by John Ettorre

If a parent can be said to ever harbor homicidal tendencies, there’s little doubt about when those feelings would come to a head. If you make it through your children’s teenage years without at least contemplating the commission of a felony, then you should consider yourself lucky.

OK, the truth is that I’ve never for a moment considered personally harming my offspring. But handing them over to the authorities for an hour-long stay Guantanamo Bay? Now, that’s worth exploring. I think it would have a salutary effect on my boys in their most intractable moments and perhaps add some leverage to our side of the negotiations during our next clash of civilizations (parent vs. teen, that is).

So civilization may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think about American teenagers. In fact, there’s much about their behavior that seems to be downright pre-civilized, but that’s only when they’re around us (and perhaps around their friends).

Take them to school or introduce them to other adults, and you’ll inevitably be startled at their ability to adapt to routine forms of human courtesy. They actually can look someone in the eye and greet them warmly, something they’re seemingly unable to do in their house, where a series of primordial grunts and eye-rolling exercises are the standard forms of communication.

Lest I seem unreasonable, let me give them their due, these teenagers of mine. They are, after all, members of a remarkable, even astonishing, cohort group. My teenagers, like all teenagers, are marvels of human engineering. Teenage boys especially are wondrous creations.

Take their eating habits, for instance. Try this experiment in your own home, if you have teenage boys, or perhaps call a friend who does. Some evening when they don’t have school the next day, sneak down to the kitchen around midnight (apparently the peak feeding hour for nocturnal creatures) and watch the carnage unfold.

More than once I’ve done this myself, watching in slack-jawed amazement as my two sons forage for food, expertly darting around the kitchen like veteran sous chefs at a four-star resort hotel, quickly assembling huge piles of food. When first I witnessed the spectacle, I was reminded of a resonant line from the movie "Jaws." Richard Dreyfuss, who plays a marine biologist in pursuit of a killer shark, delivers it flawlessly. "Sharks are a marvel of evolution. They are nature’s perfect eating machines." That also would nicely describe teenage boys, my own included.

During the inevitable arguments with our teenagers, we parents do tend to get all righteous about ourselves and our opinions of what’s right and good. Then a moment of honesty hits, in the form of the occasional flashback from our own teenage years. They can sometimes arrive like bolts from the blue, reminding us with stunning clarity that perhaps we’re not the ultimate repositories of truth that we might imagine.

I had one of those clarifying flashbacks recently after our eldest, who recently turned 18, defied a direct parental order to stay home one night. Just as I was about to lower the boom on him, revoking all the privileges I could think of, I remembered a similar situation from my own teen years, a moment when defying my mom seemed the right thing to do.

I remembered how it was raining one afternoon as I prepared myself to head outside for a quick run. My mom, always an alarmist about the weather, told me she certainly hoped I wasn’t considering doing something as dumb as running in the rain, where I might well catch a cold. I wasn’t merely considering it, but in fact was about to do that very thing, and I wasn’t in any mood to let her prevent me from exercising my freedom of choice.

I stared at her, and she stared at me. Without saying a word, I headed out the door and out onto the sidewalk, breaking into a slow trot. As I raised my face to the heavens to enjoy the soft rain that day, I somehow knew that by taking this run, by defying a direct order from the highest form of temporal authority this side of the Pope, everything had suddenly changed.

We probably would never go back to our old routines, where parents automatically knew best, and kids had only to meekly surrender to the superior force. Now, we had entered a new phase, where persuasion, reason and, of course, argument would take precedence over the dubious logic encapsulated in the familiar parental line (now enshrined in a movie title) "because I said so."

My teenage moment of truth happened to arrive at 15, or three full years before my son’s. Whenever it comes, both sides can feel the ground subtly shift beneath them. Whether it’s destined to be remembered in later years as a devastating earthquake or just the routine jostling of a necessary rite of passage is largely up to you, dear parent.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor whose writing has appeared in more than 70 publications. To reach John, send e-mail to: jettorre@voyager.net or call him at (216) 382-6548.