not so still life with teenager

I knew this day was coming. The knowledge hovers at the hazy perimeter of our conscious from the very beginning, never fully crystallizing, because if it did, we might change our mind and then where would we be as a species?

Enter the teenager.

The man-child comes out of the bathroom in the morning smelling like…I can’t describe it actually, but he tells me it’s Axe and thinks it makes him smell good. Some girls at school tell him so, he says. And I must agree it’s an improvement over the sweaty man stench that usually emanates from his pits and feet. Maybe only teenage girl pheromones can pick up on the nuances of this scent and respond accordingly. Maybe those same girls will ask him to go a little gentler with the spray nozzle next time. But alas, I have little expectation here as these are the same girls that douse themselves in vats of the feminine variety of this stuff and apply makeup in similarly excessive quantities.

The proportion of scent and makeup to clothes seems to be directly inverse however. The teenage boys that are visible in my universe all seem to wear jeans just as tight as the girls and verge on slipping off their asses. There’s nothing quite like the indignant squeak of a teenage boy who’s received a massive wedgie because I’ve abruptly hauled his jeans up by the belt loop as I don’t really want to know what type of boxers he’s sporting that particular day. I really don’t want to see your ass, okay?

Similarly, the jeans worn by the female of the teenage species seem designed to pinch internal organs and prevent them from moving with any measure of comfort. I don’t think that even when I was traversing the landscape of the teenager there was any appeal in jeans that cut off blood flow to the legs. Maybe in the last twenty years that’s changed and bodily injury from clothes is a badge of…something?

Ace also sleeps the sleep of the teenage dead. His cell phone alarm and his alarm clock go off and off and off until I wake up from the discordant symphony eating at my brain and I yell at him to turn off the damn racket already! Or haul my ass out of bed, go to his room, turn his lights on full and beat him around the head with his pillow until he finally crawls out of the teenage coma he’d fallen into.

Somehow this racket, just feet away from her own door, fails to rouse my almost teenage daughter, whose own alarm will go ignored for several minutes before the noise penetrates her sleeping head and she grumpily slaps it off. Then she will bury her head and growl with a fiendish ferocity at the unfortunate individual who tries to wake her up completely. That is most invariably me.

It’s a wonder I don’t start my day slugging back a fistful of happy pills. Caffeine barely smooths the path.

We’re lucky so far, and we all know that stating this is tantamount to shaking my fist at the universe and daring it to fuck with me, in that our son remains generally affable and not assailed with the turbulent hormonal influxes that cause mood swings strong enough to shatter the Richter scale. He’s generally good natured, currently obsessed with making enough money to buy a new airsoft rifle, swimming season, his pending driver’s education class and what type of truck he might be able to get with the savings he's spending on something else when he gets his license, so help me I’m going to need more bourbon next year, and girls.

Ah, the girls, they text him constantly. I don’t think he actually has face to face conversations with these girls, at least any which happen after school has let out. It’s really hard to eavesdrop on a conversation when the only sound is the beep of an incoming text. I’m going to have to resort to reading his messages soon so I can tease him about which girl he is currently infatuated with; for all his affability and openness with his life, he is amazingly closemouthed about the girls. This removes some of the fun of parenthood, you realize.

Giggles may not fare so well in the hormonal storm. She’s being buffeted by the winds of change already and finds herself discombobulated in the maelstrom that is puberty. Just last night, she was alternately cranky and needy. One minute cuddling up next to me while we watched the idiot box and then snarling like a trapped hyena because I reminded her twice that she had yet to unload the dishwasher. And then after realizing that she had morphed into something unpleasant, she came back over to lament that she didn’t know why she was feeling so schizophrenic – her words, not mine, because had I pointed that out she might have popped out my eyeballs and eaten them.

And so we sat, cuddled up close together, in female solidarity discussing hormones and mood swings and ways to find stable ground amid the shifting sands of unseen forces. I think it helped to share my own mental chaos when I was similarly afflicted with pubescent angst and how there were days I couldn’t stand my own company and found refuge in music and books and long ass walks in the woods. Where there were no people to annoy the hell out of me. Because really, sometimes IT IS the people around you. A couple of weeks ago her father, being a man, blithely mentioned that he noticed she was getting curvy in the hip area and I swear the top of her head exploded, flames shot from her eyes, burning him to cinders on the spot, before she stomped off and slammed her bedroom door so hard the foundation of the house cracked. Ace summed up the scene perfectly when he turned to his father and said “Nice going, Dad.”

The good thing is that we talk and talk about the mood shifts and the anticipated physical changes, which my girl is so not looking forward to right now, as a matter of fact she views the oncoming bodily changes akin to handling venomous cobras in close quarters while blindfolded. It’s hard to combat the disturbing reality of breast buds, curvier hips and the onslaught of hormonal tsunamis with a girl who doesn’t hesitate to admit that she’s not sure how to handle all of these changes. The fact that she is willing to share her thoughts and feeling on this tumultuous time with me, and to some extent her Dad, barring any more foot-in-mouth scenarios, helps keep me in tune on whether the girl sitting across the table is the cranky moody girl about to spew bitchiness all over us because her brother is breathing next to her or the fragile vulnerable flower who’s going to cry her way into her room if I mentioned the ketchup smear on her shirt.

It’s a parental mind field I tell you and I really need all my limbs to survive this.