Mother and Son day

Chapter 1

"Tuck has been sitting in front of that video game all day." Ben said pointing to the deeply occupied Tuck.

He and Miranda were seated in the kitchen, both wielding a steaming, freshly, brewed mug of coffee with a croissant completed with bacon and scrambled eggs. She had the day off with both her boys, the first she'd had in an extremily long time and Ben's poorly timed observation wasn't making her look forward to the rare opportunity very much.

"Well it's summer vacation Ben. He's finished all of his reading and his assignments, his dad has been busy with work all week and quite frankly so have we, so what else is he supposed to do?" Miranda asked sassily. 

Ben shrugged not at all deterred by his wife's snappy tone.
"I don't know, maybe we can try spending more time with him? Like you said we've all been busy, too busy to really spend any actual time with him,  hes clearly using electronics to fill that void."

He put his hands on her shoulders adding just the slightest pressure, but it still managed to send shivers down her spine.
"The last thing we want is for Tuck, to become one of those obnoxious teenagers, like the ones we see in the ER everyday with injuries, just because they couldn't be bothered, to pick their damn heads up from their devices."

They both glanced at the boy again, who had paused his game in order to post a picture of his newest high score.
"We may already be too late."

     
 Miranda was well aware she should probably put aside more time to spend time with Tuck. He was already in his teenage years, and the same way teenage hood had snuck up on them, the same way he would eventually reach adulthood and have his own family to take care of, and that would mean that she would have even less time to spend with her son.

The guilt she often felt was immense. Half the time she was at work being the Chief of surgery, which in itself was one of the more time consuming jobs thqt existed and the other half of her time, she was fast asleep trying to recuperate to do her job again the next shift.

There was no in between.

So now on top of divorced mother guilt, there was also the absentee mother guilt.

She and Ben hadn't even had time together recently either, their work consumption was almost equally matched and they'd had to resort to the sad method of scheduling sex, which almost never seemed to work out because he was just as exhausted as she was.

However Ben was right, eventhough she hated to admit it. Tuck had been spending an excessive amount of time glued to his electronic devices recently.

Miranda didn't mind some screen time, she wasn't some grinch of electronics or young people being 'woke'. She knew they had positive attributes, in fact she saw them in action every day at the hospital, assisting hospital staff with saving patients' lives and then using them to keep in contact with their own loved ones while they were busy saving said lives.

      The problem was that Tuck was charming. A trait which always drew people to him.

He was like his father, Tucker in that way.

Before Miranda had transformed  from a minnow to a shark and even then in some rare moments after that, Tucker could charm her into doing anything.

Then on top of his father's charm, her son had also managed to pick some of his charm up from Ben, who could make friends with anyone with the snap of a finger, wherever he went.

With that much charm under Tuck's  belt, he was bound to have loads of friends. His inner circle in particular seemed to be a very close nit group, so Tuck was constantly in contact through texting and posting on social media, sharing things from as frivilous as pictures of their food to funny shaped rocks they found outside.