Dealing with my troubled-teen is like trying to survive a hurricane!
No disrespect to the survivors and victims of Hurricane Katrina. My heart goes out to you, but right now, from where I’m sitting a hurricane is a very fitting metaphor to describe dealing with my adolescent daughter whose gone wild.
Just like a hurricane, my troubled-daughter’s poor decision-making flies in unexpectedly, yanking up the family foundation, and along with it, our hopes and dreams, sending her mother and I whirling about, caught up in her savage-winds.
Am I being a bit over-the-top?
Nope.
I’m sure any of you who are dealing with troubled teens can feel my pain. Those of you who might be in the eye of storm right now, trust me, you’re not alone. This bud’s for you. And to those of you who’ve never experienced life raising a troubled-teen; consider yourselves fortunate, very fortunate.
When I’m feeling more reasonable and less dramatically, I see my sweet daughter as a New Orleans resident without transportation. She’s engulfed in this raging hurricane inside herself. The hurricane is life threatening. The hurricane’s name is adolescence and it has a mind of its own.
I feel like Mayor Nagin.
I have limited power. I’m imperfect. I fear for my daughter’s safety, but honestly, I don’t have the resources to do everything I need to do to save her from this inner-hurricane. Where’s the federal assistance? Get FEMA on the line! Get the President, the National Guard; somebody! Buses? Who’s going to drive them? My wife and I are busy trying to fix the levee!
My mother is like all the knowledgeable-scientist’s who predicted the impending disaster. She saw it coming. She knew about the levee’s not being strong enough. She warned us. I can still see my mother shaking her head slowly as my wife chased after our sweet little princess who’d raced away on her tiny legs across the living room, hiding beneath a footstool with a remote control in her mouth full of slobber and toddler cooties.
“Come here Jazza Wazza….give it to mommy” “No, mine” “Jazza Wazza Snazza Pazzza, let mommy have it” “No, mine. Mine, mine,…… mine”
Isn’t she cute?
That’s when my mother made that face. You parents know the face I’m talking about. The face of despair sprinkled with a touch of I told you so? It’s a scary face, but being a new parent you’re too dumb to grasp the full meaning of the face. If I’d known the truth behind my mother’s sullen face I would’ve grabbed my wife and ran away from home leaving that cute-pie toddler/future troubled-teen right there.
“You’re going to have your hands full Tim! She’s going to be a tough one”.
This is where I hold my mother partly responsible. A hand full isn’t a strong enough term to describe a parent attempting to employ damage control in a troubled-teens life. A hand full sounds like a slight irritation. Holding it only requires two hands which aren’t that hard to do because, I actually have two hands. Now, if my mother had said :
“You’re going to be in for the fight of your lives!”
…then I would have listened.
I wonder how the scientist reported the problems with the levee. Did they speak in obscure scientist mumbo-jumbo academia speak? You know,
“…based on the longitude minus the latitude times the photosynthesis of the gravitational pull of the torrential winds collectively impacting the nougat density of the steel coupling coupled with the fragmentation of the incendiary Lake Pontchartrain downpours, and isolated occurrences converted into kilometers and miles per hour taking in account for the airborne reconnaissance, high-resolution ground-surface geophysics…you’ll have your hands full”.
After hearing that synopsis it’s possible Mayor Nagin thought like my wife and I,
“oh is that all? A handful isn’t too much to deal with. We’ll be fine”.
If the scientist and my mother were a bit more “obvious” with their diagnosis, I’m sure at least in my case, different actions would’ve been taken.
Imagine the scientist saying this:
“Almost Everyone and Almost Everything that’s in this Section of New Orleans will be GONE!!”
Short, yet highly effective. Who could ignore that type of warning?
That’s what I’d call a forecast. And just like the Mayor, or the Governor of New Orleans, My wife and I did the best we could; we crossed our fingers.
So much for finger crossing.
Our daughter is now in therapy. She has a mentor, a family therapist and a personal therapist. Last year she missed 50 days of school, this year so far she’s missed about 15.
“Well at least she’s making progress….” says the therapist.
Unbelievable, but in our world of dealing with a child who skipped 50 days last year and only 15 this year, this is actually considered progress.
“Oh, she’s not a bad kid. She just makes very bad decisions”, at least that’s what her therapist says.
When I was a teenager you were either bad or good. The good kids went to school, didn’t smoke or drink and made their curfews most of the time. The bad kids cut school, smoked cigarettes, drank cheap liquor, hung-out with other bad kids, and were eventually kicked out of the house until they learned to play by the rules. Today you can’t just kick your kids out. You must send them to therapy where they can sit around and blame you for their actions. These troubled-teenagers have it good don’t they?
Therapy?
A belt and no dinner was my therapy.
This brings me to another new concept: Troubled-Teen. What exactly is a troubled-teen? How about we make up a new term, call it troubled parents. Come on people, who’s really in trouble, the parent or the teenager? I’d say the parents, because we’re the ones who are stuck dealing with the troublesome-teen. Troublesome-teens will throw your entire family into a swirling, whirling hurricane of frustration and then cry themselves to sleep as if they’re the victim.
Luckily for us, we’ve taken actions to help our daughter deal with her personal Katrina or adolescence. This is adolescence and no one said it would be easy. As with most teenagers, the biggest obstacle is controlling her associations. The friends your child spends time with are usually the main source of the problem. No one likes doing bad things alone. In one session I recall my daughter saying to the therapist:
“I wish my parents were more like Sonya’s parents” “Why” “Sonya’s parents let her smoke and drink as long as she doesn’t do it in the house, that’s why!” “You do understand that a parent who lets a child drink and smoke drugs doesn’t care about that child?” “….I guess.”
Needless to say we’ve taken steps to eliminate Sonya from our daughter’s life. I don’t blame Sonya. I blame her parents, not for having a troubled-teenager, but for giving up.
Life with a troubled-teen travels quickly from “Peaceful” to “Chaos” to “Rebuilding” and then back to “Peaceful” again. Currently, we’re in the rebuilding stage. Trust has been all but destroyed. My wife and I are doing the right things, at least that’s what the mentor and therapists say. Most importantly, we haven’t given up on our daughter. There are tiny moments where our cutie-pie princess appears from within this trouble-causing teenager. The tiny signs of life from the daughter we used to know magically replenishes us with the extra incentive we need to muddle through the setbacks and frustration.
I love my troubled-teen. I want her to enjoy a bright-future. I want her to persevere through her adolescent years and go on to accomplish many great things, but in the end, her survival is her decision. With eyes of tears today she says she regrets skipping her English classes to visit the mall with friends. She says she wants to have a promising future. I guess I’m a pushover, because I still believe in her. What choice do I have? Giving up on our little jazza-wazza doesn’t seem like an option we can live with. As her parents we’ll helplessly wait until her dreams and her actions coincide, and in the interim, we’ll continue to drop supplies and keep a helicopter running on stand-by.
