And all that road rage, quickly shifts to empathy, compassion and patience.
I can take a breath and return to my kind, sweet, lovely self. (Say, âYes".)
Because learning how to drive is hard and scary.
I remember being 15, behind the wheel of the family minivan, ink not yet dry on my learner's permit, with my Dad, riding shotgun, encouraging me accelerate to âPass this suckwad!â as my Mom was screaming top her lungs âSLOW DOWN!" from the backseat.
It was terrifying.
(Suffice it to say, I pulled over, asked my Dad to drive and refused to ever drive a car with both of them in it at the same time ever again. Even now. 24 years later.)
Your teen or young adult is like a student driver.
But at life.
Like a STUDENT HUMAN.
They are learning and learning how to do life, like driving, is hard and scary.
They are new and green and inexperienced at being humans.
They need our patience, our calm and our grace in order to make mistakes so they can get better.
And it helps to remember that they aren't driving poorly to ruin your day or piss you off. They simply don't know.
My children aren't giving me a hard time, they are having a hard time.
When they struggle, so often it isn't personal, even though it feels like it is.
(This is true even when they say things like, âI hate you [ENTER YOUR NAME] and you are the worst parent in the world [ENTER YOUR NAME AGAIN].â Trust me on this one.)
They aren't trying to get in your way or make you crash or drive your (emotional) car off a cliff, they are just struggling with what they don't know how to do well yet, which is âAdultâ and âBe Humanâ and âBe a Rational Reasonable Person in the World".
So the next time your adolescent does something that makes you want to yell a wild string of curse words and flip them the bird (figuratively or maybe even literally), just imagine they have a huge yellow bumper sticker on their forehead that says STUDENT HUMAN.