When we think about the relationship between teenagers and their middle-aged parents, we often think of a lot of head-butting and conflict. We think of two groups who sometimes purposefully antagonize one another, and have a hard time finding common ground. A wider angle view, however, might just reveal more similarity than difference. In addition to both experiencing significant physical change, teens and middle aged adults sit at an inflection point for their futures, with all the attendant anxieties and woes. While parents don’t want to see their children have to go through all the same hardships and make the same mistakes they did, they too are experiencing forms of upheaval and angst. The choices a parent made as a teenager have, after all, brought them to where they are now – for good and ill.
But beyond the coincidences of life stages, having teenagers in middle age could be the very thing adults need – and vice versa. In his book, Like Dew Your Youth: Growing Up with Your Teenager, Eugene Peterson argues that this overlap is providential, a perfectly-timed gift from God to middle-aged parents. A slightly awkward, and often difficult gift, but a gift nonetheless.
During the teen years, while being hit with everything that puberty entails, from post-growth-spurt clumsiness to acne to unpredictable rushes of hormones, we end up face-to-face with expectations we’re not sure we can live up to and new responsibilities we’re not sure we can handle. It is a time of utter discombobulation. Or as Peterson writes, “there are no well-adjusted adolescents. Adolescence is, by definition, maladjustment.”
There’s a certain topsy-turviness to middle age as well, as many of the things we thought were important turn out not to be. A marriage ends, a career stagnates, a dream dies, an illness takes hold, and we’re left futilely grasping. Our bodies start to lose some of the reliability we’ve taken for granted. And though we all know that aging will happen to us, the early stages of it can feel lightning-quick in their appearance. In what seems like no time at all, the cause of our injuries go from skateboard-related to sleeping-in-a-slightly-incorrect-position-related. Things that used to energize us, now drain us. Peterson writes that in middle age, “the wonders of life reduce to banalities … The ideals and expectations of earlier years are experienced as fatigue.”
In the midst of this creaking and despondent time — at precisely the moment when careers tend to stagnate — middle aged parents receive the gift of teenagers that disrupt the status quo: “All the realities that have become hackneyed and trite are suddenly in fresh form before us, demanding response, requiring participation.” This new compulsion in relation to someone we love can break us out of the cycle of self-pity. When we’re feeling beat down by the world, and too inwardly-focused, it’s easy to respond by falling into nihilism.
Teens can help adults remember what it feels like to be not entirely jaded about what’s ahead, when expectation often feels promising, not just anxiety-producing. They can help us to remember that the wonders of life are truly wonderful, to wipe some of the mud of disillusionment from our eyes. After all, teens are nothing if not idealists, no matter how jaded an air they attempt to project. This idealism can be a double-edged sword, though, all the inherent hope on one side, a high anthropology/false superiority on the other, that frequently gets aimed at the supposed “hypocrisy” of their parents, who they are now seeing as the broken people they are, but without the mature insight to see it just as clearly in themselves.
Parents occasionally need a little help with reality too. When we’re being less than honest with ourselves, it’s easy to believe that we were never quite as explosively emotional as the 15-year-old slamming a door in our face. However, we might recall that just last week we wanted to do the same. It’s just that through some combination of maturity and adherence to social mores, we were able to resist doing so. Given this, it stands to reason that we may have conveniently forgotten just how strong a hold hormones had on us at their age, even if we didn’t always act on them. Remembering how impossible life felt as a teen can open us up to more compassion for our own children, even when our less hormonally-charged brains and developed frontal lobes are perplexed by some of their behaviors and thought-processes. Remembering that these things didn’t last forever can be reassuring to both the parent and child. A reminder that there is hope on the other side. Our disappointments and their redemptions can sometimes even help steer one’s teens toward the ultimate hope of Christ, who already took on and overcame all of our hurts, troubles, and disappointments through his life, death, and resurrection. But the reverse is likewise true: seeing God become real to our teenagers can also help us see God’s hand in the trajectory of our own lives.
Sometimes, when we try to find the meaning in, or the ultimate significance of, an event we’re too close to, we can miss the mark by quite a bit. In 2011, Chicago pop-punk band Smoking Popes released This Is Only a Test, a concept album from the eyes of a teenager. This wouldn’t necessarily produce much insight in the case of a band either still in, or just out of, the throes of adolescence, but by 2011, the guys who made up Smoking Popes were all in their 30s and 40s. This distance from the teen years occasionally allowed them the space to reflect on some of what had actually been going on. That the need for love and the need to love are at the core of everything. A viewpoint that a band of 18-22 year olds generally couldn’t access in the same way.
This hits hardest in the final track on the record, “Letter to Emily,” an epistolary song to a classmate who recently took her life. Some of the lyrics sound like a teen, especially the line “I could’ve been the one to tell you it’s alright,” a line that comes out of deep empathy, but also out of the romantic (and not necessarily realistic) idea that the protagonist could have saved Emily, had he just known she was suffering. However, Josh Caterer, (Smoking Popes’ lead singer/songwriter) couldn’t help but include some hard-won wisdom in the lyrics, diagnosing the reality of the human condition:
I believe there’s a heart in everyone,
crying out for the love of someone.
If that heart isn’t held by anyone,
it can start to believe that it’s no one.
Did you start to believe you were no one?
Did you start to believe you are no one at all?I believe there are lost hearts everywhere,
searching hard just to find home somewhere.
If you don’t see the light shining anywhere,
you get lost in the darkness of nowhere.
Were you lost in the darkness of nowhere?
Were you lost in the darkness of nowhere at all?
“Lost in the darkness of nowhere” seems like an apt description of the place we can find ourselves in our teen and middle-aged years. And in these first two verses, we get at the heart of what actually troubles us. We often assign too much weight to things that are, in reality, secondary concerns. In middle age, we’re not really all that hung up on getting that promotion, it’s just that when we don’t, we feel unloved and underappreciated. If we’ve made work our home, a rejection in that space causes us to see the folly in having done so. The same can be said of teens who have put all of their hope in academics, sports, or another sort of quid-pro-quo relationship. The dissolution of these dreams can cause a crisis. Sometimes, though, that is just what we need.
Peterson writes that, “It is by the grace of catastrophe that people sometimes come to themselves and see what is before them as if for the first time.” We might wallow in our misfortune, but disruptions can also shift our priorities to see the triviality of a pursuit. Like the protagonist of the Smoking Popes’ album, we can come to “believe there’s a point to everything, that it all adds up to something,” beyond the circumstance of the now. That life isn’t found by our looking deeper into ourselves, but in something external.
And with the faith that comes via the epiphany that “even though we are unacceptable, God through Christ accepts us… that God calls us… forgives us,… (and) acts toward us in a way which draws forth our trust,” (Peterson) we find ourselves drawn to loving others, and to repentance, turning away from ourselves and their myriad justifications, towards confession and surrender to God, the only source from which we’ll find absolute love, supreme meaning, and a home to rest our wearied, lost hearts, no matter our age.
