Dear Parents, Welcome to Middle School. A joyous period of time in your life and your child’s too. Hormones! Puberty! Exams! Growth spurts! Rage!
Your middle schooler is a strange and unpredictable creature. One moment they are happy and laughing and the next — BAM! The door has been slammed shut and they are screaming at you through it. One day they are cherubic and the next day they wake up covered in pimples and blaming it all on you.
If you would like to survive these trying years with your hair and sanity intact, here are a few things that might work.
Always have a snack in your pocket
Bad day at school? Fight with a best friend? Three-headed Chemistry teacher? Life is full of miseries for your almost teen. Sure, it’s not like they have deadlines, evil managers breathing down their neck, or a leaky toilet to have fixed, but guys, puh-lease, their lives are so hard, didn’t you know? When faced with a litany of complaints, take out a snack and stuff it in their mouth. It will also restore their levels of blood sugar. In the time they take to chew their snack, you can escape to another state.
Buy a gas mask
The jury is out on what one can die from sooner — inhaling noxious BO or over-generously applied deodorant. Either way, you’ll be wanting a gas mask.
Channel your inner shrink
When your middle schooler asks you ‘Why is everything so unfair?’ ‘Why does life suck?’ ‘Why do I have to do this dumb project?’ don’t make the rookie mistake of trying to answer it. Instead, do what shrinks on TV shows do and ask ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
Invest in anti-door slamming products
I’m not making it up. That door is going to be slammed a lot. A LOT. Get used to it. An anti-door slammer protects your door and also considerably reduces the effect of a dramatic room exit.
Get a swear jar
A coin every time a bad word is uttered. There’s the start of your college fund right there. Of course, do understand that you will be contributing to this jar the most because a) you have a teenager in the house and sometimes only a four-letter word will relieve the stress inside you b) your middle schooler is too smart to swear in front of you.
Practice your blank expression every day
You know the one you used when your kid was little and wanted to know where all the Nutella went? That one. Your pre-teen is going to ask you questions that you will not expect. Please apply aforementioned expression to your face and answer non-judgementally, truthfully and share information that is age appropriate. Be happy that they are still coming and asking you instead of Googling or even worse — going by what their friends tell them.
There is light at the end of the tunnel folks. That light is a freight train called ‘being a teenager’.