How to think Like a Teenager

"How do you think like a teenager?"

Im asked this all the time. I keep hoping that some day a profound response will occur to me. It hasnt yet. And so I keep answering the same way.

"I remember."

Im not sure if remembering pain is a blessing or a curse. But Ive always been able to rewind the years and revisit ancient angst in Technicolor and wrap-around sound.

The great gift of being fifty-one is remembering with perspective. It makes up for having to wear support hose and getting hot flashes in public. This kind of remembering also leads to sub groups: laughing with perspective, parenting with perspective, failing bleakly with perspective.

Ive been a professional writer as long as Ive been a mother -- twenty years. Ive worked through parenthood in print. My first paid pieces were in American Baby magazine in the early '80s. My daughter was so adorable (she still is). I wrote about her surgery at nine months of age; the family hiking trip we took when my husband and I discovered that it is possible to be in the woods for two and a half hours with a toddler and only cover eighteen inches of trail; I wrote about keeping marriage strong after the baby comes. Laugh together was one suggestion-- I failed to mention that all bets are off during flu season. Everyone was relieved when I transferred to fiction. I remember Jean coming home from school one day (I had three novels out by then) and she announced, "I have to do a report on an American author." I leaned forward expectantly and she sighed, "Im sorry, Mother, they have to be dead."

But this remembering business -- a young reader came up to me and said, "Mrs. Bauer, you write exactly like I feel." I told her there wasnt a better thing she could have said to a writer. Its the chief reason I think through my characters lives. I have to know who they are, what they care about, who understands them, how they overcome. The adult characters I create are as important as the adolescents. There are grandmas who understand the deep things of the world -- one even runs a pool hall. There are single, married, and adopted moms who are trying to balance between being themselves and being a parent. There are dads you want to shake and dads who make a powerful difference. Theres an introverted hermit aunt, the greatest shoe salesman in the world, an aging business tycoon dedicated to quality, a gaggle of giant pumpkin growers who know the rigors of competition, a Vietnam vet grandfather facing down the ghosts of war.

So, if youre looking for stories that can prompt discussions with the young people in your life, I hope youll consider mine.

I hope youll see truth in the lives of these characters.

I hope, too, that the young people in my books will, in the best ways, cause you to remember.

As their mother, that would make me proud.