What To Do When Your Teen Says “I Feel Like I Wasted Two Years Of My Life”
Last Sunday, I was folding soccer socks in the laundry room when my 17-year-old son Luka leaned against the doorframe, picking at the crack in his skateboard deck, and said, “I feel like I’ve wasted two years of my life. I don’t know what to do.” The dryer was still tumbling, my cold coffee sat sweating on top of the machine, and my first instinct was to jump in and fix it. “Oh, honey, you weren’t wasting time, you were sick,” I said, already reaching for him. He just nodded, pushed off the doorframe, and walked back to his room, closing the door soft behind him.
Two years earlier, right after his freshman year of high school, Luka got COVID that turned into long COVID. Fatigue, brain fog, chest pain that flared if he walked too far. He did half-days online for six months, then full online for another year, only coming back for in-person classes last fall. He dropped out of the soccer team he’d played on since third grade, stopped hanging out with his best friend, fell behind on almost every core class. By the time his energy started to come back last spring, all his friends were talking about college visits and driver’s ed and summer jobs, and he was still catching up on 10th grade biology. I’d been noticing the weight of it for months, but I didn’t know how to talk about it without making it worse.
I called his guidance counselor, Ms. Henderson, a day after that first conversation in the laundry room. She’s worked with teens with chronic illness for 18 years, and she told me straight up that I’d made the most common mistake. “When a kid says they wasted time, they don’t want you to argue them out of the feeling,” she said. “They don’t need you to prove them wrong. They just need you to listen, and then help them figure out what to do next. Next time he brings it up, don’t contradict him. Just say, ‘That sounds so heavy. What’s the hardest part for you right now?’”
I didn’t have to wait long. Three days later, we were driving to get new brake pads for my old minivan, the radio was off, and he brought it up again out of nowhere. I swallowed the “you didn’t waste anything” line that was already on my tongue and said exactly what Ms. Henderson told me to. He talked for 20 minutes straight, the whole way to the mechanic. It wasn’t even the missed classes that bugged him most, he said. It was the after-school skate sessions he missed, the homecoming dance he couldn’t go to because he was too tired to stand for an hour, the fact that all his friends could drive to the mall on their own and he still had to ask me for a ride everywhere. He didn’t care that much about credit gaps. He cared that he’d missed being 15 and 16, that he couldn’t get those years back. That part wasn’t going to change, no matter what I said.
Ms. Henderson helped us rearrange his whole schedule after that, instead of forcing him to cram every credit into senior year to stay on the standard four-year graduation track. The school had him scheduled for two extra electives just to fill the gap left by his missed classes, but we crossed those right out. We dropped one unnecessary study hall to free up every Wednesday afternoon for the skate park, no exceptions. We pushed the AP physics he wants to take for college credit to after graduation, when he can take it at the local community college for half the price without cramming it into a busy senior year. It meant he’ll walk at graduation with a half credit left to finish over the summer, but no one cares about that except the people who built the inflexible four-year plan.
We also did one small, weird thing that’s worked better than I expected. We got a sheet of notebook paper and wrote down every single thing he said he missed, then taped it to the side of the fridge. I thought it would just make him mope more, but Ms. Henderson said if you don’t name a loss, it just sits under the surface and grows bigger. Now the paper says things like “Driver’s ed, sophomore homecoming, soccer season, late pizza runs with Jake” and it’s got a coffee stain on the corner from when I spilled my mug last month. Every time he hits a bad day, he’ll stare at it for a minute, and that’s it. He doesn’t have to pretend it didn’t happen.
It’s not fixed, not by a long shot. Last month, he failed his first driving test by three points, and when we got in the car to leave, he said it again: “I just wasted two years, and now I’m wasting more.” This time, I didn’t try to talk him out of it. I just drove to the gas station down the road, bought him a blue raspberry slushie, his favorite, and said “That sucks. I get why you feel that way.” We sat in the parking lot for 15 minutes drinking slushies, and he didn’t say anything else. A week later, he went online and signed up for the next test on his own. I didn’t have to nag him.
He passed his driving test last week, so we added “passed driving test” at the bottom of the paper on the fridge. He still says he wasted two years sometimes, usually when he’s stressed about college apps or sees his friends posting photos from a trip he couldn’t go on. We don’t get those two years back. There’s no way to rewind and give him the sophomore and junior year he was supposed to have. But what we do have now is a plan that fits him, not the one the school handed us when he got sick. We don’t rush him to “catch up” as fast as possible anymore, because we realized that rushing just makes him feel more like he’s falling behind. Most days, that’s enough. It’s not perfect, but it’s working, for right now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What To Do When Your Teen Says “I Feel Like I Wasted Two Years Of My Life”