And another thing...

A teenage boy thing.

Why must teenage boy things treat their mothers like dirt? I give him everything I never had. I work hard (ok, maybe not hard but long) to support him. To have the internet and the cable and the cell phone. Not to mention the video games, guitar, skateboards etc, etc. Sometimes he looks at me like I am something he scraped off his shoe. He talks to me like I am a stranger. Hell, I doubt he would talk to strangers the way he speaks to me.

When I was a teenager, I wouldn't say shit to my mother if I had a mouthful of it. Sure, I might mumble under my breath but that was the extent of it. And does anyone remember talking back? You just didn't do it. You would get the back of her hand, and deserve it. Raise your hand now to the little shit who just told you to fuck off and what do you get? Child Protective Services, that's what.

Don't get me wrong, I think there is a need for services such as that, but I also know that there are abusers on both ends. Kids today are evil creatures, they use the obsession with political correctness against the people who are obligated to feed and clothe them. How did 'you can't beat the living shit out of your kid and burn him with cigarettes' become 'you can't discipline your child at all'?

Don't you find that with anything, there is no happy medium? First you can't torture and kill animals for fur coats, now you can't kill a chicken before he gets the chance to experience air conditioning and digital cable. It's one extreme to another.

How about 'zero tolerance' in schools for bullies. Sounds good. Do you know what that turned into? No snowball fights. All they needed was a little supervision in the school yard, did they get it? No. This doesn't even stop bullying, it just stops the good kids from fighting back because they don't want to get expelled right along with the kid who is terrorizing them. And the bullies know what they are doing, it hasn't stopped them. They know how to get around it, they punch you in the face and walk away, takes a few seconds, there is no one there to see it.

Sexual harassment laws taken to the extreme, means no five year olds professing their love for little blond haired girls. Charlie Brown would be in the pokey for stalking if he were a real boy.

But I digress.

A friend of mine has a teenage girl thing we will call The Lump. She is 16. She informed her mother in the midst of one of their knock down, drag out fights that all this abuse was foretold.

My friend was very upset at the treatment she was getting from her once sweet little girl. The Lump looks at her like she can't believe she is upset and says, "I don't know why you are so upset now. You knew when you were pregnant with me that between the ages of 16 and 18 I would hate you."

Where do teenagers get this shit?

I blame Oprah.