Please, for your own Sanity, begin at Part 1.

I have to say that right at the stroke of 13, you could actually see the difference and difficulty that hormones bring on to both budding teens and parents alike. I hardly expected it to be that drastic and true, but it was. Maybe I was hoping that all the horror stories I had heard were wrong, but they are not. You can see it rising up like the swell of a wave. You can feel the physical change like electricity charging the air.

Being a girl, and after a lifetime of dealing with PMS, I could understand the overwhelming and uncontrollable emotions Horrible emotional outbursts for no reason. Crying and sensitivity at the drop of a hat or a heartwarming Coca cola commercial, thinking for days that wow, suddenly, my life really does suck, but then you ride it out and the fog lifts and you go: “Oh, it was PMS!” I certainly did not have that clarity when I experienced myself as a teen, feeling oh-so-righteous in my personal indignant; but as a parent, I could sympathize. I didn’t hold it against him. I understood it and mostly tried to guide him through the other side.

Now I would not be honest if I did not think that somewhere the root to some of this was male pissing contests and some kind of weird vying for my affection. After having me to himself for years, and a usually absent father, it was hard for Garin to assimilate to the new male in the house. Especially when that male was ex-Marine, had a lousy (aka horror story) male role model/ father really step father/ absusive Ahole for real of his own, and didn’t, especially at first, take too kindly to anyone questioning his authority.

But, this is not about making it all Rye’s fault, because it is so not. Rye came in as a friend to Garin. Always very clear about his role, “I’m not your dad, I’m not trying to be your dad, and you have a father”. In fact, Rye cared way more than I ever could about what Pat thought of what was happening in our home. He actually cared about Garin’s father approving of him as a role model than I ever could.

Still, it was there. I think. I can be aware enough to think that possibly some of my seeing it is based on my own childhood as my mother DID play my father and me off each other and there WAS some weird ass family dynamic where I HAD to side with my mom against my dad. Needless to say, I knew how crazy fucked up THAT was, so I had no problem acknowledging that the parental units ARE a united front. Even if that is easier to say verbally than to always act on, especially when your other half is saying or doing something that makes your insides scream NO! Granted it took Rye and I a few years, or maybe it is still a work in progress, to master the subtle signs given between partners that say “Hey, your crossing one of my lines… back off…back off..”

Looking back, the been to too many shrinks in my day me wants to say that Garin felt displaced by a new daddy man, a new sister and a new brother. Looking for fault lines, I can understand how having all the attention (which was NOT EVER my 100% undivided attention Live-for-and-through-my-child because I have NEVER been that kind of mother and I have always maintained MY OWN personal space.. aka Bedtime is bedtime and them mommy is OFF!)..Anyway, the attention gets sent to another man, and then these two needy babies who happen to be full sibs and we all make the nice happy perfect family…except that I WAS ALWAYS SO AWARE OF THAT ISSUE AND CONTER-ACTED AGINST IT.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I have always adored Rye’s family…they don’t pull that blood-not blood thing. We don’t do “half’ siblings. None of us do. No step crap either. The family is all over with all that stuff… and we are just that FAMILY. Scarlett and Tristan were always just Garin’s Brother and Sister…he just happened to have another dad. Just the same way Max is all their brother’s too – he just happens to have been raised by another family as well. I mean, as Garin stopped doing things with us as a family, I thought it was because he was a freaking teenager and that’s what teens do. So, I am being an uber cool understanding mom by not making him go to Easter brunch at Grandma’s.

The thing of it is really, is that this all me worrying to death and the child has never really said that he feels this way. I am really projecting. The only time that he ever said he felt left out was this past Labor Day weekend when we all went to NJ to go camping and I told him at the last minute, assuming he was working (he was), and assuming he would NOT want to go away for 4 days with 3 kids under 7 and 4 boring adults to the beach ( he didn’t) Also, was the fact that the two daddies didn’t decide to go until THAT MORNING and messed it up as well. So yes, he pretended to be insulted and maybe he was somewhat… but he also threw it in my face because he knew it upset me and made me feel guilty and he would laugh. He did like to torture me so.

Can you tell I still feel bad anyway?

Oh wait, when S and T were really little he used to act jealous at times, but I would calmly tell him that he had all the same baby like attention that they are getting, even more so when he was small, but he didn’t remember it. Maybe he was too independent for his own good. I don’t know. I do know that he was a tremendous help at times, and really, two babies, 20 months apart…sometimes Garin was necessary to my sanity. Which also made me feel guilty as I, being 12 years older than my brother, HAD to babysit him as a teen and I hated it…and so, swore I never would do that to my kids and I did. Heck, if you have a 14 year old at home and two toddler’s asleep and you and your husband can run out to see friends for 2 hours… without paying a babysitter… I get it now. Sanity.

Anyway, back to the hormones. OMG, they suck.

