There is so much in parenting that no amount of age, wisdom or experience can prepare you for.  No matter that I am educated in child development and spent most of my career working with young adults.  It is a giant exercise of strength and will just to hold on tight to the grey matter in my head and keep myself from physically dissociating and taking a permanent vacation in my happy place.  Even more difficult is having two children who are on two complete ends of the spectrum.  Nothing I learned from raising the first was applicable to the second.  They never agree on anything except how unbelievably stupid their parents are.  When suggesting that they could benefit by walking in each other’s shoes and trying to see the world from another perspective, they of course took me literally and went on infinitum about cooties and the diseases that each would get from touching the others shoes.  When I told them I wasn’t being literal, but figurative they both snorted, ignored me and took respite in their iPods.  Don’t get me wrong, they are both great kids in their own right, but I certainly have a greater appreciation for the divisiveness that plagues our country.  So I used the great ol’ USA as my example at dinner.  I told them both they were perfect examples of how both political parties have become completely intolerant of one another and are at the same time ignorant about who and what the other really is.  My sons were behaving like a little mini microcosm of the large macrocosm of our two-party system.  Yes, they almost choked on their meatloaf, but I concluded with this phrase, “If you two Yahoos can’t get along…and you’re family, who can expect the rest of the country to broaden their perspectives….”  the reply…”What’s a Yahoo?”   my answer “Read Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.”  Conclude with plenty of eye rolling and masticating of beef.  Seriously now, am I really the stupidest person you know??????