Get thee to a nunnery!

Right now a convent sounds good.  A cloistered convent.  A nice, cloistered convent, with tall walls.  On a mountaintop.  In Switzerland.

What, you're thinking I'm a bit old and a little too married to be thinking about this?  Not for me silly.

For my daughter.  Let me show you....

I have three daughters, and shown here are the oldest and the youngest.  Meaghan is nearly 14 and as you can see is beautiful.  She is also as smart as Einstein (no I am not exaggerating, ask her math and Latin teachers), kind, funny, and generally a wonderful person.

So what were her father and I thinking letting her just walk around in the world, where everyone can see her and notice her?  What.  In the hell.  Were we thinking.  Because now... someone noticed her.  A male someone.

See now why a convent sounds good to me?

Here's the thing:  in theory, I want all of my children to grow up to be successful adults, to marry, and to raise families.  I want them to know the feeling of laying on the couch with the most important person in their world, watching their children play, knowing the joy of baby smiles and preschoolers learning to write their names.  It all sounds great and wonderful.

But that means that people of the opposite sex have to start noticing them, and that will take place when they are teenagers.  Which means I have to deal with this RIGHT NOW!  Oh dear God help me remain sane.  And nonviolent.  Let's add Meaghan's dad to that particular prayer list too, while we are at it.

Even though we knew it had to be coming, and we could see some signs that at least one boy likes her "that way," we really, literally were not ready for this.  She hasn't seemed to be on this wavelength at all yet, and we were grateful for that.

I trust my daughter.  I trust the upbringing we have given her.  She is a strong, confident young lady with no doubt about her own value.  She is rooted in her faith in a way I didn't know people that young could be.  She continually amazes me.  Hell, she amazes stangers on the bus.  Apparently, an accountant sitting near her the other day told her he would have no idea how to do her math homework!  If I am honest with myself, I don't really expect her to make bad or stupid choices.

I know the young man who asked her out.  He is a fellow altar server with Meaghan at our parish.  He seems like a nice boy and he and his mother are very active in our parish, so I know he has good roots and is grounded in faith as well.

But, and there always is a but.....teenagers are unpredictable.  Raging hormones is a cliche precisely because it is true.  I remember how it felt, and so does every other adult.  I also remember how hard it was to fight temptation once I found the person who made me not want to fight it anymore.  I am now in the stage of parenting where my child is still a child, but yet in a state of development where one poor choice, one lapse in judgement, one devil-may-care moment......can literally determine the course of the rest of her life.  Anyone who doesn't spend at least a good chunk of their time in fear over that is just not paying attention.

By the way, I will feel the same way about my boys as they get older too.  This idea that one needs to worry more about girls, well, let's just say I find that offensive.  If a girl can get pregnant, my son can get one pregnant.  One is exactly as serious as the other.  And any son of mine who thinks he might go on his merry way and leave a girl and his child in the lurch will be forewarned that this family takes the role of a father very seriously, and he will receive no help or support of any kind from us, including room and board, should that be the choice he makes.

I have never been that person that believes that teenagers are "going to do it anyway," so that paradigm and its attendant issues need no discussion here.  I have informed all of my children that I expect them to graduate high school virgins (and ideally stay that way until marriage), never having been drunk, and never having used illegal drugs.  Once they are adults and out of my control, they will have to make their own choices, but that is my expectation and they are aware of it.  And will be reminded.  Many times.  Crazy you say?  Unrealistic in today's world, you say?  I really don't care what you think.  I want better for my children than the social cesspool this country has turned into, so I fight.  I will never lay back and concede defeat.  If one of my kids fails to live up to this, well, then we deal with that and we move on.  But still, never concede defeat.  You can always strive to do better today than you did yesterday.

