prodigals and paper plates

I guess we are having to accept the fact that Charlotte really isn’t going to have much more to do with us. Sigh. The usual explanation is that, you know, she’s seventeen, has a job, has (somewhat of) a vehicle, and that would make sense except that…well, we’ve been expecting her to drop out of our life for quite sometime now. Children of divorce have to decide which parent is right and which parent is the loser. Guess which side of the coin we landed on?

I admit that whenever a family has ‘issues’ with a child I assume they must have done something wrong (in other words, if I do everything right, then I won’t ever have to go through that kind of pain.) And you know, there is truth in that. We do a lot of things wrong. But I also have to accept the reality that even when you do everything right, you can’t control someone else’s decisions. Yet I know the story of the prodigal son- I know how much fun he had at first, and I know where he ended up, and I know many other prodigal stories that have that same plot. Many of them don’t end as well, though. Many of them end up starving in the pig sty, always too stubborn to admit that maybe they had something to do with their situation, that even though their parents were the biggest losers on the planet they themselves could have been- dare I say it- a little bit less self-centered too. How will our story end? Only God knows.

On a funnier note, this morning Malachi (who is nine and a half) was shocked to discover that not all animals mate for life. I explained a few of the more…um…unorthodox mating behaviors of several animals. For instance, I said a goat will kill itself in its efforts to impregnate all the females it finds.

Malachi says he would rather die by eating too many paper plates.

Give it a few years, kid.