I'm hot.
I say this without any false modesty or bravado - I am on fire.
No actual flames are present but I'm quite certain that my core temperature is hovering between 100 and 150 degrees.
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 percent.
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 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, 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...car keys.
As I stood there stirring the eggs, the thought appeared in my head that there would be a car accident today. Over the years I've learned to listen to the voices, and so I began to think about how far we were going to be from our offspring, who they could call in an emergency.... But 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 police 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. You might be what is termed "cautious."
Not even close.
Nothing fazes her. A bulldozer could have picked her up in the 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.
Tonight, she and her brother were given the easy, uncomplicated and fairly simple task of taking home one of his friends.
Enough time had passed that they should have been home, and we were a bit concerned. I called my son 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 McDonald's."
"Get home now."
I assumed that they were turning the corner and parking the truck by now. After fifteen more minutes, I called 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."
After interrogation under bright lights and threat of key removal, we learned that they had gone "for a drive."
"Gone for a drive where?"
My daughter said, "Uh, I don't know the street names."
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 17 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? Oh yeah, I'm boiling.
Freelance columnist Pamela Troeppl Kinnaird can be reached at needitor@nwlink.com.
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