Teens Just Don’t Understand

Long, long ago in a time called the 80s, Will Smith was a singer not an actor. He was known as the Fresh Prince and along with some guy named Jazzy Jeff, he performed a song that I played (probably way too much) for my parents to listen to.

In your face, Mom and Dad!

(YouTube says the embedding capability is disabled, so here is the video and lyrics.

When I first heard this song, I focused on the lyric “parents just don’t understand.” Now, I am focused on the part I didn’t get then “there’s no need to argue.”

I need to hear that refrain more often especially when it comes to my oldest, age 14 with boyfriend. And yes, that is her age. She is not 14. She is 14 with boyfriend. There is an important distinction between these two ages. One is exponentially more annoying than the other.

Minor digression: The 9-year-old boy (also known as Justin aka JT) and I were somewhere, and he made the comment that parenting a teenager is a big responsibility. I chuckled thinking parenting is a big responsibility, but I think he is onto something. When the children are younger, you want to nurture and care for them. And then they turn into teens, and it is a HUGE responsibility to just keep yourself from throttling their little (but growing way too fast) necks. (End Digression)

Last Friday Autumn *needed* my cell phone since hers isn’t working right now. There would be a point in her day when she would have to call for a ride, and I agreed to hand over my cell phone thinking she would use it to make that call and be done with it. No. When I received my phone back, I had a new wallpaper. My color settings for the various buttons were now green. She was with me when I noticed, and I let her know I wasn’t happy.

Yesterday, I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled to my text messages. I had about 10 saved, but there was one that I really needed. That’s when I noticed all of my incoming and outgoing text messages had been deleted. Hmmm. Wonder who did that? Of course, she did it because she sent and/or received text messages on my phone and was trying to cover her tracks. But why did she have to delete mine? MINE?

Over the weekend, Autumn stayed at my mom’s house. Guess how long it took her to change my mom’s computer? If you didn’t know, may I just direct you to a comment in the previous post — it says that Autumn left me a comment, but Autumn was in bed by the time the comment was made and NetNanny blocks her from the Internet if she managed to be up when she should have been sleeping. No, it isn’t Autumn that commented. It is my mother, using my mother’s computer, which must be still signed in with Autumn’s name. I’m not sure if my mom knows how to change those settings, so it may be a while before it gets corrected. Sorry, Mom.

I remember being like that — thinking everything that belongs to my parents was mine to do with as I please. My mom never really said anything though — at least not that I remember. But my parents didn’t have electronics with personalized settings either.

A few weeks ago, Autumn used my laptop even after I had specifically said no. When I called her on it, she said what she always says “Sorry,” and I understand now how my dad used to tell me that being sorry isn’t enough. Autumn thought her sister, Maxine, had tattled on her (Maxine takes after HER mother and although she isn’t quite up to my level of world-class tattletale, she is making it into the running — and she has technology on her side — she doesn’t have to wait for Mom and Dad to come home; she can call them on their cell phone). But no, Maxine did not tattle on Autumn. My laptop did that. It was pretty obvious when my IM program logged me in as Autumn when I turned on my laptop. Touching my laptop, in my mind, is a high crime. It is where the neck-wringing patience really comes into play.

But I think the thing that bothers me more than anything is the phone. The girl is on the phone constantly. We pulled into the driveway yesterday, and Autumn walked out of the house with the phone attached to her ear. When I went inside, she told me one of my students had been calling. According to Autumn, the student had been calling “every half hour, and she is annoying.” I saw red, and Autumn heard a little bit more about phone behavior than she ever wanted to hear. Along the lines of if she stayed off the phone, she wouldn’t be annoyed…. That comment from my daughter put me in a bad mood the rest of the evening. I was just furious.

