How to Live with Teenagers - Is it Me or is it Them??

Heres' the question, who keeps changing the rules and where do I get a clue? Somehow I feel by the time I start understanding the rules, they'll already be grown, or at least past into another stage of life. I never know when it's fine to take their pictures, and when it's not? Funny hats,...?? not embarassing...wearing a cute t-shirt in the backyard...back off mom! I'm the mom but you know what, I feel like I'm the one who's always in trouble!

Ok, it's not really that bad, well, except for that one week per month....

We still cook and have meals together several times a week, watch the latest films, we have all nighters in the summer when school is out, when no-one goes to bed. I can vaguely remember the times when the girls would fall asleep and my husband and I were left alone to finish out the "all-nighter" they had begged for.

I have to admit that the last one we had, one recent weekend... Greg and I were the ones sleeping and the girls, well, I am sure you can guess.....dad had a thousand ponytails and makeup clownishly smeared on his face when we woke up. I'll only leave you to guess where the stinkers stuffed my bedroom fuzzy slippers!

Last week my youngest daughter went to Arizona with a friend and her family, they were visiting her friends grandma to celebrate her birthday. For her entire life we just about lived in the church, daily, helping with various projects, classes and church family tasks, so you could say quite accurately that my children "grew up in the church". They call some members "aunt" and "uncle", to make it short, church & family became synonomous.

So my Christian daughter comes home after four days with this family and begins to announce to us that her friends' relatives took her on an adventure to meet the dead, to speak to her past husband , "from a past life", who she will remarry in this life at the age of 23 years old!!! As I sat and listened to the events of her past four days, I physically trembled, I thought, how can fours days with total strangers undo fifteen years of teaching, modeling, mentoring and prayer? Teenagers....who are they?

I can't really place the moment it happened. not as clearly as the way my husband remembers. The moment my daughters changed from my sweet angels, always trying to be like me,trying to please me and anticipate "what would make mom happy"...suddenly they seemed to have morphed into independant teens who felt their parents embarassed them???

My husband, dear sweet man that he is, remembers waking up one morning sensing something had changed. The "old wives tale" became a reality for him as he stated, "it was like all the women living in my home were having PMS issues all on the same week!" He confessed to me one evening, I knew all you girls needed was to take a deep breath and maybe count to ten, but the fear of God warned me to just shut my mouth or the wrath of these women would turn itself upon me! Like I said, he's a dear sweet man, not so much cowardly as born of wisdom.,

TO BE CONTINUED:

With all the love we have in our hearts for our kids, and of coarse our best wishes that they succeed in life and find the thing they like to do, some kind of work that will make them feel happy and fulfilled, there are days when you just want to, need to..., lock them away in their bedrooms and find some peace, take a break, have a grownup time-out! Coarse on those days I find myself locking myself in my own bedroom and putting the TV on a bit louder to drown out that stuff the kids call music... actually some of it is quite good, just not during that certain week of the month!

Sara works two part-time jobs when college is on break, Christiana is an honors student, and she even gets homework during the summer from her Honors teachers. The very kids who count the days until summer break, are now counting the days when school will start! I think I have heard every kid in town complain this week that they are bored! Christiana sometimes lets me read her Facebook Wall! Trust me, the kids are bored!

I found out my daughters were "normal" teenagers when I took the oldest to the doctors'. She sleeps all day, she won't go to bed at night...the doctor said, "Nothing to worry about, teenagers are nocturnal!" All teenagers need lots of sleep, especially when they hear their parents reminding them to clean their rooms, do their chores, or help in the garden!

My refrigerator was being emptied daily and my kids were complaining that they were starving. My husband and I scheduled a meeting while the girls were off somewhere, so we could discuss the food situation, also our home was starting to look alot like their bedrooms and I never really new who I was going to run into in the hall. The local teens had adopted our home as the "cool" place to hang out! Greg and I didn't want to say anything because we always believed it was better to havethe girls' friends here where we had supervision, rather than at someone elses' home where we didn't know if a parent was there.

So we lugged a used refrigerator into the garage, bought a couple of used couches, tons of pillows, some bean bag chairs, a TV and a DVD player, their playstation 2 and a rug for the floor. We have a cabinet for snack foods, healthy and not so healthy, and lots of gatorade, and bottles water and iced tea. Thank you God for Costco!

The thing Greg and I have become aware of now is, they are noisy, moody, extremely messy and unaware of the impact they have on our home, ....but, they won't always be here and when they move on to their own spaces...we will miss them so very, very much!

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