Ten ways of engaging with your teenager
- Hold your motives up to the light. What shimmers there? If your own inner child is overloud, put her to bed with a kiss on her forehead. Let her sleep to the sound of machines: mechanical, rhythmic.
- Wait till your teen opens their door, mute and solid.
- What she gathers from her solitude will emerge eventually as a shroomy clump, garrulous and bunched, a bouquet of earthy bells.
- What he doesn’t say over eggs and orange juice will nest in his pharynx till the eggtooth of his voice is strong enough to crack through.
- Practice the art of leaving. Malls. Museum halls. A beach at low tide. A beach blanketed in fog. A forest trail that forks and forks again. A stranger’s doorstep in a foreign country.
- Practice the art of return. Always on time, or close. Always with lips sealed around your need.
- Too much praise and you’ll turn irrelevant as a jellyfish, sack of water pulsing in some far-off ocean.
- Too much scolding and you’ll turn riptide and isn’t the world already a basin of tears?
- When you find them, they’ll form a new star, blue and shining, trailing clouds of dust, unlost to time.
- There will be a thousand origami swans to unfold before you find them.