Parenting is never easy, and it’s particularly uneasy when your sweet little toddlers turn into sulky, rebellious teens. Or do they? Just because you were one as a teenager, doesn’t mean it has to be in their genes.
I’ve always dreaded having teenagers. Mostly because I was such a terrible one myself.
Remember being a teenager? That raging uncontrollable boredom, that made you want to stab yourself in an eye or at least crash into bed for a 10-hour nap? Having all the feelings, and assuming everyone else was twisting theirs around incessantly too ? To feel so strongly about things, whilst feeling so vulnerable…what a combination.
I wouldn’t wish how I felt in those days on anyone. And I wouldn’t want to be near anyone I loved while it was happening.
‘It’ll happen to you too now,’ my Mom once told me, dandling my firstborn son on her knee and cooing down at him. ‘One day he’s all cute and snuggly and the next minute, you open a cupboard door to hang up some pants and bam… you get hit by a tsunami of badly hidden empty beer cans.’
‘You must admit, that was funny,’ I said, somewhat defensively. ‘And 10 years ago, no statute of limitations. I may have been a touch sulky and judgemental. And perhaps a little…wayward. But it was just a phase.’
My mom clucked her tongue affectionately at my son, shooting me a world-weary look over his head.
‘Sure. A phase, from 12 to 24. Some phase.’
This was a trifle rude, as I was 25 when we were having this conversation.
My sons both started out pretty well behaved which I have always taken as a blessing that could turn on a dime. (I always cringe when I hear other parents over-praising their children’s ability to sleep, eat vegetables or win things. Why tempt the Gods? That way lies Failure to Launch in a bedside bong.)
‘I don’t know why you are so worried,’ my husband Andreas used to remark, as I peered at the bottles in the booze cabinet with an appraising eye. ‘They are great kids. Also, they are under five. Our pre-schoolers are not the reason the level of the whiskey has gone down. That would be you.’
‘That’s just what they want you to think,’ I said ruefully. ‘See? They are already wily beyond our imaginings.’
I have now carefully watched my sons move from dandelion hair to starter ‘staches, from ABCs to calculus, from Club Penguin to Reddit…and I have this to add to the general debate: teenagers get such a terrible rap. Either that, or millennial teens are so, so much nicer than angsty Gen X ones. Or my teenage sons are just so much nicer than me. I’m assuming the truth is some combination of the three.
What has happened is that, while I was fretting, my sons turned from being cute children who relied on us for almost everything into amusing housemates who make the odd meal, but are pretty moochy when it comes to money and the family Uber account.
‘Why aren’t you walking 10 steps behind me?’ I’ll ask 16-year-old Ben, as he slips his arm through mine, guilding me over a curb as we cross the road towards a restaurant. ‘Oh my God, don’t hold my elbow… there may be young people watching!’
He’ll look at me puzzled. ‘Because we’re out together? Because I am about to have dinner with a parent? Why would that be embarrassing? Or at least,’ he chuckles, ‘more embarrassing than it has been for the last 16 years?’
He has a point. I may have been making much ado about not very much.
‘Clearly you’re just a terrible parent,’ I said to my mom, as she made us a tea last week. ‘My hideous teenagedom was all your fault, for not managing to contain my extraordinary needs and such.’
‘Clearly that must be it,’ said my mom, companionably. ‘But much more importantly…. do you think this green would look good on the kitchen walls? And when you said we should watch a movie tonight, did you mean a movie-movie or for us to stream something on the telly?’
It appears that while I was waiting for my sons to morph into horrors, my mother and I had developed an easy closeness that had evaded us until I was a parent myself.
A funny old thing, this life.
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