Teenagers

Can't live with 'em and - erhh - can't live with 'em at times like these.

I seem to have suffered more than my fair share of teenage angst this past week or so.

My current situation is thus - Son No.1 is doing AS levels. He is not working hard enough. He has had to work till late into several nights in a row to finish course work which was due in on Monday and with which he was miles behind. The late nights have done nothing for his good humour which has been on leave of absence.

Then there is the small matter of his exams which start Mid May, which by unhappy coincidence is the exact same time that Son No.2 commences his GSCE exams. And there's another coincidence. Son No.2 isn't working hard enough either. No matter how hard I nag it seems to make no difference whatsoever with either of them. I start to dread August (results month) already.

To add to the woes of Son No. 1, he rings me up at work this afternoon to inform me that "WE have a problem." What this turns out to mean is that HE has just had a bad driving lesson and with his test booked for next Wednesday, which he is most insistent he will not cancel, that is not good either. Of course, this is all the fault of his instructor, or in the alternative version it is my fault, and nothing at all to do with his inability today to reverse round a corner without driving up the kerb. I got back from the gym where I went straight from work thinking "Thank god I have an hour before he gets in from his job at the chip shop before the aggro starts" but no such respite. In fact he was standing waiting for me at the back door. It turned out so bad was his mood he got his mate to cover him at work because he would have turned the chip fat sour, not to mention frightened all the customers away. Cue long 'discussion' by which I obviously mean 'blazing row' about the meaning of maturity/responsibilities, and his urgent need to 'bloody well grow up'. Even as I sit here I am painfully aware just exactly how ineffective that all was.

Worst of all though comes from an unexpected direction - My Beloved and Can Do No Wrong Daughter. She is beside herself with anxiety about three year old Maddy who as we all know is missing in Portugal. She is entirely incapable of putting it out of her mind, is asking unanswerable questions, and keeps dissolving into floods of tears. She keeps asking me what we can do about it. All I can manage is to say we both need to keep hoping for the best and to try and reassure her how rare such events really are. But as she said to me, that is no consolation to Maddy and her family is it?