Late Teens

And, no, I am not referring to teens that are always late...

... oh, wait a minute.  Yes, I am.

The late teen years (16-19) are an incredible adventure... 

... for the teen.

For parents, the late teen years can be full of frustrations and expenses.  Expenses?  We have watched our car insurance double, our food and utility bills go up, and experienced sticker shock at gift giving times.  There are school fees and technology needs (no joke).  But the expenses are really just part of the experience of raising kids, and are manageable because we know they are temporary.  Soon enough the kids will leave home and the expenses will drop substantially.

No, the frustrations are the part I really want to talk about.  

Thinking back to when I was 16-19 years old, I still didn't really see my parents as individuals.  Not yet.  They were still MOM and DAD.  MOM and DAD had one function only.  To provide for us kids.  That meant they were supposed to feed us and clothe us, take us on vacations, pay for our stuff, and nag, pester, and harass us about school/church/chores.  In the meantime, it was my job to inform them of how outdated their view points were, how things were different now, and that they should just trust me and let me do whatever I wanted.  [Yeah, I never convinced them of any of that, by the way.]  By the time I was 19, I was pretty convinced I was all grown up.  I was "An Adult", who didn't need my parents telling me when to be home or what to do.

It wasn't until I was truly an adult (meaning I had moved away and was now fully supporting myself financially) that I started seeing my parents as individuals with needs and wants that really had NOTHING to do with their kids whatsoever!  Woah!  And I didn't empathize with my parents' struggles with teen aged kids until I had teens of my own.  So, I don't expect my kids to understand or empathize with me anytime soon.

Still, it would be nice.

Where is all of this rambling-ness going, you ask?

I just really, really want my daughter to be courteous and come home at a reasonable hour on weeknights.  Not stay out til midnight or later because she doesn't work until evening shift and can sleep in the next day.  Great for her, crappy for me.  I do have to go to work in the morning and would like to have a good night's sleep.

Just give her a curfew, you say?  Yeah.  Nineteen is a difficult age for that.  She feels she has a right to stay out as late as she wants.  And really, if she was living in an apartment with roommates, she could.  But she is not living in an apartment.  She is living at home.

She has told me to just go to bed and not wait up for her.  My response to that is simply that just because she is being selfish doesn't mean I am going to be selfish.  You see, I wait up because I love her.  I wait up to make sure I don't sleep right through a call for help.  I wait up to remind her that she is not an island.  Her actions do affect those around her who care about her.  

It is true that apartment living with roommates is much more "freeing".  But roommates don't wait up for you... because they don't love you.  It doesn't matter to them one way or the other if you make it back home again in one piece.  That sounds callous.  Of course, they'll care.  After the fact.  After something disastrous happens.  But they won't stay up waiting for a phone call that tells them you need help.  Someday, she'll have a spouse who will wait up for her, because he will love her and not want to go to bed until he knows she is home safe.  

I know she'll move out sometime soon, if only to feel that freedom of having no one care enough to wait up for her.  It feels so liberating, at first.  But, really, it can be incredibly lonely.  I remember living in an apartment with 5 other girls and feeling severely depressed and homesick because no one truly loved me in that apartment.  I didn't realize that was the reason for the homesickness, at the time.  I just knew I was miserable and lonely in a house full of other people.  

Until the day she moves out, it is my job to love her enough to want to wait up to see her safely home.  And care enough about her to hear about her adventures.

I just wish she could see me more as an individual who needs a good night sleep before I go to work and less like MOM who has outdated points of view.  I know she loves MOM.  I just wish that she loved Kate enough to come home early on weeknights.