"She's A Little Runaway" - Bon Jovi

When I was a little girl I thought often of packing a bag and running away. The only thing that stopped me was a) I had no idea where I would go as I lived in a small town where everyone knew my parents and b) I knew I would miss my mom too much.

That certainly didn't stop my 13 year old niece Gothica from actually doing it.

Yesterday morning I get a call from my mother at 6:23AM. She's wondering how to get text messages off my nieces phone. It seems her mother (Zoloft) took her cell phone away (thanks Aunt Mo-Mo [ME!] for getting it for her for Christmas) because she has been staying up all night instant messaging someone or several someone's. This pissed little miss Gothica off so much that she went to her school counselor and told her that my sister beats her and broke her arm (none of this is true) and that she wants out of the house and away from my sister who does nothing but buy her a ton of clothes and allow her to go and do whenever she wants. My sister even gave her the "Goth" room she's been wanting. While she was visiting her dad over the summer she painted it, bought her a new bed and desk, painted her a picture of "Jack the Pumpkin King" and made the room look very cool.

The counselor called DCFS who met with Gothica the next day. When she got home from school she was pissed off and didn't want to talk about how her "date" with DCFS went. I'm sure, since there was no evidence that my niece is abused by any stretch of the imagination that the DCFS worker probably told her that she would remain in the home. What was Gothica thinking? I imagine she has NO idea what the foster care system is like. I shudder thinking about all those poor kids in foster homes. I know there are good ones out there, but for every good foster home I'm sure there are at least five that are not up to spec.

But alas, the child is so put upon and so abused she was forced to run away.

WHATEVUH!

She did NOT have her phone so there is NO way to track her (I work for the wireless company where I got her the phone so I have access to all sorts of convenient systems to track her GPS unit). She left in the middle of the night out the back door (left it wide open) with an apparently packed bag as her room was torn up and several things are missing. She must have been picked up by someone. She's been gone for over 24 hours now and there are no leads as to where she may have gone and who she may be with. My sister is freaking out to say the least. My parents are too since she lives with them. The cops? Well, they aren't worried. They say this happens all the time and that she'll turn up. Since her best friends don't know where she is I have to wonder about that. She's 13, shouldn't they be working diligently to find her? I mean, this IS Atlanta. There are child sex rings in this city. She is a beautiful, exotic looking girl so she would definitely be a target. I'm not freaking just yet, but I'm about to. I keep thinking that she'll come home on her own, but I think someone is helping her so she may decide she's fine where she is.

My son, Peabody, says he understands why she left. He's 15 and in the same wacked out, irrational, pubescent state Gothica is. It's been proven that hormones in teenagers cause them to be irrational and irresponsible. In essence, the hormonal imbalance makes them unreasonable, irrational, slightly off. Crazy is probably the word I'm looking for. Peabody thinks I'm mean and hateful because I wake him up for school in the morning and make him go sit though several hours of instruction. Yah, I'm a real evil bitch.

If I was really evil he would be sleeping on the floor with a thin blanket and nasty pillow and nothing else in his room. I would chain the cabinets and the refridgerator so he couldn't eat until I feed him nothing but table scraps. I would never wash his clothes and I would turn off his hot water. Now how is that for mean? The kid has it great. His teenage angst makes him feel otherwise and it's killing me. I'm going to start getting gray hair!

This generation is 10X worse than my generation ever thought about being. I'm part of generation X, well I'm EARLY gen X. In the 80's, when I was a teenager, no one had cell phones except the very RICH when I was growing up. I never had a t.v. or a phone in my room. I had to buy my first car with no help from my parents (Peabody expects me to either foot the bill or pay for half if he ever gets a job, WHATEVUH!). Computers were big and clunky and made by Radio Shack and were ridiculously overpriced. MTV actually played videos all the time and reality TV wasn't even on the road map. A Big Mac was $1.54 (I worked at Mickey D's) and a cheeseburger was only $0.69. Gas? Oh, that was really cheap. It was way less than a $1/gallon. We only had one TV in the house and my dad controlled the remote.

Strangely I miss those days.

I hope Gothica comes home soon. I love her to death and I can't believe that she's so much trouble, but I have seen it with my own eyes. She behaves differently towards me. Kind and sweet. Not sure why. I offered to my sister to let Gothica come stay with me for a few weeks if she comes home, just to give them some space once she comes back. I will be working from home more (my company is going to telecommuting for mobile workers - ME) so I will be able to keep a very close eye on her. I guess my sister is mulling it over.

It sucks to be a parent of a teenager from this generation.

What did we ever do to deserve this?