Teenagers are no longer children but they are not quite adults. Part boy and part man or part girl and part woman, each is a complex mixture of maturity and immaturity, riding his or her last leg of physical, emotional, social and cognitive development up toward adulthood. Throughout history, the innocence and emerging boldness of young adolescents has been a cultural fascination.
Our culture today is particularly fascinated by teenagers. We find the combination of immaturity and emerging adulthood in a teenager highly endearing. Philip commented on his own feelings toward the immature behavior of teenage girls one day. “Lots of girls I know talk really fast and throw in ‘like’, ‘sooooo’, ‘oh-oh’ and ‘you know’ as filler,” he said. “I just find that really cute.” Moments after Philip made the comment, I remembered having similar feelings when I was his age. I remembered partially mimicking the communication pattern when talking with teenage girls. I would accelerate my own voice and throw in similar filler as punctuation to my half of the conversations. As an adult, I rarely speak with teenage girls, but when I do I now interact with extra deliberateness, extra articulation and less excitement than I would when speaking with an adult or even a teenage guy. I alter my communication behavior with teenage girls this way in order to clearly establish what I believe is an appropriate safe distance of unfamiliarity between adult men and teenage girls. As a result, it had been a very long time since I had witnessed this kind of teenage girl manner of speaking until just the other night.
The other night a group of families had gotten together for a late summer barbeque and many of the teenagers had invited friends along. The result was an unusual social mixture of adults, teens and tweens. Among the teenagers present was Philip’s friend Jocelyn. Jocelyn had recently returned from a month-long summer adventure into the Amazon jungle, and everyone wanted to hear the details of her rather unique experience.
As Jocelyn got more and more comfortable interacting with us as a group, she transitioned into what only could be described as a monologue. She spoke as quickly as she could think and released a stream of consciousness from which her story emerged in bursts and stops, often backing up to add extra detail that had initially been omitted. At least every other sentence contained the kind of filler words Philip described as cute. Jocelyn spent a while describing how her interest in the Amazon jungle first emerged early in the previous school year and then how her interest oscillated between intense interest in the Amazon and intense interest in various other summer pursuits as the school year progressed. Her recount of her oscillating interest culminated some time in April when it was only days before she had to register for the intercontinental adventure. Jocelyn’s long preamble included many references to her interactions with her mother who was clearly both very patient and very supportive throughout her daughter’s on-again-off-again decision process. I found it particularly touching how much Jocelyn chose to include her mother in this part of the retelling of her story.
Eventually Jocelyn transitioned to the trip itself. It included a brief description of the service projects she did in the villages, but she mainly focused on the details of day-to-day life. She first told us that in order to be culturally appropriate, her clothing had to be much more modest than had ever been required of her. Everything from her knees to her collar bone and shoulders needed covering. Then she talked about bugs, spiders and a large cat that pawed through the garbage one night. She ended her story talking about how she wanted to go to
The evening with Jocelyn was an important reminder to me. Though Philip and Chloe are now both in the second half of their tenure at home, I still have plenty of endearing events, actions and sayings to hear from both of them in the future. The happy memories will keep coming.
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