesn’t take long for the boys to outgrow you.

All too soon, he’s taller than you. Stronger than you. And smarter than you. At least he thinks he’s smarter. You remember this, don’t you? How much wiser you were than your parents when you were seventeen. It wasn’t until I hit about twenty-seven that I realized my parents were pretty sharp. Having three kids in my twenties dumbed me down, and made me ask stupid questions like, “Is it dangerous for kids to eat dog food?” Oh wait, that was a few years ago when I gave birth to a child who thinks he’s a dog. In my twenties my kids thought they were purple dinosaurs.

“Can we please burn the Barney videos,” Scott said one day after coming home from work to find us all doing the purple dinosaur dance together. I invited Scott, standing there in his green army flight suit, to join in the dancing, but he looked at me like, I really married this? This being me boogieing with Barney. So when Luke was a toddler, we embraced Bug’s Life instead of Barney because dancing with ants is so much better than dancing with dinosaurs.

When Luke was little, and running me ragged, everyone said, “Wait till he’s a teenager, you’ll be so glad that he’s a boy. Teenage girls are so much harder to raise than teenage boys.”

Hogwash.

Here is what I learned from washing hogs. Some hogs are easy to wash and some are not. In 4-H, I found this out at the fair. We always had to bathe our pigs before we showed them. Forget giving a pig a bath, have you ever tried to show a pig? It’s not easy. There’s no leashes or bridles or bits with pigs. You use a cane in the show ring. A regular walking stick you tap the pig with to make it move around the ring like a poodle. Some pigs fight. So you’re walking your pig, trying to make it look like a really good poodle, and another pig passes by, an evil pig, and bam, you’re in a battle. A ferocious pig fight. That little walking cane does nothing when two pigs are trying to kill each other. This is when the men jump into the show ring with their boards. Shoving plywood between the pigs until the quarrel calms down.

Washing and showing pigs is kind of like raising teenagers. They all have their own personalities. Our girls, in their twenties now, were easier teenagers than our oldest son. There were no car accidents. No school suspensions. No determined boys master-minding social media to get to our girls. Cami and Lacy didn’t get squirrely until college.

“Why are the big kids so hard?” Scott asked the other night. It’s not that our big kids are breaking laws or breaking us, but it’s hard to watch your big kids doing something you know is going to end badly. I used to intervene when I saw this happening. Cami and I went round and round that last year she lived with us. I even had a meltdown because she went to the Happy Viking with her friends and two of the friends ordered drinks, not sodas mind you, and then posted pictures on facebook for all the world to see.

My precious daughter sitting beside a beer, someone else’s beer, but what if that beer jumped on Cami? What if it forced its way into her mouth? Cami’s sweet little mouth with the strawberry birthmark I missed so much when it faded from her upper lip around the time she turned seven. My baby fading into someone I didn’t know with a beer beside her.

Oh my gosh! Cami’s in a bar with a beer within reach! Someone shoot me with a tranquilizer dart because I might be having a heart attack when I see this posted on facebook. What if our pastor’s wife sees this on facebook?! I didn’t even know Cami went to the Happy Viking. The Happy Viking… how stupid! There are no happy vikings in Yuba City. We aren’t in Iceland for Pete’s sake. Why the Happy Viking? Who’s happy here? I’m certainly not happy right now!

“Cami, what were you thinking! I didn’t give birth to you so you could hang out in bars!” I rail that afternoon when she gets home from Yuba College.

“Yes, you did!” Cami throws in my face. “You took me to pubs all over Germany. I drank beer before I could walk!”

“Oh my gosh! Don’t bring up how stupid I was in Germany! I was twenty-three years old in Germany! I didn’t know Jesus in Germany! Your dad and I were idiots! You’re lucky you lived!”

“I want to live,” Cami softly interrupts my rant. “Not your life, my own life.”

“But what about Jesus?”

“You’re not worried about Jesus, Mom. You’re worried about your church friends.”

Why does she have to be so smart? “Don’t be smart,” I warn her.

“I can’t live your faith, I have to find my own.”

Cami and I are standing in the kitchen, tears streaming down both our faces. I’m having a hard time understanding why Cami is struggling with being a Christian in college. We’ve raised her in a good church. In a wonderful Christian school. In a home full of Bibles. How can she be questioning her faith now at twenty years old?

“She’s a late bloomer,” a friend tells me over the phone. “A lot of kids do this in high school.”

High school would be better for this to play out, I think to myself on the phone with my friend. But nearly five years later, when it plays out for our son in high school, I decide high school’s a horrible place for a child to push their boundaries. “I just stopped brushing your teeth,” I long to tell Luke. “Yesterday, you were a little boy singing, I’m in the Lord’s Army, yes sir! Now you’re wrecking cars and selling crack on the street.”

