Several times in the past year, friends both in cyberspace and in “real” life have asked me the same question: Do I ever pause to consider the impact that this blog will have on Heloise, and any other children with whom we may be blessed, when they are older? Though it’s been a quarter century and more since I was a teen, I’ve been working around them continually almost since I stopped being one. And though there are some surprising exceptions, the general rule continues to be true: most teens, particularly at the onset of puberty, go through a stage where they are acutely embarrassed by their parents. Call it the “please drop me off a block from school” phenomenon — it’s a rare fourteen year-old who wants his or her friends to know much detail about his or her parents’ lives.
I write and speak openly about my past and my present. Compared to the degree of disclosure now common among teens on social networking sites (both in terms of words and images), what I’ve shared here is pretty tame. Of course, I write as an adult — and though I have plenty of youthful indiscretions in my past, I cannot claim the excuse of youth when it comes to explaining my reasons for choosing to be so candid about certain aspects of my life on this blog.
I cannot protect my daughter entirely from future embarrassment. No doubt there will come a time when how I dress, or walk, or even breathe will be a source of intense annoyance to her; I know adolescents well enough to know that that those moments of deep disgust with her parents (perhaps particularly her father) will be brief albeit (probably) intense. And no doubt she’ll wince when and if (realistically, just when) she reads what I’ve written and continue to write about my life and my past.
I remember vividly a conversation I had with my father not long after I had lost my virginity. I was seventeen, and he was fifty. He was in Carmel visiting us for the weekend (when my parents divorced, my mother took my brother and me to the Monterey Peninsula while Dad stayed in Santa Barbara, where he remained until his death.) Papa and I took one of our long walks and talked about many things, mostly about my new girlfriend. Dad remarked, as we strolled on San Carlos Avenue, that I was younger than he had been when he lost his virginity; “I was nineteen and in the RAF”, he said. It was the first time he had ever mentioned his own sexual life to me, and I felt that familiar mix of revulsion and curiosity so common to adolescents when a parent begins to offer what my cousin Dinah calls an “over-share”. He told me a little about the “girl from the village”, how they had met and so forth, and I listened with eagerness and trepidation, not knowing how much I wanted to know, afraid of hearing more than I wanted but fascinated by my father’s sudden burst of almost uncharacteristic candor.
We walked on for a few more moments in silence, and then Dad asked “Were the lights on or off?” I said something like “Jesus, Dad, what a question!” I told him that the lights had been off but the television had been on (videos on MTV). My father seemed puzzled and asserted that he preferred the lights on. And that was the last we said of the subject; indeed, in the remaining 21 years of his life, we never had a similar conversation again. But what I’ve noticed, as I play through my memories of my father in my head, is that the embarrassment I felt discussing sex with my father has faded completely. What remains is the recollection of a precious glimpse into his youth, of what life in England in the early 1950s might have been like for this bookish, gentle, funny young man doing his national service before heading off to university. What remains after the awkwardness is the memory of intergenerational intimacy, tinged as it was with the mutual incomprehension that comes with an age gap and a different cultural vocabulary.
To put it simply, what made me cringe when I was seventeen is now a fond and precious recollection. And it is in that light that I think about my daughter’s future reaction to my own writing, so full as it is of stories about my past. There will be a time, I am sure of it, when Heloise will wish very much that her father had not been quite so forthright, so inclined to what my generation often calls “TMI” (too much information). But I also suspect, based upon my memories of my father, that when she is older still, what once seemed so embarrassing will become considerably less so. Though our culture does do its damndest to turn adolescence into a quarter-century process (at least for men, and not an insignificant number of women), psychic puberty does end. And as far as I’m concerned, psychic puberty ends when we cease to blame our parents for our own adult mistakes, when we absolve them of responsibility for the outcome of our lives, and when we no longer cringe when we contemplate them in all their lovely, flawed, perfect humanness.
What humiliates and infuriates at fifteen becomes the happy recollection at forty; the story I shared above is hardly the only such instance. And it is a good reminder to parents and children alike about the need to balance both candor and respect for boundaries, and to forgive generously when that balance becomes skewed, as it inevitably will.
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