after_dark raze all my careless prayers come true, give or take a frozen few. 231207 ... ovenbird Teenagers have a well earned reputation for being challenging. And what I’m finding is that it’s not so much the moodiness and unpredictability that’s difficult, but the hormonally induced certainty that mortality doesn’t apply to them. So last night I ended up in a fight with my son, a child who has just started wading into the brackish water of adolescence, because I wouldn’t let him go biking with a friend, in the rain, after dark, without front and rear lights and a high visibility jacket. He sprung the outing on us. He made plans with the friend and then announced he was leaving, becoming enraged when we pointed out the incredible folly of biking at night without, at least, the legally required safety equipment (lights and reflectors). I explained that we could procure those things, but it would require more than fifteen minutes' notice. Rage ensued. I was being “overprotective.” I suggested alternative activities such as (gasp!) walking, but this was not, in his mind, an acceptable replacement. He went to his room to seethe in the dark but eventually emerged to ask if he and the friend could take their bikes over to the school and ride around the field. I capitulated while making him promise to stay off the roads. I felt drained afterwards. The responsibility of keeping someone alive is a heavy one, especially when that person does not seem inclined to participate in protecting their own life. I know how drivers are. I know how distracted and negligent they can be. I know how astigmatism and cataracts make the lights flare and how you can’t see the lines on the road when it’s raining. I know how easy it is to miss a child, who insists on wearing all black, on a bike in the dark on an otherwise normal Wednesday. I know how easy it would be for that child’s soft body to break against the force of a generic SUV hurtling through the early night. I wonder how I will survive these next years, the seven or so trips around the sun required to carry him from childhood to adulthood. It feels impossible, but so did infancy, so did toddlerhood, and we came through. My job is contradictory now. It’s my job to keep him safe and it’s my job to let him go and somewhere in the middle we define what we mean to each other, what motherhood becomes, who he grows to be, how we learn to see each other in the harsh glare of the future, high beams blinding, coming at us too fast, too recklessly, too soon. 251023 what's it to you? who go blather from