!!!TEENAGERS!!!

I woke up at 4:27am to my 19yr old daughter talking on her phone in the bathroom. She wasn't answering a call to nature. She'd been up all night, so she was tired. Maybe she was confused.

The fact that she was talking to someone on the phone meant another teenager had been up all night.

She'd moved back in with me a few weeks before Christmas, after a bumpy year and a half with her mom, while I finished divorcing my 2nd wife: her step-mother. My daughter had lived with me all of her life until she was 18. She got into a few bad habits living with her mom that I've been trying to ween her off of.

Sigh.

Like herding cats.

My teenager has a good friend who is 17, who is struggling for her independence from an over-protective mother. I've been asked to lie to this woman for the sake of teenagerly antics, but I refused.

The relationship between parent and child is sacred.

No one should come between parent and child unless the child is being abused. Restricting a child from something is not abuse. Kids have been living without things since the dawn of time.

The friend's mom is nuts. She's raising two teenage girls, on top of seeking her own independence from a husband who self medicates with alcohol.

But I understand why she's nuts, considering I've only just paid off my divorce lawyer within the last few weeks.

And I understand what the teenaged friend is going through, having been 17 once, a very long time ago. 17 is when God tells us we know everything, and forces us to assert ourselves to the world. At 17, the only thing standing between you and the world is your parents; for some, just one.

Before a child comes into the world, it's parents are the architects. They create the blue-print for how it will live. Where it goes to school. Who it's friends are going to be.

As our construction projects reach completion, we discover that not everything went according to plan. Anyone who's worked construction can tell you, blue-prints are the ideal, but they change to fit reality, on a daily basis.

Subcontractors have to be dealt with. People with differing opinions on how to run the water lines and where the emergency exits should be.

Sometimes the architects disagree and one of them moves off-site, to a cozy, air-conditioned office, where they attempt to hold onto some kind of influence over the project, when what the on-site manager really wants is a silent partner. Someone who helps fund the construction, but keeps their opinions to themselves.

When the project is complete, your job as site-manager and architect is finished. The drafty little trailer you directed the subcontractors from is dragged off site. You're left with nothing to do but maintenance.

The job of raising a child is all consuming. You forget about things you enjoyed doing. A guitar will sit in a closet for 20 years while the strings get rusty and the neck twists and bends. Your old Mustang sits under a tarp for so long it's thought of as an obstacle and a pain in the ass, and boxes of books and old toys are piled on top of it.

Man! That would be great. I still have 2 little kids to raise and I'm 48. If I did have a Mustang in my garage it would be a pile of rusty dust by the time I'd got around to rebuilding it. My guitar itch never went away but, with a bit of ointment, has been reduced to the size of a ukulele.

If you're an empty nester, I envy you. I don't wanna hear any bitching about how the kids never call or come by to visit. I'm raising my second generation of feral monkeys and I can't watch my favorite show without fighting a gang of poo-flingers for the remote!

But I love 'em! Ahem.