Joëlle Anthony

By make lame jokes in front of my friends.

Good luck with your complexion!

Almost anything parents do when one is a teenager can be construed as humiliating.

One specific I recall was our inability to understand what the other meant. One time my father said, “You don’t even know how to use a washcloth.” What he meant was, “Take a bath, for cryin’ out loud!” What I thought was, “Don’t blame me if I don’t know how—you never taught me washcloth techniques!”

I often had responses in my head that I could not say, either because a child was not supposed to speak to adults that way, or because I had the thoughts but not the words, or because it would just perpetuate the speaking-at-odds situation, so what was the point?