A Generational Issue

So this morning Groceries, our 19 year-old son, gets up and announced that he's going back to the Valley for the weekend to see his friends and hang out.  This was after he repeatedly asked these same friends what they were doing this weekend, and if they wanted him to drive the two hours it takes to see them.  They were non-responsive, all week long.  

It's so easy when the kids are this big.

But sometime last night, they apparently figured there was nothing better to do than invite our son out for the weekend, and so this morning he announced he would be leaving presently.

(Perhaps I will discuss the issue of why kids are so willing to jump through hoops for friends who don't appreciate them on another day, but all three of my kids exhibit this tendency when in the presence of the pretty, popular peers of their group, so it's a universal teen malady, I know.)

Anyway, this presented a problem.  Groceries had already agreed to help my husband Big Ag put in some fencing at the bottom of the property today, a project we desperately need to finish if we hope to keep the deer from consuming several hundred dollars' worth of orchard and vineyard plantings.  I pointed this out to him and said that, under similar circumstances, his Dad would never, ever leave him in the lurch like that.  Nothing like dose of good, old-fashioned Jewish guilt, dealt out by a good, old-fashioned Jewish Mother.  

And so both men are now at the bottom of the property installing fencing.  One happy, the other not so much.  And the not-so-happy one will leave this evening to see his friends instead of jumping in his truck this morning and leaving his Dad one man short for a two-man job.

Gosh, were we adults ever so flighty, so inconsistent, so self-centered when we were that age?

The answer doesn't even require any thought, does it? Of course we were.