Parenting, It's Hard Work

When do children twenty-agers grow up? I believe it's true to say that you probably love your spouse and offspring as much as your parents and in some cases a lot more. So I will start off by saying that I love my spouse and both my kids as much as I could ever love anyone. I'm basically focusing on my son on this post. He is a great big lovable guy but has probably put a few gray hairs in my head over the last 10 years. He seems to be some kind of bad luck magnet when it comes to borrowing mom's car. This weekend he borrowed my car to visit his cousin down south near Sarasota. His car is a $400 1986 Volvo that I bought for him last January and is definitely not road worthy. As you can imagine. His past history with driving my car (and others cars he has owned) has not been very favorable. He had a 1965 VW bug when he was 16 and the car's brakes failed and there was a tremendous about of drama over that episode. He has had a couple of situations before this weekend with my car. The first happened when he hit some kind of concrete barrier and my car needed $2800 work of repairs. He had just paid off that $1000 deductible balance when he accidentally planted my car in the neighborhood flowerbed and knocked down a light pole and neighborhood sign at the entrance/flowerbed and that was another $2000 fix. So he had to pay another $1000 deductible. We have this policy if you break it you fix it. This weekend when he drove my car to Englewood or some little town down south and on his way home he said some guy was driving a pickup truck with a whole bunch of shit falling off like lawn chairs and boards. He said he dodged the lawn chairs and the board hit the car underneath and he said he lost the air conditioning. Today it was fix it time. Only problem was he decided to go out late last night after he came in from his trip down south and I think he might have indulged in too much beer/whatnot because today he was really sick. He was working on my car and then he would go off in the grass and puck. He knew that he couldn't afford to take it and have someone fix it and he is smart enough to fix it himself but not when he is majorly hung over. He worked on my car in the 98 degree weather with bouts of puking and did get the broken part replaced. Then it didn't cool so he decided it needed to be recharged. He is doing that tomorrow. My son has really bad luck and seems to be accident prone. It's never been anything extremely serious except for the time he fell off a second story building downtown into razor wire about 4 years ago. He was on the roof of a building where he lived and slipped off and fell directly into razor wire which carried him about 30 feet to the ground. He needed several hundred stitches on his butt, thighs, and hand. Parenting, It's hard work. Kids, You gotta love 'em.



You break it you fix it.
r.m.