Having children teaches a person so many things.
Love so big it sometimes hurts. Compassion for some of the strangest things. Fear on levels you never knew existed. Pain. Wonder. Joy.
But perhaps one of the most enduring and frequently arising lessons is that you are in fact capable of loving someone so much you would leap into a flaming vat of oil to save them while simultaneously tearing your hair out with unrelenting frustration.
Nothing drives that lesson home more than having a child who has become a teenager.
Teenagers are an interesting group. Especially at the beginning. Right around 13 it’s like some mental switch flips and suddenly, almost overnight, your precious little angel becomes an angsty, sloppy, hormonal mess who is wildly offended by the concept of personal hygiene.
Now I’m a young parent. So it really wasnt all that long ago that I was an angsty, sloppy, badly washed teenager myself. I was labouring under the misguided assumption that my teenage years being so much fresher in my mind than that of my parents would give me some kind of mystical leg up in this raising teens business.
Spoiler alert: I was wrong.
If anything it has just added an extra layer of complexity and opportunity for eye rolling.
You see, my teenager, like so many others lives in a largely online world. Life revolves around the smartphone (not entirely foreign for me, my generation may not have had smartphones at 14, but we had unlimited text plans, thanks Telecom, it was a blast) texting and calling friends almost constantly.
Not so bad really. At least they talk to each other still right. Even if it is mostly in badly spelt, awfully abbreviated txt messages loaded with emojis.
But my generation never carried social media a click away in our pockets at this age. We all developed exceptional stealth txting skills to be able to continue our chats during class time (just looking for a highlighter miss! While sending a covert txt from the depths of my pencil case) but having the words and opinions of potentially hundreds if not thousands of others flowing direct to my pocket at any given moment was never an issue.
Attempting to raise a healthy young adult, who despite many protests claiming otherwise is in fact still a child, in this magical age of instant gratification is a rather spectacular challenge.
Instant access to almost anything has convinced these kids that any whim can be met faster than the speed of light regardless of distance or price. Teenagers have long been convinced that money is endless. This society that rams high end products and instant gratification down their throats is just fuelling the fire.
There is a great saying that ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’, whoever it was that rolled out that gem had clearly never met a teenager who has just been told they can’t have a $400 pair of nike trainers just because all the other kids on Instagram have them. Or the latest iphone, macbook, gaming console, overpriced ‘retro’ sweater (if I had known my ugly jumpers were gonna be trendy I would’ve saved those nasty old things), tropical bloody island holiday, the list goes on.
When I was younger I certainly wanted things other people had, I just wasnt carrying a beeping reminder around in my pocket, letting me know I was missing out every time it made a noise.
I remember wanting a pair of adidas superstars so.damn.bad when I was around 15. When I finally got them my life was made, they were the best shoes, i bought the same pair again and again well into adulthood. So when my teenager announced they wanted a specific pair of sneakers I hunted high and low, scoured the internet for sales, trawled endlessly through trademe until I found a pair for a price I could manage.
Of course, by the time I had spent countless hours, and invested myself in this hunt for the perfect shoes, the teenager had set their sights on different shoes. The sneakers i had invested all this effort into were no longer the dream shoes, they had been replaced with another pair spotted on some ‘influencers’ feed, soon to be spotted on the feet of teenagers everywhere.
How on earth is anyone supposed to keep up with this sort of malarkey?
I’ll let you know when I figure it out.
Until then, I just want to send out a universal thanks to all parents, mine, my partners, yours, the grumpy dad in line at the supermarket buying overpriced coconut oil for his influenced darling to use once and forget about, the mum sitting in the dark late at night trying to find all the things to please all the people, the parents who spend more time than they care to admit thinking they are fucking it all up (they aren’t), the ones who withhold the wifi password just to get shit done (I bow down to you), the ones who just fed the kids cereal cause this shit is exhausting (Brinner mate, we do this at least once a week, GAME.CHANGER).
Thank you. This shit is hard. Like walking through fire just to step out the other side and realise you still have to traverse a canyon of Lego. Barefoot. But thank you for showing up and doing it anyway. Even when your teenager refuses to throw any thanks your way. They will someday. But for now, I will.
-Bee
The Benedict Post 