If Only There Were A Handbook for The Teen Years

Parents, I know you feel me there.

Teenagers, I know you feel that JUST as hard.

My mom once told me that the turmoil between parents and adolescence happens so that at the end, both parents and kids are ok with the separation that needs to happen for the now adult child to leave the nest. My daughter, Alex, told me recently that she spent a year when she was 13 being angry with me. An entire year. That’s a long time in the life of a teenager. When she was in college she wrote an article in the Odyssey Online declaring that she had the coolest parents.

Here’s the truth. I was both of those moms. The one that she had plenty of reason to be mad at, and the one that by her own admission was (and is) far cooler than she is.

In the middle of Alex’s teen years, I started my One New Thing Project. It was a simple enough concept — do one new thing each month and post it on Facebook for an entire year. Twelve new things. Both Alex, and her younger brother Ryan, looked at me skeptically when I announced that I was going to be doing new things for a year. I wasn’t really the kind of person to go in for a lot of things out of the norm. In fact, that wasn’t really our family’s strength. Our weekends were generally spent doing the same things with my brother’s family and his kids. Our dinners were a…