were you a rebellious child?

I staged a coup at 18 weeks.

I got kicked out of Catholic school in 7th grade because I told my teacher she was a cunt and to go fuck herself. That was pretty much the beginning and the end.

I had a brief rebellious period from 8th grade to about 10th grade. My friends all drank and did a lot of drugs and were generally idiots. I would go to my friend's house and we would sneak out his window and go to parties. Oddly enough, I don't really remember getting angry at my parents very much, even in this "rebellious" phase, it was more about being cool than trying to upset my parents. I was very careful to hide my behavior from them (though I got busted for smoking). Then I moved to a new city where I had no friends and was generally miserable. I spent a lot more time at home and began to appreciate my family more. I was a pretty perfect son for the last two years of high school, between getting easy A's at the shitty school I went to and never going out except to buy cds or go to movies by myself. So basically I had a brief, minor rebellious period.

I got kicked out of a Catholic school in 7th grade too!

You know, I got picked on by bullies growing up, but I didn't think to rebel. I was very much into the turn the other cheek bit I learned in Sunday school. Of course, this meant that I just continued to get my feelings hurt and tried even harder to fit in.

Also, my parents were convinced I was their little princess/angel and I liked all the praise I got from them and didn't want to ruin it.

Then my sister came along, rebeled (ie: drank alcohol at parties, fooled around a little), and became labeled the Bad Sister/Daughter. She's not so rebellious any more - she's in law school. And my youngest sister was even more rebelious, but not until high school really.

*snort*

You should've had my parents for your parents. You would've had too much respect for them to think of them as idiots. Granted, I feared my parents for quite a long time, but eh, it's helped keep me on the straight and narrow. Not even a single mention of a jaywalking incident in my past.

I did think of many of my classmates, though, as complete and utter imbeciles. I could not stand them, could not stand to be around them, wished they would just sit down and behave instead of going about being morons, etc. Then again, I was an uptight little child and that wasn't much fun, so maybe that approach didn't work for me.

But yeah. Could never think of my parents as idiots. Not even now.

Oh yeah, and I stayed in Catholic school from pre-k up until the end of my high school years. Y'know, reading the student handbook from my HS alma mater, I've come to realize that it was quite a feat for me to have never gotten in trouble there. The list of rules and regulations there is almost legendary.

i got kicked out of sunday school for fighting with another kid when i was like 5.

Take THAT Mr. Pope!

and i pulled a girl's hair on the first day of kindergarten and had to go sit in the corner!

Does anyone regret their rebellious phase? Though I realize that a lot of what I did during this time was really stupid, I'm still glad I did it. I went through my embarassing 'learning to deal with alcohol' phase and got past my curiosity about drugs (to a stage where I realised that I'm not very interested in recreational drug use) at an early stage. I learned stuff.

I wasn't rebelling against anything, I just had general, vague issues with authority.

interesting, my first rebellion started at about eight years. i would be doing something the parents didn't approve of and they would say "Jimmy, if you don't stop doing that we will take your new train away" (or whatever toy I valued the most at the time). I would then simply get up walk over to the toy in question, hand it to them and then return to doing what I wasn't supposed to do. For some reason my mother delights in this even today, however I think there is something there that still affects me even today, esp. in relationships with women....oh well, what did Woody Allen say "I tend to reject before I get rejected, that way I save a lot of time and money"

Well, in kindergarten I got in trouble for refusing to sing Halloween songs because I was told at home that Halloween was evil. So, I guess my self-riteousness got me in trouble with teachers sometimes.

