Ok, who sings the above titled song? Wait for it, wait for it...
The Who!
What do you expect, from a music trivia freak!? If I title my post with a song then of course we have to talk about that first!! (Correction: My husband informs me that the real title of the song is "Baba O'Reilly", but everyone knows it as "Teenage Wasteland") Now we can move on to the reason for the title:
"The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no context or perspective.... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures."
I finished reading "Bleeding Kansas" by Sara Paretsky over Memorial Day weekend, and that quote stuck with me. The book was a great read, a story about two farm families and their tangled and feud-filled history, that comes to a head with the teenage children of the modern day families. The quote was midway through the book, and as I read it I marked the spot, thinking that it perfectly described adolescence.
I remember those days, as being the absolute best and the absolute worst times of my life. I remember telling my father one time that I was depressed; I'm sure I was going through something very traumatic to me, as a teenage girl. But I remember his snappish reply, "Depressed? You're not depressed! You don't know what depressed is!" Of course, in some respects, he was right. I had not yet experienced the bitter realities of life. But to me, what I was experiencing was "big" for me. I didn't have the context or perspective to deal with it, as Paretsky says.
It was very fitting that I read this book and came across this quote, as I then had somewhat of a heart-to-heart with my stepdaughter later in the weekend. She's going through her own joys and pains as a teenager right now, and is an incredibly beautiful, intelligent and, best of all, genuine and kind-hearted young woman. I'm so pleased to have her in my life, and just wish that I had met her when she was younger, rather than when she was already almost 15. She is growing up so fast, and turns 17 this Friday. I thought about this quote as we were talking, and about how difficult, but wonderful, this time of her life is.
I loved that time of my life, and still remember those chilly fall nights at football games, my first junior high dance, riding to and from school with my best friend Angel after she got her license, falling in love with my first boyfriend... those were the days! Oh, to be 17 again! I learned some life lessons as a teenager, and then some others took me much, much longer to learn. But all of them were important, and I don't know that I would change much of anything,looking back.
