Modern parenting

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I remember growing up in the 1980’s. As teenagers, our parents thought we were the worst of all generations before us. They did not understand our music, rock ‘n roll and hair bands. Talking about hair, they did not like the way we dressed. Our hair was too poofy our makeup too wild. We spent countless hours at the mall trying to be material girls. We wasted gobs of time trying to get to the next level in Pong, Space Invaders, and Frogger on our Atari’s. We traded in our records for a large boom box with a tape deck. We dubbed tapes off of other friends tapes off of other friends tapes instead of listening to what our parents listened to on the record player or radio in the living room. Kids were rebellious, times were changing, and parenthood was hard.

As a parent of teenagers, I look back and wish times were a little simpler. We have less control and no guidelines. How much computer time should we allow our teens to have? How do we enforce that? How do we implement parental controls when we need our teens to help set them up? How do we monitor what they are doing when they know more about computers than us? I think that this is probably one of the biggest generation technology parenting gaps that has ever been and probably will ever be. At least our children will know what to do with their children because they grew up with the internet. From experience they will know from their childhood all the things that we don’t know now.

How do we know what to do? How much computer time is too much? My teens now do their homework on their computers. Taking away their computers is like taking away their pencils and paper. Is it good for them to spend all the time that they can on computers so they are prepared to use them in future careers? It is extremely hard to be hypervigelent with our teens use of the Internet without sitting next to them the whole time they are on it. This also is hard when they are at the stage in life where they want to be independent more than anything. If we have no reason not to trust them should we treat them like they are untrustworthy??

I remember as a young child finding my dad’s girlie magazines and showing them to my friends. They were in our house. We don’t have that option of keeping it out of our house if we don’t want it there anymore. My oldest daughter was exposed to porn in middle school when our previous pastor’s daughter showed it to her on a computer in our own house. Who would have thought?

What about cell phones? Back in my day, we had to talk on a phone tethered by a cord on the wall. There was no privacy. Now teens can talk anywhere with complete privacy about anything they want. If they wanted to send or receive naked pictures of someone, it is a click away. Who would ever know?

Now as far as music goes, the options are limitless there as well. If I wanted to buy a parental advisory CD as a teen I would have to go to the music store and show them my id. Once again, anything can be downloaded or listened to and I wouldn’t even know. How do you become proactive in monitoring that?

What about school shootings and violence? Back in my time there were a few kids that would call in bomb threats when they wanted the day off. I assume that doesn’t happen all that much anymore with caller id. Instead there are school shootings. Do you know how scary it is to send your child off to school after something like that happens?? Yesterday I received a letter from the principal of my children’s high school stating that there was an incident where a student was talking about bringing a gun to school. The authorities were called into the school to investigate. So, I sit here and worry. Worry about the things I can’t control. I wonder if I am doing a good job as a parent. Is anyone really? I don’t know what the hell I am doing parenting the modern teen. Does anyone? We are dealing with issues that our experienced parents wouldn’t even be able to give us advice about. 

On the flip side, it is a great time to be a parent. We have webmd for every bump, scratch, and sniffle. There are online support groups for any parenting issue. There is countless free advice for practically any parenting problem from getting stains out of clothes, potty training, to extra math tutorials at the tips of our fingers. Maybe it would have helped my parents raise us when they had 4 teens in the house at the same time. My brother could’ve gotten diagnosed with autism earlier, maybe would have had early intervention therapy. My mom could’ve joined online support groups and wouldn’t have had to parent an autistic child totally alone finding out what worked through trial and error.  

Ah, these are the best of times and worst of times for parenting. I am doing the best I can. 

Let’s go back to the future

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Today is the future day that Marty McFly time traveled to in the 1985 movie Back to the Future. I wonder if his character would be pleased to see how the future really turned out if he traveled here from 1985 today. We do have some pretty cool inventions since then like the cell phone, ipads, kindles, the internet, etc. Technology few of us thought would be possible back then. I can liken it to what it would be like going back hundreds of years and telling people about electricity or indoor plumbing. It would be hard to imagine. We still don’t fly around in cars, but can see the possibility of self driving cars for the future. Will we be telling our great-grandchildren about how we had to get a driver’s license someday? Maybe it will provide a solution to the problem of drunk driving.