I regret not rebelling more than I did. I was actually a really well-behaved kid in high school, band geek, whatever but I fucked off in class and got in my fair share of trouble with my teachers etcetera. I was always kind of repressing this very insistent urge to tell everybody to go fuck themselves and never did much about it. The problem is is that it's never ever possible to win a fight with either of my parents so I just hide my indiscretions in the shadows most of the time. If I had been more of a punk in my school days I suspect it wouldn't have taken me quite as long as it has to grow up and start sort of behaving like an adult.

don't regret it much, only the grief I caused my parents (who I would later discover to be not only real actual PEOPLE, but sorta cool even)

in kindergarten, i was evil. I once put gum in someone's hair, like on purpose. Because I was, y'know, curious. I'd heard about people getting gum stuck in their hair (usually because they fell asleep midchew), but had never seen it.
And I would always lie about when my birthday was. So much so that one kid actually brought me a present (a toy car) one fake b'day. I took it home, my dad asked me where I got it and I had to give it back. I felt ashamed for taking advantage of the kid. Even though I was a kid too. But it's not my fault he believed my lie!
Anyway, when I did eventually have my real birthday, for some reason I didn't invite him to my party.

btw, it was more the other parents than my own, granted if I had known who Buckminster Fuller was when I shook his hand I would of not grouped my parents in with the others at all...but sometimes they just...argggh!!!

Haha I'm not answering this question but suffice to say the comment "One day you will have a child just like you and boy will you think yourself big and clever then" has been said to me by more relatives than just my mother. My grandmother prayed to the Virgin Mary that retribution would be taken against me! Though she does that to like everyone in the family, crazy bitch.

My parents and siblings were OK because I figured out that they were just as intelligent as I was and for the most part left me alone (it also helped that everyone was a LOT older than I was).

Other children were just insufferable, and for the most part my only interaction with them was during mandated social activities at school. Otherwise I really had no use for them. I never really "rebelled" in the traditional sense as I noticed early on that alcohol/drugs just made the other kids even more intolerable than they already were, and it was cheaper (and more rebellious) to like history books, punk rock, short wave radio static, and computer hacking.

Obviously, this is not affected my adult life in anyway whatsoever.

I'll leave it up to everyone else to decide if that was sarcastic or not

No. Not till I was 15 anyway.

i didn't rebel till i was 16, and it was because school bored me out of my wits. first i cut off mum's pride and joy, ie my ultra long hair (it was down to my butt) and bleaching it blond. my mum cried. then i slowly replaced a bottle of my parents gin with water, and put the gin in a sipper bottle and took it to school. me and my best mate would bunk our afternoon classes and hang out at my grandparents house (who were in aussie that entire year) watching menace to society type movies and drinking gin. it was my parents fault, they wouldn't let me go to university even though i got in. "too young" or something.

before then i was religiously square.

'i bought a guitar to punish my ma'

I would always do the opposite of what people (parents, teachers, etc.) have told me to do simply because I did not like other people telling me what to do. It got me into huge amounts of trouble over stupid minor things, so I don't advocate rebelling just for the hell of it.

0-12=very good calm child, hard working.

secondary school=progressively more cheeky and rebellious, by 17 or 18 spent most school days trying to undermine and annoy certain teacher in smart ass ways. also asking weird and difficult questions at school assemblies, blurting out things people wanted to hear someone say. For example once there was a teachers strike and the school captain called a meeting to urge us, the students, not to stage a walkout in protest.

I really didn't care about the effects of the strike, I was quite enjoying it, but I felt that walking out would be funny and so I stood up and made an empassioned speech about how we were getting "shafted" by the teachers and our own school captain and all we could do was walk out.

I got a rousing applause, and led the walk out. It was so cool in an immature kind of way. I feel now I was very manipulative, I think this story maybe says more about me, negative and positive, than most others I've ever told on ILX. (though I may have told it before)

x-post with Nicole, I think I am the same. I really have childish issues still with people telling me what to do, or power balances etc. I really hated the fact that some teachers of mine couldn't even spell and were teaching some fairly easy subject like geography and still managing to be incompetent, I felt it wasn't good enough and they deserved to be confronted with that.

I also felt teachers who clearly didn't like children or young people were the scum of the earth.

