I am pleased to present this week’s guest blogger, C. L. Landers. She is a mother of four who works full-time in corporate communications. She reads books obsessively in order to avoid housework.
Someday she will write a novel that will see the world beyond her hard drive. Maybe even before the kids leave home. No, probably not.
Ironic Mom’s blog takes me back to the days when my kids were small, bizarre, and unpredictable creatures. Now that I’m mom to two teens and two tweens, they are large, bizarre, and unpredictable creatures. Today’s post is my chance to give Ironic Mom a preview of what she’s in for when Thing 1 and Thing 2 hit puberty.
There was a time when my bank account hemorrhaged diapers, baby wipes, and day care tuition. I thought that when my kids got older, I would have so much extra money it would be like having a third income. I didn’t account for the way teenagers go through tennis shoes and jeans like they’re made of wet cardboard. The cost of high school yearbooks leads me to believe that every page is hand-sewn by armies of unionized book binders. Extra-curricular activities bring daily demands for costume money, uniform money, pizza money, t-shirt money, admission money, and on and on and on. If my checkbook had a heartbeat, my kids would be mainlining its lifeblood away.
My finances aren’t the only part of my life feeling the effects of the monkey show that is adolescence. We live in a fixer-upper that’s sustaining damage faster than we can patch it up. Judging by the state of the walls, I strongly suspect the boys have full-contact football sessions indoors when we’re not home. I will never understand why the same boy who can make a three-point basket from across court can’t hit a standard 16-inch toilet seat. At least all our furniture matches—only because all the pizza and soda stains have blended together into one uniform shade.
I don’t find myself saying quite so many bizarre things to my kids anymore. More often I’m stumped by the bizarre things they say to me. My fifteen-year-old daughter can list fifteen reasons why she loves her butt. After a full semester of driver’s ed, she climbed behind the wheel of my car and earnestly asked, “OK, which one is the gas and which one is the brake?” They are so entrenched in the internet culture, I’m seriously considering listing YouTube as a second language spoken fluidly for college applications. However, when I was giving my daughter an abstinence speech, I was shocked to hear myself say:
It seemed like safe bargain to strike, given that her odds of meeting her favorite band are roughly equivalent of her being crowned Queen of England.
Or actually listening to my advice.
~~~
Your turn:
What are some memories you have of being a tween or teen?
Did you destroy your parents’ house?
LOVE, love this! I am mom to two boys 11 and 13. We are living the dream, aren’t we? Favorite line: “I will never understand why the same boy who can make a three-point basket from across court can’t hit a standard 16-inch toilet seat.” Sing it, sista! The boys and I exchange information on a regular basis – I explain famous movie references, they explain what dubstepping is – so we can try to speak the same language. So now I know more about Minecraft and swag than I care to know. I recently discovered we’d all downloaded the same band from ITunes and had a moment of shared joy – only to have to listen to the latest meme news. #yolo
I was too afraid of my mother to have dared to even considered destroying the house! I lived in fear of angering my mother. Everything I did seemed to set her off, so doing something as far out as messing with the house was out of the question. I was in enough trouble just trying to behave!
Ha ha ha, great stuff!
Memories of being a tween or teen. If the small army of therapists that helped me repress those memories found out I was taking a willing stroll down memory lane *read dark alley*, they, well… they probably wouldn’t care since I’m sure they all purchased boats and houses with my fees.
– Shortly after moving back to the US, my parents gave me a black powder rifle for Christmas. What’s the harm, right? The entire family (minus the hellion) went on a 4th of July vacation during which I had to work. (wink wink nudge nudge).
Once the family was gone, the backyard and driveway were full of friend’s cars, the living room was full of band equipment, empty pizza boxes, and empty beverage cans built into a pyramid. Being the brilliant teen that I was, I bragged to my friends that I had enough black powder in my room to level the sandbox in my backyard.
*game on*
My little brother had one of those plastic bowling ball sets that had hollow pins. Could I have been given a better vehicle for sandbox destruction? Nope. I apparently used a little more black powder than I needed to. Shortly after midnight we buried the FILLED bowling pin in the sand and hid behind trees once I lit the fuse. The sandbox met a very loud end. There was a crater large enough to hide a soccer ball in, and many years of accumulated cat poop that suddenly took flight.
……. Good times. 😉
#thethingsweusedtodo
Lori Miller, are you as confused by Minecraft as I am? How is something slightly less visually appealing than the old dos-prompt Oregon Trail the next big thing?? zkullis, I’m SO glad my boys aren’t reading this. They would find that idea GENIUS.
Yikes! Quite the view into the future. I remember that no matter how well we thought we’d covered our tracks, mom always knew when we’d been up to something. Krazy Glue can’t fix everything.
I roller-skated in to a wall once and left a nice skate sized hole in the wall. I got a solid lesson on wall patching, plaster, and touch-up painting. One of the more useful mistakes of my childhood!
I wanted to surprise my parents one Sunday morning by painting the living room walls. I knocked the paint can over. It suddenly turned into a mini tsunami and washed over a large area of the carpet. Yes they were surprised.
I smoked for many years – started when I was a young teenager, trying desperately to be “cool’ like my older cousin, who smoked. (Who now trains Iron Man athletes for a living and wouldn’t smoke if you paid her. Go figure…)
What kills me now is that I sincerely believed that my parents had no clue whatsoever. That popping a “Halls” cough drop into my mouth seconds before waltzing through the front door at midnight would mask the smell of cigarettes on my hair.
Ha! What a fool I was.
Also, there *may* have been a night that found me naked on the roof while my parents were at the cottage. It’s a bit fuzzy though, this memory, as the evening also involved drinking their booze and the filling the bottles back up with water….which, incidentally, I also believed they did not know.
What a fool, I was….
I don’t remember what the arguments were about, but I often argued with my parents. Once I told my father, “If you don’t like it, you can lump it.” Then the chase was on. I had to outrun him to reach my bedroom before he got me with his belt. I stayed there for a long time until he calmed down. I don’t remember if I apologized or not.
Well done, C.L.!