When you get to a certain age awkwardness kind of fades away a little. You get to live a few years of blissful awkward-free life. Having teens live in your house, some of that comes back to you. That shirt with those slacks look awkward. Your hair is a little awkward, Mom. And who calls them ‘slacks’? Awk, Mom–they’re pants.

I’ve been a parent for a while. I have friends and family who are parents. We’ve all gone through, or are going through, the awkward teen phase. This is not like the awkward stage pre- or early-teens go through, but the mid-teen phase where the embarrassment of parents is almost turning into pity because we, as parents, have hit the stage of knowing nothing!

I am having a contradiction of sorts with awkwardness. I am a fairly confident, comfortable-in-my-skin middle-aged mom. At this point in life, I am who I am. I try to be the best I can be of: a child of God, a child of my parents, a parent to my girls, an aunt, a friend, and most importantly I am the best Julie I can be.

After all that being said, that confidence and identity being bandied around–Gretchen and I were waiting to get her sports physical the other day and she was bored. She dug through my purse, used my lip balm, played with the flashlight on my keychain, and found my little notebook I use for blog ideas. She started looking through it and I felt awkward.

I think the vulnerability of it made me feel awkward. This is my child and she knows how I think. These are blog ideas that I will be posting online for anybody to read. Watching her read them, and listening to the ones she read out loud, was a little like having someone find your diary. Those are my ideas, but I haven’t fine-tuned them yet. Those are the thoughts I have, but I am not ready to share them.

She didn’t do anything but read them aloud. I got over being embarrassed about it. She did not once pity me for not knowing anything. She read more, and a couple of them are (hopefully) funny ideas. We laughed. I snorted, as I sometimes do, just as the doctor walked in.

Okay well, that was  awkward.