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My daughter is 40 now and raising near teens herself. We laugh because one of our fondest memories is me saying to her one morning when she was about 13, “I don't know what you think happened last week, but I assure you nobody came and sucked daddy's and my brains out. We are not stupid, nor have we ever been. So whatever you think happened, that made us so dumb, it didn't! And I suggest you now look at yourself, because maybe it was your brains that have been sucked out!” She said she went to school that day saying over and over... “maybe it was your brains that were sucked out!” She dreads the day she needs to use that line with one or all of her kids but she has it fully prepared in her upcoming repertoire. We made it through those years, just as our parents did with us; with a lot of love and effort. I remember it being exhausting raising a teen aged girl but couldn't tell you why now :)

I figure it’s the universe getting back at me for what I was like as a teenager ... but I have four daughters, and my parents only had the one.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? How smart we parents are, absolutely able to solve any problem in the world, knowing everything, for about 12 years. Then suddenly we become so stupid. We remain stupid for about seven years, and then suddenly it is realized that we DO know some things after all! And we might become geniuses again ten years from then, for a short while. We end up dumb again though it seems, but at that point they tend to at least love the old dummies. :)

A fellow I worked with was raising his Granddaughter. When she hit 13 he said "her brain flipped over". As I had just gone through it with teenagers, I had to agree.

That is an apt description of teenagers.