Our daughter was always telling me that we needed to trust her.
She thought she was old enough to be home alone and that we needed to stop thinking she was a baby.
At eighteen, a lot of kids her age were living on their own. She was absolutely right about that, but she was our little girl. She was also going to be going to college in another month. My wife and I had the opportunity to go to the mountains for a weekend with our friends. We decided to give her the opportunity to stay home alone. I asked to not have any parties, and I also asked her to change the air filter in the air conditioning unit. I thought she would ask a friend to change it, but I never expected her to call the HVAC company. Everything went well with her weekend alone, until I saw the bill from the HVAC company. I was upset and yelled before I thought. She told me I had told her to change the AC air filter and she had tried. Instead of breaking something, she called the HVAC company. She said the air filter was stuck in the AC and they had to pry it out. The air filter was so dirty they had to clean the AC unit again. I told her I knew she was irresponsible and I should have never trusted her to stay alone and do a simple job like change an air filter. My wife grabbed my arm after our daughter had huffed off to her room. She told me she couldn’t remember when we last had the air filter changed and maybe it was our fault for not doing it several months ago. I’m heading upstairs to apologize to my daughter.