You Can't Touch This, Mother!

Growing up in the 70s when Generation Gap was the in thing, I used to find all sorts of unreasonable excuses to get into a fight with my Mom. Being anti-establishment was in too then. Every motherly concern (read as nag) was then an intrusion into my privacy and an an attempt to stiffle my self-expression. Or so I thought.

Poor woman. She must've been completely confused and disappointed at what was happening to her eldest son at the time. I sported long hair, had patches on my jeans and I wore an earring. The long running confrontation came to its ugliest point when I decided to fail my MCE exams in retaliation. I ignored the books totally while my mates were hitting them like crazy. (OK, I lied. I did speed-read a few pages just before the sitting; I didn't want to hand in a blank piece of paper.)

Funny thing is, I couldn't even do that right. The patches were there to cover real tears on my jeans, from falling off my bike. The earring was actually soldering wire bent into a ring and I didn't have my left earlobe pierced. I couldn't bear the thought of my earlobe being ripped off in a brawl. No, I didn't get into brawls, which were in too at the time, but just in case.

Worse still, I couldn't even fail my exams -- sheesh! I didn't score except in one favourite subject which didn't require much studying, but nor did I fail! The results disappointed me more than they did my Mom. I was one troubled kid, wasn't I?

I still get into fights with my Mom every now and then. The tables are turned, now she has the knack of finding all the ridiculous excuses to get on my nerves. She opens my mail everytime she has the chance and I hate that. She cannot read but gets someone else to read them out to her so she and her accomplice (usually my youngest daughter) know how much money I owe the bank, the Income Tax people, etc.

But now I use the intensity of the fight to judge her state of health. If she isn't picking up fights with me, I know that she's a little bit under the weather. Or maybe she runs out of her pills and medication. We'll just run off to the clinic to stock up and we'll be at each other's throats again in no time.

Now that I'm a father of four adorable kids, I'm so thankful that the Generation Gap is no longer a 'cool thing' with younger sat. Maybe I'm such a spineless doting father but I simply couldn't find enough reason to confront the kids on anything. They confided in me almost on everything they do. So far, so good. Touch wood.

But I really would like to use my parental privilege of prying into our children's lives and find out what my son had been up to with his pretty co-singer. Hmm...