Contributing Writer

There's a place where facts, myths, and legends merge, blending together in our minds into a soft purple, swirling haze. It's a place where each of us was the star; the captain of the football team, the head cheerleader, the smart kid with the 4.0 average, or the popular kid that everyone wanted to be and be seen with.

Memories. Somehow, now that we have children of our own, we've forgotten the awkwardness of adolescence as it slowly ebbs with time. In time, we have forgotten how hard it actually was.

Things that once we lived and died for don't seem as important to us any more as we're burdened with the every day responsibilities of being adults: hanging out at the mall with our friends, talking endlessly on the phone about everything and nothing, dating that someone we knew our parents didn't approve of just because they didn't approve of him or her and just because we could. We did every possible thing we could to push the envelope of their tolerance with our risky behavior for no other reason than just to see how far it would stretch. But those same things are still important to our kids: acknowledgment, acceptance, and above all else, being dependently independent.

Memories. The more time passes, the more perfect we were as teenagers. We were teenagers who never gave our parents any trouble, and if we did, somehow we remember that it was they who did not understand our wants or needs. It was not our misunderstanding their responsibility to set down rules to raise their children in accordance with societal norms so we could be a success in school and later in life. Upon seeing our children's report card, instantly we reinvent memories that make us smarter than we actually were in high school or college, conveniently forgetting all the bad quizzes and test grades that were handed