Where Parents Fear To Tread

Or, sex, drugs, and rock and roll

At lunch last week I was describing what I thought a rather sensible decision on my part with regards to my new apartment: the use of designated "nowhere to go" bins in each room. It seemed like a good idea at the time: I have these nice glass platters I rarely put to work, so why not use them as the general repositories in each room for, literally, stuff I can't deal with yet? Keys, bills I can't remit until the next paycheck, odds and ends I find as I unpack. You know. The stuff of life. Crap.

And I always walk around with that kind of stuff, wondering what to do with it, eventually losing it, getting annoyed -- I'm sure you know the drill. But they're things I can't process yet, so it's not like I can put them away.

Well, my lunch partner remarked that this was a very mature approach to dealing with keeping my life, not to mention apartment, in some semblance of order, and we spent a portion of our meal discussing working with yourself, with your own tendencies instead of constantly at cross-purposes. Hey, I admit it, I'm a slob. If I don't deal with things right away, or at least log that they need to be dealt with and then deal with the log regularly, it doesn't get done. On the job I use a computer to keep myself together, and it works well enough that I'm actually that disgustingly organized programmer who writes down what she does as it's happening. Oh, the horror. I document my code, too. But see, it's all just a ploy so I don't have to think about it later, all I have to do is look it up. I call it active laziness.

At home I've never really found the best method for providing a similar level of active laziness. I don't sit in front of a computer all day there, so logging my activities in a text file somewhere is not necessarily helpful. Now, I must admit that the Visor [a Palm OS device] has helped a great deal. I think it's the only reason I'm on top of things with regards to my story submissions to magazines. At any moment, I can pop open my palmtop, fire up MobileDB, and see where "It's The Smell" or "The Last Supper" are, and even where I think I might send them next.

I keep a file cabinet, but -- for whatever reason -- that only works with "done" things. Not pending ones. Maybe it's just training from all that filing as a college student. Filing is the thing you do when it's all over and done with.

I'm just trying to accomodate reality, and work with my tendencies instead of against them.

So, here I am sitting in my home office [oh, what heart-filling words] pondering the fact that people as a rule find it easier to accomodate our pets rather than our own natural inclinations, so of course I start thinking about teen sex.

You read that right.

Teen sex.

Ah, adolescence. A time of raging hormones, not to mention exploration of boundaries of self, society and life. Emotionally and physically.

I ask you the following:

Is it practical, is it sensible, to insist that you can effectively control everything your children face over the entire course of their formative years? When I say it that way, it sounds absurd, doesn't it? You can't live their lives for them, and you can't demand your local school ignore statistics and pretend teen sex doesn't exist, just because you want to avoid thinking about the subject.

So, how about accomodating reality, instead? Why not operate on the assumption that your children will encounter unpleasant aspects of the world? That they will face a bully at recess, even though they shouldn't have to. That they will meet up with the tragedy of a suicide, even though they shouldn't have to. That they will "do it", or know someone who does.

Pretending things away doesn't seem to have a very good track record, so why not take a more pragmatic approach, and prepare your children, instead of hiding things from them. If you really want your kids to do better than you, to not make the mistakes you made, to learn from your errors, you're going to have to share your errors with them, not just the lesson you learned, but the stupidity that got you in hot water in the first place.

Turn off the TV, open your mouth, and talk. And when you do, keep the following in mind.

Point the first:

The world is not always as you might wish it to be. No matter how much you may want it to be otherwise, no matter how remote and insular your environment, someone is going to get offered weed at a party, someone is going to get hot and bothered over another someone who hits their buttons. What can you do? Plan for it. Plan ahead. Because you cannot keep your children locked in a cage of your making and then expect them to survive, when, magically, on their 18th birthday, they become legal adults and you have to let them out.

Which leads us directly to point the second, being,

Your children will make mistakes, just like you did. What tools you equip them with to learn from those mistakes, to recognize them as mistakes, to move forward and build on them, are the tools they will use the rest of their lives.

Don't damn them with only half a kit.