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allynabean · 5 years ago
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Taurgust Day 15 - Reptaur
It’s her!! Grandmother Tortoise! She’s incredibly old and has the best candies for all her grandchildren
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topsolarpanels · 8 years ago
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Why your adolescent thinks you’re an idiot
Emma Beddington cherishes the days when her sons watched her as a goddess. But they have entered a new phase of life in which their parents are buffoons
Do you think Im stupid? Sooner or afterwards as a parent, you will hear yourself say this. You cant used to help. The topic merely falls out of your mouth, without being consciously formulated in your brain. Its an impotent rhetorical flourish inherited from your forefathers, a piece of indignant punctuation when your child has just told you, for example, with a straight face, that they dont know where their phone is.
But of course its not rhetorical for your children and their answer is yes, they think you are stupid. Very stupid. You have reached the phase in your parenting life when your status has changed, irrevocably, from hero to tedious buffoon. Congratulations!
It has happened to me twice now. My elder son is 14; two brothers is only 12, but with the habitual precocity of second infants, he has already mastered the art of procuring me entirely idiotic. They are both in the middle of exams. I may be an inadequate human being of underwhelming professional achievements( my sons certainly think so ), but I have never met an exam I couldnt hotshot. I love exams, but my revision skills have been proclaimed redundant: I am too stupid to be trusted. I am banned from any participation in maths or science and my proffered index cards and highlighters are greeted with an enthusiasm normally reserved for my( now long retired) suggestions that we go on nice country strolls together. The elder is dodging my attempts to engage him in stimulating debate on feudalism; the younger has taken to correcting my pronunciation when I try to test him on his Chinese vocabulary, a superior smile playing around the corners of his lips.
Thwarted, I cornered the elder on the stairs this morning to give him some last minute advice. As I started to expound on my carefully sharpened technique for answering questions you havent rewritten for, my son placed his hands on my shoulders and looked at me with a remote, benign, oddly familiar expres. It was, I realised, the expres I adopt when watching videos of bumbling pandas falling out of trees on YouTube. Theyre funny for a few seconds, but basically ridiculous.
Im going now, he said, gently but securely, cutting me off in full flow. Then he patted me on both cheeks. This is my life now. I have become that bumbling panda falling out of a tree, subjected by turns to waves of sarcasm, teensplaining and condescension.
Life used to be so easy. I was an oracle. A goddess, I could conjure wonders. My infants trusted me implicitly. I only had to show them a fuzzy video clip of an owl on a skateboard, cook a lopsided Pikachu cake, or expound, sketchily, on gravity or the Vikings to be lauded a hero. Now they giggle hysterically when I try to lend some rudimentary sex education advice, deal with Scart cables or express an opinion on Syria.
I confess that a certain degree of midlife befuddlement has crept up on me of late, coinciding unhappily with the sharpening of my childrens critical faculties. Do I know what they entail when they say they need to buy more Ram or enable SLI? No. Have I really asked my younger son five times whether he has swimming tomorrow? Perhaps I cant rule it out. Recently they have derived great pleasure from repeatedly proving me a video in which you have to calculate the probability of there being a goat or a auto behind a set of three doors, which leaves me tearful with embarrassment. When their parent and I feed and drink too much, then fall asleep on the sofa in front of Britains Got Talent, waking hours later in dishevelled, drooling bafflement, it only serves to confirm their notion that we are basically Roald Dahls Twits.
As parents of bilingual infants, we are at an additional disadvantage. I sound like a simpleton speaking French, erroneously referring to Mrs Pencil Sharpener, Mr Interview and Mrs Tentacle, whereas both boys like to persuade their parent to say things like Thirsk and wide-mouthed frog, merely to mock his French accent.
Of course, we are far from alone and that is some comfort. All teens guess their parents are stupid. Its an evolutionary imperative: a cruel, but near universal one, motivating them to leave the nest and us to expel them. When my son teensplains the causes of the first world war to me( a modern history alumnu ), I recollect the conservation biologist whose son teensplained the need for renewable energy to her and her( alternative energy consultant) spouse, and another acquaintance who was treated to a lecture on menstruation from her 11 -year-old son. We are all in it together( it being the moronic soup of adulthood ), mystified and incompetent, scarcely able to operate our remote controls without assistance.
Following in the wake of generations of stupid mothers who dont get it, we embattled straws of people have gleaned a few survival strategies from our forebears. First, it is feasible to comforting to think that there may be a degree of karmic comeuppance involved: you did it to your parents and some years hence, your children will suffer in turn.
As a adolescent, I was surely convinced of my vast intellectual superiority over my mothers, Professor Beddington and Professor Baldwin, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. My parent has a mathematical model named after him, but I expended six years believing him to be the stupidest individual ever to stroll the face of the earth. So outlandishly stupid did I believe him to be that I walked 10 paces behind him in the street, a penalty now regularly meted out to me by my own progeny. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. I look forward to watching any future grandchildren I may have trail my sons at a surly, disgusted distance.
But what, if anything, can we do about it? There are two schools of thought. The first says dont try too hard. You know how cats are attracted to the people who give them the least attention? Adolescents are basically cats( infants aged four to 10 are labradors, patently, and the under-fours are the product of some unholy union of howler monkey and honey badger ).
Do not, what it is you do, attempt to ingratiate yourself by being cool in any way. We all recollect how awful the teachers who tried to be down with the children were: dont do it. Stories of your partying or your festival-going are revolting: they do not care that you watched Radiohead in 1992 before they were famous or once shared a urinal with Bobby Gillespie. Do not say sick or fleek or similar. Plough your own austere, consistently adult furrow. My stepfather spent much of my and my sisters teenage years reading Turgenev and smoking roll-ups in the back yard: this earned him a sort of gradual, grudging respect from us. If you follow this approach religiously, you may occasionally be rewarded by a languid advance: a head laid down in your shoulder as you watch television or an off-hand request to be shown how to stimulate chocolate chip cookies or solve a quadratic equation. You may not. The key thing is not to care too much one way or the other.
Alternatively, you can prove them right. Ham it up: wear a cagoule in public, say you really love that new tune from Asos then start singing it aloud and ask them if they still like that nice Floella. Be the buffoon they think you are: theres something very restful about being viewed as little more than a ludicrous, cash-dispensing flesh marionette. After all, you cant disappoint a adolescent because they already expect the worst of you.
The thing is, I love teens mine and others. For all the contempt and the ridicule and the galling refusal to listen to my excellent advice, they are wonderful company: funny, intensely alive and explosion with ideas, the most vivid distillation of what it is to be human. I truly feel lucky merely to be around them( except when I want to kill them. Id say its 50:50 right now ).
The more I think about it, the more Im seduced to conclude that perhaps we just need to accept their verdict: we are stupid. Its their world now and we, with our climate change extinctions, homophobia and Brexit flotillas, are merely messing it up for them. My friend Barbara recently asked her teenage daughter if there was anything she could do to stem the flow of adolescent contempt coming her way. Dont be a twat, said her daughter.
Words to live by, fellow idiots.
Read more: www.theguardian.com
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