The times, they aren’t a changin’

I sit at the dinner table silently watching my brood chatter, and I reflect on my own teen years.

My mind dances over one particular period in middle school, which began with a single day marked by streak of confidence. That day my hair looked good, my makeup went on right and I loved the outfit I was wearing. I felt, perhaps for the first time in my middle school years, cool.

When I arrived at school, a friend commented on how great my outfit looked. And so, with the assurance that only such compliments can ply, I proceeded to wear that same outfit everyday for the next 3 days, and then as often as possible in the ensuing two weeks.

My mom tried to get me to change my clothes, but I was convinced I was onto something important here. I mean, looked good! And I felt good. My clothes, however, were starting to get natty…

And so went middle school.

It didn’t matter what my mom said; she just didn’t get it. And my father? Pshh. Why would I even bother to listen to him? Nobody understood me or my life or the horrific travails that I faced as a teen; nobody on Earth could possibly understand the pain and sorrow of being me. At least when I was sad, anyway.

Other times, no one could possibly be as “right” about everything, as I was. Because I WAS right. All the time. About… well, everything. Duh.

My opinions were grounded in ABSOLUTE FACT and I always remained completely unswayed by other people’s completely valid arguments, until such a time I thought it prudent to reveal that they must have been completely confused because I actually thought exactly like they did the whole time.

My vast knowledge of life and its trappings was only outsized by my enormous sense of empathy and my unfailing desire to change the world but was vastly, enormously, unfailingly curtailed by my wee-little attention span. Oh, that is so awful! Oh, that is so terribly sad! Okay I get it, I get it, what’s on MTV?

Quite frankly, I was expert at spotting injustice, both elsewhere and against me. There are people starving in Africa? That is so wrong! I can’t go to the mall? That is so wrong!

My mother—who understood me best of all—would stare at me blankly, or roll her eyes and shake her head at my self-absorption. My father would smirk. "Theresa Lynn," he would say, smiling at me sweetly from across the dinner table, "I hope that one day you have a daughter. Exactly. Like. You." And I would smile back at what I saw as his loving nature, not realizing that he meant it as a curse.

I sit now, years and years later, at a different dinner table, with memories of my own asshattery fluttering past my mind’s eye, and watch my own children plod their way through those same awkward years: one wearing the same outfit day-after-day, refusing my entreaties to change into clean clothes; another swimming in her own outsized sense of empathy and stifling self-absorption; while a third declares passionately and irreverently that she is absolutely and unequivocally 100% correct.

I smile inwardly and sigh, seeing my father’s curse play out before me, and I send up a little thank you to him: first, for the ability to experience this, and to see the humor in all this angst.

And second, for not killing me back then.