My Chemical Romance once said something about teenagers in their 2006 hit song of the same name (Teenagers).
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Now, I’m not sure they scare the living anything out of me, but they certainly stir some other interesting emotions.
They are odd creatures.
Every time I think I don’t feel all that much older in my mind than I did at the same age, and that it’s just my ageing body betraying it, one of my three teenagers reminds me with a strange and unfamiliar behaviour of how great the divide is.
Some of their behaviours are delightful.
Not in a sarcastic use of the word, but legitimately delightful.
Some of them are frustrating, irritating and inspire an almost blood-letting amount of tongue-biting from me to quash the unfavourable reaction bubbling at the brink of my neck.
Teens in general often get a bad rap.
I don’t particularly like lumping any demographic in the same heap.
It’s unfair.
And given my three teenagers are (mostly) good kids (I promise I’m not just biased, wink wink), I especially don’t like hearing that all teenagers are “self-absorbed” or “rude” or “lazy” or “antisocial”.
But, they do all have their moments.
Don’t we all? Isn’t that what it is to be human?
I mean, I’ve been so exhausted before that I’ve fallen into a lazy heap of self-absorption while rudely telling my kids to leave me alone and fend for themselves because I was feeling very antisocial in that moment.
Is it some kind of cruel joke that often a mum’s (new buzz word incoming…) cougar puberty, aka peri-menopause, synchronises with her teen’s puberty?
More moods are swinging around this house than bras at a Tom Jones concert.
I was dropping one of my boys off at work on the weekend near a zebra crossing.
We stopped and he didn’t open the door to get out.
I looked at him and he returned my gaze in a way that said I should have been able to read whatever was on his mind, and, by the look on his face, was clearly bugging him.
I wasn’t picking up what he was putting down.
We’ve done this routine a hundred times before.
Just get out of the car, kid. What are you waiting for?
“Mum, can you please turn the music down, there are people right there,” he said in an irritated tone, as he nodded in the direction of some people my parents’ age walking across the crossing.
For starters, the music wasn’t even loud in comparison to where the volume knob in my disco buggy usually floats.
(I can actually visualise him cringing at me calling my 4x4 ute a disco buggy just now).
But here is the thing I just can’t get my head around: why did my son care what those people — complete strangers and not even in his peer age group — thought of his mum’s music?
When I picked him up later that day, he told me it wasn’t so much the kind of music (a classic club banger — Insomnia by Faithless — in case you’re wondering); it was apparently just the volume of said banger, and that I “just don’t get it”.
Now, this phrase was something I could relate to from my teen years.
I never thought adults “got it” either.
How naïve of me, of all of us, who dismissed the wisdom every human incidentally collects simply through their years of life experience.
I see how teens get it twisted.
When we ask them to help us understand some kind of new technology, we’re usually met with their frustration or mockery.
If we don’t ‘get’ their jokes or they have to explain memes to us, we’re apparently dense, not just on a different frequency of humour sense (a sense that actually makes sense, if you will).
I mean, they can cringe at me all they want, but what they don’t know, is that I’m suppressing complete-body cringes every time one slings some teen slang at me.
Teenagers have butchered the word charisma, and turned it in to ‘rizz’, and every time it escapes from one of my teens’ mouths, all I can think of is Rizzo from Grease.
If a meal I cook is ‘bussin’, I fear it was so bad they’re threatening to board some public transport at the bus stop down the road and get the hell out of Dodge(y Cooksville), until I remember it means the opposite.
On the odd occasion that they like my ‘drip’, I check my shirt for tomato sauce or toothpaste.
No ‘cap’, ‘fam’, I struggle keeping up.
I saw a quote this week that said ‘I am both dumber and smarter than you think. Don’t estimate me.’
It’s the perfect response to my worldly, all-knowing cherubs.
I love my teenagers — 14, 16 and nearly 18 — even though we’re not always on the same wavelength.
And even though they tease me for it, I’m grateful they’re around to help with the technology that is over my daggy greying-haired head.
Senior journalist