Friendship: What is it? Where do we find it? How do we keep it?

According to Facebook, a friend is someone we may have met for a minute, added to a list, and then left to the algorithm.

According to Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, friends (like Romans and countrymen, respectively) tend to lend their ears and are often prone to peer pressure.

According to my youngest son, friendship is a compass that points to where your heart is, regardless of time or distance.

Sorry, Bill, but I’m with the kid on this one.

“I’m not tired,” said that same kid, lying through his eyelids, then his mouth fell open and never closed again. We were five hours into a 10-hour flight, somewhere over something dark. It was late. We were all tired. He was asleep.

We were on our way to Sweden. Again. The best friendships, you see, like any compass, are a magnetic thing, and they pull us through the iron of our heartstrings. Frankly, it is a wonderful way to travel.

I get that long-distance friendships aren’t for everyone. There are far more obstacles to family travel than not, with money being perhaps the biggest. It wasn’t easy for us, either. In fact, it nearly didn’t happen. Despite buying our airfare so far in advance that it was cheaper than most domestic travel, and having accommodations provided via the generosity of our friends and their timeshare, it was still a big undertaking that involved a lot of saving and even more corners cut. The benefits, of course, outweigh everything.

The best friendships are a good investment

The slopes of Storlien look soft from a distance, white and fluffy like marshmallow rivers running down the sloppy side of a bright, cold sundae; and the nuts in the thick of it are those you love the most. Mountains are made for metaphors, but they are not nearly as soft as the brochure may suggest. Still, it is worth it all the same, even more so for the sharing.

This is where we spent a week, a quick walk in the snow, uphill both ways, between cabin and ski lifts. We were an overnight train ride from Gothenburg, sans internet and dressed in more layers than an onion. The temperature stayed well below freezing. The wind blew it colder. The kitchen, however, was cozy with wine and conversation.

The best friendships, when done correctly, become the family that you choose.

Ours started seven years ago, when two little boys, both new in town, met in a California classroom. Neither spoke the language of the other, nor did they seem to care, but they knew what laughter sounded like and they understood kindness perfectly. Their friendship rippled to include their older siblings and their parents, from play dates to family game nights to theme parks on the weekends.

And then they moved back to Sweden, which could have been the end of it. We all know life has done meaner things.

But it wasn’t.

Absence, it turns out, really does make the heart grow fonder, but the digital age provided a tether that wouldn’t break. The boys’ long-distance friendship grew all the stronger, and they took the rest of us right along with them. It is an easy comfort.

Hence, our trip to Sweden, and plans are already in motion for the next trip we will all take together. We’re thinking somewhere warmer.

Friendship is anything you want it to be, and everything you make it.

Winter sports are optional.

This article about long-distance friendships was originally published in 2018. Best friendships main photo by Sunny Jat via Pexels.

Editor’s Note: We’re digging into our archives for great articles you might have missed over the years. This article about Halloween with older children comes from 2017.

Last night was Halloween, and there were ghouls and fools aplenty. All our favorite shows were represented in various levels of costumed detail. Movies, too. Star Wars and superheroes, the staples of my own childhood, still remain firmly affixed upon those of my children. There were red balloons and orange buffoons, clowns from every angle.

The ratio of candy given to the amount received was squarely in their favor. My boys laughed. They had fun. They ate more sugar in one night than in the past six months combined. It was an evening of playful mischief and warmly lit wonder.

Man, I’m glad that’s over.

Except, and I’m not supposed to tell you this, it isn’t.

That may be because deadlines created by evil editors in eye shades are forcing me into actually writing this a week before, only pretending to have survived yet another Halloween. Or it may be because we live in a world so much scarier than anything the holiday can throw at us. Either way, we seem destined to live out the rest of our lives (or the next three years, whichever comes first) in a very special episode of American Gothic, but slightly more racist.

Maybe it’s both.

The thing is, I’m having a hard time getting into Halloween this year. There are several reasons, including, but not limited to the aforementioned fact that nothing make-believe can compare to the terror of our actual reality. Knowing that, it makes conversations about costumes and decorations feel mocking and hollow, the gallows humor of a Target aisle.

Also, I quit eating candy.

Additionally, the boys themselves seem less than excited about Halloween this year. As I typically fuel my enthusiasm from theirs, our home shows nothing to suggest the season but a couple of gourds rolling around our doorstep. The spiderwebs hung themselves.

