In Defense of Teenagers

People are afraid of teenagers.  Probably because they remember cruelty they either inflicted or was inflicted upon them in adolescence.  Maybe because they remember their vast discomfort and awkwardness and don’t want to return to it, even just in proximity.  I, too, was afraid of these years back when my kids were babies.  The thought of these sweet crazy people being out of my safe grasp in a few short years was daunting.

Teenagers get a bad rap, I’m here to say.   We are ourselves at any age.  These tall people that now live in my house are the very same people I spoon-fed, carefully dressed, monitored closely as they careened down the slide.  And just as they are the same essential entities, my friends that I knew when I was in high school are still just the same people.  We are more mature, supposedly, but we still spend a remarkable amount of time discussing clothes and boys and pot (for instance).  Megan at 14 and Megan at 49 are the very same Megan; glamorous, strong-opinioned and goofy.  Evany?  As sharp-witted, as acerbic, as on the front edge of what’s cool at 14 as she is today.  I’m as romantic, as brainy, as covertly nerdy now as then.  We contemplated our lives with as much weight and wonder then as we do now.  We were trying hard to make sense of the big mysteries, then as now.  We were learning, we were growing, then as now.  And we were wise, then as now.

And so it follows that my teenage daughters (Mihiretu has one more year before he hits his teens) not only are as familiar as they were to me in infancy, they’re also who they’ll be through out their life.  The baby lives in them but so does the grown-up.

I get along suspiciously well with teenagers.   Not only my girls, but also their friends.  It’s easy for me to downshift into teenage talk, to take the formality down to quiet. Part of it is because I am aware of the adult they are almost - I respect them as much as I would a new middle-aged friend.  Part of it is because my inner teenager is alive and well.  It’s not hard to imagine we’re the same age, at least internally.  It was a minute ago I was 15.

It seems to me that I had far less grace and ease as an adolescent then my daughters do.  But maybe the worst part of being a teenager is how weird it feels to be you - bridging childhood and adulthood, unsure what to do or who to be.  Maybe that’s what we adults are so afraid of.  Because it never goes away, that wierdness, that newness, that uncertainty.  We just get better at covering it up.

Teenagers are brave.  They don’t have a choice about it.  They have to be to pass from childhood to adulthood.  But they march forward anyway, maybe hunched, perhaps side-eyed, but undaunted.  And if they can do it?  If they can face the world and walk out into it?  Well, then, the rest of us can, too.