I was sitting in the car at the bus stop the other morning with my youngest daughter. She’s 14 and dresses herself and everything.

I say that because she had her foot on the dashboard, her shoe untied and was pulling up her sock that had slid into her shoe. When she re-tied her shoe I had a flashback.

It wasn’t a flashback of her father chastising her for having her foot on the dashboard; it was a flashback of when she couldn’t tie hershoe. I was glancing at her and trying to remember who taught her how to tie her shoes because I don’t tie my shoes the way she was tying her shoe.

Then I started thinking of when my kids couldn’t dress themselves, couldn’t tie their own shoes, couldn’t feed themselves or make their own lunches and wondered where the time had gone.

Guiding little kids through the maze of growing up can be difficult. Sometimes I think they are born wanting to be independent and you know in time they will be, but it feels like such a long road when they are young.

Before I had kids, in fact when I was pregnant with my first, I used to panic when I encountered adolescents. They frightened me and I didn’t feel I would ever be prepared to deal with teen angst and rebellion.

What I didn’t fully comprehend until I had a child of my own was that they aren’t born teens, and we have plenty of time to figure them out; there are many ages in between infancy and adolescence. And there are many things they must learn before they become independent.

But unfortunately, they do not come with instruction manuals. What worked for one child doesn’t necessarily work for the next.

This brings me back to tying shoes. When my oldest started kindergarten they took class time to teach the students how to tie their shoes. By the time my youngest started kindergarten it was forbidden for the teachers to teach the kids how to tie shoes and it was forbidden for the teachers to tie kids’ shoes.

It took a teacher to get my oldest to tie her own shoes, but my youngest wanted to learn because her sister knew how.

I don’t even know how old my youngest was when she learned. She was an older kindergartener, as she missed the Aug. 31 birthday deadline and turned six a couple weeks after she entered kindergarten,so she probably learned how to tie her shoes before she even got to school.

But I remember trying to teach her.

In those days my youngest had a temper akin to a volcano. She would blow up at me or her father when things went wrong; this included learning to tie shoes. She would try and they wouldn’t be tied tight enough or would flop helplessly with a missed loop and she would explode, “I am never tying shoes again!”

She often made these blatant comments when she got frustrated and her temper got the best of her:

“I am never talking to you again! I am never eating again!”

Of course, the resolve of her statements would last all of five minutes when she got distracted with something and forgot she was angry.

Tying shoes was no different. And after each failed attempt, I would encourage her to keep practicing. She would stamp her little foot, resolve never to tie her shoes again, and then we would start all over. After a day of this, I began to get frustrated. I tried toget her to stop for a while and calm down before she tried again; but she was determined.

When her dad came home, he took over. He’s a big, bearded, cuddly daddy. He took her on his lap, put her little foot in his big hand and went through the motions of tying her shoe. He did it over and over, patiently coaching her through each failed attempt until she finally got the hang of it.

So I gazed at her now-tied shoe at the end of her long, long leg as we sat waiting for the bus; remembering a time she couldn’t tie it. I wondered where the time had gone and what was left to teach my kids.

Then I had another flashback. This one was me in the car trying to teach my oldest daughter to drive; my life flashed before my eyes.

Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Covington. She is committed to writing about the humor amidst the chaos of a family. You can read more of her writing and her daily blog on her website livingwithgleigh.com.