Okay, the truth is, Luke is not selling crack on the street. I don’t even know if people still sell crack on the street these days. They probably sell something else that makes your teeth fall out. But my mind works this way. My imagination hits overdrive and pretty soon I’m down at the police station begging the cops to let my little boy out of jail. “He loves Bug’s Life,” I will tell the police chief. “If you won’t let me take my son home, can you please put on Bug’s Life for him in his cell. He’ll settle right down and be a good boy if Bug’s Life is on.”

“I’m not a bad kid,” Luke tells me in the kitchen when I ask him about drugs.

“But drugs are out there,” I say. Out there like the beer in the facebook pictures with Cami. “Drugs can jump on you. Force their way into your mouth. Some kid offers you candy and there you go. On the news, I saw a kid died the other day from smoking spices. Do you know spices are dangerous? I didn’t know spices were dangerous.”

“It’s not the kind of spices you’re thinking, Mom.”

“So you know about these spices?!” I’m back at the police station begging the police chief to put on Bug’s Life for my son. My jailbird son.

Luke steps over and hugs me. “I know you’re scared, Mom. Don’t worry. I’m smart. I won’t smoke spice, okay?”

“Don’t smoke anything,” I whisper against Luke’s chest, my teenager’s chest that feels like a two-by-four, hard and lean and tall. When did my little blond boy get so tall? Can we go watch Bug’s Life together? I want to ask him. I feel so humble in his arms. So powerless. So dependent on the grace of God to raise my kids now. To get us through these teenage years. I wasn’t like this with our firstborn, Cami. With Cami, I stood in the kitchen like a lioness growling my expectations. And my expectations were very high.

My expectations have changed. I have changed. I’m now a battered little alley cat in the kitchen. I expect my kids to mess up now. I’m messed up now.

I remind myself if Luke falls, grace is there to catch him. And some of that grace needs to come from me, his mom.

It’s amazing how easy it is to give grace when you need grace so badly yourself. Before my breakdown, I didn’t know how much I needed grace. Now I’m a beggar for grace. I’m one of those people standing on the sidewalk holding a sign. Will work for grace. But I know grace is something I can’t work for. Can’t earn. Grace is a gift from God.

I haven’t touched a drink for seven years! Seven years! You promised me if I didn’t drink, my children would never drink. I’m having this conversation with God after Cami informs me in the kitchen, “I will drink, Mom. When I turn twenty-one, I will order a glass of wine at the Happy Viking.”

Oh my gosh! Did that just come out of my daughter’s mouth?! I teach Bible study! I’m on the prayer team at church! Somebody needs to get a grip here. I need to get a grip here.

“I didn’t raise you this way!” Did that just come out of my mouth? When did I turn into such a hypocrite? The truth is we did take Cami to German pubs. But I didn’t know You then, I remind God. I’m not who I used to be. Our kids aren’t supposed to want this. You promised me…

You can’t earn my grace, God reminds me. I never promised you your kids wouldn’t drink. You promised you this. And then I sob into my hands because I’m not in control of what my big kids do. I’m not even sure I’m in control of what I do anymore. God’s in control, and I can’t earn his grace. I can only extend the grace he gives me to my children.

So I give up on never touching a drink again. At the next family function where my cousin presses her glass of wine to my lips, I take a sip. And I thank God that for seven years I didn’t take a sip. I thank God I’m not who I used to be, and his grace is enough for me to take a sip, or not take a sip.

I’ll never forget the day after fighting with Cami, God impressed upon me: Your children need to see the parting of their own Red Seas. How strange is this, I thought to myself. What was my Red Sea parting? And I realized my Red Sea parting was all the times God rescued me when I couldn’t rescue myself. And this didn’t start when I was saved. When I became a real Christian. This started well before I became a real Christian. Well before I was saved by grace.

God’s grace will be there for our kids. We may be up, we may be down, but God is never up or down. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, Hebrews 13:8. He is faithful and true and you can trust Jesus with your teenager.

Being a teenager is hard. Raising teenagers is hard. But God is there. Fall on your knees and fall on the grace of God and when you talk to your teenager, remember you were once a teenager.

A teenager falling…

And being caught by the grace of the universe, which is really the grace of God, whether you knew it or not when you were seventeen trying to figure it out. Because this is what high schoolers do. They figure life out. Sometimes they figure it out with straight A’s and straight driving and straight parents thinking everyone is so brilliantly straight.

But coming from someone who isn’t brilliantly straight, who has never been brilliantly straight, who never wants to be brilliantly straight, life is a teeter totter and you just got to totter on until the grace of God lifts you up again.

P.S. I just want to apologize for calling the Happy Viking stupid. While working the Thursday night farmer’s market, across the street, the Happy Viking became my favorite bathroom break. Then I discovered the Happy Viking’s seafood pasta. So good! And it really is a happy place with lots of happy people. So there you go. There really are happy vikings in Yuba City after all.