For a while, I thought the boys may be apprehensive, seeing as each of them are in new, bigger schools than they were last year. Maybe they just needed some extra time to get a feel for how Halloween worked at the current level. I may have been too optimistic.

The oldest did have a costume idea that he seemed relatively interested in, where “interested” means he mentioned it once. He thought it would be fun to dress as Monty Python’s version of the Spanish Inquisition, which if you are familiar with the sketch, is quite funny. However, I had to point out that the context may be lost on some people, which would leave him as:

• a non-Catholic kid appropriating a different culture (the irony being that the Spanish Inquisition was established to deny others their respective culture through acts of great severity), and
• wearing religious stuff to a public school, which may or may not be against the rules, but certainly out of my comfort zone.

The youngest remains uncommitted.

I suppose my fear is that this is yet another milestone on the path out of childhood, the one where holidays, while still enjoyed, lose a bit of the magic that once made them monumental. They are no longer the pinnacle of a season, but rather Tuesday with a wig on it.

Factor in the heat (it’s over 100 degrees today), carry the one, allow for whatever, and you’ve got The Great Bupkis, Charlie Brown (rocks sold separately).

Honestly, I don’t know what will become of Halloween this year, if this is new for us or just a phase that we are going through. I’m pulling for the latter. I will do my best to keep the season, but at the end of the day, I just want my kids to have fun. We could all use a bit of that.

UPDATE: We did it. The boys picked out costumes on Monday after school while I went through the slim pickings of discount candy a couple of aisles over. The youngest chose a werewolf mask, the oldest a decorative light. One cut shirt and a jigsaw later I found myself sitting in a neighbor’s house with a group of other parents (and the frequent passerby) watching the Dodgers take it to Game 7 while the boys enjoyed the safety of mob mentality, a pack of sugar-bellied kids knocking and laughing and hopefully saying “thank you.” They were back by the bottom of the 8th, taking the corner and rounding for home.

Editor’s Note: We’re digging into our ample archives to find some great articles you might have missed over the years. This Father’s Day recollection comes from 2015.

Until my own first child was born, fatherhood was just what my dad did, and all I had ever done was take it for granted.

My earliest memories are of sitting on his shrinking lap, a slice of jean-covered thigh quickly losing ground between the random growth spurts of a lanky boy and the constant expansion of an ex-smoker’s belly. I sat there for years sharing tickles, snacks and forgotten conversations. There was a montage of facial hair, and I was captivated by its splendor or the sudden lack of it. Everything was long legs and gangly tussles. I nestled happily in the swell of my father’s contentment.

The years stretched and the stories we planted sprouted stories of their own. The days passed, blooming with milestones, lessons, and the fragrant sweetness of life in hindsight. Fond memories wafted down a timeline, always spinning toward what will be and always remembering what has been. The scent was fantastic and the world somewhat dizzy.

We spent days together that grew into weeks, rolled into months, and segued into years as smoothly as you like. I was hanging one arm out the window of a blue and bruised Datsun pickup, home in the welcome give of a worn bench seat, my father popping pistachios in time to an AM radio already out of date. I was bronze and blond, buck-toothed and skinny, and I was glorious against the sinking horizon that we spend our whole lives chasing. My father was a smile in sunglasses, a song on his breath, and he was younger than I ever knew.

The journey also took us through fields of frustration tended with firm hands and cultivated by consequence. There were sidetracks and shortcuts, disappointment, and discipline, but all days ended in sunsets and every morning the sun would rise. There were birds in the distance and a whistle brought them nearer.

At some point, our kisses fell from lips to cheeks to hugs masked as handshakes. The emotions on our sleeves grew heavy and hard to carry. Life has a way of twisting and testing, and it wrings out the innocence with the sweat and the tears, leaving two grown men in the shade of all that we built, awkward with gratitude and loving one another.

I remember the day I called my dad to tell him the news. He was at work in Arizona, and I was states away, sitting in a parking lot with my wife and our giddiness.

“You are going to be a grandfather,” I said into the phone. His joy was instant and electric.

I spent the next nine months trying to examine the examples he had given, preparing to cross to the other side, the fatherhood side of my experience. My wife and I went on long walks through wet, winding woods, and we talked about the things that we would do when the baby came. We were all things but patient, and we walked around again.

“It’s a boy,” I said through more tears than rain. My father had been sleeping with the phone by his side and had answered before the first ring ended. “You have a grandson.”

