Teen Science

I haven’t the empirical evidence to submit the work to the journal Science yet, but certainly the anecdotal support is abundant.
They’re trying to kill us.
Painfully, slowly -most likely, over time. Not because they’re naturally sadistic, but because they realize if we go too quickly there’s a hiccup in their meal and laundry schedules. They’re clever, they are.
There will be no trace evidence, no discernible weapon, no DNA left on scene, nothing to affirm their identities.
But we’ll know.
Teenagers -they’re trying to kill us. And odds are, they’ll succeed.
It won’t be the single stroke of an ax or blast from a firearm. It won’t even be poison –although certainly its effects will mirror the internal gnawing of toxins run loose in our insides. It’s like the drip, drip, drip of water torture without the immobility. After all, if we’re strapped into the devices, who will chauffeur them around until we hand over the car keys?
Sure, you may be parent to one of those perfect kids I’ve heard about (mostly from the parents themselves) but for the rest of us, the teen years can be a bit trying. Wow, is that an understatement.
My son Michael seems to have a different friend for each slice of his personality. It’s not a bad system and since I’ve begun to decode the formula, I can pretty much anticipate what to expect from the various pairings. So when I came upon him and his buddy on the roof of the shed, I was actually pretty calm when I suggested that they get down. This wasn’t untrodden territory. But later when I found Michael 30 feet up in a limbless tree dangling from a belaying contraption they’d hooked up, I wasn’t terribly reassured by his explanation of the physics involved.
“Find something else to do,” I exhorted.
Stupid suggestion.
Remember when they were toddlers and silence meant, “oh, oh, they’re up to something?” Hold onto that caveat.
When I walked out front to view the new activity, they were playing catch. With a perfectly spherical ball of fire. Don’t worry. They were wearing my gardening gloves. Somehow I don’t believe the manufacturer was considering the possibility that while digging in the dirt, I might hit Hell.
Maybe I'm supposed to be proud that he was able to formulate a chemically based play toy to occupy his idle hands. Couldn't he just take up pottery?
But I’m not alone. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway. And thanks to teen nephews in town forging the way with their own individual idiocies, I’ve got proof of the family flaws. But is it just our heritage?
Not so, I put forth.
When I was recently thanked for giving one of my son’s peers a ride home by her mother, I missed the opportunity to just nod and smile. Instead, displaying my utter lack of savvy, I said I hadn’t given the girl a ride.
“But why would she lie –she came right home?”
Wait. Let me rewind to my own daughter’s same-age transgression. After being told explicitly not only that she wasn’t allowed to take rides from newly licensed teens but also instructed that her best friend’s sister was no exception, Alex still took the ride. Caught practically red-handed, I asked her how she’d gotten home.
“You want the truth?” she asked.
And another friend, unrelated in any way except by her willingness to admit she didn’t birth a rocket scientist told me how her son, after hearing perhaps for the umpteenth time about the dangers of drinking and driving assured her that he totally agreed.
“Don’t worry mom,” he said will all sincerity, “I only smoke pot.”
Really, he thought he was putting her mind at ease.
And my neighbors with the toddlers wonder why I gave in to the drum set? At least with the deafening beat of a bass, I know not only where he is, but also what he’s doing.
Certainly there’s the option of putting our collective heads in the sand and buying into the notion of perfect children. I love when I hear from a parent that, “oh, my-Johnny-would-never” on the same day my daughter reveals that “oh, her-Johnny-does-all-the-time.” Theirs must be a wonderful bubble –I wonder if there’s room inside for me. No, I don’t think they’d let me and my cynical self in.
And I know I don’t belong there. There’s something about reemerging from the cover of darkness to face a blinding and unrecognizable light at the end of the teen tunnel. Those flawed and funny kids of ours are supposed to come out the other end as adults, ready to face real life and real responsibilities. Masochist that I am, I don’t want to miss the steps and missteps that lead them there. I want to be there at the origin of their choices, and all its convoluted logic. After all, they learn more from getting burnt than they do if we strike the match. It’s their fire to start.
But they are trying to kill us. They have to. If we’re not out of the way, how can they ever take over the world?