With apologies to “The Breakfast Club”
Sept. 19. By Jon Show. After a long stretch of fighting an uphill battle against the teenage years, and hoping my little buddies would bend to my will, I’ve given up.
When our kids were younger, I remember older parents talking about the harrowing teenage years and my thoughts were always, “Oh, not me. I do stuff with my kids all the time. You must have ignored your kids.”
As I sit here a decade later, I know now I was wrong. Dead wrong.
Maybe you have little ones and you think as I once thought? You’re wrong, too, and here’s why.
One, you don’t have a teenager yet. You have no frame of reference.
And/or two, you have a neighbor with an older kid who cleans his or her room and converses like an adult. Has a job. Colleges picked out by sixteen. A car with no small, unexplained dents.
Well, you don’t know it yet but that kid is an anomaly. A four-leaf clover. A full solar eclipse. A Powerball jackpot.
How will you know when you’ve officially entered the teenage vortex? It’s not easy and it doesn’t necessarily happen at 13. Some get there early and some arrive late.
My extensive research has found that an early indicator is a disappearance of spoons.
One day you wake up and you’ll be missing the majority of your spoons.
I found one last month in the mulch in the backyard. I didn’t even ask anyone why it was there—I was just happy to have four spoons again, down from the eight we had just a short time ago.
Chip off the block
While I used to yell and grumble, I’ve stopped inquiring altogether.
“Why is there chipped paint on the door of my truck?” Or, “Where are all of our bowls?” Or, “Why was location sharing turned off on your phone for an hour this afternoon?”
At the end of the day, I probably don’t want to know, anyway.
The other problem with asking those questions is I never get an answer. Or the answer is a question.
“What do you mean there’s a small dent in the tailgate?”
I meant what I said. In your spoken language. The only language any teenager speaks despite multiple years of learning a foreign language in school.
Generally, after one of my inquiries I’m presented with a potential explanation of the problem that never makes any sense.
For example, one morning I learned that the lid to my sauce pot was bent, like someone put it between a bench vise.
I walked upstairs and opened Future Man’s door at noon (because his job was rained out) and politely asked if he knew what happened to it.
“I don’t know,” he responded quite lethargically. “Maybe it got super hot … or something and … the metal, like, I don’t know, bent?”
Cool, cool. So you think something that was designed to sit on fire got so hot that it bent the metal lid that doesn’t even touch the fire on the stove? Seems plausible.
Jonnie on the spot
The Blonde Bomber is a new teenager but has taken to calling me Jon at all times, like I’m her stepfather or some guy currently dating her mother.
Not the “daddy” that rolled off her tongue with the mild Southern accent that you get from growing up in North Carolina.
Nope, now it’s, “Heyyy Joooonnie, wut’s for dinner?”
I haven’t corrected her once. I just don’t care. As long as she’s not calling me something worse to my face.
She celebrates seasons and holidays months in advance, so the upstairs of our house currently smells like a pumpkin came to life and flatulated in the main hallway.
I hate the smell of pumpkin candles. Like I’m physically revolted by them. Does she care? No.
She used to. She used to only light them when I was out of town because she knows how much I hate them, but she’s a teenager and no longer cares about my intolerance to the smell of burning pumpkin.
New car smell
Back to Future Man, who’s obviously served more time in his teenage years so I have more history to pull from.
He got his first car this summer, a 2009 Honda CR-V that we originally owned and gave to my dad a few years back, but my dad returned it since he doesn’t drive anymore.
Many of Future Man’s friends have tricked-out cars made in exotic places like Germany, so he set about upfitting his ride to a design motif best described as Fast and the Furious: Suburban Drift.
He painted the steel rims black. Taped over the silver trim with black electrical tape. Painted the silver Honda logo on the grill black.
Then he put spacers on the wheels so the tires stuck out.
When the spacers arrived via Amazon, I told him that they often mess with wheel bearings and axles but he ignored me and put them on anyway.
The old me would have demanded he send them back and never have allowed him to install them in the first place.
The new me watched him spend three hours installing them in 100-degree heat and another three hours uninstalling them in 105-degree heat because they made his tires wobble when he drove.
And then I watched him drive his car to a mechanic to pay someone to realign all four wheels.
Along for the ride
I think back to that naïve parent I was many years ago, watching teenagers do donuts in the elementary school parking lot while Future Man tested out his new two-wheeler, sans training wheels, for the first time.
In hindsight, there’s no better metaphor for parenting than showing a kid how to ride a bike.
You spend so much time teaching them, and they finally get it, and then you stand there and watch them ride away, hoping they’ll eventually turn around and come back to you.
But they don’t. At least not for a while. Why would they? You gave them a skill that makes it possible for them to get away from you. That’s the whole point of parenting.
I’m hopeful that I’m doing all this right but, at this point, I’m not even sure I know what that means anymore.
I just hope that years from now, maybe over a beer in their twenties, someone will tell me where the dents and chips came from. Why my pot lid was bent. Who left dishes in the sink every night.
And where, please tell me, did all our spoons go?
Jon Show lives in Robbins Park with his wife, who he calls “The Mother of Dragons.” Their 16-year-old son is “Future Man” and their 13-year-old daughter is “The Blonde Bomber.” Their dog is actually named Lightning.
