Mid-CenturyModernMoms: Afar and Beyond: Another Time, Another Place

Occasionally, we at MCMM will be posting guest bloggers on weekends. If you're interested in writing about your teens, please contact us.

Work and social life, to this generation, is a matter of keystrokes.
by guest author Channie Greenberg

When I was a teenager, my peers and I were focused on the usual things of our generation; which color polyester pantsuit to wear to school dances, how to meet boys from other schools, and whether or not our eye shadow was sufficiently neon. Personally, I: eschewed machined fibers for gauzy creations, met a boy through an intercity debate tournament, and used my entire underdeveloped artistic ken to paint a figurative rainbow on my face.

Things are different for my kids. My girls wear skirts which cover their knees, my boys go to schools where theirs is the only gender, and none of my children adorn their cheeks or lids with any manner of color (albeit my youngest teen does wear bangles in her ears). As for dates, my family is part of is a collective in which dating is for marriage, not for sexual gratification or for any other currently acceptable purposes.

And yet teenagers, regardless of the demographic from which they stem, are at once ranging hormones and calm astuteness. It is to my children’s credit that my wardrobe contains blues and greens and not only browns or other somber tones. It is to their merit that I have learned how to apply for an Ad Sense account and that I am currently constructing a webpage. It is because of their grace that I have tried a few more music genres and have even liked some of them.

Such wisdom, as found in youth and in sombulant cats, keeps mommy-type minds slim despite the thickening of our other parts. My offspring know how to link computers with Ipods and think nothing of communicating via instant messaging. Work and social life, to this generation, is a matter of keystrokes. I have to think to keep up.

But such teens as these still need their feet to be massaged before they go to sleep. They still need to discuss means by which to create peace among belligerent factions of friends. They still need, especially if they are boys, to consume, unfathomable amounts of calories, as those calories are found in foods cooked especially, and exactingly, by their moms.

So, keyboard in hand one moment and iron pot in the other, I wade through this water known as “the adolescence of my children.” Join me in weeks to come in my exploration of homemade sushi, of this year’s hair styles and of the “significant” differences between regular DVDs and HD DVDs.

If you have a teen or more in your own home, you might enjoy smiling along with me. It’s been proven that laughter is a far more utilitarian medicine than even the most beneficial of tears. Besides, no amount of wringing of hands or of honking of noses will ever restore the heirloom vase, which the cat knocked over when someone let her into a closed off area, will ever explain why one child has a telephone permanently affixed to her head, or will ever provide an account for why teenagers, themselves, laugh, or cry, incessantly, if you look at them funny.