When I was 15 I threw my first party while my parents were gone for a night. It wasn’t big, maybe ten people. I would have gotten away with it except for the unfortunate proof of evidence that lingered. One of my friends proceeded to drink too much and ended up getting sick right in the middle of our TV room (we had very light, beige carpet). Gross, right? Yes, but even worse was the color of the vomit. You see, wine coolers were the thing during my youth and this particular night we drank strawberry daiquiri flavored ones. The stain was stubborn and after much scrubbing I gave up. As you can imagine the first thing my parents asked me upon their return home was about the large, stinky, obtrusive stain staring up at them from the ground.
“It wasn’t me,” I pleaded. I swore up and down that I didn’t do it and I didn’t know who did. It was an absolutely ridiculous situation. Laughable actually at how stupid I must have sounded. My poor parents, I was such a jerk.
Well, the “it wasn’t me” phrase has come back to bite me in the you know what. Maybe you can relate. Every time I ask my teens if they are responsible for something askew they both claim it wasn’t them. For example, things like, who took my phone charger off my nightstand table? Who forgot to charge the laptop? Who left the water bottle on the couch? Who forgot to roll up the window in my car? Who ate my salad and where are my coveted earbuds? Do we have a ghost in the house? What the heck is going on?
This is what I think the answer is: short term teenage memory loss. Now, sometimes they both just flat out lie, but most times they are not paying enough attention to their surroundings to notice their mishaps. My teenagers are so self-involved, in such a haze that they don’t hear the world around them. Half the time I think they are sleep walking. It’s like they leave behind a trail of invisible teenage mayhem.
Some days I want to scream at them, I really do. But then I try to remember that their brains are in full teenage throttle. The gears are in place but they haven’t learned to push the gas. It’s a very strange phenomenon. Teenagers are an entirely different species. Gotta love them, but man is it hard sometimes.
In my adult world I need efficiency, organization, punctuality. When I am dealing with my teens I feel like I live in a time warp. It’s taken me a while to learn how to adjust to their way of doing things, to practice patience and be kind. I don’t want to yell all the time. What parent does? It just brings negative juju into our lives. I want goodness and love and we parents have the ability to create and foster that in our homes. Why would we want anything different from that? Just know that when your teen is given a task, it might take them a while to do it.
Now, I usually try to not succumb to getting even, I really do. I’m an adult after all. We don’t do those things. And I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but this time I did, to both of them. I ate my daughters delicious leftover burrito that she was saving for lunch the next day. I swore it wasn’t me. Then I wore one of my son’s t-shirts to work out in. When he claimed it smelled of my perfume, I swore it wasn’t me who sweated in it. My little acts of revenge annoyed them and inconvenienced them. Maybe made them think twice about things.
Sinking to their level was kind of fun. Silly, I know, but I got a laugh out of it. So, I simply blamed everything on the ghost, our family’s new friendly Casper.
