I don’t want my children gone, but I am so sick of being a good parent

Dec 23, 2023

After decades raising her children, Tegan Bennett Daylight needs a rest. As her youngest finishes school, she reflects that the children are beautiful - but they are also dickheads

As the end of my last child’s schooling approaches, I’m thinking about freedom. I know, once you’ve had children you always have them – Francis Bacon called them “hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises”. I don’t want my children gone for ever, nor do I have any great enterprises in mind. Like you, I just need a rest. I’m so sick of being a good parent. A good enough parent. An OK parent. A shitty parent.

Recently I found something I’d written in 2007, when my kids were two and six. Brace yourself.

The thing about children is this: they need your attention all of the time. You need to be feeding them, giving them drinks, getting them warmer or colder, stopping them from being bored. What are you going to cook for dinner. What will you give them for lunch. How will it balance out with the dinner. Will they have had enough fruit and vegetables. What are you supposed to do if you can’t get them to eat fruit or vegetables.

You have to stop them from hurting themselves but allow them to take risks. What if another child said something awful to them which they are worrying about, but they haven’t told you so you can’t help them. What if you lost your temper and screamed at them and scared them. Are they getting a cold. Do they have cancer. Or are they just hungry.

What time, honestly, is it reasonable to begin drinking wine.

The pain in your breasts, your hip, behind your eyes, your teeth – is it normal. Why are you feeling dizzy in the morning. Where will you fit in some exercise. How much can you talk on the phone. How often can you sneak a look at your email.

Looks like I had a lot on my mind. Our biological kids are 18 and 22 now, and our foster daughter is 19. While they were growing, I invented a few unwritten books, even gave them titles. The one I really thought I would write was called Menopause and the HSC. However, menopause scuttled that plan. Fun times! If I’d written a pitch it would have read like this:

I’m anxious about everything! Anxious about anxiety, to begin with. So much of it! Everywhere I look!

Anxious about phones!

Anxious about the stupid HSC!

Anxious about having failed to teach my kids how to clean a toilet!

But now our last HSC is a matter of weeks away. The kids are not dead. And I’m somewhere new, somewhere we might call Feeling The Anxiety and Giving Up Anyway. I look at younger friends worrying about whether their kids are exposed to too much social media and are getting low self-esteem because of it, and I think, meh. We had low self-esteem in the 80s. Let them have their phones, that’s where all their friends live, don’t lock them out of that vital conversation. And yes, they have seen porn. It won’t kill them.

I look at younger friends locked in ceaseless battle over “screen time”, an expression I never want to – and don’t have to – hear ever again. I remember the days of sticker charts and timed gaming. Goodbye sticker charts! Have at it, kids! I see friends worrying about their kids drinking and taking drugs, smoking, vaping and skipping school, gaining or losing weight, being depressed, having the wrong friends, no friends, mean friends, drug-taking friends. You know what? Let them sort it out. Stand by them, protect them when you can, and love them. Pencil in a few boundaries, but don’t lose your shit when they cross them. Talk to them about anything they want to talk about (and some things they don’t), feed them whenever they will eat, encourage them not to take too many drugs, to slow down, to read books. Do not go to the wall for any of these things. Some of it is your fault, sure, so suck that up. But the rest – well, my attitude these days can be summed up by an exchange I’ve been having for years with one of my closest friends, when our boys are being horrible.

Question: “Is it something I did, or is he just being a dickhead?”

Answer: “Just being a dickhead.”

Kids are frequently dickheads. But you are too. Go forth, babies, and be dickheads; the world will let you know what it thinks of that.

And this is also true: The children are beautiful. They smell nice. When they were little they noticed things you’d long forgotten to notice, like moths or sticks or stop signs. They said stuff that made you gasp, that realigned the way you thought about the world. My daughter, finding the pulse in her wrist: “I have a heart in my arm.” My son, holding the hand of one of his godfathers: “Why are the grownups in charge?”

Remember this too: they used to dance when they felt like it, and, and skip or jump with happiness. The promise of chocolate or a party made them ecstatic. They helped you to grow up yourself. You (relatively) patiently and bravely survived those long years of absolute service. You finally found out what it was to work hard. You learned to see life for what it really is. It is so brief. It is uncontrollable. It can’t be saved if it is going to be lost. Sunlight has to be seen as a gift, like food. The world that you brought your kids into is worse in some ways but so much better in others: your kids will have space to learn themselves, to find an identity that is true to who they are rather than an identity decided for them by others. Your kids have learned kindness and tolerance in a way you never did.

We’re a few weeks away from the beginning of spring, and soon enough the final exams will begin. Every morning the light falls differently into the house; I can track it by the cat, our very own sun dial. The kids are doing OK, but as my partner said when they were small, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about having children, it’s that nothing ever stays the same.”

Why are the grownups in charge? Who knows. Maybe our children will have children themselves and be surprised, pleased, grateful and furious with us for everything we have done. Maybe they’ll pass on the art of loving. As well as the art of screaming till your throat hurts.

Tegan Bennett Daylight is the author of Royals, a novel for teenagers, in which six kids and a baby are trapped alone in a mall, and everything (eventually) turns out fine