If you don't have the answer, why are you still standing here?

What amazes me most about the tenor of my life lately is the ability of something like a workout to completely 180 my mood.  For a person who has spent the better part of her life trying not to physically work hard at much, to discover in my mid-thirties that exercise is the key to happiness is an irony not lost on me.  Case and point was my general funk of yesterday, mitigated almost entirely by the late evening trip to the gym.  Go figure.

I slept this morning until after ten!  This is truly out of character since I usually accomplish more by ten than most people do in a whole day.  Really.  My adult life has created this morning-productive person who up until about 30 never knew what the hours before noon even looked like.  I still have not written the final papers for two of my classes (for which due dates are fast approaching), but I'm liberated by the fact that I simply don't care.  They'll get done when the impulse strikes me.  Just like dishes get done when I get the urge to clean, and so on.  

My daughter is quickly becoming a true teenager and this both makes me smile and terrifies me at the same moment.  I know full well that as she gets older I will not be her chosen confidante - it is quite imperative that I am the enemy for a while, but I so desperately don't want to be the enemy.  As I've mentioned before, I don't necessarily believe that teenagers are entitled to complete privacy, particularly in a world where the pitfalls and dangers seem to carry heavier consequences now than they did when I was thirteen.  I never had to worry about predators in my email or meeting strangers from online chat rooms, or being e-stalked or terrorized via text message.  I worry almost endlessly about these things and check up on them frequently.  I try to never read personal things of hers from names I recognize because she is entitled to safe spaces to express herself and I stand by the fact that people who read private correspondence in order to glean information of any kind get exactly what they deserve.  But I stumbled upon my daughter's "diary" the other day and opened it.  Not out of the spirit of feeling I had the right, but only because I wanted some insight about the part of her she keeps so private.  Her friends talk about boys and group dates, and it makes me wonder that Sami isn't also talking about these things, even in the abstract.  I guess I wanted to know her story on the boy front; out of compassion, out of sensitivity, out of concern, and mostly because I know what I went through at her age and hope to keep her from that path.

There was little written there and I really did just scan it - I don't want to know for what and how much she often hates me, or what she thinks about me when she feels compelled to write it down.  She did mention that she invited some boy to Kayla's "after party" last week and that did bother me.  Clearly she is heartbroken at the fact that this boy apparently doesn't reciprocate her crush (and we all know that kind of incomprehensible ache, don't we?), but I want to know why she didn't tell me that she invited him.  Of course I know why, but I get so scared that she will meet up with a boy who isn't nice, who will convince her to leave the place she is, and will do her harm in a host of ways I can't even write down.  I worry about this because I should, and because it's how I behaved at her age.  I look back with parental perspective and feel extremely lucky that more bad things didn't happen to me because in retrospect I can see where they quite easily could have.  Guh.  I would never mention any of these things to her as a direct result of my shameless snooping, but I will try to find ways to incorporate general advice into general conversations.  That's something my mother would have never taken the time or energy to do, so it must be the right strategy.