Hi. I’m still here. Nothing tragic has kept me from posting. I’ve just been really burned out by pandemic and politics and parenting, and I just haven’t been doing much. I’ve been working on projects, but very slowly, and thinking thoughts, but nothing coherent enough to post. The past year has been exhausting, and sometimes I don’t even have the energy for pleasant self care stuff like blogging.

Two of my kids are deep into their early teens now, and dealing with teenage stupidity during a pandemic has been special torture, for me and them. Our relationship has turned into an epic power struggle lately, but I’ve switched some things up and I think we’re slowly turning things around. Man, now that I’m the parent the teen years look so different.

It’s also weird that my kids are so . . . mainstream. They wear trendy jeans and love brand names and listen to smooth electronica and country pop and have tons of popular mainstream friends who do exactly the same things. Their favorite class is gym, and neither likes to read much. My kids are so popular and basic.

I like my kids, don’t get me wrong. Truly, when they’re not being teenage turds, they’re excellent people. This just isn’t what I thought I’d be dealing with.

Like so many gothy types, I was pretty weird in high school. I was into alternative music and thrift store clothes and sad poetry and John Irving. Back then, when I imagined being a parent at all, I imagined myself being super understanding of my kids’ weirdness in a way my own parents totally weren’t. I vaguely imagined myself helping my nerdy or artsy kids navigate high school hell and find their place. That’s what I was prepared for.

I was not prepared to parent these popular jocks.

Luckily, I wasn’t tortured by jocks in high school or anything. I don’t have horrible memories of mean cheerleaders or football players ruining high school. I just also had nothing in common with those types. And now I have three of them, and I suddenly have to watch the Super Bowl and listen to endless gossip about brand name clothes and luxury cars. Parenting sites have little to say about kids who aren’t weird enough for their parent’s comfort. Most parenting advice is geared toward turning kids into exactly the kind of basic, mainstream kids I have, but with much better grades. I haven’t found anything written to help weird parents connect with their not-weird kids, because society pretty much thinks you should just stop being weird once you have kids.

I actually know some other alternative parents from our time with the Unitarian Universalists, but none of them had basic mainstream kids. They all had quirky, nerdy kids who struggle to find their place in the world. You know, the kind of kids I thought I’d have. I’ve met normie parents with unusual kids, unusual parents with unusual kids, but I don’t know any unusual parents with normie kids.

If I were a better parent, I’d be writing an advice post about this. My parenting is pretty mediocre, though, so I should not be giving advice. I guess it’s just another version of the problem most parents run into, anyway. It’s just hard sometimes for parents and kids to connect–different personalities, different life stages, different everything sometimes. Like all families, we connect where we can and accept the rest as best we can. So far, I seem to be raising the most open-minded normies ever. Imagine the biggest, most popular sports star in your high school, but instead of making fun of your black nailpolish thrift store outfit or vampire novels, he thinks it’s kind of cool. “Yeah, my mom made us read Dracula as a family. It was pretty good.” So far, that’s my kids. I’m a little proud of that.