10 Things: My parents don't know everything

10 Things I Wish I'd Known When I Was A Teenager

My parents don't know everything
(but they usually know more than me)


“Listen, my child, to what your father teaches you. Don’t neglect your mother’s teaching. What you learn from them will crown you with grace and clothe you with honor.” (Proverbs 1:8)

“If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not to have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.” (Russell Hoban)

I’m looking forward to the day when flying cars are the norm, teachers have been replaced by holograms and I am the ripe old age of sixty-three. The younger generations will gather at my feet and listen with rapt attention to the sage wisdom that I’ve sown from years of cultivating vast amounts of knowledge in regards to living, loving and avoiding jury duty. I will be revered for my quiet countenance and humble acumen in all things important that I’ve gleaned from ages of watching this humble earth spin ‘round the sun.

At that point in time I’m relatively certain my mother will still insist that I’m folding my underwear wrong. And I will still continue to do it my own way just to spite her.

Whether it’s through pink hair (which I’ve done), an older boyfriend (also done) or blowing off curfew (done to death) there’s usually a spit of rebellion in everyone under the age of twenty-one. Whether or not you recognize it for what it is (I know I didn’t), you’re probably going to feel the urge to flip the middle finger to conformity in some way/shape/form. I found early on that one of the easiest and most effective ways to accomplish this is through domestic disobedience.

Parents: we’ve all got ‘em (though the form may differ depending on the situation) and perhaps with little exception most of them have rules to abide by, making this particular avenue of rebellion an accessible one. It’s mutiny from the comfort of your own home where you don’t even have to leave your room to start an uprising. My personal revolution came in the form of impeccably timed smart-ass commentary aimed at anyone foolish enough to open their pie-hole in my presence. This, as I’m sure you can imagine, made normal conversations with me difficult enough but it made arguments the height of aggravation.

Have you ever seen the eye-roll that accompanies the sarcastic verbal punctuation “Yeah, right”? Or the forced frown of blatant disbelief that’s paired with a single raised eyebrow? Was it all you could do not to poke them in their patronizing little eye socket when they gave you that annoying snort of doubt? Well, then you understand exactly what my parents dealt with for nine years while I was under their roof. I’m sure on some occasions the wit was hysterical but more often than not I was pretty damned obnoxious. I made disagreement a hobby and found far too much fulfillment in frustrating the good intentions of any unfortunate soul that had authority over me.

I blossomed into adulthood at some point during that decade and after two years of community college I decided to declare a major of Biblical Studies and was met with a wall of skeptical ambivalence, mostly from my father. And though he did what he could to talk me down from it (including setting up a chat with the apologetics professor at a local Christian college), he still backed me up when it came time to sign that first tuition check. I was smug throughout the first semester and stayed that way all through the entire two years I stubbornly stuck it out. One night, in the midst of a typical debate (which I’m sure included a fair amount of attitude from me and more than a fair amount of teeth-clenching from him) he announced, without an ounce of condescension, “I think you’re going to be a writer.” And while I don’t remember exactly what I said in response, I think it’s a safe bet that the words “yeah” and “right” were present, as was the infamous eye-roll.

There’s a special kind of irony in using the above anecdote as a part of my first serious attempt at writing. At one point not long ago I wanted to become “the female C.S. Lewis” (and yes, those were my exact words) and would have busted heads with anyone that suggested otherwise. The more that people questioned my plans, the harder I fought to drown out what I perceived as doubt. When the decision to focus on English (rather than Animation or Theater or Biblical Studies or Underwater Basket-weaving) was made, the memory of that conversation haunted me. When I decided to write an actual book – one that I hoped people would read – that conversation mocked me. But now that I sit here, typing away, that conversation humbles me.

At this moment, I’m twenty-six years and five months old; my father is sixty-three years, ten months. Using what little math skills I possess, it would appear my father will always have thirty-six years of living under his belt that I do not. Albert Einstein said that “The only source of knowledge is experience” and Lord Byron adds to that with “Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried?” In other words, it’s impossible to really understand something until you’ve been through it. In those surplus thirty-six years my father has had the opportunity to see a lot more, do a lot more and fuck up a lot more. As a consequence, he understands a lot more and while it might not always fall on the most enthusiastic ear, he’s usually more than willing to share that knowledge.