And then I rambled about the all of it — full of I-had-no-ideas and now-I-sees. I got it, suddenly, like a swift kick to the head I never knew I needed. The road opened wide before me, and the future teased us all with a glimmer, orange and bright, warm with promise and paths untaken. Then I returned to my wife and our new baby boy, him bundled tight and her softly sleeping. The room was already spinning with fatherhood and motion.

Then three years later we did it all again, but this time with dimples.

Now I spend all my days on the dad side of the fence, where the grass is always greener and in desperate need of trimming. It is my lap slowly shrinking and my shadows being cast. We are the stories being written and we are living in our memories.

I don’t see my own father often enough, but I see my boys every day. Their eyes are like time machines, always racing toward tomorrow, taking lessons from the past, and making the most of the now well before it passes. And it turns out, my father is here, in all of that. The next time we meet I will tell him so, and perhaps a small kiss upon the cheek will show him.

Fatherhood isn’t just something my dad did. It is something he taught me, and it is a thing we do together regardless of the miles between us.

And so it goes. The shadows we cast grow longer as the days grow shorter. We wax and we wane. We give love and we take love. That is the way of fatherhood, and I wouldn’t have it any other.

I learned that from my father.

This post first appeared on Honea Express. An earlier version appeared on Safely.com. Main photo: © ivanko80 / Adobe Stock. Other photos: Contributed.

I met a friend for coffee the other day. It’s something we try to do on a regular basis, which, apparently, means once every eight months.

Our schedules have proven difficult to align, despite our living two miles apart, having kids at the same school, and working in similar creative fields. It takes half a year and two dozen texts to create 90 minutes of quality time at Starbucks, 15 of which are spent standing in line. This is the sum of our parts, a modern life defined by new math and the old habits we cannot help but cling to.

This is a pattern in my life when it comes to friendships, and I’m not sure how I got here. That is, I have great friends around the globe and corner, but I don’t spend nearly enough time with any of them. Granted, my own anxiety and the comforts of home tend to keep me in more than my younger self could ever have imagined, but I’m still social, awkwardly so, and often want for company.

Work is at least 60 hours per week, filled with meetings and deadlines, edits and interviews. My wife works even more, with her schedule scattered across both sides of the wee hours, the coming and the going. The boys have extracurricular activities, and when they don’t there is homework, friends and binging The Office again. Also, the daily reality that they no longer want to spend quality time with me, despite a good decade begging for my attention.

Finding the time, will for friendships

Everyone I know has something similar. We are all trying to juggle the commitments of work, family obligations and the things we want to do, plus assorted health concerns, financial considerations and the respective battles that each of us is fighting. All things considered, meeting for coffee once every eight months seems fairly reasonable.

So how is it, with a life busy between work, family, volunteering and six streaming services, do I still find myself with regular bouts of downtime? I do enjoy time by myself, but even I can have enough of me. I could fill that time by lifting some weights or picking up the phone, but I despise both of those things, regardless of the benefits they may carry.

What I want is an unexpected knock at the door and a smile through the peephole, a random text to grab a beer on a Tuesday or my kids to help in the kitchen because they enjoy the company.

In jukebox terms, I’ve spent 16 years whistling Cat’s in the Cradle, only to have Piano Man sneak up behind me.

The fact is, I’m often lonely, and I know I’m not alone. Plenty has been written about the importance of continued camaraderie and adult friendships as we age, and while I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have the relationships I do, I can’t help but wonder if we’d all be better served by putting a larger focus on them.

Perhaps that requires a bit more flexibility or accepting that there is a difference between inviting and imposing. Maybe instead of waiting for a moment, I just need to make one.

After all, it’s hard to expand your comfort zone if you never attempt to leave it.

We should grab a coffee sometime.

Photo: © pavelvinnik / Adobe Stock.

“I could make the jump.”

He was sitting across from me at a small bistro table sandwiched between walkway and railing.

We were sharing a pretzel, one of us more than the other, and speaking of the things that people do while shopping for shorts on a Saturday.

“I could jump to the escalator,” he reiterated against my disagreement. He mentioned his parkour training. He referenced his youth.

“There are better options,” I said.

We were in the same mall we always go to for back-to-school needs, having a new version of the same conversation we’ve had for years. The recent addition of a sporting goods store had made our previous plans all the more plausible. After all, they sell camping gear and baseball bats, not to mention food supplies and all the things required for anyone in the throes of a zombie apocalypse.

On one visit we had realized that bean bag chairs would fit perfectly in the giant iron chandeliers hanging throughout the mall, allowing enough room for our family of four to nest comfortably, assuming we could get into them.

