Nobody Warned Me It Would Still Be This Hard

Part 1 of the "Still Raising Kids" series for parents in the sandwich generation

It was 11:47 p.m. when I heard the front door.

He was forty-five minutes past curfew. Again. And as I sat there in the dark waiting, I realized something that caught me completely off guard: I was just as exhausted, just as scared, and just as unsure of myself as I was when he was two years old and running a fever I couldn't bring down.

Nobody warned me it would still be this hard.

I thought by now — by this age, in this season — the heavy lifting of parenting would be mostly behind me. I had done the sleepless nights. The endless carpools. The homework battles and the teacher conferences. I had survived all of it. Surely, I told myself, the teenage years would be the final stretch before coasting into something quieter.

But here I am. Maybe here you are, too.

You're somewhere between 40 and 60, sandwiched between generations that both need you. Your kids are still at home — or they left and came back, or they're technically adults but still very much your responsibility in every way that counts. And somewhere in you, there's a quiet, guilty voice that whispers: Shouldn't I have figured this out by now?

Can I tell you something? That voice is lying to you.

Parenting a teenager or a young adult is not easier than parenting a toddler. It's just differently hard. When they were small, the stakes felt high, but the problems were concrete. You could fix them. Hold them. Redirect them. Now the stakes are even higher, the problems are invisible, and you can't always reach them. That's not failure. That's just the terrain of this season.

And this season has a name in Scripture. It's the season of not yet.

In Isaiah 40, God speaks to a worn-out people — people who had been carrying a heavy load for a long time and were starting to wonder if they had anything left. And he doesn't open with a pep talk. He opens with a question: "Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, 'My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God'?" (v. 27)

In other words: Why do you assume that because you're exhausted, He's forgotten you?

Then comes the promise most of us know but rarely feel in our bones: "He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak." (v. 29)

Not strength to the people who have it together. Not power to the ones who figured out parenting by now. Strength to the weary. If that's not a verse written for parents of teenagers in midlife, I don't know what is.

So here's what I want you to sit with today — not a strategy, not a list of five things to try with your difficult teenager. Just this:

Your exhaustion is not evidence of your failure. It's evidence of how much you still love them.

The parents who stopped caring checked out a long time ago. You're still in it. Still showing up. Still sitting in the dark at 11:47 waiting for the headlights to come around the corner — because you love that kid more than sleep, more than comfort, more than the easier life you could have had if you'd just stopped caring so much.

That kind of love is costly. And it is holy.

One thing to do today: Find five minutes alone — in your car, in the bathroom, wherever you can steal a moment — and pray just one honest sentence. Not a polished prayer. Just the truth: "God, I'm tired and I don't know what I'm doing. Help." That's enough. He meets weary people right where they are.

Next week: "Letting Go Without Giving Up" — when your child needs space but your heart needs connection.