Category: Teenagers
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My Son Has Never Read A Book
To have to admit that at the age of nineteen my son has never read a book fills me with the sort of bad-parent angst and shame that I imagine I would experience if I stood in front of an AA meeting and admitted to being an alcoholic. He reminded me of this fact yesterday…
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Retirement: Sea Change Or No Change
It feels like we’ve been planning our retirement our whole lives, yet now as we inch closer to our target, the old man and I have realised that the dreams we shared in our early years together may have changed. I thought that my aspirations would centre around little more than long lunches at the…
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‘Tis The Season Of The Family Holiday
It’s that character-building time of the year when all those carefully thwarted irritations caused by living with people you didn’t choose to live with, are thrown squarely into the spotlight on the family holiday. Why I insist on instilling this week of hell bonding I have no idea, but I get sentimental after I watch…
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Suicide, And Making Men Understand That They Don’t Have To Be Heroes
It seems a million shades of wrong to be preparing for Christmas drinks when a week or so ago another family lost their son, in his early twenties, to suicide. I cannot imagine their ongoing suffering as I worry about whether we’ll run out of wine or if I’ll poison everyone with my Thai chicken…
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This Time Last Year My Son Should Have Been Sitting His HSC
Don’t worry, I’m not torturing myself with this fact, but this post is one that I’ve wanted to write for a long time about my son. It’s similar in vein to the piece Jenny Lawson, “The Bloggess”, wrote on election day in the US – It’s Going To Be Okay. It’s about holding onto the…
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When Your Kids Selfishly Decide To Become Vegetarian
For the third time in her short life, NC has decided to give up meat and become a pescatarian. She is an environmental vegetarian which is apparently the practice of vegetarianism or veganism based on the indications that animal production, particularly by intensive farming, is environmentally unsustainable. Industrialised agriculture contributes on a “massive scale” to global warming, air pollution,…
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Teenagers, Privacy and Door Slamming
A friend once bragged how when her daughter went through that special teenage phase when she used to ram home her opinions by slamming her bedroom door, she finally reached her tipping point one day, found a screwdriver and removed it. When her daughter returned home from school, she explained to her that privacy is…
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Teens Eating Salad, Working Ovens and Medals for Outstanding Parenting Achievement
There’s major cause for celebration in the new house this week, firstly because the oven is still working after Kurt cremated a pizza in it at 4am on Sunday morning, forgot about it, went to bed and if not for the old man’s remarkable sense of smell, (or weak bladder), none of us might be…
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Kate’s Parenting Angst and Toddler Versus Teenage Tantrums
I know she has about thirty-five staff on the payroll to help her, which must give her a level of confidence that none of us can truly understand – because who else in the world could pull off white jeans with a baby and a toddler in tow? – but Kate Middleton must be an…
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I Should Have Packed The Wine
‘You’re the one that I want…’ the old man sang to me when I got up this morning. A sincere effort, I believe, to calm the storms that have inevitably begun to build up as we get ready to move. He’s been in a suspiciously good mood all week which he has tried to disguise…
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Anxiety, Hope and Earning The Olympic Gold For Worrying
If they handed out an Olympic Gold for worrying, I’d get it. I’ve skirted around the void of depression many times, when my anxiety has gnawed away at me like some flesh-eating bacteria, so close to the bone that I’ve felt like it was all too much. Unlike many people out there who wax lyrical…
LOUISA SIMMONDS 