“This mall needs a hardware store,” my oldest had said at the time, before deciding the maintenance department surely had the means of reaching such heights.

The leap to the escalator, however, was a twist, built not on the previous concept of hunkering down, but rather the fastest form of fleeing.

“It would depend where the shooter was,” he said.

When my wife worked in that mall, the shooter had been in a paper store. A man bent on murder found it in the card section, killing his former partner with a pistol like so many jilted lovers before him. Another life lost in senseless rage, just above the food court.

Meanwhile, thousands of shoppers went running.

My wife had been working in a restaurant. She had stepped up, as she is prone to do, and made sure guests and employees got out safely. The restaurant was deserted. There were bags and phones left on tables, strollers flat on their sides, the random shoe abandoned upon the tile.

The sound, she said, was stunning silence, save the distant hum of shouts and sirens, fans slowly spinning with Ed Sheeran singing in the background. She texted me that they were in lockdown.

We all know what that means.

Life in America is not needing to explain to our kids what is meant by “active shooter” or “lockdown.” Life in America is sitting in a mall, church, movie theater, school, office, restaurant, festival, concert … anywhere, and making sure you know where all the exits are should someone walk in and start shooting.

It is explaining to our children that the government cares more about money made from guns than the lives of its citizens, and it is a child’s quick “I know.”

Life in America is a stampede through Times Square over the eruption of a backfire, and it is 100 lives lost to gun violence daily.

It is publishing this piece and the comments sure to follow.

We all know what that means.

I used to be a lot more fun.

There was a time, it feels like years ago, when every free moment was seemingly spent amusing my kids (and myself in the process). But lately, that isn’t the case.

Granted, these days there is far less free time to speak of; plus, the boys no longer consider me their primary source of entertainment. Both factors render my services more or less unnecessary, which is a justifiable excuse for the dulling of my comedic timing, but it’s more than that. I often feel like I’m actively avoiding fun.

To be fair, some of the blame comes from our family’s transition from monarchy to democracy. Increasingly, the kids have their own interests and ideas. What used to happen because my wife or I said so has now become the result of vote and negotiation, sometimes contentious. Bartering for good times is tiresome, and it can cast a shadow of disappointment over the best of ideas before they even have a chance to prove themselves worthy.

Such is the price of kids growing older. We’re all tall enough for the ride, and everyone needs an adult ticket.

Over the past year, the overwhelming focus of my work has shifted from parent-centric writing to trauma-heavy annotation and promoting social causes. It’s incredibly rewarding work, but beyond exhausting. The kids have papers, testing and homework. They have practice and meetings and responsibilities they would prefer to ignore. There is the stage of teen drama. My wife works 80 hours per week dealing with the public, and — fun fact — the public doesn’t always provide the healthiest of takeaways. All this comes constantly coated by the news of the world: a loop of negativity, violence and hate.

That isn’t to say we don’t have our laughs or adventures. It’s just that the seriousness of real-world issues and endless pressures have made something we once took for granted more of a special occasion.

This reminds me of an old story about a jar filled with rocks. Observers accepted the jar as full. Then, it would be topped with pebbles that, following a slight shake, filled the crevices between the larger stones. Once again, the consensus was that the jar was at capacity. Scoops of sand would then be dumped upon it, the grains falling into place despite clogging the hourglass with nope.

That trickle of sand is the tickle of time. It is the game of chess in the coffee shop and the hoops we shot a few days ago. It is the silly songs I still sing each morning to sleepy, teenage groans and a notable lack of requests

It is fun finding a way to fit into our packed lives, one grain at a time.

Perhaps it isn’t that I was once more fun. Rather, fun was once more obvious, easier and tangible. It has gone from abundance to a precious commodity, and there is value there, too.

I totally had more hair, though.

Photo: © Vadym / Adobe Stock.

There were butterflies everywhere, so many that I was hesitant to open my mouth for fear one might accept the invitation. Besides, taking this walk was my turn to listen.

The only sounds were a panting dog and the distant waves of traffic.

My oldest son, on the cusp of 16, was a step ahead, leash in hand and disappointment everywhere. The walk had been my idea — even though he and the dog have a daily date to do so — this one wasn’t to schedule and being voluntold for the excursion conflicted with his plans to plan nothing. The dog, however, was thrilled.