Sometimes I just feel like I want to do some really outlandsih self-destructive bullshit (and I often do) because I never ever got to do a DAMN THING I wanted to when I was living at home, it was like a damn prison (two Army officers, one of whom used to teach high school math, and me, imagine). I don't really want to come off and say I blame my parents for my latter-day indiscretions, but FUCK, am I really supposed to still want to get drunk and just break shit and yell things at people every weekend when I'm 25 years old and have a degree and a job and life insurance?

I don't want to read this thread anymore because it is pissing me off to think about this issue.

my post above should read "certain teachers", it wasn't just one, that would have been particularly mean.

Yes, that's very unusual behavior in unmarried males under 40. To the instituation with you.

"instituation"

I bet the Virgin Mary cries when I make typos. :(

*cries*

I'm really serious, the Virgin Mary is like an evil spectre in my life and I have a difficult time dealing with organized religion, as does my mom, because of this sort of thing! My greatgrandmother and my grandmother both put curses on people all the time by talking to the "Blessed Mother". It was horrifying. My mom told me that when my aunt got pregnant my grandmother first disowned my aunt (who was in high school at the time) but then took her back but ONLY if the Virgin Mary cursed the children and "made everyone who laughed at my family cry ten times more than I cry every night". That is not shit you mess with. And quite honestly looking at how my two cousins turned out, THE VIRGIN MARY MEANS SOME FUCKING BUSINESS.

Arrgh. Seriously, I'm pretty convinced that the Virgin Mary is like some sort of horrifying thing working for crazy ass Sicilians. I refused to go get confirmation because of this, which my parents were ok with because my dad was kicked out of Catholic school and my mother had to live with my grandmother her whole life, saying things like this, so it was all ok. I've been thinking about it since I posted that and being really creeped out!!

Uhhh this isn't meant to be a thread hijack but this indoctrination at an early age to regard important religious figures as demons probably didn't help me at all in my later complete godlessness. I probably wouldn't have ended up in handcuffs four times (but no arrests FUCK YOU COPS) if I wasn't wholly convinced that god was evil anyway.

This post is completely insane, I'm sorry. I've come around quite a bit though still the Virgin Mary freaks me out.

Things you instantaneously regret posting #459.

I was a rebellious child, and since I still live with my folks, I guess I still am.

I really hate being in handcuffs. Oh wow I hate being in handcuffs. Holy crap just thinking about being in handcuffs really makes me break out in a cold sweat and want to kill a LOT of people. I really should not have clicked on this thread again at all. I really fucking hate handcuffs. I have to drive home now in traffic.

Haha I guess it's time for me to get rid of the "fun" handcuffs then. They don't work with my current headboard anyway! Bastard shelvy headboard.

I have always been anti-authority, but I never had the power to do much, except by trying to undermine them. This wasn't directed at all authority by any means - just those I thought were claiming my respect without acting in a way that warranted it. It's given me lots of difficulty at school where I was repeatedly threatened with expulsion (but I was maybe the school's best bet at getting into Oxbridge, as I did, which gave you a fair degree of immunity, short of physically attacking teachers), at home (but it was never going to be possible to respect my mother, the way she behaved towards me) and at some jobs. These days, I have almost nothing to do with my mother, and she doesn't bother me much, and I have the highest respect for my boss and my boss's boss (who I deal with directly a lot), for their intelligence, professional skills, their reasonableness, everything, so it's no problem there. We have arguments, but they never turn into anything bad. I don't think this is particularly because I've mellowed, though middle age may have had that effect, as that I've found a tremendous place to work.

Hmm, also I'm in a different position now - there are a few people in the department who aren't so great in the skills and intellect department, but I am one of the main person they come to for help, and I hope I do help them with grace and without being nasty or patronising. At least, I try hard to do so, and they keep coming back. I suppose I'm sort of middling senior there, and I'm very conscious that I need to earn and deserve respect, not just expect it because of my position in the hierarchy or age or whatever.

