Since Sunday night, I’d been in Nashville with Skylar for an internship she has here, and I took three photos, maybe? Gone are the two trips we traveled here as a family and took tons of photos to document our memories. Now we’re separated. Dividing and conquering because everybody has something different going on all at the same time.

But being here with half the clan and spending most of the day alone making new stomping grounds where my daughter’s going to school in the fall, I have half a mind to drive an hour out of my way to go back to The Loveless Cafe to take a selfie of me in front of it. Now that would be appropriate for my blog.

But then I think better of it and go to the Belle Mead Plantation instead. There’s nothing like the free wine tasting afterward. And the married bartender who pours double shots for the girl at the end of the bar.

I look again. I guess that girl’s cute. I don’t typically look at women that way, but I’m curious what makes this guy who can’t stop talking about his wife (for the brownie points, no doubt) start flirting with this girl who’s with her mother? And doesn’t the mother seem to notice what’s going on here? And doesn’t anybody care that I don’t like my wine to be sweet, even if it is free?

I notice these things. Just like there’s a lot of singing going on around me. Everybody’s singing here in Nashville. Well, I’m not. I can’t sing. And no one’s singing for me, or singing my praises, for that matter. Loveless ring a bell?

But last Sunday was Mother’s Day–the day we’re supposed to get treated like royalty, where everybody stands aside and gives us the right of way. And we always got that special treatment from our kids. We raved about it for years to our friends afterward–the brunch, the cards, the flowers.

This year was different, though. We had to blush behind those Mother’s Day flowers, not because of all the sentiment–as a sign of embarrassment because our kids have turned on us. It must have happened when they slept and had all those growth spells. They don’t love us anymore. What did we do to deserve this?

And the shame comes in because we can’t talk about it. No one would understand. When that friend or stranger asks how was your Mother’s Day, pretend you haven’t had a heated argument with your perfect teen since your last trip to Nashville.

But leave it to me to get these conversations started with other mothers. We need to get it out, so we don’t evade the problem and worsen it. Let’s face it, now that our kids can talk (there was a day we couldn’t wait for that to happen), now we want to silence them again. If only they wouldn’t talk back.

People with older adult kids who have gone through the teenage fire try to pull us through to the other side. “It’ll get better, I promise.”

Will it? Sometimes I’m not so sure. I wonder if I’ll ever want to see, let alone try to talk (civilly) with my adult kids again.

And speaking of talking, I had a sore throat so bad, yep, strep (a Mother knows this stuff). So I got on the airplane to go to Nashville anyway. It wasn’t Covid, so did it matter if I wore my mask on the plane?

But as I mentioned, Skylar has an internship here in the music city, where everyone sings or has a singer. The clerk in the clothes store was good enough to go on tour. The restaurant with awful food had a fantastic singer. And, get this, the nurse at the walk-in clinic doesn’t sing, but she “has a singer,” too.

I found this out because I was incidentally filling her in on my cancer and how I had my ovaries and tubes out, not that it had anything to do with my strep-like sore throat. There I go again, telling my stories.

But she said it’s good I had my oophorectomy because she had a singer who had breast cancer and then got ovarian cancer two years later.

Of course, I had to switch gears and ask, “How do you have a singer?”

She replied as if people have singers all the time, “I’m a backup dancer for her, and she used to sing for Marvin Gaye, and now she’s doing great and owns a lounge out in Cookeville.”

And then she swabbed the back of my throat with two thick swabs that had me cough right in her masked and plasticized face. She jumped back and said, “I can’t do this.”

And, that made two of us. The only swabbing I do anymore is with these Covid tests, which are nice and thin. But the nurse dancer softened up again when she had to mine for strep–round two.

I said, “That hurt.”

And she said, “I’m sure it did. Your throat’s so raw it’s bleeding.”

So when the doctor came in six minutes later, I predicted that he too would have a singing story and that I’d have strep.

Wrong on both counts. But my cancer story must have mattered because he wouldn’t prescribe steroids, though my throat warranted it, so I had to get through this thing the old-fashioned way: Flonase, antihistamines, and salt water gargles.

Great! Where are antibiotics when you think you need them?

But this isn’t about my sore throat. That’s just a precursor to how I’ve treated myself, like a battered, raw sore throat.

No wonder I get no respect–I’m not respecting myself. It’s time I take a stand and get mentally tough! And, yep, blame it on my lack of strep throat if you want to, but it’s not my teens with the problem, it’s me. If I’m feeling so bad about myself, what kind of role model am I?

A very bad one.

Teens are intelligent and can see what we do. We can talk all we want, but they won’t listen. That’s because they do what we do–even the bad stuff. Most definitely the bad stuff. We can do everything right, but they will mirror the one bad thing we do.

Ouch! They make us look like fools. Could somebody please turn down that light? It’s way too bright. Do I have to look at my faults? I thought we were talking about how annoying our teens are.

You didn’t think we had kids so that we could teach them all there is about life, did you? Please tell me you didn’t fall for it, too. The big surprise nobody bothered to tell us is our kids are here to teach us, too.

We have teachers all around us, not just in our kids–though that’s when it hits us closest to home.

And then there’s the camp of women who don’t think they’re mothers because they didn’t have kids. Ahem! If you notice a pattern here, teachers can come in any form. (And self-abuse.) Every relationship we have in life, even the bad, especially the bad, teaches us something about ourselves.

But let’s stick with teens here. As miserable as those years can be, it makes us feel glorious when it turns right-side-up again. After the growing pains that we all must go through to heal and grow, that’s when we can learn to love our kids again.

When we want to talk to that person who put us through all that grief and anguish, it’s as if none of it ever happened. Trust me, that day will come; I have wiser friends who tell me so. And I’m finally learning to stand up for myself and sing my own praises, regardless of what my kids might think of me at this moment in time, I’m in the music city, remember?