Uh-oh, I Think I'm Running Out of Teenagers

Be advised that reading this post may be offensive to some and cause the eyes of others  to bleed.  If either begins to occur then stop reading immediately and return later when properly clothed in big kid pants.

Over the past few weeks I've had two pseudo-adults leave the safety of my well-feathered nest for the painfully unforgiving hardships that exist for them beyond my front door.  That means I have only two more at home.  One whose teen years are almost over and another who is short one birthday of arriving there.  After the oldest arrived at the troublesome teen years and I got a dose of what that meant, I optimistically supposed that the next one to arrive there would be better.  The "next one" was never better.  Sometimes the next one was worse.  That is not to say that from the oldest to the youngest they got progressively worse and harder to live with.  What I mean is that each one had their own way of redefining....."bad."  Yeah, I said it...BAD!  There were many times when they KNEW the right choice from the wrong one and chose poorly anyway.  I realize that there are the touchy-feely warm & fuzzy do-gooders who say to never refer to a child as "bad."  Here's a news flash for those people:  A teenager is not a child!  Sometimes I wondered if it was even fair to reference them as human.  A teenage person who has been properly informed of what is right, what is good, and what is safe by the God-ordained authority in their life yet consistently chooses the opposite cannot be described as a "good kid."  So what do you call them if not what their normal behavior describes them as?

Now, to be clear allow me to emphatically declare that I have never looked any child of mine in the eye and called them a bad kid or a bad person.  Not that it may not have been true at times, but because I absolutely refused to accept that about them and they knew it.  I have learned after turning a few loose on the world that my good opinion is very valuable to them now.  I think my good opinion of them was always important.  A lot of their struggle, rebellion, and anger was about their futile attempt to maintain my good opinion of themselves AND their behavior. I wonder if they know that my "good opinion" was never at risk.

One of the most difficult things, I have found, is to have an honest conversation with a teenager.  There is another conversation that is rarely verbalized that occurs below the surface simultaneously with the one that is spoken.  If my teenage child asks for permission to do something, I wonder what they are really going to do.  Has past performance enhanced or diminished trustworthiness now?  If I refuse permission then my child usually believes that my desire is to remove all personal enjoyment from their lives....forever.  If I verbalize my assertion that last week's performance causes me to be disinclined to grant permission for something similar this week, I am rebuked for living in the past, not trusting them, or judging the people they are going to be with.  I have never mastered the ability to explain why that is not unreasonable.  Understand that if the conversation has reached this point without having granted permission then the emotional meltdown is about to begin.  Sometimes I like to think of it as the emotional cleansing.

I've had the police to my home to investigate the noise more than once.  I've had a child returned to my home by the police.......in handcuffs.  I've had a son who confessed to me that he thought his girlfriend was pregnant.  I've had a daughter ask her mom to buy her a pregnancy test at the drugstore.  I can't remember how many car wrecks, speeding tickets, and court appearances I've had to attend on behalf of bad teenage drivers.  Maybe I should call them "inexperienced" drivers as conventional wisdom suggests.  In my view inexperienced drivers and bad drivers have the same results on the road.  Maybe some people should accept the fact that an inexperienced driver is a bad driver until time and experience have the opportunity to qualify them as good drivers.

My youngest son just turned twelve.  The question is not whether or not he will turn to the dark side.  He will turn.  They all turn.  The question is how "bad" will be redefined this time.  I'm really not that curious but I'm up for one more rodeo.