I don’t think that Marty would like our hair and clothing today. Clothing and makeup do not reflect a neon geometrical style anymore and our hair is ho hum boring. If you were a teen in the 80’s, you would know what I mean. Big hair was fun! While the movie was right on with a few predictions, quite a few were way off. Where were you in 1985? Could you have predicted the future of the world much less the future of your own life? Were you even born? In 1985, I was younger than my youngest child is right now. My future life was a mystery. Who would I marry? Would I have children? What kind of career would I have?

The last 30 years have been a winding road. Most of it reflecting consequences, either good or bad, of the life that I have chosen. I became set in my beliefs over this time. I got married, had children, went to college, found hobbies, made and lost friends. Some things happened that I did not choose, this was also within the framework of who I would become.

What will happen over the next 30 years? My husband wants us to start planning for retirement. The next 30 years scare me. There are too many unknowns. I don’t want to think about getting old and declining physically and/or intellectually. I think I will probably have grandchildren. I will most likely enter into retirement. I will possibly face the loss of my spouse and have to face the possibility that I may not be a part of this future in 30 years. Sometimes I want to focus on the past instead, it is certain and known. But focusing on the past also makes me unsettled. Sometimes the good old days were not always good.

I try to focus on the here and now. I want to make myself the best person that I can be in the present so I can be a gift to those around me today and tomorrow. I am thankful to have all of you in my life as I am living it.

Where were you in 1985?

Sheerly not cut out for it

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I really suck at cutting hair. I could use the left handed excuse of having to learn how to cut with my right hand, but I don’t even think that would cut it. I didn’t always think that I sucked at it. As a teen, I got sick of my autistic brother constantly pulling my hair. It hurt. I noticed that my younger brothers didn’t get their hair pulled, probably because it was too short to pull. Just my mom and I got our long hair pulled. I got really sick of it so one day I took a scissors in my right hand and hacked off around 6 inches of long tresses and lot of stress. People commented. They liked my new hair cut. I thought that I wasn’t terribly bad at it.

Then I got married and had kids. My oldest daughter needed her bangs trimmed as a toddler and I was on it. I cut her bangs, but they were crooked. So I kept cutting until they were straight and about a quarter of an inch long. I didn’t really suck. She wasn’t sitting still. People commented. Ah, your daughter decided to cut her own hair. Poor thing. She wasn’t talking too much yet, so I didn’t argue that I was the one who hacked her hair. It wasn’t too long after that when she started to cut her own hair. She was better at it then I was.

Then my husband got the idea of buying a hair cutting kit to shave some money. He liked to cut his hair short so it really wasn’t that complicated. I could almost handle that. I decided to take on bigger things, my dad’s hair. First, let me tell you that he looks exactly like Santa Claus. He has a humongous stomach, everything else is flat. He has long gray hair with an equally long beard that children could try to yank off and find it to be real. He has the glasses that he looks over, worn on the lower part of his nose. He would be a perfect Santa Claus in appearance. He would just have to work on being jolly. He would have to smile and tolerate little children. He would have to give them candy instead of hiding it to eat himself. Darn, it would have been so perfect otherwise.

I made the mistake of offering to cut my dad’s hair. This is a job that my mom always did, but for some reason didn’t have time for. At one point in her life, my mom wanted to be a hairdresser. During her senior year, the high school had a career day. They brought in someone that worked with the disabled doing what she does now. That person probably never knew that by telling high school kids about his career changed my mother’s whole career and life path. I don’t see her being happy as a beautician. She loves her career and finds it very fulfilling.

The day came for my dad’s hair cut. He came over to my house. I realized quickly that I was in a little too deep. My dad’s hair was long. My husband’s hair was short. I decided to buzz my dad’s hair using the longest setting. It really wasn’t going very well. As I was buzzing the back of my dad’s head, the guard came off. I gave him a very noticeable bald spot down the back of his head. Thankfully, he just laughed the whole thing off. After that incident, things such as scissors and hair cutting kits mysteriously vanished from my house. My mom made time to cut my dad’s hair. My husband stopped complaining about $20 hair cuts.

I realized that cutting hair was sheerly not my thing.

The dark unfeeling cardboard box

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When I was a young child, I never really liked school a lot. Sure, there were some bad teachers, some good, and some everywhere in between. But it really wasn’t that. It was never that. It had more to do with Matt, my autistic brother. Being less than 2 years younger than me, I could never get away. The school really didn’t know what to do with Matt. He was the first autistic child to come through the school district. When he couldn’t function in a regular classroom, they cut the library in half to make it a special ed room.

