Diary Of A Teenager’s Mother

My kid’s teenage years are kicking my heiney!*

I was smarter as a teen than I am as a middle-aged mother of one. Primarily because I kept the eye rolling to a minimum and the simian grunts to a fairly non-existent level.

I had to since my mother was handy with her spatulas and my father could freeze water at 15 paces with his glacial looks of annoyance. He rarely had to open his mouth to discipline which is good because his bark was as bad as his bite. As an only child, with no other sibling to deflect blame on, you learn pretty quickly to either not do stuff that’ll get you in trouble or not get caught doing it.

Fastforward a few decades and I have a teenager of my own who hit puberty during the Covid years. While that was unfortunate in itself, the fact that his onset and travails of puberty is on a collision course with my perimenopause. There are head-on collisions from time to time but we get back up and live to fight another day.

The fundamental issues with teens are these (purely IMHO): they know more than they did when they were in primary school but don’t entirely have a hold on the adulting aspect. But do they want to be told that? Nope!

They are ruled by their emotions and their apparent superhuman metabolism because they are always hungry and never full. Let me correct that: they are full when it comes to fruits, vegetables, nuts and everything else that’s good for their holistic growth but are seemingly bottomless pits when it comes to everything else that gets chucked into their gullets.

Now the part of the brain that deals with emotions and behavior is called the limbic system and it is responsible for many more things than just emotions. It deals with survival behaviors including feeding, fight or flight et al. So if you really want to cut your child some slack, you could say their brains are compelling them to be a human food disposal and it’s that same brain which is says ‘bring it on’ in the face of authority and indulges in the overuse of words like ‘whatever’ and ‘FINE!!’

They can also give the Big Bad Wolf of the fairy tales a major complex because of all the huffing and puffing they do when asked to do chores or not be giant pain in the patootie.**

Why else would an erstwhile adorable cherub of a child, who would do things to please his parents and not act like hygiene was optional, smell so often of musty clothes left in the hamper, bathe and brush like he’s going to be taxed on every drop of water he spends and look grungier after his “bath” than he did before? It boggles the mind.

But in the immortal words of Rumi, King Solomon and Abraham Lincoln, “this too shall pass” and hopefully not take us parents from being borderline insane to crossing the border completely!

*&** If you’re wondering why euphemisms for the rear end are being used instead of the actual word well, sometimes the mind of a teenager’s parent is rather full of expletives so it’s a nice destressing exercise to find less vitrolic words because let’s face it, a moment on the lips and a lifetime of hearing it from your kid because you saying it opened the flood gates!