The hope for a conversation was fueled by my latest parenting fear: the lingering thought that I haven’t done enough. This came on the heels of a brief respite during which I accepted a decade of melancholy, watching windows close and hands grow too big to hold. That was apparently over now and often for naught. After all, the teen years have been a pleasant surprise in independence and new levels of bonding. Sure, the kids are somewhat more skeptical now, and my advice is routinely challenged, but that’s OK. They should be skeptical. They should question authority. I’m as full of crap as the next guy.

But now, with two teen boys on the constant verge of yet another milestone, my moment of zen has been bombarded with doubt. Watching them melt into their own devices, usually at the expense of family time, kind of hurts.

My wife and I have talked about it. A lot. We want the boys to do their own thing, to find whatever it is that they enjoy and then enjoy it; but when that thing is being away from us, not doing much of anything, well, that hurts, too.

We give them space. We give them choices and support, ponder options and consequences in their general direction, keep them fed and hold them accountable. So what is the “enough,” or lack thereof, that haunts me? Change is a challenge, be it something we want to see or the downright Kafkaesque.

Welcome to the teen chrysalis. We are pupa-adjacent, and it takes a while.

The butterflies fluttered as they do, floating flowers on cartoon wings against the brilliant blue of the morning sky. They flew independent of one another, together in focus and direction, yet separate through the slipstreams. Between them was space to stretch and grow, traveling companions always on the horizon. None of them seemed particularly interested in my mouth.

“Do you know what they call a group of butterflies?” I asked as we turned around the oak tree.

“No,” he said. “What?”

“A kaleidoscope,” I said.

“That’s a good name,” he replied. I agreed.

We stood in the shade for a moment, watching the park breathe with kids, parents and dogs. The only sound was a swarm of laughter.

The words flew easier with our backs to the wind.

Teen years photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Warning: The following contains some minor spoilers for “Avengers: Endgame” and other films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

It all started with a son.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), who would become Iron Man, the leader of the Avengers and subsequent father figure to Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Tom Holland), was so driven by the ghost of his own father that the elder Stark’s specter cast a shadow over the entire MCU.

Tony Stark, over a series of 22 total films, was joined by others on either side of the dad divide:

• Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston), both vying for the affections of their father, Odin (Anthony Hopkins)
• Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), who protected his family like a secret identity
• Ant-Man/Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), maker of questionable decisions in an effort to spend more time with his daughter
• Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) who shared a contentious/on the cusp of tender relationship with her dad, Henry Pym (Michael Douglas)
• Black Panther/T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), spurred into action by the murder and secrets of his father
• the collective Guardians of the Galaxy, who run the gauntlet on dad-related issues

That isn’t to say that all the fatherhood story-arcs have been negative. There have been several gems of redemption, love and sacrifice throughout the respective films, many of which have led us here, to the endgame.

My boys are 15 and 13. They have grown with the Marvel movies the way I grew with Star Wars — which certainly adds several layers of memory and nostalgia to the mix. But unlike the pop culture of my own childhood, which was only appreciated by my parents from a distance, our entire family has bonded over the Marvel films (and Star Wars, of course). My wife and I, not to mention most other parents we know, are as equally enamored with the MCU as our children. Our shared fandom has blossomed into quality family time, sparking endless hours of conversation, speculation, and in the case of the last two Avengers films, sobbing.

Ours is a generation that grew up holding on to the magic of pop culture and its effects on society, which made it inevitable that our own children wield it with equal passion.

However, I suppose it only natural that the shifting of our seasons, the aging and adulting we all go through, should provide an evolution of perspective with regard to story. Where once I may have been lost in the wow of spandex and superpowers, I am now intrigued by the connections between the characters. That is, I may love the smash and awe of an Avengers battle, but it is the look on a dusty Peter Parker’s face that puts tears on mine.

Fortunately for everyone, Avengers: Endgame has plenty of both. It is layers upon layers of carefully crafted story and relationships coming together, adapting to conflict and challenging the forces of evil. After all, we are trusting it, a decade’s investment, to create even more memories, even more conversations that we can carry forever.

It doesn’t disappoint.

On the drive home, we talked about our favorite parts. My leg was still sore from where my wife clinched it during a particularly empowered battle scene. The boys couldn’t stop talking about “America’s butt,” and my dad bod received an electrifying endorsement. But there were other moments, like how we all cried before the opening credits rolled and then the many times that followed.

We talked about family, fatherhood specifically, and the bookends of it. Fatherhood has been the fuel driving the MCU machine, whether igniting on so many fumes or making us turn this movie around. It’s been a hell of a ride, and in the end it took us exactly where we were going.

It got a great parking spot.

