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Once you make it through to the
double digit years, things become interesting. And if you’re like me, and your
kids are already weirdos, things just get MORE interesting. And stinky.
Especially if you have pubescent boys. The good news is that the funk that has
become a permanent stench fixture in your house will eventually go away.
Approximately three years after said stink bomb finally moves out.
But I digress. I believe I was heading
somewhere else with this…
Oh yes, things become MORE
interesting. After the sweet double digits, (ten, eleven, and if you’re lucky,
twelve) you will enter the Twilight Zone. A.K.A. The Teenage Years. Each kid
will demonstrate this teenage-ness differently. And at different times. Some kids
may resemble human beings until they are as old as fifteen! Some may exhibit
the signs of madness earlier. Since my son has always been a little bit
precocious, he’s decided that twelve is a good time to tune up his teenager-y ‘tude.
Now, before you start the flogging,
I want to preface this by saying that he’s still pretty much a good kid. And I still
love him, even in his fits of douchery. But he’s also developing per the normal
hormonal evolutionary chart dictates. Though this manifests differently in every
household, it typically starts with “the sounds”.
My daughter sounded like an air
leak in a tire. Every time I turned around, there it was: a hissing air noise
akin to a deflating balloon that, lo and behold, actually came from my
teenaged, eye-rolling, wind whistling kid o’mine. Now that my son has entered
this phase, he’s started a more masculine version that is a cross of an 80’s
teenager mixed with a zombie. Like a groan that vaguely sounds like a
disgruntled exclamation of “Mo-om!” mixed with caveman grunting.
Although I will never admit this to
him, I actually pretty impressed with the level of disgust that he manages to
convey with a single (pre) teenaged sigh-groan. He really nails the whole “My parents
are SOOOO lame” without uttering a single syllable. If he wasn’t such an
athletic sports type, I’d definitely encourage him to try out for the drama
club. Such skills! Like a child prodigy!
Then again, I may be biased. What
with donating half of his genetic make-up and all.
Realistically I knew that we wouldn’t
sail through the turbulent teenage years without some sort of rough seas and
stormy weather, even with the kid who was once dubbed “the nicest boy they’d
ever met” by an acquaintance of ours. But you can’t blame me for thinking that
if it was going to skip a kid, it would be this
paragon of virtue right here. The kid got an award for being nice. In sixth
grade. When kids have long since found the dormant jerk gene that seems inevitably
found in middle school. (Wouldn’t that make a good title for a self-help book? “Taming
Your Inner Jerk Gene”)
Luckily we’ve gone through this
phase before and we know that it only lasts until they graduate college. Kidding,
we don’t actually know when it ends because all our kids are still jerks. Ha!
Kidding again! College seems to knock the snot out of them for a few years and
they regain their humanity. Or maybe it’s a class in their junior year. Either
way it seems like they gain some respect and understanding of the real world,
or at least enough that they realize that their parents weren’t just big
meanies out to spoil their lives. (Or were
we? Muah ha ha ha ha ha)
So for any or my fellow parents who
are starting to hear their own “sounds” from their teens/pre-teens, just know
that I am here for you. As long as you realize that by “here for you” I mean not there where you are but here, where I actually am. Probably
hiding from my own teenage sounds. Not in a closet with a book, a flashlight,
and a package of Chips Ahoy. Nooo, uh, totally not that. (Brushes cookie crumbs
from shirt.)
