According to many of today’s “mommy bloggers”, there’s
currently a worldwide epidemic of asshole children. Visit the kidsareassholes blog, or the Mothers Against Asshole Kids and Kids Are Just Adorable Mini Assholes
Facebook and Pinterest pages and you’ll see what I mean.
While most parents can think back to an incident when their
three-year-old destroyed the entire house with a single granola bar or screamed
so loudly for candy that wasn’t purchased that everyone in the supermarket parking
lot believed they were being beaten, and think, “yeah, that was an asshole
move,” there are others who think referring to toddlers and prepubescent
children as stupid, incompetent, and detestable (Webster’s definition of asshole) crosses the threshold from edgy
joke into inappropriate parenting. In fact, Healthyday.com calls such
references “verbal child abuse," along with any name-calling, swearing, indirect
criticism, and sarcasm.
While I can agree that regularly referring to innocent
toddlers engaging in toddler behaviors with putdowns makes me uncomfortable, I feel no such discomfort when the moniker is used to describe
teenagers behaving badly. After puberty has begun, all bets are off.
[Photo Credit: Me, I made this and it's freaking hilarious!]
I get it: teenagers are CRAZY—like literally have stuff
going on in their brains that turns them into insane people, but the resulting
asshole behavior HAS GOT TO STOP! As the mother of four assho—er, teenagers—I
am at my wits end!
[photo credit: columbian.com]
I recently heard a TED Talk scientist refer to adolescence
as “the period of life that starts with the biological, hormonal, and physical
changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual obtains a stable,
independent role in society.” Dear Lord! I can’t wait that long for my kids to
cut the shit!
This summer, the Summer of Freedom as my kids must have been
referring to it in their addled minds, I witnessed behaviors from my children
that I used to sit back and wrongly judge “slacker parents” over.
The oldest of my brood got five tattoos in a span of four
short months—all but one of them in a foreign country where I have no idea of the
industry’s regulations and safety procedures, and one of them containing an
error. This has been one of my biggest fears since seeing all the examples of
regrettable tattoos on Facebook and TV shows like Bad Ink. The horror! #1
assures me that the erroneous ink is an easy fix, but I have yet to receive a
picture of the corrective work. I have begged him to stop the madness!
It wasn’t long before #1’s misdeeds were eclipsed by his younger
sister—my kids seem to be in some sort of twisted competition to see who can
kill me with stress and worry first and most gruesomely. My oldest daughter, my
National Honor Society student and Homecoming Princess, was cuffed and stuffed into
the back of a police car until I could get to her for changing t-shirts inside
her car in apparent view of a skatehop waiter with 20/20 vision in pitch
darkness. (If only she’d changed before
ordering a side of cheese sticks, she may have avoided the witness who was able
to somehow differentiate a solid blue bra from a bikini top in July from 50
feet away at 10:00 p.m., but I digress.) Pissed as I was, I thought the
handcuffs were a little much, but the cop let her go with the warning, “There
are a lot of things you can’t do in public. Taking off your clothes is one of
‘em.” Wouldn’t she know this if not for her hormone-befuddled and
junk food driven brain?
Not to be outdone, my middle child has also recently thrown
his hat into the ring of Mom’s Death Match, by skipping school three times the
month of August and then having the audacity to forge excuse notes from me with
grammatical errors! I got a call from the school secretary when one of the
closings was followed by a colon instead of a comma.
“Thank you:
Michelle Combs”
Aw, hell no! All I
can say is that he deserved the paddling he got, for that damned misused colon if nothing else, along with the punishment we
levied at home.
There have been other instances. A couple of them teamed up
and snuck out of the house after 12 a.m., supposedly for McDonald’s McDoubles. I didn’t know those were tempting enough food items to risk losing driving
privileges over, but apparently to the insane teenage brain, much like Sonic
cheese sticks, they too are irresistible. The car the Princess and my own junior
aspiring writer share to get back and forth to athletic practices and an
after-school job is currently parked at a relative’s house some five miles away
until the two can come to their collective senses. We all hope it doesn’t take
until they’ve obtained their “stable, independent roles in society.” It’s been
a real pain having to cart them around everywhere again.
This summer has made me long for the days when the worst my
kids were doing was causing me umpteen trips to the ER for skittles and shit
they were shoving into their nostrils and ear canals. I no longer begrudge the money
they cost me by flushing my car keys, favorite earrings, and any other object
at hand down the toilet every time my back was turned. I’d settle for my
youngest son pooping in the bathroom air-conditioning vent as a toddler again
over the shenanigans of asshole teenagers any day.
On the bright side,
today is Labor Day, the official END OF SUMMER, and #1 turns twenty tomorrow!
That’s one of the brood into adulthood, one of the five stable and having
claimed his independent role in society. Surely with a little swearing,
indirect criticism, and sarcasm I can survive the adolescences of the others, no matter what those HealthyDay writers think.
