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I'm Hot!

5.September.2006

I'm hot. I say this without any false modesty or bravado ~ I am on fire. Literally. Ok, no actual flames are present but I'm quite certain that my core temperature is hovering between 100 and 150 degrees. Closer to the 150 mark I'm guessing.

This has nothing to do with the ambient temperature of my home, although I just peeked at the thermostat and it's reading a nice balmy 75 degrees in the family room with a humidity level measuring somewhere around 300%. No, this has nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with raising teenagers.

On Saturday morning we had out of town guests visiting, so naturally we had to take them out of our town in order to show them a good time. Before we left I made them a hearty breakfast consisting of a ham/onion/mushroom/cheese/egg scramble, toast, bacon and juice. As I was standing in front of the stove, getting hot (do you see a pattern here?) I was pondering the wisdom of leaving the two teenagers home and taking our two youngest daughters with us. I was leaving two teenagers alone for the day, with (and this is a biggie) car keys.

As I stood there stirring the eggs, the thought appeared in my head, and yes it actually appeared, as in I saw the letters and heard a voice telling me that there would be a car accident today. Over the years I've learned to listen to the voices (no medication required) and so I began to think about how far we were going to be from our offspring, who they could call in an emergency and then I saw something shiny, got distracted and forgot the whole episode.

Until we had just driven north of Marysville and my husband's cell phone rang. I'm driving and this is what I hear:
    “Hello?”
    “What?” (Sharp intake of breath)
    “How bad?” (Gasp)
    “Are you hurt?”
    “Is Stephanie hurt? Huh? Really? How bad?”
    “Ok....yeah......yeah.....uh huh....are you sure?”
    “Where did this happen?”
    “Is it drivable?”
    “What did the police say?”
By this time I have exhausted my entire repertoire of pantomimes signaling the following statement:
    TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON OR I WILL SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST, VEER OFF I-5 AND KILL US ALL!
As I neared the point of self-immolation, he hung up the phone and turned to look at me.
    “She had an accident, didn't she? Is she ok? Was Chris in the truck? Is he ok? What happened, do we need to go home or is there someone we need to call?” I gasped out in one breath.
    “I will tell you what happened if you stop looking at me and watch the road”, he calmly informed me.
Oh yeah. I was supposed to be driving.

It turns out that someone in a rather large truck rammed into our rather small truck on the passenger side at a light. No one was hurt except for our small truck. Even better is the fact that the man driving behind my daughter at the time was an off duty Washington State Patrol officer. He got out and told my daughter that it wasn't her fault, he'd seen the whole thing. She even got his name and telephone numbers.

Now you'd think with all that I'd be tickled pink and happy. You'd also think, and rightly so, that the daughter involved in the accident, through no fault of her own, would be a bit more careful in the following days. Sometimes after an accident you are a bit gun shy about driving, and you're extra careful about what you do behind the wheel of a car. You might be what is termed cautious.

That's because you're assuming that the person involved in the accident is a rational human being. No. Not even close.

This is a TEENAGE MUTANT DRIVER we're talking about here. Nothing fazes her. A bulldozer could have picked her up IN the Mazda truck and shoved her off a cliff into a roaring river and the only thing she'd be concerned about was that her hair was getting wet and you just know that's going to make it all frizzy!

Tonight she and the Boy Wonder were given the easy, uncomplicated and fairly simple task of taking home one of Boy Wonder's friends. Enough time passed that they should have been home and we were a bit concerned. I called Boy Wonder on his cell phone.
    “Where are you?”
    “mumble mumble um....almost home...mumble”
    “Where have you been? You should have been back a long time ago”
    “Oh....uh....mumble mumble....we stopped at McDonalds”
    “Get home now”
I assume that they were turning the corner and parking the truck by now. After fifteen more minutes I call back.
    “Where are you??”
    “We just dropped Joey off and we're coming home”
    “You're what??? You said you were almost home”
    “We were”
Uh huh. After interrogation under bright lights and threat of key-removal, we learned that they had gone 'for a drive'.
    “Gone for a drive where?”
    Daughter: “Uh, I don't know the street names”
By this time I'm very unhappy and it shows. It turns out, after more key-removal threats, that they'd gone to the dirt roads to 'spin the tires'.

I now have an extra set of truck keys and two disgruntled teenagers who keep asking me 'what the big deal is' and 'what am I so hot about'.

I'm hot because nobody warned me that the tiny baby they placed in my arms seventeen years ago would grow up without any common sense.

And did I mention that today I had to go get her because apparently the truck has blown a gasket (much like me) and is no longer drivable. It's being towed tomorrow. Oh yeah baby, I'm boiling.

Even Hot Hubby was unable to fix it, though he tried.
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comment on this column

I hate THOSE phone calls ... (((((Pam)))))
billio
USA -
Wow... And I thought girls were supposed to be more responsible drivers than boys... Maybe WonderBoy (and I love the name! :-) was goading her on?

Or not!
Jeri lynn
Everett, WA USA -

Scripts modified from Matt Wright's guestbook. His scripts can be found at Matt's Script Archive

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