Category Archives: Parenting
Adolescent Sex Is as Addictive as Crack Cocaine
Adolescent sex is as addictive as meth, crack cocaine, alcohol, or nicotine. Once teens start having sex it’s like two right handed children playing left handed catch with a live hand grenade. I was a “wait ‘til you marry” person, not because I was a “goodie two shoes,” but because I was a devout coward. In my day there were immediate unpleasant consequences for getting pregnant outside marriage And we weren’t surrounded by people selling sex as the only reason for living. But today’s world is simply saturated with sex in almost every ad, book, movie, and on line site. The culture no longer supports abstinence or even monogamy. No matter how good, articulate, loving, and supportive we are as parents……it is like sending our children into war with water guns. Kids have way too much freedom at very young ages, both the opportunities and stress of unchaperoned situations, and less immediate consequences than older generations had. And like all adolescents they live in the moment, oblivious to any life long consequences. Or they are like most of us are about death, not believing pregnancy or disease will happen to them.
Short of locking them up from 12 to 21, I have no simple solutions. I believe and talk about a loving forgiving God, but what I probably never stress enough is that neither love nor forgiveness protects us from the consequences of our bad choices. Without obvious consequences we will just keep making them. That’s not what a loving God wants or allows for us.
In our teens most of us aren’t yet sure who we are or if who we are will turn out to be sufficient in this world. Sex isn’t just amazing pleasure, it makes us feel like a hero or princess…..we are #1 with someone. We are not alone anymore as we do the work of separating who we are from who our parents are.
We don’t realize that need is not love and that infatuation doesn’t last. Learning to love takes years of learning to make unselfish choices. When we make our lives incredibly harder by creating another life that we aren’t yet equipped to nurture, finance, and protect by putting their many needs before our wants, our infatuation seldom has a chance to become love. The overload of challenges may well freeze us in our immaturity and lock us into remaining overwhelmed immature children making bad choices for much of our lives. So many lives are stunted from choices made in the teen years.
And for most youth the danger of disease has no more personal reality than death. No matter what medicines are available, the consequences of STD’s and even the side effects of medicines for them can permanently diminish the joy of sex and complicate relationships. Today even many adults assume there’s a medicine for everything. But the reality is that as soon as we find a cure for one disease, another disease appears. The sad reality is that often the victims are youth who plan to abstain from sex until old enough to make a life commitment, but are overwhelmed by cultural circumstances.
Many people of all ages assume a fetus is not a person and if we are the type of person who doesn’t naturally consider possibilities, we may not worry much about emotional repercussions from having an abortion. But in my 78 years of life, I have witnessed the changes in personality traits that people experience as they enter different stages of life. I am convinced that even those that do not feel guilt, worry, sadness or even curiosity about their unborn child at the time of making the choice for abortion, will eventually have to deal with those.
I think society has pretty much obliterated fear of hell. What no one warns is that bad choices can turn our life here into a hell,.
Parents, tell it like it is. They may not hear you, but at least you will have tried.
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A Sign of Hope: An Easter Story
My heart sank and I felt a wave of nausea as I read the thermometer. One hundred and four degrees.
“Oh, God. Not again please,” I whispered, as I coaxed medicine into my feverish son. While I was fixing him juice, the telephone rang insistently until I finally answered it.
“Eileen,” a neighbor said, “you need to get over there to my granny’s old home place and get yourself some of those daffodils. They’re just coming up. If you plant them now, they might go on and bloom for you next month.”
“I can’t take Tommy out today, Mae. He’s running fever again. Besides are you sure it’s not stealing??
“Naw. There are thousands of them now, all from the ones my granny planted years ago. They need thinning out, so they’ll keep blooming. I’ll come over and watch Tommy for you.”
“Well……Okay,” I answered hesitantly. “I’m just putting him down for a nap. Come in about twenty minutes.”
I sighed as I hung up. I didn’t really feel like going out in the cold January weather, but I couldn’t think of any more excuses. I picked up my three year old son and began to rock him to sleep. His face was flushed and his thin little body felt hot against mine. Poor Tommy. I hope this isn’t going to be another long siege, I thought silently.
“I love you, little one,” I said softly.
“Love you,” he whispered hoarsely, patting my face gently as his eyes began to close.
As I carefully put Tommy in his bed, I heard my neighbor come quietly in the front door.
“Hi, Mae. Thanks for coming. He’s restless, but I think he’ll sleep,” I greeted her. “But I don’t have anything to put dirt in. How will I carry the daffodils?”
“They don’t need dirt. Just put some newspapers down in the back of your station wagon. Get yourself a lot. They’ll look great along your driveway and out front of the house.”
