My children are out of the house and grown. High School seems like a million years ago, even though the youngest graduated in 2017. That said, I decided to share a post about relationships and teens I’d written in 2013. It still rings true today for everyone of all ages. ~ Juliette
LETTERS FROM JULIETTE – TALES OF YOUNG LOVE AND HIGH SCHOOL
I was going to write a post on love letters tonight but my kids, especially my daughter, started to talk about kids at school and relationships and making friends, so we’re still on track, just a slightly different track.
High School has started an already the teens (Garrett age 17 and Clara age 14) are already in the full swing of things. No slow starts here – they jump right into the fire.
Their both in their rooms doing homework, with friends via iPhone and Skype.
School has always been easy for Garrett. He is charming and sweet and smart. And being as good looking as his father (the most handsome man who ever lived) he has it made more or less. My son makes straight A’s, has a huge circle of friends and has flirted with every girl he has ever met. A girl who meets Garrett will think she is beautiful for the rest of her life – because he knows that all girls are beautiful. ALL girls.
Garrett’s circle of friends, includea a somewhat large group of V-Teens. That is Vampire Teens, and yes, for those of you who might be new here I cover parenting topics with special notes on Vampire Teens (for after all this is Vampiremaman.com)
But Garrett is my romantic. I find love poems he has scrawled in the laundry, underneath couch cousins, tucked away in books and binders. Right now he is dating Ione, another Vampire Teen, but who knows how long that will last. I hope through the senior year or at least until they leave for college next fall.
Clara on the other hand only has a few Vampire kids at school her age, but that doesn’t bother her. She is quickly making a lot of friends. New names come up in every conversations. They get to know each other through what band shirts they wear, by their classes and where they sit at lunch.
And that brings us to relationships. Tonight Clara told me about a boy she can’t talk to anymore, or he can’t talk to her. His girlfriend told him not to talk to any girls she hasn’t approved. This has been going on for a year. When he tries to break up with her she lies and gets him into trouble. This poor boy is in an abusive situation and he can’t see it. I hope he tells his parents he need help, but he won’t. They rarely do.
This girl is what I call a predator. More than any Vampire ever was. She has her minions who do her bidding. She threatens and kills to get to the top of the popularity charts with all the mean girl tactics in the book. And end the end, after high school, she might stay at the top, but…
Anyway, PLEASE talk to your teen about relationships. The sooner the better. And don’t pretend you were some lily white virgin until you got married at age 36, because you were not a lily white virgin. Just like you had your heart broken, you smoked pot, you drank until you threw up, you did all sorts of things your parents didn’t know about. And most of all you had your heart broken and you were in bad relationships. You don’t have to tell your kids everything, but use your experiences to teach your own kids not to make the same mistakes.
One of the best books out there on bad relationships, a book I feel most teens should read is The Jealously Game by Mandy White. It is short, under 100 pages, and Ms White has made it available for FREE download FOREVER. She feels like it is that important, and it is. Click here for the link.
Homework is boring, it is confusing, most kids are nice, teachers are weird and stressed, and the kids are doing fine. They’re in High School. Clara was smiling, that knowing smile that girls have, when she got off of the phone with her “friend”, a boy she just met, who is good at math and helped her get through her homework. She could have asked her brother or dad or me. But she had another offer from someone else.
This afternoon traveling home from a business meeting with Nathaniel Chase.
I’ve known Nathaniel my entire life.
He is like that “Most Interesting Man in the World” character from the Dos Equis ads. A man (in Nathaniel’s case a Vampire) who has done it all and done it with style, class and perfection. Except he is much much older but looks much much younger. And he drives me absolutely nuts.
I spoke to him of the adventures of my teens when of course he threw it back at me, way back to when I was young.
“I used to see you looking at the women who seemed to float with beauty. You wished you could be like them. You turned more heads than you thought.” He said this in his perfect voice, for all things, of course, are perfect with Nathaniel.
“That isn’t true and I had my charms.”
“You have more than your share of charm, you still do. But you wanted to be one of them.”
“For about five minutes.”
“You still want to be one of them.”
“I wrote all of their love letters for them.”
“Like Cyrano,” he said flatly, trying to be cool, but I know he was amused and surprised.
“Without the big nose. I even wrote letters to you, under a different name of course.”
“Who?”
“I’ll never tell. Oh, right, she did break your heart, if only for maybe a week or two. And there was more than one. All the girls loved you. I have no idea why.”
I was just giving him a bad time, but at least it made me smile.
Anyway, that is a story for another post, but the point is that school has started and no matter how old they get we need to keep the lines of communication open for our kids. We need to listen. We need to laugh with them. We need to talk with them about anything. More than ever now is a time to give them that sounding board for safe discussion about things that might make us uncomfortable – like love and relationships and homework.
~ Juliette aka Vampire Maman
Vampire Maman 