Ally, no VM stuff for me I'm afraid; it's all Eek! Jehovah's Witnesses! with my mom (she isn't), which proves finally that we do not have the same mom.

What used to annoy me is that I was a good kid with straight As who did not smoke, drink, use any drugs or do the sex, yet my mom used to tell me that none of this mattered because I was incorrigible. I merely replied that she was probably using the longest word she could possibly spell. Just call me the Acid Adolescent.

I think I realised very early on about the arbitrary nature of rules and am not naturally the sort of person who buys the answer 'because I said so.' I was also very visibly the weakest kid at school when I started, in a school district where kids were together for the next 12 years and had little to distract them from remembering things about me. My mom tells me that the schools had inaugurated a policy of 'getting the students to work it out between them' so anyone who went to an adult and told them they were getting shoved around got the detention, not the kid doing the shoving.

So I got picked on pretty regularly (homework stolen, things ruined, the usual) until I was 14 and a combination of absolutely trammelling one person who was basically a stalker and a stand-up shouting match with the school shrink afterward changed my reputation overnight. They didn't think I was hard, exactly - they just didn't want to get in the line of fire if I started shooting off my mouth. My folks were also finally getting divorced and my mom and I basically fought nonstop for four years once I wasn't fighting at school, where I became a little too good at working the system because through my own articulacy I was treated as an adult even if I wasn't acting like one.

Probably what is also crucial about my rebellion is that I did register earlier than a lot of people about basic hypocrisy, especially in matters of religion, the law, relationships which seemed perfect but were not, mental illness, female misogyny in addition to the male kind, health - all sorts.

I never decided my parents were idiots, since neither of them ever really grew up; I tried to make friends with the other kids but for some reason they never liked me, which probably explains the rapid development of my bitter/smug/sarcastic/who the fuck are YOU to be above ME????!!! side.

But no matter my depths of bitterness and crankitude, no matter how she's snubbed me, I NEVER EVER EVER have fucked with Mary.

i had a "difficult teenager" phase at school when i was around 14 or 15. i was selective about the teachers i clashed with, but i had stormy relationships with a couple of them. one threatened to kick me out of school for the relatively harmless crime of "making funny noises at him" while he walked past in the corridor. after that, i made an effort to be obnoxious as possible to him.

i still got decent grades and stuff, though: i never slacked off on the old schoolwork much. i remember one teacher writing something on my report along the lines of: "i was surprised at kilian's good mark considering the amount of times we crossed swords this term." i still cherish that one. i remember i was politely-but-forcibly told not to attend the last two of his classes before the end of 3rd year, and our mutual dislike raised its head again in my last year in school, when he overheard me calling him "a spa".

never rebelled against my parents much. got on quite well with them in my teenage years, probably better than i do now.

i was a rebellious child, yes.

care to elaborate? ;-)

most rotten advice i've ever gotten was something a school social worker once said to my mom: "i'm sorry your daughter's not fitting in. but she should just suck it up and learn to adjust."

(hmm. maybe i should have listened. but then life wouldn't have been nearly as much fun!)

I was an altar boy long after all the other kids my age stopped. I got drunk in my cousin's car as a freshman (Rocky Horror, PDX, what what) but didn't party at the river because those kids were crazy dangerous and several of them hated me for some reason I never figured out because I wasn't really a smartass or an asshole or anything. (I refused to get out of a tough kid's way ONE TIME and we bumped shoulders and they all decided to fuck with me.) I had a reputation with my teachers for being "rowdy" but it was never bad rowdy, and I was always in Student Council and advanced classes and shit. So yeah, no REAL rebellion, although I did see the inside of a cop car as a sophomore. (It wasn't really my fault, and no handcuffs were involved.)

i wanted to topple the government of the USA from the inside out, and had been planning for its downfall since i was a small child. my well laid, maniacal plans - chronicled along with my manifesto in a series of 72 handwritten tomes - would have resulted in an heretofore unprecedented level of human loss and suffering, as well the the total disintegration of the American state and the current world system. this won't prevent me from getting a job, will it?

only had you succeeded, carey. your failure to destroy the world has saved your career aspirations.

that applies to a lot of us.

