Life with Raccoons

Living with teenagers is a lot like living with raccoons. You see them rarely by the light of day. Most often you only hear them skittering and clattering around in the middle of the night, and you wake to find the house in disarray. Things go missing and turn up in the most illogical places. Remnants of their snacks are left scattered in the living room or found stashed around the nest, tempting other vermin to the party. If you do encounter one and make a suggestion as to how they should amend their behavior, you just get the blank stare. At best, they will pretend to comply, but the charade is dropped or the lesson forgotten as soon as you're not forcing the issue. There seems to be no end to the messes, literal and otherwise, you're left to clean up.

Technically, we have neither raccoon nor teen in our house. Our son is officially just beyond his teenage years, though still not old enough for all the privileges of adulthood. But, despite the date on his birth certificate, he's still in the teenage phase of his life. Adult responsibilities and choices are still things to evade at every opportunity. In fact, this is one of the key reasons he came to live with us when he finished high school. His mother's household was strained by his resistance to responsibility, and he needed the space to grow up a little. Looking back, I can see he's made significant strides since then, but our raccoon's not out of the woods yet.

This isn't our first experience with wildlife. Our son has two older sisters who each went through their own struggles on the way to adulthood. Thankfully, they grew out of their striped tails comparatively early and seem to have claimed their adulthood with a firm grasp. But expecting our son to be on pace with his sisters' development would be unfair. Each of our children has had a different set of environmental factors to influence them: different households with parents or stepparents at different stages of their lives, different friends, different schools and teachers, different expectations or pressures laid on them, different opportunities to grow. Beneath the environmental factors, they simply aren't the same people. Personalities, interests, strengths and weaknesses, and ambitions, all are individual, and you just can't assume that everyone will grow at the same rate and in the same ways. There are elements in his nature that may delay our son from accepting his full adulthood, but at the same time, they may feed dimensions of his being we hadn't considered. As thoughtless as he may sometimes seem, I know there's a lot going on inside. Like his siblings, he'll be a decent adult when he gets there; he'll just have to do it in his own time.

Meanwhile, I have to balance patience with nudges in the right direction. I'll have to stifle the frustration and remember the good things that counterbalance the temporary raccooniness. Although I've known plenty of raccoons of all ages over the years, in my experience the teenage kind usually grow out of it.