Page 10 - LIfesOuttakes4

How Much Is It Worth

My daughter stormed to her room and slammed the

door. She was in the middle of her junior year in high

school, and was finding some of the family rules not to her

liking. She had stayed out longer than she was supposed

to, and when we couldn’t reach her on her cell phone, I

went to find her. It was after midnight and I was tired, and

by the time I found her, I was not in a good mood.

My daughter is a wonderful young lady, and she

really never did anything all that wrong, but we still

expected rules to be followed. I let her know that I was not

happy with her, and, as teenagers often do, she became

defiant, and I ended up grounding her. This seemed to be a

reoccurring event in our lives. She would test the fences

and push the boundaries, and when I held firm, there would

be conflict between us.

For the previous four or five years, I had been

teaching night classes a couple evenings per week at a

school about 45 minutes away. It paid quite well, and we

desperately needed the supplement to our income.

However, I started to realize that the evenings I was gone

were when the problems occurred. I would get home from

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