When Your Parents Became The Coolest People Ever
The moment when teenagers become adults and realize their parents were always the coolest people ever.
When Your Parents Became The Coolest People Ever
For starters, your parents were always the coolest people ever, this is just about when you figured it out. It seems that every time my friends and I begin telling stories of our pasts and our relationships with our families, we always arrive at the same conclusion; our parents are simply the coolest people ever. Now I use the word “cool” because that is the evolution of being a parent that seems to take place.
When you are a child, your parents are like God. Everything they say and do amazes you and you worship their every move. This is because they control your whole world. No one has really given you any ideas other than those two magical creatures. Somewhere through learning about other things and being influenced by the presence of your peers, your parents start becoming the opposite of cool to you. You feel like they just don’t “understand you” and all they want to do is “control your life”. This period lasts different amounts of time for different people. During this time you are distant from them and want to escape them. If you are a teenage girl, you actually view your mother as the anti-christ, because for some reason mom is always the more evil one. If you’re a teenager in general, you think every friend you have is the absolute most amazing person to ever set foot in your life, or rather in your internet life more so at times. You start trying to find things wrong with your parents and reasons why you’d rather lay locked up in your room listening to music than be around them and their expectations that feel so outrageous to you. Growing up is confusing, and feeling inadequate is natural. Insecurity means despising being questioned, and your parents question you a lot. Therefore you cannot stand them. Everything around you is changing. Friends are kind to you. Friends are also immensely cruel. You just want to be “cool”. You want everyone to accept you. Therefore you try relentlessly to accomplish that and keep saying how much you cannot wait to get the heck away from those awful parents of yours that hold you back. But then at some point, it all changes.
For some, it’s when you graduate high school. For others, it is during high school. It can even last longer than than college at times. The thing is, life will eventually start showing you how much better your parents are than literally everyone else. The first time you move away or experience any change, you realize all of the people you lose. You are actually friends with maybe two or three of the fifteen plus BEST friends you would have died for in middle school or high school. You start watching life change and people change, and then you look around and who do you see? Those freaking parents again. You stop trying so hard to be liked by everyone and stop trying to make sure people stay in your life. You want the people who stay on their own. You become happy with who you are and no longer feel like you have to impress people into being interested in spending time with you. You don’t need to convince people that you’re awesome. After all, your parents always thought you were awesome. When you get older, you want to spend time with the people in your life who deserve to be there, and you actually appreciate the reasons why they deserve to be there. You remember every school play, dorky awards ceremony, and soccer game that your parents treated like the Olympics or the Oscars. You remember all of the people that made you feel like you weren’t good enough and just think about your mom running around taking literally a thousand pictures of you with your friends standing in front of a stupid tree before prom. You realize you were always good enough, you were a celebrity to the coolest people ever. You will spend your entire adolescent years trying to figure out what it means to be “cool” and realize that your parents showed you all along.
I have learned the coolest things ever from my parents. Be honest. Be a hard worker. Be dependable. Be kind. Be confident. Be true to yourself. I have learned that if I want to have cool people in my life, I need to choose people who treat me like my parents do. You learned this too I am sure, or you will. You know when a Friday night comes around and the idea of hanging out with your parents sounds like by far the best option. You know when something exciting happens in your life and they’re the first ones you run to. You know when you are choosing a couple to double date with, and you know there’s only one dynamic duo you want to call. Above all, you know your parents are the coolest people ever at the moment you realize that no one has ever put up with as much of your crap, and yet no one has ever loved you as fully as they have. So go, give the coolest people ever a hug or a phone call, they deserve it.
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