For a long period of time, Matt was nonverbal. Oh, he did scream and cry but he did not talk. He was uncontrollable. His teacher at school set up a naughty box for him between the library and special ed room. Almost every time we had library, my brother was in the box screaming and flailing around. The box seemed high at the time because I was so little. When my class lined up to look at books, the kids could peer into the box. Most of the time the kids laughed and I hated them. I put my feelings in a big box that seemed even bigger than the box that Matt was in. Many times I would rather be trapped in that empty box devoid of feelings, life, and light than to face the pain of the real world.

For a long time I floated around in my own little world. How could I make friends with my classmates? How could I like the kids that called my brother a retard? I went deeper and deeper into that box. I stopped eating. I didn’t talk to anyone. I started failing my classes. The only thing that touched my heart was music. I had this focal point that I would always stare at so I didn’t start crying in that class. I was so lost. My mom was very concerned, she had the school counselor talk to me. She was a wonderful person who tried to help me make friends and talk about feelings.

My mom wasn’t in much better shape herself. Mother daughter outings with the extended family ended up with my mom sharing with the family how much she hated autism and all of the things that Matt did or didn’t do. The family just wanted relaxation and fun. They were uncomfortable that my mom was crying and needed their support. They stared at me all the time. When I was alone with family, they peppered me with questions about if my mom was ok and how was Matt. I didn’t feel like anyone cared about me. Most of the time they were just trying to help without being very helpful.

One day Matt started talking again. He told stories of how his teacher in the grade school was abusive towards him. She shoved him under her desk and sat down at her desk squeezing him in there. He also said that the teacher would place him face down on the floor and sit on him making it hard to breathe. My mom asked me if this could be true, she was very upset.

After everything that happened, my mom tried to keep my younger brothers sheltered from going to school with Matt. She sent my brothers to parochial schools and schools that were out of our district. I wonder if that had anything to do with me not responding well to being in school with Matt. Did I save my younger brothers some pain? I hope so.

A stranger weekend

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Well I can check sleeping with strangers in a hotel room off my bucket list. Seriously though, I am not sure flippant things count as checking something off my bucket list. Do they? Or do they have to be long drawn out meticulously orchestrated premeditated plans like running a marathon? I certainly find that a lot more enjoyable! Or do I? I mean really, it was a hell of a lot of work. But I don’t enjoy the spontaneous checking things off my bucket list that I just added 5 minutes ago. Maybe these things need to be on separate lists. Maybe I am too structured. Are there rules? Hmmm. 

About the sleeping with strangers….. As some of you know, my best friend Lisa moved to Florida this past summer. She is probably sitting on the beach in the sun right now…ok, I have to stop thinking this way or my sanity will not be intact for winter. Anyway, after Lisa left Cindy came in and took her place. Cindy invited me to a girl’s weekend away with her two childhood friends that I didn’t know. We shopped, went out to eat, and got a massage. It was nice even though throwing an introvert in with complete strangers who know each other well can be a little awkward. I mean, I couldn’t share any juicy gossip. But I am quick with the jokes and love to make everyone laugh. 

Unlike Lisa, Cindy is not a runner. Gasp! Shocking, I know. She said she wants to put a 0.0 sticker on the back of her car just to spite me. She said opposites attract. She is crazy, fun, and carefree. I am excited to see what adventures we will share next. 

Grounded for life, part 5

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A few days later, Randy showed up with a car full of friends in his old boat of a car wanting to go for a ride. But I was grounded. Sometimes if I knew that my mom would say “no”, I would ask my dad. He always said “yes”. I suspect that if I asked my dad if I could go out for a wild drunken night of debauchery he would still say “yes”. But no such luck, my mom was home. Plus she got pretty angry if I went past her and asked my dad. Anyway, there was no getting around it, I was grounded.

Randy drove off leaving us behind. That was not all he left behind. As Randy drove off, the guys noticed that Randy’s car was leaking fluid of some sort. Brake fluid! Back in the day, we couldn’t just call him on his cell phone to tell him. I will liken it to my parents stories of walking to school uphill both ways. How did we survive? Sometimes it is amazing that we did. Instead we worried. Randy never came back to pick up my friends. Later that afternoon, we received a call that Randy got in a car accident and was in the hospital. He was going 65 on a back road. As he approached the stop sign he didn’t have any brakes, lost control, and ended up hitting a tree head on. Luckily he walked away with a few bumps, bruises, and glass imbedded in his face and body. It was a miracle that he survived a head on collision with a tree without wearing a seat belt. He remembered wandering around aimlessly in confusion. His Def Leppard tape still playing but the front end of the car was gone.

