Teach Your Children Well…

Some time recently, while I wasn’t looking, they turned the corner.  Son made the jump from oblivious little kid to wise and thoughtful preteen – who “knew all along” the things I was still trying to protect him from knowing.  Daughter is T minus eleven days to age sixteen and already transitioned, mentally/emotionally, from younger to older teen.  Both are rapidly moving beyond my ability to control by force of authority alone.   I can lay down rules; I can lay down consequences for breaking them.  I can monitor grades, check alibis and make them check in with me.  I can insist on having valid street addresses and parents’ phone numbers.   But I can’t be in their lives 24/7.  I can’t know exactly what they’re doing after school, can’t follow their every move when out with friends, can’t look in the friends’ parents’ windows (not without risking getting shot or arrested, anyway), and can’t think of any blocking/filtering/tracking products that they couldn’t eventually find their way around.   In short, they – Daughter more than Son, although Son is coming up right behind her – are at the point in time when they have it in their means to get what they want.  Whether I want them to have it or not.  

Now comes the time when the theory is tested.  Husband and I have tried to raise both of them to think carefully and ‘want what they get’.  Yes, substances can make you feel very good, but they can also kill you.  Yes, you can prevent pregnancy and STDs, but you can’t prevent the emotional fallout.  Yes, unchaperoned parties are a lot of fun, but police station holding cells are not, and date rape drugs are real.  In a world where infinite choices exist, together with infinite possibilities of consequence ranging from ‘none’ to ‘death’, we have done our best and are still doing our best to help them think for themselves…and to let them know that, if they choose poorly, we will still love them and work it through with them as best we can.   I don’t buy into a religion of blind obedience and fear, so I guess it’s natural that I wouldn’t parent that way either.  But it’s difficult not to second-guess myself now that the theory is at the testing point.  Should I have held the reins tighter all along?

My instincts are right 98 percent of the time; the other 2 percent I don’t like to talk about; and in this, especially, God, let this be within the 98.  The garden gate is open and the angel with the flaming sword, whose name is Adulthood, is moving in fast.   May we have given them what they need to walk in the world beyond.

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~ by Mad God Woman on December 18, 2011.