"I'm Counting To Ten...Slowly!"

This is not a rehashed version of "When I was her age I had to walk twenty miles to school in the snow...up hill...both ways!" But I tell you, my daughter Megan tries my patience to the point of total exasperation at times. This was one of those weekends.

Megan is now seriously dating a very nice young man, Greg, whom she met in college. Judi and I like him a very much. He appears to have a great deal on the ball and from all indications is conducting his life in a manner that centers around making sound decisions that productively affect his life both now and in the future. It appears that both are equally matched in drive and intelligence. We don't know where this relationship will eventually wind up, but daughter Megan could do far worse. At the moment they are infatuated with one another and spend unlimited time in each others company. This is certainly understandable and acceptable.

Greg's home is in Pennsylvania and this past weekend he flew to New York City to meet his family for the purpose of celebrating his up-coming birthday. He is also to interview for the possibility of accepting an appointment to the New York City Fire Department...a prospect that doesn't exactly meet with Megan's hopes for their current relationship. Megan was to remain behind, or so I thought, being unable financially to purchase the cost of a round-trip plane ticket. I learned later, from her Mother, that Megan had received a refund on this semester's college tuition. She used that windfall to purchase said ticket and off together she and Greg flew to New York. So what's the big deal?

Megan was to bring the car she is driving back to St. Petersburg so that we could get the oil changed...a task that hasn't been attended to since Megan began driving it this past summer. Instead, she parks it in the airport's long term parking lot with instructions that we were to drive from St. Petersburg to the airport and pick it up. Not a major inconvenience, but still time consuming, not to mention to expense of the gas we had to use going to and from the airport. Problem. Megan took her set of keys, but failed to mention that sometime in the past she had also taken the only other set of keys that we thought we kept at our home in case of emergency. Fortunately that set of keys she left in her home here in St. Pete, which meant Judi had to take extra time to go locate those keys. So late Saturday evening we trudge over to the airport, finally locate the car, pay the parking fee, and return home. And that's the rub... Her decision to spend her refunded tuition fee on a trip to New York is costing her Mother and me money that she should be personally responsible.

When Ms. Megan returns home tomorrow evening she and I are going to have one my infamous "Father & Daughter" discussions on where I do all of the discussing and she does all of the listening. Whatever monies she has left from her refund will be turned over to us, from which the parking lot fees and the cost to service the car will be extracted. Secondly, we will inform her that she is to remain in her St. Pete home that we purchased for her (and her best friend from high school) this past spring until such time as we can locate a new tenant to assume the monthly rent payments. Meg wishes to return to Tampa to rent a condo, because "the cost of gas is too high" to travel back and forth to Tampa each day, and has expressed to her Mother that she could just tell the previous owner that we've decided "not to keep the house." Doesn't seem to matter to her that we have a binding contract to make monthly mortgage payments...after all, "it's only money."

Overall Megan is a very responsible person, very dedicated to her studies and intern position duties with the University of South Florida's Athletic Department. But there are those times when she gives into her whims and flights of fancy without thinking through the consequences that others have to shoulder in her wake. She is not going to like to hear "Dear 'ol Dad" reading her the riot act. But it is time...past time...that she learns that Mommy & Daddy aren't going to just give in and continue to underwrite her desires to conduct her life in a carefree manner. It's time for her to suck it up and shoulder more of the at times painful responsibilities of being an adult.

There...I feel better already.