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” (C.S. Lewis)

It’s a very unfortunate truth that there really is no substitute for first-hand experience. You could have read every book on depth perception, parallel parking and three-point turns and I still wouldn’t ride shot-gun if you’ve yet to be behind the wheel of a car. My sister and I learned to drive in my father’s Camero and while it might have grated my nerves sometimes to have him sit beside me (“You pressed the break; you shouldn’t accelerate after that.” “Comfortable, not complacent.” “Yellow does NOT mean speed up!”), there’s a reason why you need to have a licensed driver present if you’ve only got a Learner’s Permit – because they know what they're doing (...mostly). They’ve learned that, no, a “rolling stop” doesn’t count at a stop sign and driving through knee-deep water could cost you more than the price of a car wash (Arizona has the “Stupid Motorist Law,” which fines the offending driver for the cost of public emergency services, such as paramedics, if their rescue necessitates them).

Sadly, we don’t get a Learner’s Permit for living and on most occasions we’re learning as we go. You’re not as likely to hit a biker or kill a bird (done and done [three times!]) in your body's driver seat but you can do a considerable amount of damage to yourself in other messy, drawn-out and humiliating ways.

When I turned twenty-two I had my second crisis of faith. I like to think that I’m a lot more intelligent four years later but as Rita Mae Brown says, “Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment,” and that year was proof of concept. I’m an incurable romantic but gun-shy when it comes to trusting someone else with physical intimacy. However barely two months free of my first serious, long-term relationship I set my sights on Dave, a casual friend known for his wandering eye and charming personality. Looking back, I wonder what kind of pheromones I was excreting that announced I was ignorant and open for business because as soon as I made the decision to crush, he came a’runnin’. From the beginning a conscious decision was made to explore my sexuality (and his) without the constraints of my faith. I was going to figure out sex, love and my lady parts on my own terms, Bible be damned!

Dave was, to his credit, totally upfront about what he wanted and expected (sex, in one form or another) and what he didn’t (emotional entanglements or a relationship). Whether I deluded myself into thinking I could handle casual intimacy with no strings attached or held the all-too-common belief that I could change him I don’t know (although it was probably a mixture of both). We hooked up regularly for a couple months and I tried to convince myself that I was OK with having my body serviced (for lack of a better term) while neglecting my heart. When I was with him it was easy to believe he cared about me but as soon as that apartment door shut at my back in the wee hours of the morning and I’d take that lonely walk back to my car, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t pain and it wasn’t disappointment – it was emptiness. It was nothing. It felt so good in the moment but afterward I wasn’t filled with affection or warmth or love or even respect; I wasn’t filled with anything. For months I ignored the bad taste it left in my heart and continued the “relationship”, never stopping to question why the only time it felt "right" was when we were together.

Then one night, it happened: I sat - topless - on the toilet in Dave's darkened bathroom with only the glow of one flickering candle bouncing off the tile walls and God spoke to me. I was confused and frustrated by an inability to stir an emotional response or (other than the dull ache of physical pleasure) really feel anything at all and I had escaped. To do what, I hadn't a clue. I just knew I had to think.

“See? This is why I want you to wait.”

“… Wait, what?”

“THIS. This hollowness, this uncertainty, this insecurity – I don’t want you to go through it. I ask you to wait because it’s supposed to be better than this and it shouldn’t cause you to question yourself.”

“…Oh.”

“There’s a method to My seemingly random madness. I didn’t just pull an arbitrary list of rules out of the air and I wouldn’t ask these things of you without good reason.”

“And that would be…?”

“I ask them because I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

I wish I could say that I walked out of that bathroom, put my shirt back on and waved goodbye to Dave for good but it took some time before my heart allowed it to sink in completely. Wisdom gained from painful experiences is costly. I put a lot of time, emotion and energy into Dave only to get very little in return. To make matters worse I wound up hurting some wonderful people and pushing others away. It’s an embarrassing moment when you realize the full impact your actions and choices have on your life and the those around you.

My mother is an incredibly strong woman but I’ve always seen her as annoyingly straight-laced, mild and bookish. For years she and her old friends would giggle about the wild nights they’d spent in New York and Los Angeles in their twenties but I never believed it was much more than getting buzzed from wine coolers out on the balcony. “What? Did you use expired coupons? Keep library books past their due date?” I’d ask sarcastically to which my mother would invariably reply, “You’ll just have to wait for the book!”

