The Teen Years have begun at our house, oh happy day, which is precocious indeed since our oldest has just barely made it into the double digits, but we pride ourselves on being ahead of the curve. Rebecca got up on Friday morning and decided she was Not Going To School, and the discussion that ensued involved a lot of screaming and Rebecca's being escorted out to the car in her jammies before she changed her mind and decided that, yeah, she would make an appearance at the local institute of higher learning. "Mark my words," I told my husband, "she is going to run away from home before she is 16." Little did I know that my words would prove prophetic before the day was over--but that afternoon, Rebecca found our parenting so egregiously wanting that she decided she could do better in another family, so she left. (Note: Names have been changed to protect the guilty.) This time I did what I told her I would do last time she pulled a stunt like this: I called the police.
This is how you know you are starting to get old, is when the police start to look young to you. The officer who showed up looked like he was maybe 16. I'm sure he was older than that, but I'm also pretty sure I have brassieres that are older than he is. In any event, I sent him upstairs to Rebecca's room to give her a little reality orientation about the perils of wandering around on the street by her lonesome after dark--which, truth be told, is not at all dangerous in our neighborhood, but I didn't want to establish a precedent. I told him that our girl had ADD, and he grinned and said, "So do I"--so it's not true that having this condition dooms you to a life of juvenile delinquency, at least nothing serious enough to keep you off the police force, and there is hope.
That alone would have made it an eventful weekend, but then yesterday showed up in a blaze of gorgeous spring weather, and the four of us made it down to the park, and I got my bike out for the first time in at least five years. And then we came home and had family dinner, which is something we haven't managed to pull off in a month of Sundays, and in the middle of dinner Rebecca made some comment about peas and I found myself declaiming, "I eat peas with honey/I've done it all my life/They do taste kind of funny/But it keeps them on my knife"--and my husband looked at Rebecca with a kind of We're In This Together expression on his face, and said, "She's kind of like Chatty Cathy--you pull the string and you never know what she'll say next." And I looked at Rebecca and our youngest, sitting across from her, and both of them had this kind of I'm About To Have the Silly Giggles expression, and it was a good moment.
So it goes with family life. You never know from one day to the next whether you are going to have to call the cops, or whether it will be a Silly Giggles day. The trick is to be ready for either one--something I can't seem to manage lately without the aid of battery cables, or the medical equivalent, attached to my brain, but which I hope I will soon be able to manage without any electrical assistance whatsoever.