Currently This

You know how they tell you about the terrible twos? They slyly neglect to mention that it never ends. Far as I can tell, it continues till death. If I have to listen to one more screechy, histrionic, melodramatic wig-out about being an actress / dying the hair / results of dying the hair / all the things I am keeping them from doing / how I love their siblings more / how I don't understand them / how I never went through what they do / how they hate me and wish they had never been born, I am going to rip my hair from my smoldering head.

What happens to these people?? Where do their minds go? A two year old has enough common sense not to touch the stove if they get burned once, but a teenager will dye their hair again and again and again no matter how much they hated it the first time and each time cry because they hate it again. Like two year olds, no matter how many times you tell them they cannot audition for parts till they get older, they will ask again and again and again till you want to scream.

No matter how hard you try to do everything right, they will berate your efforts so harshly it must, must cause cancer sooner or later. And when you take away their phone, cable TV, CD player and VCR because, after all, surely they will not want any reminders of the shitty effort you have made to make them happy, they will snarl at you like dobermans on crack shouting the foulest possible language and insist you are the worst, the unequivocal worst parent which ever existed on the planet.

If you point out that you were in labor with them for nineteen...nineteen ...hours, that you have sacrificed and toiled on their behalf, that you have lovingly helped with homework, stayed up with them when they were sick, agonized when they were unhappy, fought teachers, HMOs and nasty schoolmates on their behalf, grown more gray hair than any woman your age should rightly have in their heads, they will tell you that you have to do all that because you are their mother!

An hour later, they will come to you all sweetness and light, woodland animals following them whistling, and say "Mommy?" and ask if it is ok if they go to the movies with a friend tomorrow and dare to be confused when you burst into spontaneous combustion.

Humanity spends far too much time worrying about the effects of global warming on our planet. It isn't going to be petrochemicals, asteroids or a new ice age that kills us off. It's going to be the aliens from Planet X who regularly visit our planet at night and replace our sleeping children with the adolescent pod people whose sole goal is to take eventual control of our planet by keeping our species from ever wanting to reproduce again.