I'm a stranger here myself
Over the years, my friends and I have joked about the trials of childrearing and the various frights we forsee as our children age: strangers, cars, boys, cars again (but in a different way), college tuition. But what is never discussed is the greatest threat, the one that no one can articulate. Which is why, after 13 years of always having an excellent reason for why or why not to do something, I find myself nose to nose with my daughter, all rationality cast aside, hoping like hell that she gets through this phase unscathed because I am no help.

The frustrating part is that I can't explain what frightens me. She has found a group of friends at her school, a far more worldly crowd than that to which she used to belong. Kids of the hair-dye and piercing set. She says they are helping her figure out "who she is," whatever that is. Here's the thing: I was friends with those kids when I was her age, too. And now we're all a little older and mostly still friends. So why do these children frighten me? My guess is that I see a hollow protest against conformity that ends up being its own conformity. Throw into the mix some poor decision-making concerned controlled substances and you have kids that seem to be a great waste. They aren't raging against the machine, their raging against the easiest target, the one that costs the least to maintain (my god, kids with a social policy that mirror's Bush's foreign policy). I have to guess that we were that shallow and tunnel-viewed at that age, too, but how did I learn otherwise? How can I show her?