Lost His Mind

On many levels, this summer has been difficult, but recently we have added a new issue to the mix...my son is starting to lose his mind.  It started at the beginning of the summer when he felt that he could skate through the heat with nary a glance at a workbook or a blow into his clarinet.  Seems understandable enough given that he is thirteen now and all his 'teenage-ness' is rearing its ugly head, but add a job at the barn to this mix and we have a full-blown case of insanity on our hands. Let's look at this week alone and I know I need not remind you that, as yet, we have only reached Tuesday.  On Sunday morning, he 'hit' me (it seems the men in my family know only the ambush approach to communication) at 7am with the fact that a woman at the barn had given him her keys (OMG) to start her car to shut the windows since it had started raining.  First, shame on her a hundred times over because where I am from, we do not give children the keys to vehicles until they have a permit and we never give them the keys unsupervised the first time (I could go on and on about this but I think you get the point). Interestingly, once I revived and could focus, he proceeded to argue that he knew it was wrong to do it, but that somehow I was still wrong to point that out.  Huh?

Very early this morning, he proceeded to ask me if he could take a horse and ride to another counsellor's friend's house--oh, just across the pasture.  Now correct me if I am wrong but he is only thirteen, is riding a horse that is not his own, across a pasture to a house--better yet to someone's house I have never seen nor do I know the family--riding with people from the barn whom I do not know and who are not his instructors.  See the problem?  He doesn't.  Plus, adding insult to injury he had already run this one past my husband who told him 'not to even go there with mom.'  Sound advice, if only he had listened.

So clearly, my son has lost his mind.  If  I still had any mind left, mine would be going right about now, too.  I find it remarkable that two people could have four children and that each could be so different from each other.  Believe me, I am terrified as this is child number 2 but I think it will be children 3 & 4 who will really make me a candidate for the cuckoo's nest.