This Can Not Be The "New Normal"

We sat on the front porch, my teen daughter and I, in the warm Spring air. I, on my Adirondack chair she, on the door stoop, knees to her chest.

At first, the conversation was light and focused on the outer world, but it started to turn and my daughter opened up her almost 17-year-old inner world.

She’s really struggling with anxiety and depression looking at the world turning into an Orwellian nightmare. It’s not just the here and now, but the prospect of the “New Normal”.

She put a fine point on an awareness that had been growing on the back burner of my mind: messages of good wishes on church signs for graduating teens, TicToc “proms”, Popstar online graduation ceremonies, and other, less publicly known measures for teens and young adults whose world has been cut short by grown-ups who have God complexes. It’s lovely that adults are sensitive to the upheaval that teens are experiencing and trying to take measures to make their milestone life events as special as they can be, but the measures aren’t enough to wipe out the anxiety of a group of people who are facing the future of this “New Normal”.

All I hear are adults talking about how we feel, how this is impacting us, but as I listened to my daughter’s heart, and wiped her tears away, I was snapped out of myself, my generation, and thrown back to my own memories of teen uncertainty.

All teens face the excitement and fears of being set free to live their own lives. But, under the concept of the “New Normal”, we’re leaving teens with just fear to face. We’re squelching the excitement by shutting down worlds of opportunities for socializing, exploration, and employment.

We, adults, feel the impact post established lives. Teens are feeling the impact pre-establishing their lives and, because we’ve handled this “crisis” the way we have, the already most anxious generation we’ve seen, ever, is now just about broken.

It is my job to help her see that things will be OK.

There are a couple of ways I can do that. I can help her accept the “New Normal” or I can show her how to live without that acceptance. And, if you’ve followed me long enough, you know I will choose the latter. I will not choose her emotional calm through a roll-over-and-accept-this approach. I will, rather, seek her emotional strengthening through a network of rebellion.

I do not ever want her to accept that this level of controlled existence is good, healthy, and right. It’s not OK and I’m not going to alleviate her fears by trying to make it appear OK through measures that she, cognitively, already knows are bullshit, and are not good enough. I’m going to alleviate her fears by showing her how to be strong and how to work around the restraints, how to get over or around the blocks in her way.

Mom mode switched on, plans are being made. The shit’s gonna get done.

Our own “New Normal”, here we come.