By Stacy Turner

One night when I was 5 or 6 years old, a bat got caught between the screen and window next to my bottom bunk.  The screaming of my three sisters alerted our father, who stood on my bed, straddling my still-sleeping body to rescue the bat, releasing it outside.  Being able to sleep through pretty much anything was my superpower.  

In those days, sleep swallowed me like a stone dropped in a lake.  But in high school, sleeping so soundly became my kryptonite.  That’s when it became my responsibility to get up and catch a bus long before my mom and siblings arose.  If I overslept and missed it, I’d be very late to school, needing to wait for Mom to drop the younger kids at school on her way to work.  To be on time, I’d have to find my own ride to school. I  missed the bus only once; afterwards, mom’s tough love approach to self-sufficiency helped me win the war on oversleeping.  To win each daily battle, I set multiple alarm clocks around my bedroom each night to force myself to wake up and find them just to stop the annoying ruckus. At the time, waking up and getting ready while the house was dark and quiet felt eerie and sad.  Now, I can appreciate the self-sufficiency I learned then that would carry me through college and beyond.

Unfortunately, my daughters have inherited my ability to find and disable their alarms while remaining asleep, but only when they’re especially tired.  My husband and I have agreed it’s our job to help them learn to take care of themselves. 

Still, on nights I think that sleep might overpower them, I’ll set my alarm too, just to make sure they’re up after a late night or for an especially early morning start.  Most of the time, this measure is unnecessary, as they’ve become pretty self-sufficient throughout their teen years.  But every once in a while, even though I see the light shining under their bedroom doors, I open the door and find them sound asleep, having turned off their alarms, flicked on the overhead light, but succumbed to the siren song of “just five more minutes.”  They startle awake and begin to frantically get ready for the day, grateful for my intervention.  And I’m happy to set aside tough love in that moment to give them a less stressful start to their day.  I guess I can’t resist mothering them just a little longer. 

Over the years, we’ve done our best to push them towards self-sufficiency.  At a time when they swore to us that no other kids in their school were forced to do chores, our girls learned to clean the bathroom, sweep floors, and wash dishes.  Thankfully, now, they’re able to cook basic meals. They got a leg up on their friends by driving dad’s tractor long before drivers ed class.  Meanies that we are, we force them to help pick up fallen branches each spring and pull a few weeds every summer.  It’s not glamorous, but it’s important they learn that as a part of a team, you’re sometimes required to do tasks you’d rather avoid, and that many hands can make the task more manageable. 

They earn money at summer jobs and learn to budget it to make it stretch throughout the school year to cover the cost of outings with friends.  They can go into the bank to manage their funds, even though they’d rather not talk to an actual banker.  We help them figure out how to file taxes, advocate for themselves to teachers and coaches, and myriad other new tasks they’d rather not tackle but need to figure out.  In the process, they’re learning they can handle things that had once loomed large and imposing, and they’re becoming more self-confident.  Because when they’re out on their own, they will no doubt face circumstances we haven’t thought to prepare them for.  Since they’ve already mastered mundane tasks and succeeded at some hard things, it’s our hope they’ll be more confident in tackling bigger challenges, too. 

No matter what they encounter or where they end up, we’ve tried to prepare them to be successful young adults who can take care of themselves.  But by helping them out on those rare early mornings, I hope they also learn that they can count on us even when they mess up.  And, if a late-night study session or fun evening out makes them too tired to move, I hope they remember my trick with the alarm clocks.  No matter what challenges my daughters face, I trust they’ll have the skills and confidence to solve them.