by Maureen Thomas

Created on: November 20, 2008

There is not much that hasn't been said about being a parent to teenagers. Both sons and daughters come with inherent challenges stemming from their basic need to separate and our need to care. Both also come with unexpected joys; and as a parent of both a teen aged son and daughter, I must say that communicating with my daughter, however volatile it can be at times, is easier than communicating with my son.

My son and I have a good relationship. Quiet, but good. Granted, he is away at school now, but during his teen years at home, our communication ranged from the semi-guttural, to the monosyllabic on any given day. We had talks on serious, meaningful issues, but these were at his discretion and on his timetable, usually late at night when I was exhausted and he was suddenly, inexplicably voluble. Older by four years than his sister, he started talking very early, speaking in sentences at around a year. Our early years together are a treasure chest-filled memory of precious first words and precocious sayings such as "owls can definitely kill you", uttered at two and a half. All that changed with the onset of adolescence; my formerly talkative little boy became a rather smelly, rather secretive individual. This has relaxed somewhat, now that he is almost twenty, and very close to being on equal, adult footing. The best conversations I have with my son revolve around abstracts: books we are both reading, art or movies we like. Occasionally during those conversations I can gently veer into the personal; but I have learned not to probe or pry, this will not give me any more information; the shifting from full sentences to vague "uh, maybes" is my first clue.

My daughter, however, is a whirlwind of words. She is everthing complex a fifteen year old can be. Our relationship, though better then it was during the horrifying middle school years, can be loud: we are both yellers, both volatile, quick to anger, equally quick to want to smooth things over and move on. But the main difference between her and her brother is that the day to day minutae, and the talking about people can keep us chatting for hours. My son and I don't really chat. I think chatting- about who was wearing what, hair, music, fashion, food, tends to be more of a female pastime. My daughter attends the same high school where I teach, so there is plenty of fodder for the drive to and from school. My son was a senior at the same school when I started teaching there. I don't remember the drives home being any more wordy than when I didn't know any of the players in the high school cast.

I cherish them both, as much for their differences as their sudden striking similarities: the turn of a phrase that both will use, a joke that is funny to all of us and nobody else, a family code word that cracks us up. But I have a feeling that it will be my daughter who I communicate with daily as they pass beyond adolescence and into adulthood.

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