Autumn was outside, and I was putting groceries away. I knew my mom had called me several times, so I picked up the phone to call her back. I hit the talk button, and there wasn’t any dial tone. Why? Because Autumn had came inside .2 seconds earlier and picked up the phone as soon as she moved out of my eyesight/hearing range. This despite me telling her umpteen times to NOT use the phone without permission. I had to tell her this because she was grabbing a cordless handset, hiding herself in the house and would be talking for hours before I even realized someone was using our phone. I caught on quick though, but she apparently is still trying this, and it makes me want to pull the plug on every single phone we have. When I heard her on the phone, Autumn was treated to another comment from me (and so was whoever she was talking to).

At this point, the phone and I just weren’t getting along, and I forgot all about calling my mom back. My mom called again later, and I was talking to her when the call waiting beeped in. Two guesses on who it was, and the first guess doesn’t count. He was polite, but it was 8:30 p.m., and I let him know that Autumn was done with the phone that night. After I finished my call, I did pass along to Autumn that he called, and she immediately wanted to call him back despite it being around 9 p.m. Um. No. I think I was raving again about how it would be nice to not have my phone calls interrupted and to be able to use my phone when I want to. Hearing this, Autumn mumbled that she would like the same thing — and I went off again telling her SHE didn’t have a phone. To which her sister, Amanda, (dangerously) pointed out that Autumn did have a cell phone. Yes, she does, but it is not for talking hours at a time.

(Went off on a bit of a rant there.)

I intended to say something about how I am trying to not be a parent who doesn’t understand. I have better taste in purchasing clothes than my mom did (which is the part that I really related to when I first heard the song by the Fresh Prince). I know what it is like to want to talk to a boy all the time. I ran up phone bills to her dad, so I know.

I try to use these experiences to show Autumn that I am trying to be considerate within boundaries. Autumn doesn’t hear it that way. She thinks that every time I admit to her something that I did when I was young, it means that I can no longer complain/discipline her for doing the same thing. It doesn’t work that way, Chickie.

For instance, Autumn is in 8th grade and the boyfriend is in 10th. Autumn’s parents are not thrilled about this, and the boyfriend’s mom apparently wouldn’t be either if she knew. When Autumn first started going out with him, she lied to us and said she wasn’t. I knew better, but she lied because her dad told her he was too old (heck of a thing to be 15 and too old, eh?). She finally fessed up. I mentioned when I was a freshman that I dated a junior. A-ha! Autumn thought, and she actually told me “Then you can’t say anything. You did it.”

Ah yes, I did it. I did a heck of a lot of things but that doesn’t mean I want my children doing the same things. I’m not trying to be a hypocrite — I’m trying to be the voice of experience. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. If I had to do it again, I wasn’t that enamored with the junior guy. I pretty much dated him because he was a junior.

But that isn’t the point. I wasn’t bothered with the going out with — I pretty much knew it because she was talking to him constantly, so I wasn’t buying the “just friends’ line. I KNOW better. I get upset that she lies to us. I keep trying to tell her that in the very near future she is going to need her parents to trust her, and she isn’t going to have our trust if she keeps lying about these little things. I would rather have her tell me the truth than lie to me. Personally, I think the biggest problem is lying/deceit. It is this type of behavior that makes me the most angry. It goes in one ear and out the other. Right now Autumn and I are at the stage where we are talking AT each other instead of WITH each other.

If Autumn had came inside and asked to use the phone, I may have said yes, which would have meant I wouldn’t have picked up the phone to call my mom and expect to hear a dial tone. I may have said no, but I do know that the sneaky behavior — doing things she knows she had been told not to — is going to end up with consequences that are worse for her. She, however, has yet to figure that one out. I try to tell her. I mention that in the near future she is going to want to do things — like borrow our car — and how she treats our things now will play a role in what we decide. I may as well be talking Swahili….

So back to Will…

I think he should do an updated version of his famous song. So I can play it and be annoying and basically say, “In your face, Autumn!”

Alas, Will acts now, so I guess I will have to settle for this quote from Jennifer Crusie’s Faking It: “If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.” — Gwen Goodnight*

I need to work on that horrible warning aspect….

*In the acknowledgments for her book, Crusie notes the quote was supposedly said by Catherine Aird, but she couldn’t find documentation for it. I read it in Crusie’s book, so there.

Thanks for playing.