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And they are the joy of my life.

There are some things that you quite simply can't explain. Things that kids have to experience in order to understand. It's like trying to tell a blind person what green is. Or explain sex in graphic detail to a seven year old and then tell him that one day he will do damn near anything to get it. Until the first time that he experiences those hormones, he'll think you're the most insane person on the planet. But it'll still be a few years before he gets it. He'll just understand when he's older.

Even things that can be put into words like the "kids or no kids" conversation -- I may have a better way to explain that to my own kids, but even if they understood the biological aspect of reproduction, they will still default to, "75% of what he's saying makes sense. The other 25% is just him being full of shit. I am my own person, and I know how I feel."

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This is how I picture all teenagers.

It's like telling somebody waiting for their food at Denny's that they don't actually want pancakes. "Bullshit! I'm so hungry, I'm dying over here! I'm ready to eat the goddamned picture of pancakes off my placemat! You don't know me!" Then, an hour later, when they're feeling like they swallowed a mixer full of concrete, they're like, "Goddamn, why did I eat all those pancakes? What a horrible form of food! Why didn't you talk me out of it?"

Because I know that in the same position, I also couldn't have been talked out of it. A person has to live it, from that early excitement of seeing the pancakes in front of you, to the part where you genuinely enjoy eating the first third of them, to the part where you find yourself forcing the rest of them down because damn it you paid for them, to the final stage where you write a letter to your Congressman demanding pancakes be banned.

The unfortunate part is that it appears to the teenager like we're just blowing you off, even though the adult actually isn't. It's me, as a parent, recognizing that as a teenager I wouldn't have understood it either. Because I remember adults trying to explain these things, and they remembered their parents doing the same.

And the ironic part is that you won't truly understand the honesty of what I'm saying here. Until you're older.