love-in-the-time-of-contempt

When it comes to generating writing material, teenagers are gold. Their world is a narcissistic, anarchic, paranoid hell of anxieties and stresses about how they look; how popular they are or aren__; and how fast or slowly, big or small their private parts are growing. As an observer, it__ fantastic. Hilarious, at times. Poignant and heartbreaking. It is all the stuff of great human drama because, before your eyes, you get to witness character transformation. Boy grows into man. Girl grows into woman. Writers strain to make this shit up.But _ and here__ the catch _ we dare not discuss any of this if we want our kids to trust us or ever talk to us again. And that__ because, lifts and pocket money aside, teenagers crave privacy _ the need for which hatches both swiftly and silently while we__e sorting out the laundry. It__ as if they suddenly wake up one day creeped out by the thought of all those years we wiped their butts and helped them put on their undies and they go into lock- down. They smoke us out, put up walls, close their doors, shut down their stories, and waft, earphoned, through our homes in a shroud of hormones and appetite. Their lives _ in which, until recently, we participated with Too Much Information and gross oversharing _ suddenly become __one of our business.

There will come a time when a person you most likely pushed out through your vagina and nursed from yournipples, whose bottom you wiped, and whose snot and spit you cleaned up over several sleep-starved years will apprehend you with a mixture of boredom and irritation and say, __et a life, Mum.__his would be a good time to remember that a) violence never solved anything; b) teenagers don__ have a full brain yet _ the prefrontal cortex that controls the ability to make important distinctions, like who controls the pocket money, only kicks in around the age of twenty-four; and c) you are, in fact, the adult.

You will need to stay calm as you witness the candy floss in your daughter__ smile harden into brittle bitchiness. You will need to muster a new resolve as your son__ fascination with Pokémon shifts to porn. You will have to recalibrate your mothering instinct to accommodate the notion that not only do your children poop and burp, they also masturbate, drink and smoke. As their bodies, brains and worlds rearrange themselves, you will need to do your own reshuffling. You will come to see that, though you gave them life, they__e the ones who__e got a life. They__e got 1700 friends on Facebook. They__e got YouTube accounts (with hundreds of sub- scribers), endless social arrangements, concerts, Valentine__ Day dances and Halloween parties. What we have _ if we__e lucky _ is a __hanks for the ride, Mum, don__ call me, I__l call you,_ as they slam the car door and indicate we can run along now.

Love knows no barriers, no distance.It makes you dance as if in a trance,And catches you up when you are down.It makes you draw a smile from a frown,And embarks you in a river when you fall, And most of its grace, it embraces us all!