A few minutes later I gasped and shivered when the cold wind hit me, as I got out of the car. I wished fervently that I hadn’t agreed to do this. I started digging as quickly as I could, eyes tearing from the wind. I dug for several minutes, then thought about giving up and going home. Each time I’d begin to straighten up, I’d see another thick clump just barely pushing through the frozen ground, seeming to beckon to me. I kept going until I had almost filled the back of my stationwagon with hundreds of bare bulbs.
When I finally got back and sent my neighbor home with thanks, I went to check on Tommy. He tossed restlessly in his sleep and when I touched his forehead, it almost scalded my hand. Tommy had taken a turn for the worse, so I forgot all about the daffodil bulbs, as I spent the next two weeks caring for him and making trips to the specialist fifty miles away.
With trembling voice, I finally admitted to the doctor how frightened I was, when Tommy’s fever ran off the thermometer and there was no way to know how high it was.
“Don’t try to bring it down below 104 degrees,” he advised me. “If you do, it will shoot back up fast and that can cause a seizure. He catches everything because the hole in his heart valve lets blood circulate without being purified by the lungs. We’ll try another antibiotic. If he has a virus, it won’t help, but we can’t risk this going into pneumonia. We’ll consider surgery when he’s four, but we need to get him stronger first. Bring him back in two days, if he’s not better.”
I drove us home through a flood of tears. Tommy whimpered listlessly, his eyes too bright and his skin too pale under the flush of fever. My spirits matched the bleak January landscape.
I spent the next two days and nights struggling to keep his fever down. Sometimes he lay in my arms limply. Other times when the fever shot beyond the measure of the thermometer, he would chatter brightly, using words far more complex than his normal vocabulary, reminding me of the possibility of brain damage.
Two days passed and his fever was still shooting back up off the thermometer. Trying yet again to bring it down slowly, I put him in a tepid bath, that seemed to hurt his hot skin and make him shake with chills. He looked like pictures I had seen of war orphans with their ribs showing and their sunken eyes pleading. He looked at me like he was asking mutely, “Why are you doing this? Why are you hurting me? Don’t you love me?”
As I wrapped him in wet sheets and sat rocking him, both of us were sobbing. I even yelled out loud, “Where are you, God? I pray and pray and you do nothing. This is an innocent child. Why do you let him suffer? What kind of God are you? A cruel God? An impotent God? Where is the loving God of Jesus? Have you abandoned us?”
As, I exhausted my anger, memories of God’s many gifts of grace in my life flooded my mind and I began to pray again, “You are my God, the only God I have. I have seen Your awesome glory in the beauty of Your creation and I have felt the depth of Your love through Your son, Jesus. So, I, like Paul, will try to praise you at all times, in joy and in sorrow. Right now, I can’t feel it, but with my will I praise you. I thank you for the many times you have blessed me and for the grace you have poured into my heart even in my darkest moments. But, please God, help me know you are with us in this. I feel abandoned.”
Then I began to dress Tommy for another trip to Nashville. As I carried him to the car, I was stopped in my tracks by an incredible sight.
Hundreds of bright yellow daffodils in full bloom completely filled the back of my car. It looked like Easter morning! I felt like God had put His arms around us and whispered, “See, I am with you always. Don’t despair.”
I drove to the doctor’s singing hymns of praise. That night Tommy’s fever broke and we filled the house with vases of Daffodils, my sign of hope was everywhere I looked.
Religious Rant for the Day
Theologians are theory people…and yes we need theory people…but they often miss the obvious. Yes, God is awesome, way way beyond our human understanding, worthy of our praise and admiration, but God is also practical!
YES! PRACTICAL! The BIG TEN weren’t traps, tests, or a spoil sport kind of thing. They are the incubator that helps keep us alive until we and finally all humanity mature enough to love others as much as, or like Jesus-more than-our small selves. They are for OUR protection! God is FOR us.
What about number 1? Does God need our love? God doesn’t NEED anything! WE need God What we admire and love, we try to be. But how do we imitate a God beyond our understanding? Duh! God’s goodness and love is fleshed out, visible, understandable, in a prototype so to speak: JESUS, a human growing into a Love that’s way beyond the “Big Ten,” a human struggling with the human suffering of sadness, discouragement, rejection, fear, and physical pain…but always open to God, both within and in others, open to grace to make the loving choice in the end, a human that moves beyond the “Minimum Ten” to fleshing out the beatitudes…a whole other level of love.
“Sins” against the Big Ten are just plain stupidity, once you realize that Jesus showed us that this very fleeting life isn’t all there is and that instant gratification and gathering toys are for children and need to be outgrown before we can move on. The truth is that coveting, stealing, killing etc., end up making our lives miserable, even hell.
