Read Online I've Had It Up to Here with Teenagers by Melinda Rainey Thompson - Free Book Online Page B

that, I thought it was a joke. I quickly realized that it wasn’t. The emotion of that realization haunts me to this day. It changed forever how I parent.
    In my oldest child’s eye-opening experience with one of the lucky no-rules kids, he learned a life lesson. The classmate was seated at my kitchen counter after school one day. He was eating his way through my snack basket. It was his first visit to our house. He and my son were working on a project together for middle-school social studies. He was obviously shocked when my son went to the project drawer where we keep supplies like poster board, glue, scissors, glitter, markers, string, stickers, and anything else we find on the side of the road, in the junk mail, or in the trunk of the car that we think may come in handy one day for crafts. I like to think my husband and I are very “greenwise” with our repurposing of trash. My kids call us dumpster divers. In case you are wondering, that is not meant to be a compliment.
    While I heated up the glue gun and sorted out some old magazines and catalogs for the kids to cut up, the new friend’s eyes followed me all around the room. I couldn’t figure out why he was staring. I’d actually made it to contact lenses and lipstick that day,so I didn’t think I looked too scary. I smiled reassuringly and decided to feed him. That’s generally a good way to bond with boys. First, I laid out grapes. The boys polished those off in no time. Then I made peanut butter crackers. Those vanished in the blink of an eye. My son was focused on braiding yarn hair on his puppet, so he wasn’t too interested in snacks, but his guest was clearly starving. I opened a tin of cookies and shoved it toward him. He ate every crumb, pausing only long enough to wash the feast down with a quart of milk.
    My son stopped his gluing/glittering frenzy to comment, “You sure were hungry!”
    â€œYeah. Do you have food like this every day after school?” the friend asked.
    â€œSure,” my son said.
    â€œYou’re lucky,” his friend said.
    When our guest left at twilight to walk home—alone—I made sure to invite him to come again.
    When he was halfway down my front steps, weighed down by a backpack bigger than he was, he turned to me and said, “I wish I lived here.”
    On the way back to the kitchen, my son looked thoughtful. “Mom?” he asked.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI think he meant it, Mom. I think he really wishes he lived here.”
    â€œI think he meant it, too, son,” I said. “You never really know how hard things are at someone else’s house. Remember that. Everybody doesn’t have what we have.”
    â€œYeah,” he said.
    The second time it happened, my middle child got in troubleat school for sharing his lunch with another student.
    â€œAre you kidding me?” I asked his teacher. “How is sharing food a bad thing?”
    â€œIt’s against the rules,” she replied.
    Sigh. Okay. I told him not to share food in the lunchroom anymore.
    Later the same week, he was caught giving the lunch he’d brought from home to a kid in the hall. He’d ordered a lunch for himself from the cafeteria. I got another phone call.
    I knew there had to be more to the story. I decided to fish for it. “Son, why did you ask me to make you a lunch if you were going to eat in the cafeteria?” I asked.
    â€œI needed it,” he answered.
    â€œFor what?” I asked.
    â€œI had to give it to somebody.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œThat way, he can take it home for supper,” he explained.
    â€œWhy does he need to take your lunch home for supper?”
    â€œBecause there isn’t any supper at his house.”
    That was it, the sum total of our discussion. My son shrugged his shoulders at me and walked away. He’d identified a problem and thought of a way to solve it. He didn’t understand why the adults in