Both my children demand privacy day and night. They no longer tell me everything.

No matter how I look at this, the truth is my children want distance from me.

They are always on the prowl yet I must rumble in to announce my location wherever they are.

I cannot enter the place where they are writing their journals. It is as if they are re-writing history.

I cannot set foot in their rooms when they are with friends. That is intrusive.

I am on the hunt for cowbells as even when I knock on doors they say I catch them by surprise.

This whole laissez-faire thing, the policy of leaving things to take their own course, is a huge parental fad now.

But at this point I am not sure I buy it. My nerve ends are splitting with this whole privacy trip.

As a doctor, I steal time to be with them. Work emergencies for me are a rule not an exception.

If I give them too much time to be on their own, it gnaws away my time with them.

I am cut off from their lives. I am unsettled. I don’t know what’s underneath the ground I walk.

I am so used to their cluttering my life with questions, interruptions and chaos that this distance, this soul-loneliness, bothers me. I brood.

To my horror, I discovered that they have been poking around my stuff.

Searching my dresser for their socks (they claim), they found their baby teeth that the tooth fairy forgot to take.

To avoid a catastrophe, I said the teeth belonged to my childhood dead cat.

No more laissez-faire for now. Guilt and lie management is a huge burden.

I will not let any more ruffling’s through my dresser. Or my heels will never clip clop themselves out of hell.

I will bounce into their rooms when I believe fit. My rules are to apply henceforth.

I will have to stop their drifting and floating away from me.

Balancing the parenting whirlwind is never easy. I'd love to be the ideal mother, but I'm too busy raising my kids.

Got to go now. My tea is sitting out in the garden in a sun spot. My glass is in the freezer ready and waiting.

I will pour this sun tea into this tall frozen glass filled with ice, borrow its energy and break the news to the children.

Then I will come back, pour myself more tea and refresh myself yet again.

This is how I will celebrate bringing my children back into my fold and get over their crest-fallen faces.