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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Local Scene Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us April 3, 2006 Tales From The Crib And then, they are teenagers Jennifer Margulis The oldest of my three children is in first grade. She’s only lost two front teeth and she still sucks her thumb. So I read the anthology, “I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teens,” edited by Faith Conlon and Gail Hudson like a stranger peering in on a foreign land, a place that I’ll someday know but haven’t been to yet. Many of the pieces in this outstanding, often raw and surprisingly readable book bring out moments of happiness and connection between parents and teens. But some of these same stories are balanced with a double serving of pain. In “Runaway” Debra Gwartney describes driving to Eastern Oregon to visit one of her teenage daughters who’s in state custody. Marion Winiks’ “Gods and Monsters” details the tension between her and her 12-year-old son who, during one particularly ugly fight, screams obscenities. Nina Gaby’s story, “The Thong Question,” as the title suggests, begins when Gaby’s 13-year-old announces in the car: “The boys in our school only like girls who wear thongs.” Even though my kids are still so small, it’s not unfamiliar territory. As a teenager, I had a boyfriend who showed up in my room in the middle of the night (he climbed up the gutters and onto the roof), I took classes with the “brains” but often hung with a faster crowd — the tattooed, pierced “druggies” who expressed their angst by carving up their own forearms. I mouthed off to my mother. For the most part, my parents knew little about my life. Case in point: I hosted a party for some French exchange students at my mother’s Back Bay apartment. She decided to cede the place to us but got nervous as she was leaving, muttering a long list of things we shouldn’t do. Me (standing at the door): “OK, you can go now, Mom.” My mother (starting to leave, coming back, looking me in the eye, shaking her finger at me): “And just remember, Jenny, no caffeine.” There was no caffeine at the party. Even though I don’t have teenagers, “I Wanna Be Sedated” (despite the silly title which comes from a ’70s song by the Ramones) was a book I couldn’t stop reading. I was fascinated by the hilarious essay by Dave Barry about how his son loses his passport before he even lands in Germany, and the heartbreaking story by Jeffrey K. Wallace, “Shopping for Kotex,” about how his daughter gets her first period while his wife’s on her annual mountain climbing trip with her sister. Strangely, the stories also made me nostalgic, as if my children’s teenage years had already happened. Perhaps because there is so much of the toddler in the teenager, and the stories reminded me of how quickly my children are growing up. A toddler is a baby morphing into a kid; a teenager a kid morphing into an adult. Like pulling a sailboat out of the water onto dry land, it’s those times of transition that are often the hardest and the most hard felt. But the stakes with teens are so much higher than with toddlers. “You have to trust them, and the safety of their bodies, to this person who’s not really an adult, and who doesn’t have adult judgment,” Hudson said in a phone interview with me from her home in Seattle, where she lives with her 18-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son. “And yet it is appropriate that they have more and more freedoms to go out into the world and make mistakes. It’s really nerve wracking.” “I Wanna Be Sedated” is a gem. Besides, what’s handier than a book of short stories to read while you wait up for your curfew-breaking teenager? I suggest investing in two copies: one for yourself and another for your kid. Just don’t tell him you bought it. Jennifer Margulis is the editor of “Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love,” and the author of “Why Babies Do That: Baffling Baby Behavior Explained.” DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Ceramic Piggy Banks FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products Backpacks Merchant Account Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Sportsbook Absinthe Supply Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations Hammocks Water Filter Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Bonus Casino King of Spirits Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Click Here Advertisement .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams