My daughter told me not to worry.  She should know better than to say such a thing.  I’m a bona fide 100% Jewish mother, and that means worrying is built into my DNA.  I worry if there’s nothing to worry about.

But I’m a grown up girl, Chelsea insisted, almost 15.  It will be fine, she assured me.  You see, I wanted to take a beach vacation to encompass both New Years Eve and my birthday three days later, and my daughter didn’t want to come with me.  To me, there is nothing better than being at the beach over New Years Eve.  For my teenager, a slow and painful death would have been a better option.  So we compromised:  I would go to the beach as planned, and she would stay with a friend for the week.  And I wouldn’t worry, because she told me not to.

Except that something went wrong.  During cat duty at our house one late afternoon, Chelsea and her friend got hungry and decided to bake a cake.  While it was baking, their cell phones started buzzing.  ‘What are you up to? Meet us on the square.’ But the girls had a cake in the oven and couldn’t leave the house, so they told their friends to come over.  Those friends called some friends who called some friends who called some friends.  Within an hour, there were 70+ people in my house, 90% of whom my daughter did not know. By the end of the evening, there were college students, cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, boys sleeping over in her bed, sex, footprints on the ceiling, 2 broken lamps and a cigarette burn on the arm of the couch. Hollywood couldn’t have scripted it better.  I returned home late on my birthday to the strong smell of smoke and a glass hurricane lamp sitting forlornly on the floor of the garage, and I knew instantly what it meant, because I was a teenager once upon a time:  there had been a party in my house, and someone forgot to put the hurricane lamp back on the coffee table when it was all over.  At least, my friends pointed out in her defense, Chelsea had had the good sense to safeguard my breakables.

The fallout was cataclysmic. I couldn’t trust her anymore, and she was grounded and lost her cell phone privileges too.  Chelsea stopped talking to me, and there ensued a long cold war in our house all through the winter and into spring. Things got a lot worse before they got better. And now, nearly a year later, after many months of crying and talking, therapy and medication, I’m going back to the beach, and she’s staying with a (different) friend.  My sister, the other Jewish mother, thinks I am deranged.  What kind of idiot, she asks, allows the same risky scenario to repeat itself? Have I not learned anything from last year’s imbroglio?

Ah, well.  Call me crazy.  I figure the only way I can know if my daughter can be trusted this time is to give her the opportunity to prove me right. By the time you read this, I’ll be on the beach at Cape San Blas, and she’ll be remembering last year and thinking that’s one risk she’s not willing to repeat.  Fingers crossed …

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Randy Foster is a confused communications professional who was recently laid off from her job of 22 years, and thus unemployed for the first time in 34 years. She has no earthly idea what she wants to do with the rest of her life, but figured things can't get any riskier, so what the hell. Randy is also the single mother of a very high maintenance teen-aged daughter who remains the greatest risk of all.
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