Raising a teen: part 4

Raising a teen part four 

As a child I loved watching the Waltons. I mean what not to love about a cute family, all living and working together, with the teens helping around the house and all saying goodnight to each other. It’s one of those shows that just fills you with a warm, fuzzy feeling. It also fills you with a false sense of reality and you start thinking having teenagers will be an amazing experience, full of family conversations, help around the house and of most importantly the opportunity to say “goodnight Jimbob” before you turn out the lights at night. 

It’s all LIES! Whoever wrote that program had either eaten too many smarties or was having some sort of break from reality because the only warm,feeling raising a teen gives you is the one you get when you’ve pissed yourself because your bladder is weak and the teenager has scared you half to death screaming at his friends down some crappy plastic headset while simultaneously shooting people on a video game. Let me assure you, that warm feeling soon turns to one of anger when you eventually pick yourself up from the floor after army rolling across the landing to avoid the hail of bullets you felt certain were coming through your walls, and you once again tell/shout at the teen to turn the stupid game down. 

There are also no cute family discussions around the dinner table. Don’t get me wrong, there are discussions but they are far from cute, the teen always finds a way to bring the conversation round to some disgusting topic, there is always one person who doesn’t like what we are eating and even at the age of 17 I still have to nag the teen to eat his broccoli. 

Then of course there is bed time.  Not the teens bedtime, my bedtime. You can tell the waltons never had the internet, video games or you tube, because there is no going to bed early with a Horlicks and not a “goodnight jimbob” to be heard in our house. Instead, I go to bed a good few hours before the teen. I spend the first 30 minutes of my much needed beauty rest attempting to ignore the sounds of grenades and gunfire coming from the teens bedroom, but eventually the feelings of being in an international war zones gets too much for me, que mum banging up the stairs in her Bambi pjs to complain about the noise and the teen complaining for a solid 10 minutes that it’s not the same playing the game with headphones on. 

By the time I get back into bed “goodnight jimbob” is  the last phrase on my mind, nor will it have been the phrase I would have used on my journey up the stairs, let’s be honest. It’s normally around this time when the only warm fuzzy feeling I now desire has naff all to do with spending quality time with the teen, it has been replaced with desperate need for the warm fuzzy feeling of my duvet and total isolation. I pull my koala sleep mask over my eyes, call the Waltons a few choice names and send a silent prayer up to heaven that my last nerve will hold out for another day.