On Passing Down Our Indiscretions

"Your children tell you casually years later what it would have killed you with worry to know at the time."

~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

First off, isn't that a good title? I am rather proud of it; it sounds far more academic than I have any right to sound today.

Anyway, to the point. I can’t be sure, but I strongly suspect that the quote above is very true. And I have no reason to harp on it, but Kate and Natalie and I were discussing it last night, because we do have to think about these things, eventually. We came to this conundrum: are you supposed to tell your teenage child about your indiscretions as a learning experience and then say “but you ever try it, young lady, and we WILL find out, and you’ll wish you had never been born!” or do you just ignore the whole thing and pretend you were a model of perfect behavior in your youth, or do you twist the facts slightly, with “I tried that when I was your age, and I got CAUGHT! And so will you.”?

That wouldn’t be lying on my part; every single time I do something I’m not supposed to, I DO get caught. Either I’m a horrible liar or my mother has radar; probably both. But Natalie managed to fly to and from Florida to spend a weekend with her then-boyfriend (a boy she dated for 18 months without her parents’ knowledge, by the way) without ever rousing parental suspicion. And Kate and I were her accomplices—Kate bought the plane tickets, I took her to the airport and picked her up. Speaking of Kate, she told her parents like, just last month that her boyfriend was here during exams last semester (I made the airport run that time, too). All through high school and every break, she also gets away with coming home at four or five AM and sneaking into her bedroom, which is strictly against the rules in her house. I never got away with that, either. Not ONCE. Geez. I can’t remember ever getting away with anything beyond what I just thought I was getting away with when I was little—like the time my friends and I made candles, poured hot wax on our hands, and made a “friendship oath circle,” then tried to float candles homemade of acorns, tinfoil, embroidery floss and wax in the pool. Then held Molly by her ankles while she scraped them off the pool liner. Thought we got away with it; later realized that a) the pool is right outside my parents’ window, b) we were quite loud, and c) it was oh, about ten pm, so nobody in the area was possibly asleep. We were real rebels at the age of 13, let me tell you. No way my parents didn’t figure us out—and probably had a hearty laugh about our oh-so-secret-and-arcane “ritual.” They might even have pictures. The question still stands, though: when older, should I let any younglings know that I came home past three in the morning thrice in a row despite being specifically forbidden to do so, shamelessly nicked quarters off my father’s dresser until I was 16 or so and started feeling guilty about it, and used to pin my brother to the floor, brutally yank his hair, tell him I wished he’d never been born, and then blackmail him into not telling our mother? (This is before we got older and decided to be BFFs. I’m sorry, David. I was a terrible person and I deserve for you to be higher in class rank than I was, although I am petty and despite being proud of you will probably never forgive you for it). Ok, so maybe none of that is all that scandalous. But should Natalie one day tell her kids that she totally lied to her parents about her whereabouts for several days and got away with it—after all, she’s pretty proud of the fact—or not? Oh, the dilemma! I would like to mention that I no longer contribute to such dilemmas, because I am perfect and also because these days when I stay out with a boy until four in the morning it's usually with five other girls and boys, and we're studying or singing Disney songs.

(Don't you want to live on the honors floor, too? :D We're cool like that.)

It’s all of purely academic interest, of course—I refuse to consider getting married until I’m 25, as does Kate, and Natalie should probably not marry or reproduce until she is WELL past that. But it is of interest, isn’t it? After all, we can discuss the ramifications of indoctrinating our siblings, right? It’s too late for David; he knows basically everything I’ve done in my entire life and basically everything I’ve gotten in trouble for. But when Daniel’s in upper high school or college and has a girlfriend and gives the first sign that he thinks that, since our parents will be getting older by then, he can get away with staying out till all hours of the night, will somebody say “Oh, your sister tried that, and she got in soooooo much trouble for it and also had a completely obnoxious midnight curfew that got her into even more trouble, so don’t even start with it—” or will they not want to put the idea in his head at all, since, after all, I’m perfect, and if I tested the limits on something he might get the idea that he can test them ten times worse. Actually, neither, probably. Because I’m the eldest and thus get the hardest sentence on everything, Daniel will probably be given a curfew of, oh, two o’clock. Or maybe Mama will be a sounder sleeper by then and Daddy won’t care so much since he’s a boy, and he’ll perfect the sneaking-into-the-house-even-though-the-sliding-door-makes-SO-much-noise routine and get away with it.

And then what will he tell HIS children?! The circle continues!

Feel free to ignore me; I’m in the library pretending to do homework and was remembering having this conversation with Kate and Natalie, and this is more fun than homework. And all the parts where I say I'm perfect--I'm joking, people. If I were perfect, I'd be doing my research and not blogging about such pointlessness. :)

Would you like to see an image or three about how I'm feeling towards my work right now? Oh, I knew you would! You are all such delightful people!

Have a great day; I'll be back soon!