Fallout
While preparing for dinner yesterday evening, we received a text message from our eldest daughter, asking if it would be alright to stay at her friends house overnight. She was already there, after leaving college on the same bus as her friend. We immediately kind of lost the plot. I’m not going to get into the nightmare that unfolded after that, but I’m fully expecting an explosion of nuclear proportions when she returns home.
Why?
Because I have removed many of the things from her room that she had been loaned in return for doing well in recent months. The games machine has gone. The big monitor on the computer is gone. The collection of Anime movies has gone.
If you see a mushroom cloud in the distance, at least you’ll know she’s home.
The whole episode has caused me to wonder if this is straight out of the usual teenage girl play-book? The slash-and-burn version of growing up – destroying relationships in order to begin the metamorphoses between being a dependent teenager to an independent person making their own decisions?
It opens pandoras box, doesn’t it – teenagers badly want to make their own decisions, to have independence, and to stand on their own two feet – but they don’t want any of the responsibilities and expectations that go with it.
I wonder how Miss 17 will react to being told she can have her independence, but her pocket-money is going to be cut in half, and she will have to wash her own clothes ?