TEENAGERS

Does anyone really remember what they were like as teenagers? I don't mean recounting adventures, like thinking about a movie you once saw. I'm not talking about remembering things you did; those rememberances take on an unreal cast, like something that happened to someone else, maybe in a book once read.

But that form of recollection is about the best that I can do. I remember the things that I did, the ideas that I had about things; but it is very difficult, if not impossible to feel the way that I did then. The notions that I had then about life, mine and the world around me, are so far removed from my outlook today, that trying to relate to the me of twenty-five years or thirty years ago is as unlikely as trying to place myself in the head of the kid passing outside my window.

...Or the kid inside my windows. I have a fifteen year old son, and his behavior is so perplexing, frustrating, annoying, frightening, stupefyingly irrational at times......I could go on, but you get the picture.

Sometimes I want to ring...his...neck. Othertimes I find myself thinking, "He's not such a bad kid. In fact, we're pretty blessed to have a kid like him. He'll get over the other stuff!" Then he'll do something else flabbergasting, and I'll be back to having homicidal thoughts.

Rarely do I have these moments without reflecting, to some degree, on my own adolescent years. I don't think that my parents found me to be the most rational child either. Many of the same problems that our son is taking us, and himself through, I've already done, and then some.

The irony of it is, that rarely does that realization alter my feelings of helplessness, anger and fear about him. I've come to realize that that is because I don't really know that 'me' of so many years ago. I know of him, but I don't really know him. I don't relate to him much better than I do my son, who is so increasingly a mystery with each passing day.

I don't empathize much with the 'me' of my youth. Empathy requires a certain amount of identification with someone. With each passing year I identify less with who I was at sixteen years old. I understand him less. I also have the benefit of knowing what his misguided ideas got him in the long run, so I fear that my son will repeat many of my mistakes.

You know who I empathize with? Yep. You guessed it. My parents. My poor, long-suffering parents. Going through all my balderdash, yet never giving up on me. So I guess that I can take a lesson from those that I understand and identify with so well now, and not give up on this knothead little....and I'm not going to strangle him to death. My parents didn't strangle me, and though I probably haven't become all they had hoped, I think that they are probably smiling down on me now.