The next day, my friends and I went to the junk yard to see the remains of his car. It was a pretty dismal sight. We wondered what our fate would have been if I hadn’t been grounded. Would some of us be underground?? I remember getting the call that night and driving my parent’s car to get to the hospital. I was afraid and crying. We were all pretty shook up. I think that God was watching out for us that day. If I wasn’t grounded there is no way we would have all survived that crash.

It has been over two decades since I saw Randy. I don’t think of him all that often anymore. To be honest, if I saw him walking down the street I would turn around and walk away. Some doors are meant to stay closed.

Grounded for life, part 4

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It was the summer right before my 17th birthday that I got grounded. It was the first and last time that I got grounded. I remember being pretty upset about it at the time. I just wanted to hang out with my friends. I never thought on that 4th of July that a spark would set off a chain reaction that ended up saving my life. At the time, all I saw was red from the fireworks exploding in loud angry cracks. 

My mom told me that I needed to come home right after the fireworks. Randy showed up that night in his 1970’s big boat of a car with my new boyfriend and a friend of his. Perfect, I set up my boyfriend’s friend with my friend Connie who I invited to come live with me that night. Connie had a rough life. Connie and her younger siblings spent the summer living with whatever friends would take them in. She never had many clothes to wear, no winter jacket, and her mom would leave the kids for days at time with only cough drops to eat. She never called to look for Connie when she didn’t come home. Eventually, the kids ended up in foster care but for those couple of weeks I took Connie in like a stray cat. Connie had a horrendous upbringing, but that is her story to share. Growing up the way I did, I had a hard time relating to kids whose biggest problem was a bad hair day. 

After the fireworks that night, Randy had every intention of taking us right home. However, he decided to take the guys home first and then drop Connie and I off last as we were on the way home for him. It would be a half an hour out of the way to take the guys home, not really a problem. The problem was that Randy said that he knew a shortcut to get back home. After taking some back country roads, it was apparent that we were lost. We wandered around aimlessly for over an hour, turned around, stopped when the road dead ended in a field, turned around again, and eventually ended up in a town over an hour away from my house. I wish I could say we had a map in the car or a cell phone to call home.

We eventually found our way back and rolled in the driveway after 2 AM. So much for coming right home. How do you explain getting lost for hours when you know the route home like the back of your hand? Oh, and by the way, I brought a new friend home that is going to stay with us for a couple of weeks. I almost felt sorry for Connie, it probably wasn’t the best time to have a new friend live with us. Being grounded that night stopped Connie, our boyfriends, and me from what happened next. It would have been tragic. 

Grounded for life, part 3

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Sometimes I sit and wonder about the things that I haven’t thought about in a long time. Sometimes that bothers me. I wonder why if Randy did some bad things, things that he ended up in prison for, why he never hurt me. He had the opportunity to hurt me, but didn’t. Why was I spared that pain? Was it simply because God knew that would put me over the tipping point of more than I could handle. Randy did some very bad things, but never did anything wrong, illegal, or immoral with my friends or I. Nothing beyond his vandalism of signs and driving fast on country roads without seat belts. Mainly we just joked around and laughed.

One of the last times I saw Randy was right around his 18th birthday. He told Shelly and I that some friends were throwing him a party. He wanted us to come out to celebrate with him. At the time, Shelly was living with me at my parents house. She wasn’t the first friend to live with me for several months. The minute Shelly turned 18, she lived with us until graduation. Her parents weren’t bad per se. They were smothering her with their overprotectiveness. Shelly never really did anything wrong, they never let her.

We showed up to Randy’s party at his friends’ house. It was the first time and thankfully the last time that I saw these friends of his. His friends were in their 30’s, seemed kind of strange but ok. We sat in the living room with the 3 teenage children of his friends. The six of us sat in awkward silence ready for the party to start. The couple throwing the party were in the kitchen behind a closed door. Something was wrong, there was yelling. It sounded like plates were being thrown and smashing against the wall. There was a struggle of some sort, a banging against the wall. Randy went to check things out. The screams continued. Randy came back and said that we were getting the hell out of there, something about someone chasing someone around with a butcher knife.