And it takes finding that source of grace which we call God, both within and outside ourselves to out grow our childish shortsighted selfishness .
Domesticity is Not my Middle Name
When I married in the 1950’s, the domestic, house-proud woman was the cultural norm. Unfortunately, I was neither domestic nor house-proud, but self –awareness also wasn’t one of my strong points back then. My mother’s despair over attempts to teach me to cook as a teenager should have been my first clue.
She tried to start as simply as possible by just setting out a box of corn bread mix along with the other ingredients and utensils for me. I read the instructions and combined the ingredients in the bowl. That seemed simple enough. I might have actually managed, but mom came in at that point and said, “Wash your hands and put the mix into the pan.” After she left, I thought, “Why am I washing my hands? Is this one of those baking things I’ve read about that you do with your hands?” So, I used my hands to scoop the mix out of the bowl and to sort of shake/fling it into the pan. When not a whole lot of it made it into the pan, I began to suspect than my intuition about using my hands was off base. As I was trying to figure out how to get the rest of all the corn meal off my hands and into the pan, my mother returned to check on my progress.
She lost it. “What in the world are you doing?” she shouted. “What a mess! Why is it all over your hands?” I, in turn, had a meltdown, starting to sniffle, backing away from the mess on the counter into the stove behind me, where there was a pot of melted butter. As the butter poured into the burner and down the front of the stove, I ran crying from the kitchen with half the corn meal still on my hands. Neither mother, nor I, ever found the courage to attempt to domesticate me again
Grace for a Bottomless Pit of Needs and Wants
“Simply realize who is hidden within you.” –osho
“Story telling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community. …………….when our discourse becomes more abstract, the less connected we feel.” Parker J. Palmer (These are quotes from the blog: makebelieveboutique.com)
They really hit me where I live. Not very many people relate to my writing because I tell, instead of show. I’m a theory person in that I explore the world through concepts, connections and possibilities.
But my responses to daily experiences come straight from my emotions. That makes me feel very vulnerable, so I stay focused on the outside world of theories as much as I can.
I have many “God” experience stories that are beyond statistical coincidence. But most of them came out of my struggle with repeated failures to love, because of being a bottomless pit of needs and wants. Needy people are not people who are able to love unconditionally. We may do a lot for others, but it is at least partly, if not mostly, out of our need for constant confirmation that we are worthwhile people.
My favorite autobiographical spiritual writer is Anne Lamott, because she too is a needy person who has often messed up big time because of it, but has found the grace to be open about her flawed humanity through her ongoing experiences of God and His love.
To be honest, I’m not sure I really want that kind of courage enough to ask God for that grace. But I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with where I am, so like it or not, that may be where God is calling me.
The Adventures of Nanu and Granddaughters Bella and Emma
When Bella was four and Emma was eight, Nanu used to take them to the marvelous Adventure Science Museum. This is Nanu’s account of one day of adventures there.
Yesterday was a learning experience for all three of us with lots of delights, but some challenges.
I learned that Bella has outgrown riding on my walker through the Adventure Science Museum and has become adventurous enough to disappear quickly through tunnels, and slides and climbing things to other “levels.”
I felt sick with terror when I realized she had disappeared. Fortunately, Emma can climb those same things and found her fairly quickly. Since Bella didn’t know she was lost, she was just happily exploring new things.
I also learned that Emma is smarter than I am. When I got upset with Bella, Emma said, “Nanu, Bella doesn’t understand, ‘Level.’ You should have said, ‘Don’t go up or down.”
I also learned that I can no longer do two very physical days in a row, so the great adventure was shorter than the more energetic two would have liked.
But still, Emma, wearing a harness, got to “fly” like Peter Pan and feel weightless like our Astronauts and Bella got over her fears of the darkness and learned to love the enchanting “star room” as much as Emma and I do.
And this old lady learned a lot about her own limits. Grandchildren are not only the greatest joys in our lives, they are also great teachers.
The Heart of Spirituality is Forgiveness
Laws, whether civil or religious, are designed to keep us safe while living in groups, so that we can persevere as imperfect human beings to develop into creatures capable of life-long commitment to another imperfect creature and thus become capable of concern and kindness toward all other creatures.
No person is perfect, no relationship is perfect. But if we resolve to make a relationship work, we can develop peace treaties of love and tolerance to transform a difficult situation into something beautiful. (One may start this, but ultimately it will take two.)
The key to living is not perfection, but perseverance in becoming ever more capable of loving other imperfect beings.
And the most vital part of learning to love ourselves and other imperfect human beings is forgiveness.
And the purpose of forgiveness is grace for personal growth and the ongoing evolution of humanity from survival of the fittest to creatures capable of love for all others.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 