Scene above from “Avengers: Endgame”: Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) and daughter Lila (Sophia Russo). Photo: Film Frame/©Marvel Studios 2019

We are each a collection of stories and the hot air that spins them. We are all experience stuffed inside a carry-on, the breathing baggage of merely existing. Even the tales we don’t tell still hold value, as does every strip of sinew. Connectivity is the byproduct of existing, and some episodes are meant for moving all the pieces.

Today I am traveling, and my pieces move accordingly.

For instance, the tray table zigs when I zag, its frame imprinted upon my legs, my arms adhered tightly to my sides by a paste of sweat and stranger. The turbulence is steady.

I can touch the bathroom door from my seat. The smell is even closer. Convenience wafts upon the air of consequence.

Like most of my solo travel, this trip is work-related. So was the one last week. The work is family-centric, be it films, books or conferences. The irony of leaving family to promote the concepts of family is not lost on anyone.

Last night I stayed up too late, unpacked with deadlines missed. One son had practice, followed by a movie with the other. There was homework, chores and reminders for the morning. My wife made tacos. I set my alarm to offset the difference.

Time is the stacking of priorities and the space you fill between them.

Now I’m in a tin can, somewhere over you, my screen staggering slightly against the shuffle of my seat. I can see your house from here. Meanwhile, my house is a time zone behind me, maybe two. There are taco-stained dishes in the sink. There is a dog racing through the backyard, bouncing and barking. The boys are at school eating the lunches that I made, learning by the minute and growing even faster. All they know is turbulence.

I have become a secondary character in their story. I’m there for laughs. Shelter. The driving to places. The occasional dash of conflict. My hero status shadowed beneath the stretching of their egos.

It is lonely business, traveling by oneself, even if all I am missing is being taken for granted.

Family goes on even you are on an endless flight, and someone is always reading over your shoulder. It’s a story that we all share.

Flight photo: Steven Coffey on Unsplash

When our youngest son turned 13 a couple of weeks ago he was officially engulfed in teen spirit, embracing it wholly, eye rolls and all. Granted, the smell of it had moved in several months before, body spray in a hoodie, and the attitude arrived even earlier.

His birthday completed the set: two teenage boys sharing a bathroom and little else, save their love of pets and parents. They are, for the most part, free to choose their own adventures.

There was a time that I would chronicle all of it — the love and the loss, the raw and the perfectly flawed. I would put their stories to the wind and let the lessons fall where they may.

For over a decade I maintained a website, the critically acclaimed and financially non-existent Honea Express, upon which our lives were spread from putty to brushstroke and back again.

I published my last piece there nearly four years ago, just after our oldest son had turned 12. I no longer felt ownership of the tales I told, and perhaps I never did. The boys deserved their privacy and ample room to make mistakes. Pausing my pen seemed the thing to do. Life in real time has no need for a narrator.

Since then I have continued to share a bit here and there, but limiting looks into our world has made the words easy to curate. Milestones have given way to keywords, moments to topics and honesty to hashtags. That isn’t to say I haven’t retained my integrity or been authentic — I believe that much is obvious. I’ve never avoided the ugly and uncomfortable or spun in coats of sugar. However, there is a difference between characters and children, and my loyalty is to the latter.

All of which brings me to a crossroads. There is no shortage of parenting prose, no lack of ample advice, unsolicited or otherwise, but the overwhelming majority of it is centered on younger children. There is very little in the way of teen drama this side of The CW. Yet, the fact is that parents of teenagers probably need pings of reassurance more than anyone.

And while several publications and websites, including this one, do address parenting and teens, it still feels like a large hole in need of filling. Real stories of family life with teenagers tend to be purposely vague, broad and academic, dry bread with the crusts cut off.

I suspect, much like my own experience, that it isn’t a lack of material, but rather a healthy respect for privacy that keeps parents, even those who once ran rampant with personal anecdotes, from divulging too much. After all, our obligations to the internet are inflated and self-imposed, but we owe our offspring everything.

The truth is, raising a teen is hard. Each next thing is the most important one ever. Arguments appear from anywhere and emotions are a blur of hugs and door slams. There is an emoji for everything.

The other truth is, raising a teen is wonderful. Teenagers are becoming clearer versions of themselves, defining their humor and heart, trying on interests and exploring opportunities. It is a dance of trust and worry.

Ours is now a home with two teenagers in it, and their stories are everywhere. The telling of which is always tempting and sometimes possible, but even more importantly, perhaps now is a time best spent listening.

Photo of teen angst at the breakfast table: Whit Honea