1 . It is natural that young people are not often comfortable when they are with their parents. They say that their ______ don’t understand them. They often think that their parents are out of touch with modern ways; that they are too strict ______ their children; and that they ______ give their children a free hand. It is true that parents often find it difficult to win their children’s ______ and they tend to forget how they themselves ______ when young. For example, young people like to act at once without much ______. It is one of their ways to show that they have ______ up and they can face any difficult situation. Instead, ______ people worry more easily. Most of them ______ things ahead, at least in their minds, and do not like their plans to be upset by something ______.

When you want your parents to let you do ______, you will have better success if you ask ______ you really start doing it.

Young people often make their parents angry with their choices in clothes, in ________and in music. But they do not mean to cause any trouble; it is just that they feel ______ from the older people’s world, into which they have not yet been accepted. That’s why young people want to make a new culture of their ______. And if their parents do not like their music or entertainments or clothes or their ways of speech, this will make the young extremely ______.

Sometimes you are so proud of yourself that you do not want your parents to ______   “yes” to what you do. All you want is to be ______ and do what you like. It is natural enough, after being a child for so many years, that you were completely under your parents control.

If you plan to control your life, you’d better ______your parents and try to get them to believe you. If your parents see that you have a high sense of responsibility, they will certainly give you the ______ to do what you want to do.

It’s eight o'clock on a cold spring night. Our apartment has been hit by a tornado. Every bit of furniture is draped with scissors and Scotch tape, modeling clay, and party favors. I’m so tired tonight.

The phone rings-for the sixth time in less than an hour. We know who it is. When my mother was 68,a stroke claimed her brain. She is haunted by paranoia (妄想症)—she thinks she has been kicked out of her assisted living facility; she thinks her daughters have not visited in months; she thinks that her friend Jimmy never wants to see her again.

Each time she calls, I play a game with myself called “How Good a Person Can I Be?” She has no idea that she has repeated the things she is about to say a million times today and a million times yesterday. She has no idea that I had surgery, nor can she recall her own granddaughter’s name. She is unaware of most of the past, and she is lonely.

“MOM!” I yell. “You are not being removed from your home!And we visited you two days ago!” “Mom, you have to believe me, and if you don’t, I cannot talk anymore! Everything is fine!”

Silence. Then: “I was only calling to say hi. But I also doubt about something; do you have a minute?”

“No, Mom, I don’t, I can’t have this again!”

“Why are you yelling?”

I flop(猛然坐下)on the couch, aware that my daughter is witnessing. She hears me complain my mother, lose my patience, announce that someone I love is an unwelcome burden. I have not only failed at being a good person; I have failed at being a good example to my daughter.

“Can I talk to Grandma Ellie?” My five-year-old reaches for the phone.

Wordlessly, I hand it over.

I listen to my daughter singing to her grandmother, caring for her with patience.

In our kitchen, there was a wooden table and three chairs — one for Dad, one for Mom, and one for me. In the cellar (地窖), the very last jar of apple jam lay quietly on the shelf, waiting to be turned into an apple pie when Dad came back. Mom sat at one end of the table. I sat in the middle between her and Dad. I tried not to look at Dad’s empty place. Dad had gone to the city to look for work for a long time.

Every night, I lay awake in bed and waited for the train to stop. Waited to hear the creaky (嘎吱作响的) gate Dad’s going to fix when he came home. Waited to hear the sound of his work boots dropping on the step by the kitchen door, and his voice calling, “I’m home!”

Every night, as I lay there, I stared at the window and the curtains Mom made from empty flour sacks (麻布袋).

Every night, Mom came to kiss me good-night — after the train’s gone by. She had been listening, too. “Go to sleep. Your dad will be home soon. Maybe for Thanksgiving.”

Time dragging by, it finally came the day before Thanksgiving. I went to sleep with the sound of train wheels in my head, whispering, “Maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow.”

Early the next morning, the smell of coffee woke me. I ran into the kitchen. There he was! Dad lifted me onto his shoulders and pretended to stagger from my weight. “How’s my boy? You’ve gotten so big that I can barely lift you up anymore.”

He put me down, and I stared at the two sacks on the table. One said FLOUR — I knew that word. I tried reading the other: S-U-G-A-R. Dad whistled admiringly and winked at me. Mom and I had been practicing my letters most days. I could see that Mom was pleased with me. “I’m going to bake a pie for your dad’s homecoming dinner. Jimmy, bring me that jar of apple jam from the shelf in the cellar.” Mom smiled at me.

