From a prompt on the DailyOM.com
Adolescence should be outlawed. It has the potential to truly ruin your life and carry trauma with you throughout. And so many parents have no concept of this! Did they not experience adolescence? It’s not something you go through then conveniently forget about, much like the unbelievable pain of childbirth, after which one forgets the pain and chooses to go through it again and again. I don’t know anyone who would choose to relive their adolescence and I really don’t think I know anyone who had many positive experiences with that period in their life.
I remember distinctly, as a parent, when my oldest child, a daughter, was beginning the adolescent stage. We’d gotten into a huge fight, butting heads about something she wanted to do or believed to be so and I was not going along with her train of thought or frame of mind. She was literally screaming at me that I had changed and I had become a different person, with no resemblance to the Mom she once knew and loved. I tried not to get drawn into her dramatic stance and I tried very hard to explain to her that it was she who was changing. I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain the life changes that were happening to her and she insisted that she was exactly the same and I had become this horribly changed person, disallowing her to be who she always was. That was the first of many such arguments and we went…
