Another excerpt from Book 1 on riding the teenage roller coaster:
A friend of mine recently told me a story about when he was in high school and he was all ready to go out for a night on the town with his buddies. He had a 12-pack of beer in the trunk of the family car and he was ready to roll. As he was saying goodbye to his mom, she suddenly said to him, “Hey Tom, I think I forgot something in the trunk, will you come out with me and help me get it?” “Ummm, mom, no, I gotta go! I am late to pick up Bob. I really gotta go now,” Tom said nervously. “I will do it when I get home.” His mom looked at him sternly and said, “No Tom, we will do it now.”
So, there went the beer and the plans for the night. Tom, who now has four kids of his own, can laugh about it today, and talk endearingly about his all-knowing mom, “I don’t know how she knew, but she just knew.” But Tom also revealed that for as many times as his mom knew, there twice as many times that she didn’t.
We all have these kinds of stories and then some. There were times when our parents figured out our meticulously developed, fail-safe plans to engage in stupid, and sometimes illegal teenage antics, and sometimes they didn’t and we got away with it. I bet it would be fair to say that the majority of you reading this have at least one “lucky-to-be-alive” teenage story that you have vowed to NEVER share with your children.
And this is exactly what scares us! We want our children to be able to live to tell (or not tell) their children their own stories about how they pulled the wool over our eyes . But we are too smart for any wool to be pulled over our eyes, right? We are MUCH smarter and clued in than our parents were. Maybe. But according to some recent admissions of my now 19-year-old, apparently, I missed a few things.
