I’m the happy stepmother of a teenager. Yeah… I know it sucks sometimes, but I’m hoping it will get better with age, and I won’t have to pick up dirty pants and half-eaten sandwiches from her room. Also, maybe with years, we will have more social animal who will emerge from her cave more often than for food and wee. But you know… teenagers so …
Anyway, today she returns to school. I was post night shift, and as I returned home around 1am, I wanted to sleep it off, leaving Mark to wake the child-monster and make sure she would drag herself for her classes. It was still dark, maybe around 6am. Mark was still snoring his butt off when I heard the knock.
In our household, a quiet knock at an ungodly hour means there is a catastrophe that needs to be addressed immediately, but frankly, I was too tired to care and just answered.
‘Yeah….’
The blond head of the female child popped in, asking. ‘Do you want coffee?’
Few things could jerk me straight awake, and you have to know that after years working in the emergency department and ambulance service, I have on/off switch in my head that allows my brain to flip from deep sleep to hyperalert super aware mode that allowed to deal with cardiac arrest on the spot.
My torso sprung to a sitting position straight away, pondering the wonder of
1) Child being awake at this hour
2) Child being dressed at this hour
3) Child volunteering to do coffee.
And then she nailed it, saying,
‘And I fed the cats,’
Motherfucker Bejesus on the stick, someone switched our child from a creature from Fairyland so polite and helpful that I kicked Mark awake because he also has to marvel this wonder.
Safe to say, he wasn’t particularly grateful for the morning call even if it came with coffee, but if I couldn’t sleep, he wouldn’t too, and we have potential exorcism to discuss.