Acne and angst on the way as the teenage years dawn at last

Date Published: {J}

Last weekend marked a major milestone in our house as our eldest became a teenager – frankly, with all the warnings I’ve had from parents who’ve been through this before me, I was expecting him to come home with an ASBO before the week was out.

There seems to be a sort of cycle of peaks and troughs to your average youngster’s life which begins with total dependency – but at least, because they can’t walk, they can’t cause you too much grief once they get enough food and sleep – through the terrible twos where you cannot take your eye off them or they’ll have either fallen down the stairs or stuck something up their nose.

Then there’s the trauma of school – trauma for you, that is; because they don’t mind at all – which gives way to the happy years when they’re old enough to communicate with you but largely in a positive way.

And then they morph into teenagers when they regress on the communications front, growling instead of speaking; and when they again spend most of their time lying down – only this time they’re on the iPod on the couch instead of lying in a cot.

The sense of anticipation is compounded by the fact that his younger brother is coming up fairly rapidly behind him to ensure these teenage years continue until 2017.

Stating the obvious, that’s our own fault because we bought into the notion that having children, like jail sentences, are experiences best served currently rather than consecutively – but as with shoes and school uniforms, the older one gets to go wear his teenage years first, breaking them in for the other fella.

Okay, so 13 isn’t exactly ‘trousers down at half mast’ territory or even those massive basketball runners where the laces for some reason never need tying, but it’s the first step to spots and real temper tantrums – as opposed to the mere hissy fits or tears of childhood.

Advance notice of this column, incidentally, brought an episode of foot stomping and head revolving, topped off with several loud groans to signify the insurmountable mortification that such attention is almost certain to bring.

But it’s hard to reconcile this growing lad, with the little being you one held in the palm of one hand, a tiny new-born utterly dependent on you for everything that keeps them alive.

These days, that dependence on you for everything to keep them alive revolves around money – lunch money, money for new runners, tracksuit bottoms, football jerseys and Dominos pizza.

Where once they held your hand on the way to school and ran to hug you on their way out, they now only acknowledge you if they’re looking for something – otherwise they would sooner walk out in front of speeding traffic than be seen walking with you on Shop Street.

Ahead of you lie the disco years (theirs; yours are over), the school tours to foreign parts, the girls (again, theirs; yours is your wife), the Buckfast and cheap beer, the Leaving Cert, College fees, the fact they don’t want to go on holiday with you but do want to go to Ibiza with their mates, the fact they want to live in a flat even though you can see NUIG from your front door – the fact that all of your money fuels their lives while the highlight of your night is when the key turns if they decide to come home.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.