I was a rebellious child at about the age of 7 - fairly uncontrollable, sulky, compulsive liar, randomly destructive of property (or really anything that got in my way: cutting off my hair, burning plastic, breaking necklaces)... pretty teenage, really. ; ) After I got put into therapy - and learned/decided that if you're outwardly well-behaved and placatory you'll survive a lot easier - I became a lot quieter and less rebellious, never broke my teenage curfews, didn't act out at all. It just wasn't worth it. I don't think that attitude's really changed, either.

(I think I got into religion just after the severe trouble-child phase, too. Which is rebellion when your parents are fairly staunch agnostics! Perhaps.)

I was so unrebellious that I was rebellious in an extraordinarily weird way. When other kids were listening to AC/DC I was listening to elevator music; when other kids were making their parents spend their hard-earned money on stupid fashiony clothes I insisted on wearing these ancient chinos with holes in the knees; when other boys hated school but loved sports, I loved school but hated sports. I refused to curse. I loved books. I made a show of drinking the oh-so-adult drink of coffee in front of adults, though said adults would treat me like an utter freak rather than a really mature kid. I would have something close to a nervous breakdown if a teacher yelled at me, for whatever reason. (And in retrospect, I got yelled at for some pretty ugly-ass reasons.)

In retrospect, this was mighty stupid. There were a few things that were not toys I should've insisted on in a rather noisy fashion. NO! I AM NOT GOING TO FUCKING CAMP, YOU CAN'T MAKE ME AND IF YOU TRY I WILL TAKE OFF ALL MY CLOTHES AND SET FIRE TO THE LAWN AND SMASH EVERY LAST DISH IN THE HOUSE. AND IF YOU SEND ME TO A THERAPIST I WILL SET FIRE TO HIS CLOTHES AND RIP OUT HIS LAWN AND SMASH EVERY LAST DISH IN *HIS* HOUSE. AND WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THIS 'GIFTED' CLASS BULLSHIT...

Oh, and I didn't drink until I was halfway into my sophomore year of college. Crimony, that was needless. And the fact that I've never learned to drive is probably some bizarre artifact of ancient rebelliousness.

at about age 10, i remember finding my dad's playboy collection in the top shelf of the closet he shared with mom, i took it to an abandoned field and set it on fire, in the process burning the whole field. i was taken to the fire marshall's office...i remember lying as to the reason i started the blaze (maybe because mom was standing there)

I was the teenager from hell and did pretty much everything that I was told not to do.

I just dribbled a whole bunch of Chipotle Tabasco in my Coors Light!!! Fucking REBEL YELL motherfuckers, take that mom and dad, I am getting diurnkk off CHEAP YELLA BEER and POLLUTING IT WITH HOT SAUCE and SMOKING, SMOKING CIGARETTES WHICH KILLED MY GRANDMOTHER, YES I KNOW. HAHA. LOOK AT ME I DO NOT CARE. I GOT A TATTOO. HA.

I kicked a kid in the shins in first grade, but only because I hated recess and the kids who were bad would get sentenced to spend recess in the library. Which might be ironic because the kids who acted up in class all the time were probably the kids who really needed to get outside and run around a few times a day.

Anyway, I am super duper rebellious now.

i didn't have time to be rebellious. i was busy surviving.

Kiss my ass.

Have a nice day, Tom.

Already had one.

I'm so glad to hear that. I doesn't seem to prevent you from unleashing your Tourette's on innocent bystanders, however. I hope all your tomorrows are lovely and pleasant. Yes, Tom, may happiness be yours.

No, seriously, Orbit, that is a really jerky, self-important thing to say.

dude doesn't anybody care that I am putting chipotle tabasco in my beer? Christ, I'm from the south.

you people better be drunk.

I wish you were

Shut up.