Fact: Your teen is going to hate you no matter what you do.

Good morning!

Hubs and I have always sort of thought of ourselves as cool parents.  Hey, we watched the Video Music Awards on MTV the other night!  Granted, I was waiting for Rick Springfield to perform, and okay, I watched until Mad Men came on...but still, that counts!

We've spent a lot of time and money, during our kids' growing up years, building the image of cool.  So, Monday, when Skippy turns 17, we will be celebrating another year of blissful parent/kid exchanges in a cool and loving atmosphere.

Only if that little dink eats his veggies.  And would it kill him to just once, JUST ONCE put his clean laundry in, oh, I don't know, his DRESSER so I can have the laundry baskets back?

Crap....there's my mom taking over my brain again!

Yep, it's rebellion season here as anyone with teens will tell you.  Teens don't care that you took them to Great America fifteen times one summer.  Teens don't care that you're paying for their car insurance and most of their gas.  Teens don't care that, given the cost of housing and feeding them is almost high enough that their threats to LEAVE FOREVER really sounds appealing.

Nope, teens do not care because no matter how cool we parents think we are, we are horrible, out of touch, dinosaurs in the eyes of our teen offspring.

Don't fool yourselves, parents.  You think this won't happen to you?  Hah! 

My parents didn't spend a dime on me beyond the basics.  I paid for clothes, I never got the car, and if I wanted to do something or eat something cool, I had to pay for it AND Get permission from them to do or eat or wear or listen to whatever.  So, in an effort to do things a bit differently and hopefully getting a different result  (I had an resentful relationship with my mother for about ten years, and my dad for about four.  Why the difference in the time frames?  Let's call it proportional to the amount of involvement.  LOL!)  Hubs and I have tried to do everything we could for the kids.

Yeah, a lot of good that did us.



Come on...I'm cooler than this guy...right??????



We were watching "Modern Family" the other night and Peaches and I were laughing at Phil, the dad who thinks he's super cool with his kids.  "He's such a dork," says I.  "He reminds me of you and dad," says Peaches.

Why don't you just shoot me now....please? 



The thing about teens is...well, they're teens.  They want to be independent.  They think they know everything because they've seen "Teen Mom" and "Tosh 2.0.  They think that just because I can't retrieve a voicemail message from my phone or update my face book from my phone, I don't know anything.  And, since Skippy's started driving, he's announced that I am the WORST DRIVER IN THE WORLD.  (Funny, my driving was just fine for the first 16 years of his life.)

It's completely normal, my friends.  Teens are supposed to hate us, I guess. It's part of the process of moving them out of the house so that we can return to the carefree, have sex in any room we want, days before the kids arrived.  (A direct result of having sex in any room we wanted, I'm sure!)



As parents, I guess we have to just take it day by day.  This week I can break the relationship down with Skippy this way:

Sunday:  Likes us
Sunday night:  Hates us  (Cable went out.)
Monday: hates us  (Not over the cable being out)
Tuesday :  Hates us less  (just filled his gas tank on his own and realized that he might need some $$)
Wednesday:  We're not bad  (Homecoming week...needs his curfew extended.)
Thursday:  We're okay enough to talk to for five minutes.  (Got his curfew extended.)
Friday:  Grunted at me three times on his way out the door.  HE LOVES ME

No, your kid is not going to want to be your friend on Face book.  (Would you want your mom as your friend?  Seriously, think about that.)  No, your kid is not going to take a phone call from you when he's with his friends.  (Send a text.  Learn to text.  Get your younger kid to text for you.)  And No, your teen is NOT going to WALK OR RIDE HIS BIKE when he can drive.  (don't even fight about it. Sell the bike.  Use it for gas money.)

Teens are going to hate their parents.  Cain and Abel, I'm sure, had issues with Adam and Eve.  Sure, they didn't have Face book or texting, but come on...if we can get through the teen years without one actually killing the other...we've done better than the original parents, right?

That's what I'm telling myself, and what I'll keep telling myself as I stay up late this weekend waiting for Skippy.