I am the new Type-A Mom teen editor. The difference, this go around the block, is that I am a mother of teens. Yet, I am no less excited or hyped to be writing about them.
In the 1970’s, I wrote columns for a newspapers which disseminated their pages across the city in which I lived. I was excited. I was hyped. I was a teen.
More than thirty years later, I still care about and express my sentiments on topics of interest to teens. The difference, this go around the block, is that I am a mother of teens. Yet, I am no less excited or hyped to be writing about them.
Instead of wondering what my friends will think when they see my prose under my name, I wonder what my children’s friends will think. Just last week, I received a post from a young one who had read a bit which was published in an international source. She chirped and tweeted on about how much my exposition reminded her of the exposition of my oldest daughter.
Another time, a teacher happened to read something I had written about my only child who is not yet officially an adolescent, my youngest son. She mused into my ear about what kind of mother would write that kind of fluff about her kids. I smiled with about a quarter of my mouth and nodded at her acumen. Happily, except for academic publications, I never post my last name.
In yet a different set of circumstances, my oldest son, a youth fully vested in the rites of growing overnight, literally, through clothing sizes, and of eating only little more than half of most carbohydrates which I bring to the table, exclaimed, in grand rhetoric, that my writing had become increasingly too severe. He prescribed a course in which I would return to contemplating, for the purpose of public display, the geckos smashed in our washing machine, the dumpster cats beyond our front door, and the imaginary hedgehogs which populate our personal domain. The lad added that if I wanted to chip in for a better Ipod, I’d be doing quite well.
As for my oldest, a girl in her not-yet-in-college glory, she shrugs and then introduces me to new ways to manipulate text. It’s beyond her ken that her mother can be a word expert without also possessing prowess with software.
By the time my better half returns home, socks have been tossed (you have a better way to let them vent?), tomato sauce has been made and greedily quaffed, and a variety of questions about Pythagorean identities and triangles lay on the diningroom table and floor. From whichever corner of the sofa I have sought refuge, I look up at this man, who I met when I was only eighteen. Rather than words of welcome, I whisper, “they’re yours for the next half hour.”
