Middle-aged Teen???

My 17-year-old borrows my clothes not because it's vintage fashion. People my generation listen to their music, hang out at the places they consider cool enough, my kids and their friends think we are swag (post 2014 introduction) enough to hang out with. They invite their friends to our parties but we do not do it in the reverse. I watch the latest reality TV soaps the kids watch. By this law, we are still teenagers living in middle-aged bodies battling sagging everything.

My generation suffered a huge parent gap, I think the gap now has diminished and at most times does not exist. Look at the careers we are choosing today. I know a lot of people post 40 are giving up their corporate jobs to pursue a life chasing that elusive dream, or go off the grid or travel or paint or start an eco-farm or just plain retire. Something my parents and their previous generations would have frowned upon and thought as courting monetary suicide. Isn’t that what we tell our kids today, “Don’t take that sabbatical!”, “Get a Job!”, “You’re already 21, time is passing you by”, but hey, we are doing that at 40.

I think we teenage adults don’t want to grow up. That’s why the surge in botox clinics. Not letting go of the short skirt I wore when I was 25, doing everything, even denying myself that piece of red velvet or spoon of panna cotta. Are we creating a future generation that will suffer from image issues because of our obsessions with being perennially young and being seen at the hippest clubs though they now play only EDM and trance and rubbing shoulders and back slapping our kids’ friends?

We are falling in love twice, thrice, four times, searching for that elusive love as we grew up on a diet of fairy tales and happily ever after. The very fairy tales and nursery rhymes that today are being retold in dark avatars, so dark they have an 'A' certificate. We are denying our kids a hearing of those very Grimm Brothers fairy tales. Like a child in a candy store refusing to share and saving it all for himself. So who’s actually the teenager...

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