If he hadn't been hungry, my 13-year-old might not have opened his mouth at all.

What did he have to say to a bunch of adults in their 30s and a couple of little girls who thought running to a water fountain and back was high entertainment? How could he be expected to understand why a baby could be mesmerizing when he wasn't doing much at all?

As a group, we had nothing interesting to offer him, partially because we censored the stories that might have caught his attention, so he just sat, not even trying to hide his boredom.

I was about to make an excuse for him, but a friend who I'd known since she was just a bit older than my son stopped me, reminding me what was like to be a teen and how frustrating it is when it feels like your whole being is in flux.

To a certain degree, I remember being a teen so vividly that I can't believe how much time has passed. These days, all I have to do is turn on the oldies station and I'm back in the '80s, and to quote Tom Petty, "a rebel without a clue."

The difference is that back then I didn't know I was clueless. I thought I knew it all, but that conceit has been chipped away so much over the years that now, as the parent of a teen, I'm more clueless than ever.

Maybe I'm a little more consistent, but only because I was a crazy contradiction at 13. I wanted to fit in, but still stand out. I wanted to excel, but I didn't want to seem smart. Those times when I did feel compelled to display my supposed intellectual superiority, it was often while I was making a bad decision. If someone had told me then that my drive to be different was exactly what made me a typical teen, I either wouldn't have believed them or my world would have collapsed.

Oh yeah, my world did collapse, on a fairly regular basis, as I recall. And since it couldn't possibly be my fault, it had to be my parents', right? They made the rules, set the curfews, doled out the allowance and put me in my place.

Sting was always on the radio singing "If you love someone, set them free." I don't think my parents knew those lyrics. One of their frequent refrains was, "You're grounded."

I think maybe my parents might have understood my inner turmoil if I'd been able to articulate it without venom and been able to listen without taking offense. But I didn't want them to help me sort through things. I didn't want to hear that they could relate. And too much of the time, I didn't want them to know that I respected them, or worse, needed them. I didn't want to be their little girl. I'd been there, done that. I wanted to be my own person, to the extent that I adopted stances and made decisions solely based on the knowledge that they would disapprove.

There are so many things that remind me of those angstful teenage years and these days most of the reminders come fast and furious (with an emphasis on furious) as I see my son going through the same thing. So I've tried to get back into the frame of mind that would allow me to understand his motivation, and conceded that there's not much point.

One thing that I do recall quite distinctly is that one of the easiest ways to frustrate teens is reminding them they're like their parents.

When she's not being a journalist, Treena Shapiro is busy with her real job, raising a son and daughter. Read her blog at http://familytree.honadvblogs.com.