Musings Of A Muddled Male

The Teen

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

        Have you ever thought to yourself, "My teenager is going to be the death of me?"  Occasionally one may come along that is as delightful to have around at thirteen years as they were at thirteen months.  If the teenager in your home is one of those, count your blessings.

        Doing the teen thing is easy when you are the teen.  Dealing with the teen thing, when you are the adult, is a pain.  If you have been through it you already know that there is an instant in time when they seem to go from delightful to spiteful.

        The change can happen suddenly and seems to be triggered by a struggle for independence.  I don't mean financial independence.  They will always stay close to your wallet.  The independence they seek is the right to ignore any thing you say or advice you might give.

        You are probably hoping that I have a precise parenting formula that will help you fix your mean teen.  I'm afraid I don't have one.  What I do have, however, is a personal experience that will teach you what not to do.

        I was much younger then and had enough energy to be a lot more volatile.  We had three children and our oldest was in the process of becoming a teen.  What was also obvious was that our younger two children were not just bystanders.  They were teens in training.  Thus whatever approach I used was bound to affect not only the teenager we had, but also the approaching two that were watching and learning.

        So I used my best tool, the parental lecture.  You know, the one where the parent speaks louder and louder while the teen listens less and less.  I was in mid-lecture when it happened.  I had just put catsup on my burger and was setting the catsup bottle back down on the table when my lecture hit a crescendo and, for emphasis, I smacked the bottle onto the table with more gusto than I had anticipated.

        My friend, the professor, would explain that what happened next was simply the product of hydraulics and inertia.  The bottle and catsup were headed down together when the bottle hit the table and stopped instantly.  The catsup, continuing its downward motion, was driven to the center of the bottle by the curvature between the sides of the bottle and its bottom, and then surged upward in a large blob of catsup that hit the ceiling before it dropped back down on my forehead.

        I continued to lecture with catsup running down the bridge of my nose and dripping on the table.  Our kids, including the teen being lectured, were all trying to stifle a giggle.  Ann, my wife, was not giggling.  She didn't call me a name over the oily spot on the ceiling.  What she said was that if I was going to act like a meathead, the catsup on my forehead was the appropriate condiment.  But my real punishment comes as our kids retell the event every time we get together, and Ann gets mad all over again.