Those Lines On My Face

by Kimberly Ripley

Reprinted from Breathe Deeply, This Too Shall Pass: Thirty Tales of Trials and Tribulations of Parenting Teens by Kimberly Ripley

The most intriguing species of child is the older teen. Not quite adult...won't admit to being childlike, this odd combination of wanting to grow up, yet craving a parent's nurturing makes for a hormonal mess. Sitting at my computer at odd hours of the night, I am frequently visited via AT&T, collect of course, by my first born child.

Scott is nineteen, and after finishing high school last June, took it upon himself to move nearly sixteen hundred miles away and live "on his own". Let's just say it was significantly cheaper when he lived, ate, bathed, entertained, and borrowed my car, right here at home.

Humorous fodder for my writing, Scott's achievements have been remarkable in their own way. He has, in fact, held one of the eleven jobs he's attempted for an entire nineteen days. He has been evicted from merely two apartments. He has a roommate, somehow acquired a puppy, and drives a 1987 Volkswagon Fox station wagon, when it runs.

He and his roommate Raymond have developed a keen sense of improvisational creativity. Case in point: their plumbing. It seems the boys, after running low on funds, ran out of toilet paper. Rather than purchasing more...this would infringe on buying Taco Bell and other nutritious items...they began using and flushing paper towels instead. Lo and behold, they clogged the pipes! They clogged them so badly that poop was rising up in their shower stall. This prompted a collect phone call completely void of intelligence.

"Hi, Mom. There's something really wrong with the toilet."

"What have you done?" I asked.

"Well, we ran out of TP and flushed paper towels instead. There's even poop (he actually used a more descriptive term) in our shower."

"Have you thought of plunging the toilet, Scott, or maybe snaking the pipe?" I calmly inquire.

"Oh, cool, Mom, no. Can you send some money for a plunger?"

"Scott, what are you boys doing about bathroom facilities while yours is out of order?" I'm not sure I was ready for this answer.

"We pee out back behind the neighbor's boat, and go across the street to the Sports Pub for #2"

"And showering?" I ask.

"It's pretty ingenious, Mom. On trash day we found a cinder block by the side of the road. We put it in the shower to stand on so we don't get poop on our feet!"

"Oh, good," is my only reply.

Scott decided after Christmas that college was the route to take. He enrolled in his local community college to study, of all things, writing.

"You write, Mom, and I have a lot of the same talents you have," he explained.

"I'm glad to hear you didn't want to be a plumber," I reply.

Kids can enhance our writing and they can hinder our writing. They occasionally cause desperate cases of Writer's Block. Scott has significantly contributed in all of these areas. But besides putting out feelers to find his way in the world, he, too, is writing. That slows the sprouting of my new gray hairs and eases the defining lines on my face. Knowing that the path he is now attempting will lead him not necessarily to wealth and fame, but certainly to an interesting and fulfilling future, is payment enough for me.