The three of us jumped into my car and as we were trying to leave the cops showed up. The cops said that we couldn’t leave the scene of a crime. They took us inside and threatened us with blood tests to test our alcohol levels. Our course we said that we didn’t mind because we hadn’t been drinking. I didn’t even see the domestic dispute so I was little help answering questions. Eventually they let us go. We dropped Randy off at another friends house. Happy birthday, it sure was memorable.

When Shelly and I got back to my house her parents called and chewed her out for being at a wild party. Guess they just hung around their house listening to the police scanner until eventually they could tell her what crappy kids Shelly and I were. A big part of me felt bad that day knowing that sometimes life doesn’t turn out like it should.

Grounded for life, part 2

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Sometimes things happen that really aren’t technically our fault, but could be because we didn’t do anything at all to stop them. Guilt by association. Inaction as an action. It is rather embarrassing sometimes to talk about events that happened when I was a child, the age my children are at now. Events that were stupid and childish looking back in middle age adult eyes. 

Today’s story takes place out in a very rural area by Mary’s house. I mentioned Mary previously, she was my friend that had 14 or 15 siblings. I can never remember. Please don’t make me mentally count each one by name. Randy wasn’t an only child either. He had 4 brothers. He shared a father with his oldest brother, each of his younger brothers had a different father. His older brother was along for the ride. Mary’s house was always a zoo, so we decided to take a walk. It was autumn, I remember that because the corn was high and ready for harvesting. Later that evening we were running through the corn fields hiding out. Randy’s brother lifted me up to see if I could see anything over the corn, but it was dusk and the husks were so high I could barely peek over. 

The trouble started when we got to the creek. Randy and his brother found a large sheet of plastic lying on the road near the bridge. It was like bubble wrap plastic. They thought it would be a great idea to burn the plastic. I still remember the sizzling and cracking sound of the burning plastic. To make matters more troublesome, Randy and his brother pulled out the signs for the bridge and threw them in the ditch. Around this time, Mary’s dad drove by on the way home from his third job. Mary told the boys that her dad was going to call the police if he saw the fire and suspicious activity. Not long after that we may have even heard sirens. And that is how I ended up over my head in a corn field at dusk. 

Mary decided she wanted to call her sister to see if their dad said anything. She babysat for the farmer’s kids down the road and said we should walk there so she could call home. I remember walking into her neighbor’s house at night to use their rotary phone. The TV was on and the farmer snored softly in his chair never waking up. I don’t know where the rest of the family was. It seems surreal that night in a stranger’s house as Mary called home. Mary’s dad didn’t see anything, so we walked back to her house. No one got grounded that night. 

Grounded for life, part 1

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The first time I met Randy was on the school bus. The bus was full when Randy got on except for one seat, my seat. He sat down next to me, jumped back up looking for another seat, and after finding none sat down next to me again. He nervously explained that he couldn’t sit by me because I was too beautiful, but there was nowhere else for him to go. He stuttered, chuckled, and wiped sweaty palms on his jeans. It was a couple weeks later in the middle of May that he asked me out. It snowed 6 inches on that day. My first relationship lasted as long as it took the May snow to melt away. But a friendship was struck since that first day. 

It was later that I learned more about the real Randy, but I will never know for sure. He never told the same story more than once. He loved to laugh and have fun. That was part of the problem. I learned later that he was in foster care for stealing a car for joy riding. Randy never caused me any harm, however trouble seemed to follow him everywhere he went. 

As a teen, I never had any boundaries. I was treated as an adult at a young age. I guess it was a benefit for having many adult responsibilities. For the most part I was trustworthy. There were times, however, that I wished I was grounded. Like the time Randy came over with a couple of friends to go out. For some reason, I was afraid of Randy’s friend. He was downright shady. There was something bad about him. My mom told me to go out and have a fun time when I really wanted her to say that I was grounded for life. I remember sitting in the back of this guy’s car. The floor was rusted out in the back seat. If you sat in the middle, you could see the ground. I was afraid that a bump would cause the whole back seat to fall out. 

There were other outings with Randy. He went to meet up with someone to talk about things that future felons probably discuss. I was offered a beer. Being the goodie two shoes that I was, I did not drink it but put it in my trunk. My dad found the beer. He told me I could get in a lot of trouble for that so I took the can and smashed it against some rocks. But I didn’t get grounded. 

The time I did get grounded though probably saved my life…