Am I Ready To Parent A Teenager?

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Sunday, I became the proud father of a teenage girl.  I said this to my colleague Doug yesterday as we walked together to our offices, and I believe he thought I was confessing that I had fathered a child out of wedlock seventeen years ago and she had just emerged from the recesses of my shady past.  But no, in fact, the truth is simpler and less shady.  Amy and I have taken in an American Foreign Exchange student for the year.

I must be crazy.

Or I just can’t resist my wife when she comes to me with the look of a kid asking if he can bring home a puppy.  Amy and her siblings all studied abroad (as did I) during high school, and they had a great experience hosting a student for a year.  Jose and Amy are still close more than twenty years later.  Amy has visited him and his family a couple times in the recent past, and he and his wife and daughter came to visit us just two years ago.  So when AFS contacted Amy, desperate to find a few more families in the Storrs area to host students, she came home ecstatic.  Now that we have moved into our new home and we have a finished basement with a bedroom and private bathroom, etc, etc …  Of course I said yes.

Originally we were going to host a boy from Bolivia, but he withdrew from the kegiatan suddenly, and I thought that was it.  Amy was pretty crushed.  But then AFS sent us several packets of students to review and select from.  It was oddly like buying a car.  You look at the photos, check out the specs.  Really.  I’m only being slightly facetious.  One student jumped out at us as a good fit.  Maria’s from Remini, Italy, not far from where our friends and my cousins live.  Amy speaks and teaches Italian, so that will make communication easier than if we accepted one of the German kids they offered us.  She has a little sister about my daughter Elsa’s age.  She likes to read.  She loves American movies and music.  Classic rock and Johnny Depp are favorites.  She studies languages and law at her high school, and her grades are fantastic.

So suddenly I have all the typical responsibilities of being a father to two elementary school children—monitoring Cormac’s homework, driving Elsa to gymnastics, making breakfast, packing lunches, screaming “Go brush your teeth now like I asked ten times already!  We’re going to be late!”  That sort of thing.  And I have added teen issues.  (I’m trying to avoid the word drama).  In one week, we have had to change one teacher because the first one had the social skills of an inanimate object and neither introduced Maria to the class nor spoke to her, for that matter.  We have pushed the envelope for getting to school on time each day because of hair drier issues.  We’ve encountered pickiness with food (no onions) and funny cultural differences with food (the Italians pour the milk first and then scoop the cereal into the bowl).  We went shopping for posters for the walls of her room (Pink Floyd, the Beatles, James Dean, and Audrey Hepburn—at least she has good taste).  These now adorn the walls of an incredibly messy room.  She brought one suitcase, but from the looks of the clothes strewn everywhere, I swear she had four more brought in under cover of dark.  And we went shopping for cleats for JV soccer, which turned into a shopping spree at Dick’s where she purchased several cute outfits, shorts, tops, and a new swimsuit, all of which prompted her biological Dad to declare, “How did you spend $500 already?!”).

In all seriousness, however, Maria has been a delight.  She and Amy have bonded like big and little sister.  She’s been terrific with Cormac and Elsa, playing with them, reading to them at night, and showing them affection.  She and I have bonded over shopping but also over school work.  We spent an hour last night reading and discussing the first 400 lines of Beowulf, which I haven’t read or taught in years.  She’s also very excited to take classes at EO Smith that she can’t typically take in the Italian system, like art classes.  She’s going to try her hand at painting and sculpture.

We’re all still adjusting to the newness of everything, but I think we’ll make it to June.