Maybe for girls it is all crying and drama, but for Garin… it was this “I-just-can’t-let-go-of-this-issue-even-if-it-is-so-stupid” and then some pretty yucky rage. Now part of that is just Garin, I think. It’s his personality. I mean, one of the constant lines of his childhood was “Garin, I said no and I mean no. I’m not going to change my mind no matter what you come up with. That’s it. Stop arguing with me. Just say OK, mom. My answer is final. End of Story!” The kid-man-child thinks he can talk anyone out of anything and only HE is logical. The rest of us…. freaking stupid.
And I expected that. I can deal; with being so very un-cool and not knowing, in his opinion, what real cool consists of, I can deal with my opinion meaning doodie. I MEAN, THAT IS, REALLY, PART OF FORMING ONES IDENITY. You reject what you know. You question it. You reject parts. You form your own ideas. Maturity…adulthood… etc! Ok… I didn’t take the rejection of myself personally. On a real level, yeah sometimes it hurt my ego. Sometimes it made me feel old. But I could understand it, and I feel it was normal and expected. Seeing it pretty clearly, sometimes the situations were laughable. Really.

Like the time that I was being parental with Garin about his report card. I do believe it had to do with Spanish. And he had failed it… and I was disappointed, but cool about it. What got me was not that he had failed, but he had not really tried, had decided he hated it and failed. So yeah, I was being “disappointed” as it is MY JOB AS A PARENT. (and that was something I would tell him… it was MY JOB to know where he was and what he was doing… MY JOB!) And I remember this very clearly, it was after the BIG TALK about how ONE SHOULD NOT FAIL SPANISH BUT IF THEY DO THEY HAD BETTER ACT LIKE THEY HAD STUDIED WAY MORE.. and I was walking out of Tristan’s bedroom, and he came up on me in the doorway. And you could tell he had been stewing on it for a while… and he actually said “Nothing I do is ever good enough! You didn’t say anything about all my other grades… you just freaked out about Spanish… I’m never good enough!!” Really, there should be a great big “Whaaaaahhhhh….” after that. And it was all I could do not to laugh. Of course we focused on SPANISH becasue that is the class that he FAILED. Doh! It was just so ANGST ridden!! And I said to him, ‘Garin, I feel like I have stepped into a John Hughes Movie… which, being that he was born in ’91, was a lost reference to him., but I was able to tell him, to GUIDE him, that this was an emotional surge and he needed to STOP presuing this line of reasoning and just go ride it out until he felt better. (AKA it’s just your hormones…go eat chocolate and cry for girls or for teen boys.. go sulk in your room and play loud music and then sleep please!).

Granted we had friends over that night and yes, he heard us laughing about the insanity of teen years on the porch and no, he was not amused to hear us laughing over his emotional reactions and us joking about how “Wa, I NEVER do ANYTHING right for you.. I can’t even FART good enough for YOU… I can’t even CLENCH my SPLINTER the way YOU like it”… OK… definalty a parental mistake. Yes, you must , as a parent, keep your sense of humor for you own sanity, but DO NOT let them hear you! But I tell you, the hormones made us all nuts! It was actually very freaking funny.

But still, I understood them… and I knew that those hormones just had to be ridden out. Must not let them get the best of us!

It was hard because inevitably Garin would slam a door when dismissed. As in OMG… you’re THAT WAY…go calm down and we can talk about this further when you get control. And Rye, poor man, the inner drill sergeant… could NOT deal with the slamming… and I had to train him to LET IT GO. Don’t correct the slamming… it is the child expressing his frustration… don’t engage… and if he was allowed to ride it out… then after bit, he would come back and apologize that he was, indeed, acting like an ass. And all would be ok… parental logic would rule the day and all would be right in the world. O fopcurse, he usually only apoligized to me and was Ok then with me..

At least that was my plan to ride out the teen years. It was not easy. And yes, more often than not, Rye and I would end up fighting about how each of us handled it. I felt he was too hard. He felt I was letting myself be manipulated. But we got better at it, we really did and I thought that there would come a time when Garin would realize that you just could not fight the system ALL THE TIME. I was waiting for his idealism to get beat down by life and for him to realize that sometimes, you just got to play by the rules.

Granted that might sound weird coming from me, but actually no. I know you actually DO get more bees with honey than vinegar. And people DO listen more when you talk to them normally rather than throw your opinions down their throat in anger. So I do practice what I preach… and even if, (again…my projections here) even if Garin and Rye just had an oil and water mix and for whatever resentments, rubbed each other the wrong way… I would tell Garin… you have to deal with assholes in life. Someone in your life will be, to you, an asshole. Whether it is a co-worker, or your boss or your father in law SO YOU MIGHT AS WELL FIQURE OUT HOW TO DEAL WITH THOSE KINDS OF PEOPLE NOW…and no matter how many times and in what ways Rye followed my lead, Garin could still NOT get over whatever it was.

To the point that one day, about a year and a half ago, it could so awful that I said to them… that’s it No one wins! And I announced that Garin would have to move to his dads and Rye would have to get out and I would sell the house and live alone with the kids… because the fighting was horrible and I felt so torn… and THERE WAS NO WAY I COULD CHOOSE EITHER ONE OVER THE OTHER.

I think I shocked the dickens out of both of them…which was, somewhere..I think.. my intention. And they begged me not to be so crazy and rash. That we should not throw out the whole family because they were jerks. It was a good coming together kind of time. I mean Garin was very ernest about how we should not be silly over their fighting. He was seriously concerned.. or so I read into it. And I had hoped we had gotten over the evil hump of teenage years.

HA HA HA .. I am such an optomistic fool!

-oh, there is still more-to be continued