I grew up in a county that mirrors the state of Rhode Island in both population and land mass. When I was a teenager, it was common to be separated from anyone you met, by just a couple degrees. Find out the section of town someone was from, and then figure out who you knew in common. It was a small city then.
I now live in a growing county of 50,000 people spread out over 229 square miles (Hillsborough County is over a thousand square to compare with 1.2 million people) that is the epitome of a small town. We have three high schools in the county but none of them were anywhere as large as the high schools I attended. This is not a place to live if you desire to escape your reputation.
My introduction to how provincial this area is was meeting someone and soon after being filled in on the very private business of another person and how everyone was related. I have never cared what scandals a person has done (according to a person in a store, taking down my address for delivery, my next door neighbor is a wild one with crazy parties and rumored assignations….I have lived next to this woman for almost 16 years, and she has had maybe five parties, and wild is not how I would describe them.) or who they may have slept with, but rather how they treat me or my children. That extends to their friends as well.
I am fortunate enough to be included in the gossip concerning kids my children mingle with and delight with how small minded those that divulge (the same people that castigate bullies) the juicy morsels they relay are. It’s all in the name of “open lines of communication” and “parents network” but I would call it more “my kid is not as bad as those ones” and “I don’t understand this, so I am going to gossip about it”. Oh, in case you didn’t pick up on it, I don’t feel fortunate about it. I feel dirty.
I came from a family that wasn’t perfect and I made a lot of mistakes. How I lived through my teens is a minor, no major, miracle. Not only odd I ingest almost any substance that came into view, but I drank like a 50 year old alcoholic and constantly placed myself in situations that a serial killer would have liked. At one time in high school, I had a different bar for every night of the week and since I had been going to them for years, they had no idea I was in my teens. I underestimated how angry a doorman would get when getting a valid ID after years of passing me through the doors.
The one saving grace in those years, and I truly believe the one thing that kept me from either jail, prison or the pole, was the time I spent with the families of the friends I chose. I craved normal and clean and rigid like all of them craved wildness. I dreamt of being them. Of having parents that weren’t fed up with our behavior because they were worn down. Luckily, I didn’t have some underground telephone system warning those few that I had in my life to show me what life could be like, so I wasn’t shunned or shut out.
No child can help what their parents do or are and to judge them because of that is so beneath my time or energy. The constant amazement of behaviors you don’t understand and psychological autopsy of children will not be tolerated any more by me. The only thing you breed in a fishbowl is a boring individual that will crumble when faced with the very real world that contains gays, blacks, Latins and sometimes gay, black Latinas.
The very best families can raise the absolute worst adults and closing your door to a kid you don’t understand, or worse yet, assigning evil to behavior that is normal for most kids (and yours aren’t little angels, but I’m not as vile as you to burst that bubble) instead of saying a prayer or wishing them growth, is odd. Get out and mingle with people not in your church a bit.
Bitches and Issues 