Living With A Threenage Bitch

So I hate Phila now. She's three years old now. Fucking teenagers.

My own children were not particularly difficult teenagers - we only fought about appropriate television viewing. They watched Crossfire and I watched Sabrina, The Teenage Witch. 

I was no match for my sons when it came to intellectual curiosity. Or intellect. Or curiosity. Even now I have to regularly email them to ask them how the electoral college works, or whether we should use anti-bacterial soap, or why, when I try to download photos from my phone, it doesn't work. I love to ask them shit about technology because they look at me as if I were asking if one might bake a potato in the vacuum cleaner. I know they are wondering how it is that I make my way in the world. And which one of them is going to have to take me in someday.

Rude, right? I mean, I didn't roll my eyes at them when they were three years old and asked me to explain NAFTA to them. 

Hah. I kid. They had to explain NAFTA to me.

I don't want to be a burden on my grown children. But, in fairness, they were a burden on me for a lot of years. Do they think I would have chosen to spend my weekends at museums and art galleries and the Jet Propulsion Lab at Cal Tech and watching A Brief History of Time, if it wasn't for them? For God's sake, it was the 80's. I could have been doing coke. Or napping. Though probably not both. 

God, I was so tired back then. And now.

I just don't think I'm up to raising another teenager now. Especially one who drinks pond water and then barfs it up on the neighbor's cat.

"Phila," I say in my most professional parenting instructor voice as we stand at the scummy pond, "you asshole. Get away from the fucking pond. What are you, an idiot?"

Phila looks at me as if I am speaking to her in semaphore. She is amused by me. 

"Phila," I take two surreptitious steps towards her, as I advise parents of toddlers to do before reprimanding their kids, to avoid encouraging them to run away. "Phila, get away from the pond. It's gross in there and you'll get sick."

But Phila has listened in on my sessions.  She has intellectual curiosity. She knows my tricks. She continues drinking while taking two surreptitious steps away from me. To prove she has the upper hand.

Fucking Poodles. They're German, you know, and French. And I'm Jewish. Just saying. 

Oh God, she's coming into the room. 

Quick! Turn the channel to Rachel Maddow.