Silas is 14!

I usually would post a birthday interview at the end of this, but I’m making Silas edit it himself this year, so….it might be a while.

Every year, I feel like…wait, how have I only been parenting for (x) years? And also, how has it been (x) years already?? On this trip around the sun, Silas has been to Michigan, West Virginia, Washington, DC, Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut. He witnessed a total solar eclipse, met an emu, decided that history is sort of interesting after all, and started learning to cook.

Silas is fully and completely a teenager. As teens go, we are extremely lucky. He’s kind, funny, thoughtful, affectionate, resilient. He’s reliable; his friends know they can count on him to be there for them, to support them, to follow up and follow through. He still loves hugs, and I get several every day. We genuinely enjoy spending time together. We have interesting conversations. He’s curious and knows lots of things I don’t, and he still likes us. He and Petra are super close, even though they are so different. When I picked him up from camp, he told me that he was kind of confused by some of the conflict the other kids described in their families. “I mean, we’re all just basically besties in our house, right?” he said.

That sounds about right. We’re not the kind of parents who are “our kids’ friends”—our kids don’t get away with very much, most days; we’re a chores-and-bedtime kind of family. But we do have a very low-conflict family, and when we fight, we fight like people who would like to continue to like each other afterward. We enjoy a lot of the same things, and we are a unified team, even during the transformations of life.

It’s been a big year, creatively. Silas has been in four shows (She Kills Monsters, Zombie Prom, The Orphanage, and, shortly after his birthday, Fun Home), and made his first music video (we think we will do more of this). His piano and dance skills have improved through regular practice. Although he’s drawn to playing himbos, the opportunities he’s had to do more serious acting this year have stretched him artistically.

His drawing skills have seriously leveled up over the past year as well. He creates a range of both fan art and original content. His approach to the fan art makes me think of the olden days when art students would set up easels in galleries and copy the Old Masters’ works. I see him copy some aspect of an image that he admires and use it to get more skilled at creating what is in his head.

His friend Shaymus is an excellent artist, and they spend a lot of time drawing together. Shaymus’ notes on shading and perspective have helped Silas execute what’s in his head more clearly.

I apparently failed to get a picture of Silas on his birthday. I have very few pictures of him by himself at all; he’s one of those people who always surrounds himself with friends. He’s living into the promise and the challenge of that “Friend to most” title he came up with so long ago. The “social brain” that kicks in with most teens is exponentially so in a person who is so wired for connection already. He’s better than I am at maintaining friendships across distance and time, regularly scheduling long calls with friends in Ohio, New York, and Mississippi. Unlike every other person to ever go to camp, he has every intention of keeping in touch with his camp friends. He told me recently that one thing he loves about being homeschooled is how easily he interacts with people of all ages, “So I have infinite possible friends.”

Silas is sooooort of a 9th grader (because of where his birthday falls, we can consider him to be in 8th or 9th grade depending which feels convenient given the situation). We’re starting to talk and think about college and all that. Sometimes I get up in my anxiety, worrying that he’s not going to be academically prepared for college work. And then he rolls into the living room, eating Ritz crackers straight out of the sleeve, and says, “So, where does the Monomyth come from?” and uh… yeah, I think we’re fine.

There are days when he’s full-on driving me crazy; teen brain hormones are real. He told me not long ago that he doesn’t like learning anything that I’m good at from me. So I can teach him math, but he resists hard when I try to teach him anything to do with writing or theater. I’m mostly writing this here because (1) I think someday he’ll find this funny, and (2) apparently this is a thing; I hear about it from lots of my homeschooling parent friends. If it’s A Thing for you, might I recommend tapping out? I signed Silas up for a writing class taught by someone else for the spring semester. As for theater, he is already planning his next adventure with Studio Wayne, and their pedagogy is phenomenal. I’d rather not spend my days fighting with him.

I worry sometimes that I’m letting my kids have lives that are just too easy. What if they don’t learn grit, or whatever? But this year, I’ve been impressed, over and over again, with how resilient both of them are. Lately, Silas has grown into a new level of confidence and calm, even when things are extremely stressful. He’s started to learn to take care of his mental health better, using tools like journaling (“I don’t get why this works, but it really does!”) and getting plenty of outside time. Those kinds of skills are the ones that I wish everyone developed in their teen years, instead of having a quarter-life crisis where we learn to observe our feelings and unpack them, while also trying To Adult.

I say this often, but it’s still true. Lots of things about my life have been complicated and challenging, and about ninety percent of my problems are ones I have created. But JC and I won the kid lotto, twice over. We couldn’t ask for better people to be on our team. I can’t wait to see what the next year holds for this amazing person.