Living with teens

I have decided that living with teenagers and trying to bring them up isn't a downhill slide. Nor is it an upwardhill struggle...more of a sideways, trying to get a grip of the side of a mountain, epic battle akin to the battle of Hastings or agincourt. The fingernail splitting agony of just trying to hold on to any semblance of normality.  

One minute you are trying to buoy them, as teenager number one is plummeting into a grunting, incomprehensible, hormone induced humour, the next you are trying to put the anchors on number two as they have nauseating dreams of becoming,essentially an all world conquering superpower (of course emotionally funded by the drivel that is X-factor or some other vomit making programme that makes our children think that with a bit of queuing and a brief chat with the likes of Simon Cowell you can become a huge money making star, cue long lecture where parents break the dreams of young people pointing out that the huge amounts of money are made by the likes of Simon Cowell and no one else. Long conversation that deserves an entirely different rant)

The mood swings become legendary and amusing but the toll is taken by the parents.  It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.  Everyone remembers their parents uttering those lines.  Well it's all fun and games until someone loses the use of the Internet.....that one is the new version! 

Internet access and teenageism seems to fall within the same parameters of entitlement that we, as a generation before, held for the tele.  That entitlement that we all felt the right to watch neighbours AND Home and Away and on the weekend, Blind Date and Baywatch!  No such thing as the fancy sky plus then! A Betamax video recorder went a long way to making our ever increasingly intricate lives a bit easier but only if the bastard recorded at the right time without cutting off half the program and to be fair if the programming officials, in all their wisdom, decided to delay said programming for any reason (normally sporting) we were fucked!

But of course trying to explain this to todays teenager will result in the rolling of eyes, a bit of an ill repressed sigh and a poorly written and misspelled ranting status update on Facebook. 

Trying to compete as a parent now, with the empathic support and general disgust at basic parenting rules on such social networks, is distressingly difficult.   The aforementioned troubling teenagers have a disturbingly large amount of friends all urging them to revolt, informing them of their "rights" and generally causing  chaos. What's a mammy to do in the face of such adversity?? The only thing we can do.....embarrassing comments on said Facebook statuses for as long as we are “privileged” enough to be their friends, after that the only way is venting publicly on a blog or through other media.

All is not lost though! I have read recently (in an obviously well respected and renowned for its well researched articles, ahem The Daily Mail) that children, at the age of 23, learn to love their mothers again.  I normally hold judgement on such articles (especially from such respected publications!) but this one I have to hold close to my heart and believe in it's truth or I am on a ride that's pointless and the need for medication to survive it will become insurmountable!