Hearing this, I took the steps two at a time to the cellar.

“Never mind, boy, accidents happen,” Dad said and wiped my tears.

An anonymous (匿名的) person’s rude note was sent to a struggling neighbor. Prior to receiving the unpleasant letter last month, Randa Ragland and her family had been facing a variety of tough challenges. Her husband had lost his job; she had been diagnosed with some health issues; but worst of all, her 3-year-old son Jaxen had been diagnosed with stage IV neuroblastoma just before his birthday. Jaxen had already suffered seven surgeries and been hospitalized more than 20 times.

Being a desperate Mom, Ms. Ragland had to care for her little one attentively and tried to get in contact with the “best doctor in the world for this condition”. She and her husband travelled all the way state after state to give her little one a fighting chance. Exhausted and worn out, she found the sparkle (火花) of the hope for lighting the messy situation was to go out.

On top of all of this, she opened her mailbox in Pinson, Alabama, to find an unaddressed note from a neighbor criticizing her for the state of her lawn. The note said that since her yard had fallen into disrepair, its appearance was “affecting the resale value” of their homes and that Ragland needed to “do better.”

At first, she felt a little angry. But so much had been going on with her and her family. She just didn’t have the energy to be more negative.

She posted a photo of the note on Facebook as a means of encouraging her friends to have patience with their own neighbors because we never know what hardships someone might be going through.

Unexpectedly, her post was shared by dozens of people.

Ms. Ragland had never met any of these people before in her life.

Mum and Her Bank Account

My family had the tradition to sit down by the kitchen table every Saturday night to count out the money Dad had brought home.

These are for the rent, and these for the groceries. “ Mum counted out and divided the big silver pieces.

I’ll need a notebook, “ That would be my sister Christine, my brother Nels or me.

After Mum put one or two coins to the side for the notebook, she said that was all we needed to buy for the week and we all relaxed a little. We didn’t have to go downtown and draw money out of Mum’s bank account, which could always give us such a warm and secure feeling for having enough to afford the life.

When Nels graduated from grammar school , he needed some money for high school We sat by the table and I offered my “ Little Bank” which was used for sudden emergencies such as the time when Christine broke her arm and had to see a doctor. I laid the box carefully in front of Mum. After counting out the money in the little bank and finding there was not enough, we all agreed not to go to the bank but to find some ways.

Nels volunteered to work in Dillon’s grocery after school and Dad said he would give up smoking. Now there was enough money. We felt relieved.

So many things came out of the little bank that year: Christine’s dress for the school play, Nel’s operation ... Whatever happened , we always knew we still had the bank to depend on. We never used her bank account.

That was twenty years ago.

Last year, I sold my first story. When the money came I thought of Mum’s bank account.

So I hurried over to Mum’s home.

Knowing that there was no bank account at all, I felt shocked.

9 . For many parents, raising a teenager is like fighting a long war, but years go by without any clear winner. Like a border conflict between neighboring countries, the parent-teen war is about boundaries: Where is the line between what I control and what you do?

Both sides want peace, but neither feels it has any power to stop the conflict. In part, this is because neither is willing to admit any responsibility for starting it. From the parents’ point of view, the only cause of their fight is their adolescents’ complete unreasonableness. And of course, the teens see it in exactly the same way, except oppositely. Both feel trapped.

In this article, I’ll describe three no-win situations that commonly arise between teens and parents and then suggest some ways out of the trap. The first no-win situation is quarrels over unimportant things. Examples include the color of the teen’s hair, the cleanliness of the bedroom, the preferred style of clothing, the child’s failure to eat a good breakfast before school, or his tendency to sleep until noon on the weekends. Second, blaming. The goal of a blaming battle is to make the other admit that his bad attitude is the reason why everything goes wrong. Third, needing to be right. It doesn’t matter what the topic is—politics, the laws of physics, or the proper way to break an egg—the point of these arguments is to prove that you are right and the other person is wrong, for both wish to be considered an authority—someone who actually knows something—and therefore to command respect. Unfortunately, as long as parents and teens continue to assume that they know more than the other, they’ll continue to fight these battles forever and never make any real progress.