“I wish the kids were still little,” I said wistfully to the father of my two teenagers as my eye caught the portraits that line the walls of our bedroom.  Staring back at me, perched high above the treadmill that we use for a clothes rack were my two “babies”, propped up on their elbows, smiling from ear to ear.  It’s funny how fast 16 years goes by. Yesterday I brought home a few new chicks from the feed store.  Every now and then this middle-aged mother gets the baby urge.  It’s brief, thank goodness, and it can often be soothed by holding someone else’s kid, playing with a puppy or in my case, buying a couple of fluffy little peepers.

“Are they all hens?” my husband asked when he came home from work and spied the impromptu nursery I’d created in the kitchen for the new arrivals.

“I’m not sure.  The guy at the feed store couldn’t tell me.” I answered back.

“They’re awfully cute,” my oldest said.  “That is, until they grow into big ugly chickens.”

Hey, now that’s not nice.  The same could be said about teenagers.  The truth of the matter is, they’re all cute when they’re small.  Chicks, puppies, kids, you name it.  And then they grow up.

When the kids were little I remember thinking that each stage was my favorite.  I loved it when they lay there in my arms, smiling back at me when I spoke to them in that silly secret baby language that only we understood.  I squealed with glee when they took their first steps and proudly displayed their artwork on the refrigerator when they brought it home from preschool.  I wiped away tears as they sang in the school play dressed like a hedgehog or handed me the traditional “thank you” rose as they graduated from elementary school.  Each stage was new.  Each one exciting.  Each one filled with the unexpected.

And then adolescence struck.  All of a sudden, those cute little guys that thought I was the bee’s knees were taken away and replaced by alien beings.  Now, standing in my living room is a tall, loud, self-focused, argumentative, muscular bundle of testosterone that never stops eating.

“It’s not like I wasn’t expecting it,” I laughed as I told my class about this last week. “I’m a professional after all.”  We were studying development and I had just finished giving the part of the lecture on adolescence.  “You know what’s going on in their brains and in their bodies and intellectually, you know they can’t help it.  You just have to wait it out.”

But sometimes knowing it and living it are two different things and you find yourself with a sudden urge to get something that doesn’t talk back.

Not even a peep.