Being 13

I'm going to keep this in the order of the article and discuss each part, as it pertains to my beliefs and experiences. I learned a little bit from this article, starting with 13 being that magic age, such as the Little Red Riding Hood references to sexuality; I don't think I knew that, but I'm not surprised. Honestly, I think I wanted something sports-related for my thirteenth birthday. I think I kissed my first girl at 13 or 14, somewhere in there, and had my first near-sexual experience at 15 (don't get me wrong....I was a virgin officially until just before I turned 24....not that you really wanted to know that, but in relation to normal teenagers.....you know).
Here's the thing about today's teenager: A child who turns 13 today was four years old when the events of 9/11/01 happened. That means that most of their lives have been lived in fear of terrorism, even if they don't exhibit that fear. It's in their psyche, in the back of their mind because it happened at a very impressionable age. Are today's teenage lives different from ours? Definitely. Aside from the fact of terrorism being on the rise, the technology age has exploded in just these last fifteen years. While we were calling our friends on the phone or passing notes in class, today's students are texting each other with their cell phones or sending e-mails with the laptops that they use in school. Communicating globally is at our fingertips now; when we were that age, it was unfathomable to our teenage minds that we could talk to someone half a world away in real time.
Let me refer back to myself for a moment. I married into a family, so I plunged headfirst into being a father to teenagers right from the outset. My oldest son was almost 15 when I married the boys' mother (14, 12, 10, and 7 were their ages). Now my youngest is going on 19 and is engaged to be married (2011?....remains to be seen). I can't say that they all had the same teenage problems, but my oldest became sexually active at 15, my next-to-youngest started smoking when he was 13 (I think, maybe even 11 or 12), and was once addicted to painkillers. My youngest has been the most active and had the least of the normal teenage problems (somehow he managed to take after me), probably because he is also the biggest of the four boys. My second oldest didn't have a typical adolescent life either. He was never much to socialize outside of his small peer group, which has since dispersed to the four winds since high school. He is not sexually active, which is probably a good thing until he meets that special someone, though he is already 23. I'd like to think that I had some positive effect on all of them so that anything good that happened during their adolescence can be carried with them throughout life.
Okay, so I've gotten a little long-winded (which is probably not a good thing---I think I'm developing carpal tunnel syndrome, so I shouldn't be typing so much, but I have a lot to say). Let me close with this statement: what does it mean to be 13 today? It means that your world is just beginning to expand to horizons that we as adults could only have imagined at that age. It's time to start training to become one of the leaders of tomorrow in whatever field you choose to be in. We'll always be there to be a guiding hand, but the future is yours.