Adventures in parenting, Part 1: Care and feeding of Teen Wolf

It happens almost every time. (OK, not that often, but way too much.)

A 14-year-old boy in a foul mood does something that drives his fortysomething dad bananas, and his fortysomething dad sleepwalks into the trap of allowing himself to be driven bananas.

Before you pass judgment, let me explain.

Primo is 14 and Secondo is 11, well past the stage when they need to have all of their bodily needs attended to by mom and dad. One of the advantages of having older kids is that on the weekend, if you still remember how, you can sleep in until 9, 10, 11 or even – with permission from your middle-age bladder – all the way to noon, the holy grail of loafdom.

This is only possible, however, if your kids take responsibility for feeding themselves. It doesn’t work nearly as well when they don’t, or won’t, because you’ll wake up to hungry, cranky creatures whose meal times have been thrown way off schedule, leaving you (or your payback-demanding spouse) to sort out the mess.

The problem is compounded if one or more of them turns into a complete werewolf when they don’t eat.

We’ve got one of those.

Primo, while never having been diagnosed with anything like hypoglycemia (not that we’ve ever remembered to ask his pediatrician about it), will descend into a downright nasty mood if he’s too far removed from his last meal. He’s always been that way, and his now-insatiable teen appetite doesn’t help.

He knows it, and we know it. But this fact is hard to remember when you’re tired and groggy.

So on a recent weekend morning,  I awoke at 11 or so to find Primo playing computer games, with his specialized headphones in their normal position snugly covering his ears. He hadn’t eaten, nor was he doing what he was supposed to be doing, which was working on an English assignment that he had spent the entire week postponing.

“Da-aaaad,” he’d whine each day, “it’s not due until Monday. I’ve got all weekend to do it. Leave me alone.”

Well, the weekend had arrived, and my first (semi-) human encounter of the morning was with a starving teen playing Call of Duty with an anonymous community of online gamers. He was not reading the last 12 chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird (nor was he answering 18 assigned questions about them), as he had promised.

What happened next is a blur, but you can can probably guess where this squalid little tale is heading.

Before I try to recount it, I should note in my own defence that I had not yet had my morning coffee, the one I normally drink at 7:30 a.m. on a regular weekday. And keep in mind that I haven’t been dealing with full-blown teenage behaviour for all that long, so I don’t profess to be an expert.

And besides, hindsight is 20/20 (and in parenting, you’re lucky if it’s 20/40, or even 20/80), so no gloating.

In this case, I clearly should have dealt with the first violation of a house rule – breakfast must be eaten by 8:30 a.m. – before turning my attention (such as it was) to the second, namely, that finishing homework, or at least making a dent in it, must precede all leisure pursuits.

Instead, the exchange with Teen Wolf started with a calm demand to shut off the computer. This garnered no response, because it was, allegedly, not heard through his huge, retro-themed headphones. This was followed by a repeat of the demand, which was followed by an outright refusal to comply, which was followed by a calmly delivered ultimatum, which was followed by whining, which was followed by another calmly delivered ultimatum, which was followed by yelling, which was followed by a much less calmly delivered ultimatum, which was followed by yelling, which was met by yelling and followed by more yelling, and perhaps some screaming.

We should have cut to the chase and simply slammed our foreheads together right off the bat. Indeed, pistols at dawn would have been more civilized.
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As a headache started to make its way up from the back of my neck, crawling over the top of my skull and settling into my left eyeball with a sharp jab, I decided  it would be a good time to take my leave and chill out in a different wing of the family estate.

A  large dose of caffeine was in order. So, still jangly and experiencing deja vu and disappointment at the realization that this kind of confrontation is all too frequent in these parts, I went downstairs to the kitchen.

Meanwhile, my wife – who normally wakes up before me, but whose body chose this unfortunate morning to try to snag some extra rest – emerged dreary-eyed and half-asleep from our room.

The noise had put her in a vile mood of her own.

“Have you eaten?” she asked Primo testily.

“No.”

“Come with me,” she said firmly.

(It always helps in these situations if you have a tag-team partner, even if she incessantly reminds you later of how you’ve stumbled into the same mistake over and over again. It also helps that in some primal way, “Mommy” connotes food to our boys.)

After a hearty breakfast consisting of two pieces of French toast with berries and syrup, a pizza bagel (don’t ask), half a cantaloupe and a tall glass of chocolate milk, the beast was tamed, and the homework got done.

Has this happened before? Yes.

Will it happen again? Probably.

Do we ever get it right? Occasionally.

Is he learning from his mistakes? Maybe.

Are we learning from ours? Hopefully.

But how long will this go on?

What’s that you say? Primo’s 14 and Secondo is 11 (yet going on 14), so we can expect at least eight more years of this madness? But count on 10?

Will it get any better before it’s all over?

Don’t answer. I don’t think I want to know.