Years later, at a table by the window in Einstein’s Bagels, I got to hear the first chapter right from the source. While living on her own in California, my mother got seriously involved with a man who subsequently moved in and got her pregnant. Terrified of the reaction she’d get from her strict Catholic parents, she eventually miscarried and, out of panic and shame, kept the matter a secret. All throughout adolescence our mother had been unreasonably paranoid regarding my sister’s and my sexual escapades (of which there were none, even in the tamest sense of the word). All the years that she and my father spent scaring abstinence into us suddenly made a lot more sense.

“Why didn’t you ever tell us this?”

“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think it would make a difference.”

It’s moot at this point, really, because what’s done is done. It’s hard to know whether or not I would have taken her words to heart when I was twenty-two, nineteen, sixteen. Douglas Adams says, “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so” and it sounds like he’s onto you, humanity. I believe one of the prime reasons God allows certain people to go through a particular hell is because He wants them to show others how to avoid it; or, baring that, how to deal with it once they’ve gotten there. But for all the red flags and loud regrets echoing from previous generations, we as humans remain woefully unobservant.

The pain my mother suffered and the residual ripples from all that could have been haunt her when she talks about it now. I have no doubt that God used the circumstances to strengthen and teach her but just like in school, there’s a good reason to pay attention to the history that’s gone on before – so you don't do the same stupid things. Rather than take up pottery or tai chi, Hitler invaded Poland to compensate for his daddy issues and as a result, the Toothbrush mustache can never again be worn in polite society; you never know how far-reaching the consequences will be. Sometimes the only way to get a good scope of all that could happen is to take a look at what did happen. Most foresight comes from a clear and humble hindsight and the only way to get that is to put distance between that time and the present. The morning after will not bring the most educated of understandings but put six months between the events and yourself and you’ll be amazed at how much easier the answers come. Put ten years between the two and you won’t even recognize the foolish child that made those decisions in the first place. The punch-in-the-gut that my mother received from losing a child is the kind of lesson I would rather not learn first-hand though (thanksverymuchanyway). “Learn all you can from the mistakes of others” Alfred Sheinwold says, because “You won’t have time to make them all yourself.”

I was not especially intuitive while I was a teenager and, looking back, I wonder how much unreasonable pain I could have saved myself had someone clued me in to the fact that boys can and will exaggerate their feelings just to get that friggin' bra unhooked; or that you do get what you pay for in most cases (no black-market livers); or how important health insurance is in case you get a freak gallstone attack at 3am. Then again, maybe someone did try to give me a heads-up on just how many surprises life has in queue and I simply didn’t listen.

Three years ago, after fumbling through my final semester of Bible College, I sheepishly took the long hallway from the computer room to my parent’s bedroom where my father was watching Law & Order. I didn’t realize it at that moment but he had been patiently waiting for me to come to terms with something known to him for years. Slightly humiliated, I admitted to him that, no, I wasn’t meant to be a theologian and God intended me to write. “I’m going to study Linguistics,” I announced after a deep breath and then awaited the cocky smirk I believed must have been on hold for close to five years.

“I knew it. You’re going to be a writer.” He said without even a hint of condescension and the biggest grin I ever could have imagined on his face. “When do you start?”

He could have yelled “I TOLD YOU SO”; he could have laughed in my face; he could have held it over my head for years. But he didn’t. I deserved a good ribbing for wasting so much time, energy and money on mistake after mistake but even today he can’t keep the smile from his face when he talks about this passion that I’m finally pursuing.

Are my mother and father always right? Hell no (sorry Ma, I know you don’t like hearing that). They’re human and prove it in a vast array of unique and unexpected ways. But they’d been screwing up for decades before a scream and a slap brought me into this world and I don’t want those failures to go to waste. They survived two wars, Watergate, and polyester pants (my father still rocks his) for God’s sake. Proverbs says that “Intelligent people are always open to new ideas. In fact, they look for them” (18:15), which would lead one to believe that most of said intelligence is gleaned from others.

“My son, obey your father’s commands, and don’t neglect your mother’s teaching. Keep their words always in your heart. Tie them around your neck. Wherever you walk, their counsel can lead you. When you sleep, they will protect you. When you wake up in the morning, they will advise you.”

At some point, life started requiring that I be strong enough to make my own decisions. Even though I’m past the point of adulthood (so sayeth the law) my mother and father still have something to say about each and every turn I take. I don’t follow their advice nearly as often as they would prefer (or perhaps should), in part because they aren’t perfect and I figure I’m pretty damn smart on my own. But at the rickety old age of twenty-six, I’ve learned to humble myself and admit that in most cases they’re still smarter*.









*comment void in regards to computers, current fashion and, in the case of my mother, canine reproduction.