This day is a dark, depressing Roman numeral in the outline of my life.  Today, after blood tests, x-rays, cat scans, MRI’s and stress tests – particularly stress tests – I have been diagnosed as the parent of a sixteen-year-old!

Now don’t get me wrong, I knew from the start that he was my son and we’ve been raising him all these years, so that part was no surprise.  The problem stems from the fact that, up to this point, I dealt with the parental issue fairly well because I could recall, vaguely, that I was, at one time, a child.  I could work with the child management issues easily because, after all, I was once a kid and I made it through.  Plainly, it couldn’t be too difficult.  There are, of course, some easy rules that apply – children should go to school, they should be quiet and if there is a chance they are doing something wrong, they probably are.  At least that’s the obscure recollection I seem to have about early youth.  I was comfortable with that.

Now, my son still goes to school and he does quite well.  I assume there are really cute girls in the college prep courses.  He’s hardly ever quiet, however.  Even when he does the teenaged-moody-introspective thing he’s noisy.  The times he is quiet is when the probability of his misbehaving increases – after all, it’s difficult to brew your own whisky or build self-attaching automotive nuclear pipe bombs when the stereo is blasting the current top 40 social degenerate anthems… although, at least it’s not Lawrence Welk.

At first I thought my problems in dealing with his sixteenth birthday had to do with my own aging, but that isn’t really what bothers me.  I already passed the 40 mark and I got up and went to work that day just like any other…at least that’s what people tell me because the memory isn’t as good as it was when I was, say, 39.

All right, so maybe having a 16-year-old is no big deal to you…  Clearly, you have never been the parent of a 16-year-old.  Think back.  Do you remember being 16?  I do.  I remember 16 as a milestone in my life.  I remember the things I did.  I remember the way I saw the world, my life, my family.  I remember what I thought and what I felt.  And that’s where the whole problem lies… I remember!

The deviousness of the youthful mind trying to exert its independence comes first to mind.  Basically, that means I recall periods of being a self-centered little creep.  Not everyone goes through this.  For instance, some of the kids I went to school with were self-centered big jerks.  The primary determination has to do with how popular you are.

Many youth in this age group will use the trust parents have in them as a tool.  They can scheme within this trust to say they are camping out at the lake with the guys when, in fact, they are trying to get by with spending the night at a party with a co-ed group where they do absolutely nothing wrong, not because they don’t want to but because they don’t know how.  This is a common type of deceit among youth moving into young adulthood and is the primary source of the personal belief that they are smarter than their parents are.  Again, this is a self-centered point of view based on the fact that parents have other children and other life issues to deal with in addition to one teenager.  Most kids find this out in adulthood when they become parents and realize that their folks didn’t actually believe they were going to a church youth group meeting at 9:00 PM, but they were much too happy to have the couch and the television set to themselves in peace and quiet to ask any questions.

I also recalled the temptations and difficulties involved with growing into your own person.  The WIWAK Syndrome* notwithstanding, youth still have severe problems to deal with – some new ones and many of the same ones we had as kids: career choices, the opposite sex, drugs, alcohol, smoking and, worst of all, adults who seem to have forgotten their part in the placement of Mr. Schaefbauer’s Volkswagen on top of the retaining wall at the school after wrestling practice… though I should point out that it wasn’t my idea.  At least, not entirely.

Finally, as if recollection of the world at 16 wasn’t bad enough, it didn’t stop there.  Just like an amnesiac in a bad suspense movie like those black and white ones that you see late at night when you’re sick and you slept all day and then you can’t sleep at night so you watch whatever is on because you’re still miserable but wide awake and…  Well, just like that, you remember everything about your childhood.  So not only did I run through all the memories from my teenaged years, I was stampeded by other thoughts.  Such as accidentally burning down the neighbor’s junk pile, which was hollowed out to form a secret fort that no one knew about except the people on the northwest side of town.  Or the one girl I invited to my eighth birthday party thinking none of the other 3^rd grade boys would notice.  Or the times I got in trouble for all those things my brother did.  (I do seem to remember my brother getting in trouble for things I did, but I won’t bring up anything in particular.  His son will turn 16 next year so I’ll let him think of that on his own.)

This last memory engram easily does the most damage to a person’s approach to youth guidance.  It moves the parenting picture from black and white into shades of gray, or maybe pastels, in which everything varies according to the severity of the transgression and the intent behind the action.  It was much easier when each offense resulted in a standard 9 months of being grounded with time off for really good behavior like saintly acts or the drafting of ground-breaking legislation.

After all, when we remember that there are actual reasons for the deeds of children and you once again understand their viewpoint, you realize that the problem is not so much spite or stupidity as it is genetics and upbringing.

NOW do you understand my anxiety?

* The WIWAK Syndrome is a seemingly natural phase in the human condition, which is believed to date back to a prehistoric era of early man.  Cave drawings have been found in north-central Africa which, when finally translated, read, “When I was a kid, we had to skin our own mastodons!… And we were happy to be able to do it, too!”