InnerTeub

One of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had was working at Barnes and Noble. If you have to work retail, this is the retail you want: you talk to people about books. All day. Your coworkers all love to read. Break rooms are scattered with books for the taking. Working 8 hour shifts on your feet is hard, but there is something about getting to spend the day in a book store that is really quite fantastic.

Relatedly, we stopped into a Barnes and Noble this weekend to pick up some summer reading books for the kiddo. Sure, sure, we could have ordered them off Amazon, a practice I abuse weekly (as much as I love a good bookstore, I just as much love having books delivered to me), but it’s fun browsing through the stacks, picking out what you want.

Anyway, at one point during our geek-jaunt, Sammy came up to me and showed me a quote from the beginning of a novel:

A stepmother is not a mother. She can help you with your homework and make dinner, but she should not be able to decide when you should go to bed

Now, we never talk about the boundaries of our stepparent/stepchild relationship. We have never had a fight surrounding how we can and cannot treat each other. She’s a great kid who follows the house rules when she’s in our house, and a great companion for all times when we’re outside a domestic parental environment; I had not yet encountered a need for a state of the step-union conversation.

Until now. She showed me that quote, and I had a little hyperventilation moment of “Oh God, now it begins, shit shit shit I’ve haven’t had time to think about formalizing this type of thing, gah” and right as I was crinkling my forehead, about to explain that, actually, I kind of think I do have a right to tell her when to go to bed, she pops out with:

“Isn’t that funny? How it assumes that you’re up late enough to see if I’m in bed or not?”

Ha. Haaaaaaaaaaa. So true.  Teenagers. I love it; I really really do.