I Asked for It
I asked for it. Afterall, we expected him to secure a job by age 15, to be organized and excel at his studies, and we even piled on home responsibilities like trash, yard work and cleaning his toilet. Then, to top it off, we moved half-way across the country after his high school graduation with our youngest two children, leaving he and his older sister to fend for themselves in college on the west coast. Nevertheless, I was shell-shocked when my son called the last week of his freshman year of college to level the news. "Mom, I want to stay in Oregon this summer," he said. "I never wanted to move to Colorado anyway and I have a job lifeguarding again making over $21/hour, 40 hours a week," he continued, as if it’d been rehearsed. I held my breath, in shock. Or not in shock; I'm not sure what reaction I had other than my sheer will not to overreact. Truth is, my parents did the same thing to me, moving my senior year of high school and then forcing me to come ho