Confessions of a Teenage Mother OR Velvet Verbosity Suffers from Ephebiphobia

I have a confession to make. No, as the title implies, I am not a teenage mother. I am, however, a mother to two teenagers. TWO. Teenagers. That makes two of them and one of me. This is not a good ratio, in case you were wondering. In fact, if for no other reason, this is why you all who have young children should stay married. Not for the sake of the children, but for the sake of your sanity. Otherwise, after a brutal tag-team session where one teenager screams hateful things at you that would make the self-esteem of the next three generations curl up and crawl into the nearest spider web infested corner and the other teenager is two hours late and hasn’t bothered to call even though he moves through a world FULL OF CELL PHONES you will lose your grasp on sanity. It helps to have another adult around to keep it all in perspective. It helps even more if this other adult likes you and finds your breathing adorable.

The Surgeon General warns that teenagers can be hazardous to your sanity. Only you’ve never seen this warning because it’s branded onto their backsides and even though the boys wear their pants around their knees and girls’ low-rise jeans reveal more than a thong bikini, you, their parent, will never have the right to look there again. And that would be fine and good if it wasn’t that you also aren’t allowed to look directly at their face for more than .5 seconds, you’re not allowed to expect that your favorite shirts won’t disappear, to have any of the snackfood in the house, or to breathe in the wrong way because you’re annoying them. If you’re wondering why you didn’t ever notice the Surgeon General’s warning when they were still in diapers, that’s because it’s kind of like that etching on the One Ring. The warning only shows up under conditions of extreme hormonal fluctuation. And that, my friends, is the real truth about why they wear through their jeans so fast.