The Trouble With Teens (Part 1)
Due to the response from my previous post, The Trouble With Teens: Part 2, I've decided to re-post the original The Trouble With Teens (Part 1).
The Trouble With Teens
The trouble with teens is that although they can be cute, they shed, eat constantly, serve no real purpose, and multiply exponentially. No, sorry, that’s the trouble with trebles, Star Trek - the original (“Are you mad, Jim?”) not the generations 1 through 6 series. So where was I? Ah, yes…the trouble with teens is that although they can be cute, they shed, eat constantly, serve no real purpose, and multiply exponentially.
Well, ok, they don’t actually multiply exponentially, unless fed after midnight (no sorry again, that’s gremlins), however they have been known to spontaneously produce six or seven beings almost identical to themselves after school if you are foolish enough to keep anything even remotely edible in your house.
I had an interesting encounter with one of these beings the other day as I returned from the grocery store. I came in the back door with four plastic bags hanging from each arm and a jug of laundry soap balanced on my head to find a boy eating peanut butter sandwiches at the kitchen table.
“Ok, I want to know two things, where’s Josh and did you get jelly in the peanut butter jar?”
“Who’s Josh?” was the boy’s reply.
“Ok, so you’re Ashley’s friend.”
“Never met her…do you want some help with those groceries?”
“I don’t know; are you going to eat them?”
“No, thanks, I’m full.”
“So if you aren’t with Josh or Ashley…oh no, don’t tell me Geoff moved back in again. Let me guess, it’s only until he has enough money to pay the exterminator, right?”
“Lady, I really don’t know…I’m just the paperboy.”
“You can pay for the newspaper in peanut butter sandwiches? Think of all the checks I could have saved.”
“No actually you owe me $5.40. The kid that was here when I knocked on the door told me to help myself to the PB & J.”
“Did you catch his name?”
“He didn’t say, but he told me to tell you that you’re out of milk.”
I gave the kid a check for $5.40 along with an allowance (well, he did help with the groceries - more than any of my own kids would have done) and called a locksmith to install a lock on the refrigerator door.
As far as shedding goes, well, I have to admit, I’ve never actually seen this phenomenon of spontaneously ejecting an entire head of hair and growing it back during the course of one shower, but come on. They have to be doing something in there for an hour and a half, and I think the plumbing bill would hold up in court.
Now you may think I’m being a little hard when I say that they serve no real purpose. After all, we give birth, we watch their first tiny steps. Every new word uttered brings tears to our eyes. We nurture and teach, and in return for our patience and love we wake up one morning to find our adorable little child has grown into someone who believes that his or her sole duty in life is to breathe and leave the top off the toothpaste. Seriously, does it take so much effort to put a glass in the dishwasher that you have to rejuvenate by spending every weekend in a coma-like state until such time as the phone rings and your friends ask you to go skateboarding? Should hair styling consume your every waking moment to the exclusion of anything other than the intake of food? Is vacuuming such a complicated process that only mothers and nuclear physicists can hope to be successful at it?
Recently, I decided that my teens needed a wake up call. From now on, I vowed, if they do nothing for me, then I do nothing for them. No dishes, no money for the movies. No cleaning up their rooms, no clean laundry. After all, how did I expect them to be responsible without responsibilities? They would learn, just as they learned how to walk, and I would be their teacher.
The first day of this resolution, my son came into the living room and asked me for a ride to his friend’s house.
“Did you unload the dishwasher?” I asked
“No, I thought the dishes were dirty.”
“Well, then did you load the dishes that were in the sink?”
“No, the dishwasher was full.”
“How about the lawn, it needs to be mowed.”
“Outta gas.”
“Vacuum?”
“It’s still plugged from the last time you told Ashley to clean the litter box.”
“Did you do anything in the house at all today, Josh?”
“I flushed the toilet after I used it.”
“Well, thank you for you unselfish contribution to the family.”
Driving home after dropping my son off at his friends house, I rationalized that I hadn’t really lost the battle, I’d lost a mouth to feed for at least five or six hours. Life can be fair.