Sweet sixteen. Takes a while to get there, I’d say. Also, it’s not as sexy as it sounds; not the debutante ball it’s chalked up to be. It’s a pinnacle of a problem. Throw up thirteen. Fuck off fourteen. Gross fifteen. Sickness. You hang around teenagers, amid their sniffles, dripping of various fluids, you’ll feel under the weather fairly soon. And minimal conversation. In my teens I was missing because of television, video games that sucked the air from my brain, dulling my imagination. The fingers did the walking, and seemingly the thinking as they flitted about remotes, joysticks, or a keyboard. Now it’s a deft index digit skimming over the small buttons of a cell phone. Eyes scan over the dashing pages. They appear and then disappear like cells of thought dancing about. Get a word in—you know, words—and a head may pop up and recognize external stimuli. Something from within, a hunger, signals that sustenance of an original kind is necessary. An utterance, a cry or a bark burst out with a need. Food is soon engorged. A refrigerator is emptied. Check the front door. Food is often dashed there these days. No dice. The debris of packets, spills, and a stain is all that’s left of the consumption.
Does it peak at sixteen? Does it get better afterwards, this life of or with a teenager? Savage seventeen, asshole eighteen. Nearly done nineteen. It’s not as if they’re not aware of this state of affairs, these diseases they carry. I mean, who likes teenagers? Who says or writes nice things about them? Not me. Read the first paragraph. Adults mock them or wring their hands over them. Grandparents are wary, and strain to relate. Smaller children fear them as if they were monsters lurking in closets. They don’t understand their habits: the curious disarray of belongings, the expanse of ephemera; the clumps of tissue paper, bloodied or rendered sticky, tossed about a toilet. This is why teens start forming an identity, a sense of togetherness, of esprit de corps. The world is against them, or concerned for them, which is vaguely worse. We celebrate their individualism while we lament that very incipience because it intrudes and takes over. We envy the beginning of a prime: sexual confidence is not yet there but it’s coming; athletic prowess, litheness and invincibility are upon them whether they feel it, take advantage of it, or not. Lovingly, we hope this developmental combo of affliction and power will be like one of their illnesses: that it will pass soon and drift into memory, only to be revisited every five years with terrible reunions. The worst of us will not go to those events because they’re too painful. Or, we’ll go, but much later, long after the symptoms of adolescence have abated and others’ memory of our teenage selves has dwindled.
This was true in my case. Yes, I’m not a teenager. Not anymore. Not chronologically. It’s behind me. I’m in recovery now. Or it’s in disguise, hiding like a stash of dirty magazines. Magazines? What are those, asks a contemporary teen. Don’t get me wrong. I have warm feelings towards teenagers, the few that I know, that let me get to know them. They’re both terrible and wonderful, like I was. They compel my interest while they alienate and push away. Some of them plunder and gambol about– rolling objects ever at risk of knocking down the household furniture. When they rest, they seem immovable, forgetful, unrousable. An analyst once said to me that teens are the way they are because they are mimicking the ill or absent objects they are looking to rouse. By object he meant parent. Unconsciously, analysts use the word object to signify how parents start to feel as parents. Infants pull at, chew, or cling to their parents. They drape their limbs over their heads, hug knees and ankles. They grab and scratch, give you a cold at least once per financial quarter. Parenting a small child is a workout of chasing and wrestling, interspersed with household chores, seized naps, a comradely debriefing with a weary co-parent. The teen years grant a reprieve in the form of distance. The onset of puberty, the libidinal surge, generates space and tension: privacy and basic needs do battle, forcing outbursts that juxtapose rejection and appeal. Help. Guidance. Give. Then kindly fuck off.
You’d think they’d want this stage of life to be over; that they’d want to move on. But they linger, don’t they: teenagers. The affliction bleeds into the twenties, and for some, beyond. Certain habits, the masturbatory, the dissociative, solipsistic, drifting whimsy doesn’t seem to leave. We don’t want this period of indulgence blended with insecurity to go. It’s in the dishes left by the sink; the T-shirt spread over the washing machine, left for someone else to deal with. It’s in the stolid gaze, the hapless shrug that you receive when you ask after the thoughts that linked to these actions. Were there thoughts, you wonder? Was there shame, guilt, or rather conscience, ethics, righteousness: all the qualities that magically appear when the tables are turned, a divide is crossed. One day the adolescent finishes school, gets a job, assumes responsibility and has to lead, guide, or soothe another being. As a parent, you thought to give them a head start by getting a pet, or having a second child. Feed it, walk it, babysit them, etc. That was the point, you thought.
At some point, you thought to foster independence for your own good; to take a break, thinking a massive stage of the parenting job was done. Go online, sign up for Indeed. Download that App that will get you a credit card. Get a reference, network. Find out what a deductible means. These are your decreasingly patient instructions. Take a moment. No, take several. Take years, actually. Think back to when you were a teen, or just the last time a stage of life was coming to an end, forcing you to change. Routines stopped or altered. Someone or thing modifies a system, changes the rules, or the assumptions underlying the rules. Some of those teenagers are growing up and assuming authority because they are alright as teens. They’re polite to strangers, reflective when asked questions that call for meaning. That’s amazing, you think, when you first observe or hear of this–when you get those lovely yet irritating compliments from other adults about your kids. They (the kids) are still rebelling, actually, only it’s not called that when you’re in charge and you’re organized and well-spoken; when you’re empowered and separate from the enmeshed family tree. See, they only seem empowered, or entitled if you prefer, when they’re lounging on your dime, playing the music loud, drowning out your life. It feels not quite as threatening when they’re out and about, filling the sidewalks in packs, in gaggles of giggling, mutually-interrupting, shouting groups. Give them access to a car and this gets worse. Their windows are down and the heavy bass sounds of rap coupled with raucous singing is on public display. Not everyone in the pack is like this. On the sidewalk is a couple engrossed in an intimate moment. Hands in his pockets, a reticent boy is making an effort in the dawn of an aged ritual: he is solicitous and gentle. He is sweet, the accompanying girl will think. Sweet sixteen. Keeping his hands to himself, his head down, his glances glancing, he is not yet the boorish oaf he may soon appear to be. And the prim girl is likewise demure and self-effacing, not yet the disdainful, prickly woman she may “grow up” to become. Twenty years from now they’ll have a teenage boy or girl, or someone who will identify as neither: someone who will nonetheless expect basics of food and shelter, then games and fun; then free time and space to exercise free will, often with things that are not free. They cost money because of the rules that previous generations made. Yes, you might say to the requests that demand an easier passage through the world you made and they didn’t. Yes, you will help with some things, the things you know. Well, not all things. No, I won’t give you a ride, you’ll say, alluding to an old-fashioned artifact you might have used. Take the bus.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 