Don't mess with MINE!

A friend of the daughter had the nerve to suggest that "things" my girl does would make me stop loving her. What a damn idiot!

Teenagers do things that make their parents cringe. They make decisions that are less than stellar. My teenagers are pretty typical in those respects. I was a teenager once, we all were. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles showed me that nothing my cousins, siblings and I could do would cause them to love us any less. Could we disappoint them? Oh yeah. Did we do some really stupid things? Yes. Did they always love us anyway? Absolutely!

I wrecked my mom's car. She wanted to know if I was okay. She asked that a lot. My dad told me I didn't need to drive anymore, while he hugged me tight.

Photos of my parents when they were young intrigued me. I would look at Mom and Dad's wedding pictures all the time. Mike and Jimmy, the cute brothers up the street, cut through my yard and I decided to go sneak a cigarette with them. I forgot that I'd been sitting on the patio looking at the wedding pictures until after it stopped raining two days later. Mom was mad. She was sad. She lectured me about the evils of tobacco and respecting other people's property. Then she made sure I knew she loved me. Later that summer, when I cried because Mike didn't like me, she told me he was a hoodlum. Even though I had been hanging out with him, she never said I was a hoodlum.

One time my cousin K and I came home from a party without her friend. Her friend lived in another state and was visiting with us. This was in the days before cell phones. We had a curfew, so we abandoned the girl with some boy we didn't know and went home just a little late. We smelled of cigarettes and beer, but we were home sober and safe. My uncle looked at us, called us dumb-asses and loaded us back into the car to go find crazy friend. We weren't grounded or anything - it was our annual visit and the adults just made sure we knew how dumb leaving a friend really was.

My girls are still in their early teens. They have lots of time to do really stupid stuff. I hope they don't. Maybe they will be smarter than their dad and I were. Whether they are or not, I will love them. I will be their mom and try to help them fix the problems they create or discover. Even after they aren't teenagers.