Sometimes I need a reality check from other parents of teens, especially teenage girls. I am thinking my almost 19 year old daughter is not someone I care to hang out with on a daily basis. She gets on my nerves. Bad. Yet I am stuck with her.
Do all teenaged girls do the following, or just Alesia?
Giggle insanely. Sometimes at dinner Alesia starts in with the giggling and it doesn't stop for several minutes. I just sit there grinding my teeth. I remember giggling a lot at 13 or 14, but not at 18.
Text constantly. My daughter will text while watching a movie, while sitting on the potty, while cleaning up the kitchen. Last week we were in the doctor's office, in the examining room, and I took the phone away from her because she was trying to text while being examined.
What really scares me is when I painfully and laboriously text her a message, and she texts me right back 1 minute later, several sentences. She's supposed to be in class listening.
Holler out while driving. I am trying to teach her to drive and to finish up her 40 hours to get her license. The minute I'm in the car and relaxing, she will holler out something like "OMG LOOK AT THAT RED CORVETTE!" or "LOOK AT THE BIG FAT GUY WITH MAN BOOBS RUNNING OVER THERE! HE NEEDS TO STOP! GROSS!"
Then I have to yell "Look at THE ROAD Alesia, not that guy!" or flower/car/cute dog etc.
Needless to say, it makes for fun times. I can't buy enough hair color to cover the gray any more.
Say bizarre things. I wish I could tape record some of the conversations I have with the kids in the car. I said today I might go up to the pool this weekend and relax and check out the new slide. "No, Mom, Ellen got stuck going down the new slide and you're WAY fatter than she is! Don't do it!"
I pointed out that "check it out" didn't necessarily mean throw my carcass down the thing. They were visibly relieved.
Then Michael observed that he had seen a big fat hairy guy successfully go down the slide. Thanks for that visual, son. Now I won't want to eat for a while.
Sleep with her phone. Alesia sleeps with her cell phone, the radio, and usually a book or two IN THE BED with her. When I go in to wake her up it's really hard to find her behind all the detritus. The phone is the worst though. She likes to tell me she was awake at 3 a.m. texting. When she stumbles around bleary eyed the next day I have, well, zero sympathy.
Spend hours doing her hair. Maybe because there were so few hair options available to me as a teen, I don't remember spending hours and hours in the bathroom fixing my hair. My hair is naturally wavy and thick and rarely looks good, so I sort of gave up early on. Alesia was 5 minutes late to dinner last night because she was working on The Hair. It's like another person in the house, an evil entity.
Treat her mother with extreme hostility. I went in her room a few minutes ago and she yelled "You didn't knock you just pushed the door open!" Um, I did knock. Even if you didn't like the interval between the knock and my pushing open the door, why is that cause for screaming?! She was sitting there making a friendship bracelet, not manufacturing meth.
I know I've blogged about this before. I feel like a shell-shocked veteran sometimes. When I adopted Alesia she was 13, but emotionally more like about 9. We had a lot of issues the first year related to her dislike of being told what to do by Mom, and my complete ignorance of all her particular issues, and older child issues in general. She's now almost 19 and more like about 15. I keep waiting for her to catch up, and it's a long wait. I should be rejoicing at a child I can actually have a conversation with, and instead I am thinking it's probably going to be an agonizingly long wait for that, as she struggles to catch up to her age group peers emotionally. I am starting to wonder if she will ever catch up. I hope I am just being pessimistic. My mother and I have been pretty good friends since I was about 17, and I wish I had that relationship with my daughter.
