Why you should travel with your teenagers

It took travelling to another country where English wasn’t the Mother tongue to open the doors of communication with my teenagers. These are teenagers who seem to physically shudder at the thought of spending time with me, who walk ten steps behind me through the shopping mall,  groan every time I ask a simple question, such as ‘do you have homework?’ or ‘are you going to be home for dinner?. Travelling with my teenagers was an opportunity to get to know these growing young people more intimately and discover how much my ‘babies’ had grown before they take their own path into that grand experience called life.

The idea of travelling with teenagers was wrought with emotion, anxiety and excitement. Would I be the referee between arguments between my two children, or between the children’s father and the rugrats? Would I have sulking teenagers who would refuse to talk to strangers or engage with others, or constantly complain of being bored? Would my teenagers be on social media bemoaning how many days they had left to be tortured on a daily basis by their forever annoying parents. We had traveled to Phuket, Thailand, with our two teenagers, eighteen and fifteen years of age.

Blue is the warmest color and relationship dilemma

There are not many films that encourage me to write, but as I was watching Blue is the Warmest Color I craved to pick up my pen and start writing, not because the film was so bad that I wanted to rewrite it, but because the film, the dialogue (subtitles), the characterization and the story line was so good. So strong. There were moments where I had aha moments. When I observed how the film used literature and culture to define the two main characters. I also had the odd moment when, I thought to myself, damn I’d wish I’d written that.

This film spans a decade and is predominantly a coming-of-age story for the main protagonist, Adele. Just after starting up a relationship with a boy from her school Adele has a chance encounter with a slightly older woman, which leads Adele to think that something is missing in her relationship with the boy. Adele who is still at high school and the other woman, Emma is a young student completing her final year with a Fine Arts degree. Emma, being the elder of the two takes on the younger Adele as her protégé, not just sexually but to support her in her growth in becoming a young adult and person.