Awful Parenting
November 15, 2000
The only good thing about having been lazy and shiftless and horrible in my youth is that I find it easier to talk to my kids. Nothing really shocks me that much because…how do I say this? I did it all. Or most of it. And now I own a house and have a happy marriage and vote and pay taxes.
This is supposed to cheer you up if you’re feeling down about your kids and you were perfect in high school. I feel sorry for you if you got good grades and turned your stuff in on time and never got suspended. Really. It’s hard on you now, isn’t it? If you had goofed up a bit more, you’d have more confidence that things were going to be okay. I’m going to tell you some of the things I’m willing to tell people in print.
For example, there was the smoking episode. I went to a private Catholic all-girls school way out in the boonies in Denver. There were fields all around and so during the spring noon hours, a group of us decided that it would be cool to lie out in the field, along a ditch bank, and take off our uniform shirts and tan our chubby bodies. We would pass around the Marlboros and while away the hours having a smoke and a nap. None of us ever combed our hair or wore make-up. Or ironed our clothes or tucked in our shirts. We were scraggy women. We didn’t date much.
So anyway, one day a shadow passed over us, the long shadow cast by a Sister of Loretto wearing a peaked veil. Actually, “Little Lydia” wasn’t very tall but her habit was an impressive height-add-er.
That was the first time I was expelled.
My mother told me she and her girlfriends, who also went to a Catholic all-girls school in New Orleans, would go down to Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and buy cigarettes one at a time and listen to jazz bands. (My grandmother wouldn’t even let us open the curtains in the car when we would drive through the French Quarter. Doesn’t that make you wonder what my grandmother did when she was young that made her so nervous?)
The next time I was expelled was for ditching school. I talked our carpool into skipping and flying kites in City Park. I had to ride the bus with the kindergarten kids for the last two months of school.
There were the times I snuck out of the house down the rain gutter in the middle of the night. And there was the time my girlfriends and I all told our parents we were going to spend the night at each other’s houses and stole two bottles of champagne from somewhere and drove around till six in the morning when we parked in a church parking lot and went to sleep. Only to be woken by Monsignor Moran as he went to say 6:30 mass.
I have to say, I have great memories of that with my best friends drinking a bottle of champagne. (We got scared and left the second bottle on a street corner on 9th and St. Paul for some other person to celebrate with.)
My grades were horrible. If I were my child, I would have killed me. I was sitting with my advisor at BYU, and there flashed on the computer screen the C’s and D’s and F’s of my youth at St. Mary’s. I’m proud of the fact that I didn’t just stand up and walk out of the room.
So I’m here to tell you that people change and grow up. They have children and start paying mortgages. They get jobs and ambitions for better things and they finally start to understand what you really meant when you said they’d better be home by ten and start going to church and do their homework. They didn’t know you meant, “I love you.” They thought you were mad at them all the time.
So don’t forget to tell them how much you care. Tell them how good you think they are and that you can see the things they’re trying to do right. Tell them you believe in them and that you believe they will succeed.
Someday they’ll understand and everything will work out okay.
The only good thing about having been lazy and shiftless and horrible in my youth is that I find it easier to talk to my kids. Nothing really shocks me that much because…how do I say this? I did it all. Or most of it. And now I own a house and have a happy marriage and vote and pay taxes.
This is supposed to cheer you up if you’re feeling down about your kids and you were perfect in high school. I feel sorry for you if you got good grades and turned your stuff in on time and never got suspended. Really. It’s hard on you now, isn’t it? If you had goofed up a bit more, you’d have more confidence that things were going to be okay. I’m going to tell you some of the things I’m willing to tell people in print.
For example, there was the smoking episode. I went to a private Catholic all-girls school way out in the boonies in Denver. There were fields all around and so during the spring noon hours, a group of us decided that it would be cool to lie out in the field, along a ditch bank, and take off our uniform shirts and tan our chubby bodies. We would pass around the Marlboros and while away the hours having a smoke and a nap. None of us ever combed our hair or wore make-up. Or ironed our clothes or tucked in our shirts. We were scraggy women. We didn’t date much.
So anyway, one day a shadow passed over us, the long shadow cast by a Sister of Loretto wearing a peaked veil. Actually, “Little Lydia” wasn’t very tall but her habit was an impressive height-add-er.
That was the first time I was expelled.
My mother told me she and her girlfriends, who also went to a Catholic all-girls school in New Orleans, would go down to Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and buy cigarettes one at a time and listen to jazz bands. (My grandmother wouldn’t even let us open the curtains in the car when we would drive through the French Quarter. Doesn’t that make you wonder what my grandmother did when she was young that made her so nervous?)
The next time I was expelled was for ditching school. I talked our carpool into skipping and flying kites in City Park. I had to ride the bus with the kindergarten kids for the last two months of school.
There were the times I snuck out of the house down the rain gutter in the middle of the night. And there was the time my girlfriends and I all told our parents we were going to spend the night at each other’s houses and stole two bottles of champagne from somewhere and drove around till six in the morning when we parked in a church parking lot and went to sleep. Only to be woken by Monsignor Moran as he went to say 6:30 mass.
I have to say, I have great memories of that with my best friends drinking a bottle of champagne. (We got scared and left the second bottle on a street corner on 9th and St. Paul for some other person to celebrate with.)
My grades were horrible. If I were my child, I would have killed me. I was sitting with my advisor at BYU, and there flashed on the computer screen the C’s and D’s and F’s of my youth at St. Mary’s. I’m proud of the fact that I didn’t just stand up and walk out of the room.
So I’m here to tell you that people change and grow up. They have children and start paying mortgages. They get jobs and ambitions for better things and they finally start to understand what you really meant when you said they’d better be home by ten and start going to church and do their homework. They didn’t know you meant, “I love you.” They thought you were mad at them all the time.
So don’t forget to tell them how much you care. Tell them how good you think they are and that you can see the things they’re trying to do right. Tell them you believe in them and that you believe they will succeed.
Someday they’ll understand and everything will work out okay.
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