Living the dream

One of the joys of your kids getting older is helping them learn how to manage adult relationships versus kid relationships because the expectations do change.  Once kids go off to school (post secondary) they have chances to live on their own (usually) and therefore make their own rules and routines and monitor themselves.  The first year of school is usually a bit of a write-off but if they’re lucky, they figure out how to do this without crashing and burning along the way.

Then kids come  home from school and have to find a way to fit their new found independence into their traditional family unit.  This can be a challenge at times.  Oldest girl-child never came back from post-secondary.  Once she had her own apartment that was it, she was off and free.  Boy-child, however, seems bound and determined to live with his mommy for as long as humanly possible.  For the most part, there hasn’t been a lot of transitional issues because I text him to ask where he is and he tells me.  That and the fact that he drunk-texts me all the time.  He’s not however, really good at letting me know  if he’s not coming home or little things like that.  It is a bit of a balancing act because I don’t necessarily need to know where he is all the time but it is a common courtesy to let others know where you are or when you’re arriving or leaving.  It’s a matter of respect.  Young adult children, however, don’t always realize that even though they are adults and able to make their own rules they still need to live by basic common courtesies and respects for the other adults in the house.  It’s not like they have to tell their roommates where they are or if they’re coming home that night so they don’t necessarily transition to telling parents because they don’t understand why they have to.

This scenario came to a head recently here with boy-child.  After a whirlwind celebratory weekend with friends from all over who had traveled to this town to all get together, boy-child decided to disappear briefly without letting people know where he was.  Actually, him and his girlfriend had been having issues via text message and he finally decided to travel to the city she was in to deal with it.  That certainly isn’t an unreasonable thing.  Relationship issues can feel like your world is ending and you NEED to see the person right then.  I get that.  Unfortunately, girlfriend was in a city three hours away and boy-child decided to travel there at 1 am after not getting near enough sleep due to the celebratory nature of the weekend.  He left his friend’s house at 1 am, saying he was going home (to avoid the fight his friend would give him if he knew that he was planning on driving that long, that late at night).  He drove to see girl-friend who probably thought that was very romantic of him.  He turned his phone off because he was almost out of power on his phone and wanted to save the power in case of an emergency.  Fast forward to suppertime’ish later that day and friend calls me wondering when boy-child would be done work.  He then proceeds to tell me that boy wasn’t in fact with him and that he had left to go home at 1 am the night before, to which I say “he never made it”.  My world suddenly froze while I tried to think about where he could possibly be and none of the immediate scenarios had happy endings.

Luckily, all ended well.  Friend was able to track down girlfriend who was able to let boy-child know to contact his mother and all was resolved fairly quickly.  Thank goodness because that type of stress is an awful, terrible feeling.  We did have a chat when he came home about not ever doing that again because seriously, I’ll be hunting him down myself next time and that’s not likely to end well.