I'm A Senior Teenager

 

I'm A Senior Teenager

Living the Soft Life with Larry Miller’s mom, Cheryl Koderisch 

No one warns you that one day your child will become an adult with opinions, boundaries, and a calendar that does not automatically include you. One day you are cutting their sandwiches into triangles, and the next you are asking, “When can I talk to you or see you?” like you’re booking an appointment with a celebrity.

This is the tender, humbling, and sometimes hilarious season of parenting an adult child.

Welcome to the soft life with adult children!

Cheryl Koderish and her adult son Larry Miller

As Cheryl Koderisch explains on her many Facebook videos to her son Larry, (He is a fancy news reporter in Washington DC.) The soft life isn’t about being retired and moving to a fancy villa with linen curtains, pretty flowers, and herbal tea. We parents have experienced the rush, empty wallets and ups and downs in life! Adult soft life parenting is about "Pause" and "Choice."

Larry Miller with his parents

From the parent side, the relationship shifts quietly. We still feel responsible, but we are no longer in charge. We still worry, but now we’re supposed to pretend we’re totally fine with not knowing every detail. We still want to protect them, even though they are fully capable of ordering their own groceries—and you quietly sigh at bad photos your child takes of you.

Adult Parenting meditation

Living the soft life as a parent means learning restraint.

It means loving without hovering.
Caring without controlling.
And offering advice only when it is invited… which is far less often than we imagined.

Letting them drive you places but it is really about the conversation and time you are having.

The soft life also means accepting that our child remembers their childhood differently than we do. We remember doing our best. They remember that one time we embarrassed them in public in 2006 or won the dominoes game.  Both memories are valid.

We carry pride and guilt in the same heart. We celebrate who they’ve become, while quietly revisiting who we were when they needed us most. And sometimes we wish we could go back—not to change everything, but to be a little gentler, a little more present, a little less tired.

A soft parent life understands this truth:

Our adult children are not here to complete us. They are here to continue themselves.

Sometimes softness looks like listening instead of correcting.
Sometimes it looks like apologizing without defending.
Sometimes it looks like saying, “I didn’t realize that hurt you,” and letting the sentence end there.

And sometimes softness looks like pretending we don’t mind when they don’t text back right away. (We mind. We just live softly about it.)

I giggle every time Larry fusses about his mom texting him! Watch this!

The soft life teaches us that our role is no longer to shape the path, but to walk beside it when invited. To trust that we planted enough good seeds. To believe that love still lives there, even when it is quieter than it used to be.

We are learning that our children do not owe us closeness—but when they choose it, it is a gift.

We are learning that boundaries are not rejection.
That independence is not abandonment.
That distance is not always disconnection.

Our adult children are building lives. And we are learning how to fit into those lives with grace, humor, and humility.

We still want to help.
We still want to matter.
We still want to be chosen.

And in a soft life, we learn to let love be lighter. Not smaller—just freer.

Because loving an adult child is not about holding on tightly.

It is about opening our hands and trusting that what we gave them will always find its way back to us—sometimes as a visit, sometimes as a call, sometimes as a quiet understanding that love does not disappear when it grows up. 

Thank you Cheryl Koderisch from one senior teenager to another.