To say that my parents did not raise me with this kind of structure would be the understatement of the century.  There was no support in my upbringing for chastity until marriage (in fact, the one time I mentioned such a thing it was ridiculed to my face), and the idea was communicated to me that the loss of my virginity in high school was basically inevitable.  I will not go into detail about the consequences that had.  Suffice to say there are choices I wish I could take back.  But they were choices made with a handicap, and I did beat the odds and graduate a virgin anyway.  Looking back now, I wish I would have had something different.  But my parents are who they are, they believe what they believe, and they could only give me what they themselves had to offer.  I proved to myself that I could be more than the low expectations placed upon me by virtue of my own choices.  So I know my daughter can be more than the world around her expects, through the power of her choices, too.

And so.  Here we go.  We will dip our toe into these waters.  Dad and I decreed, intolerant beasts that we are, that Meaghan is ridiculously young for one-on-one dating, so any outings will be in a group setting or chaperoned for now.  We can't stop boys from liking her, and we can't stop her from growing up, nor do we really want to.  But we can exert some control until she is older, much like one holds a toddler's hand during those first few tries at walking.

I really do look forward to the day she breaks my grip and runs away under her own power.  And I will let go when I feel she is really ready.  She may pull before then, she may test the strength of my grip.  But it will never fail her.  She is just too precious and too important for me to let go at the wrong time.

Sharing the burden

Wow, it's been four years since I posted on this blog... sad. But not too sad, really, as I just had so much life going on. I deleted some old political posts that no longer matter (Fred Thompson for President anyone?) and am ready to start over.

So I became a CNA late last year, and after three months of trying, finally landed a job at the local hospital. Getting hired as a new grad is HARD, even when you are the lowest guy on the totem pole, wiping poop off of people and emptying urinals and bedpans. Yes, that's me. I am sure I'll discuss all those lovely aspects of my job in the future, but there is one thing that is really sticking in my mind about this new job.

This is the first time since I got married and had children that I have worked full time. To some people that probably sounds insane, but hey, that's the choice I made. I am sure that over the last 14 years, more than one person has thought I wasted my bachelor's degree...and maybe I did. I sure am not using it now. But so what? I got a good education and no one can ever take that from me. I have used my brains and my education to more good effect in raising my children than I ever could have in any corporate or government setting, and will continue to do so.

So anyway, here I am, working full time for the first time in a very very long time. Up to this point, my husband has been almost solely responsible for supporting the family financially and providing health insurance. In 2010, after he got laid off from his civilian job, he did this by volunteering to be deployed by the Army National Guard. He spent a year in Afghanistan, so that his family would be taken care of. (There is no doubt that I married a full-fledged MAN.) No one should ever think that I did not fully appreciate the kind of obligation he took on by being sole support for a wife and five children, but let's face it, I couldn't really know what it felt like.

Now that I am working full time, I qualify for health insurance and such through my job. Previously, when I worked part time, either I didn't qualify or it was so expensive I might as well not have. When looking at the differences in the premiums, it became immediately and forcefully apparent that the coverage from my job is a much better buy than the options available from his. So today I enrolled the family. And I keep thinking about it. And thinking about it. Over and over again. In fact, I procrastinated for a few days, because this just felt SO BIG.

Why? When I worked before, they were part time jobs that brought in a little money to help with bills and groceries. We needed the money from those jobs, but if I had wanted to quit for some reason, it wouldn't necessarily have been the ruin of the family. But now, I am carrying this family's health insurance! Basically, now that this step is taken, I couldn't quit even if I wanted to. I don't want to, but that's not the point.

I have always had certain obligations to my family, of course, but as a stay at home mother, they were the kind of things that were built into my days, or came up by natural instinct, anyway. They didn't feel like "work." (Well okay, laundry and dishes will ALWAYS feel like work... yuck.) But now, it's like I feel a weight on me. I always respected my husband and honored his dedication to and sacrifices for us. But I had NO IDEA what this feels like. How has he maintained his sanity when he lost jobs? If this little piece of obligation feels this heavy to me, how must it have felt to him to know that absolutely everything depended upon him?!

I have long known that my husband is a man of deep faith and quiet strength. And I have always loved those things about him. Because of the feelings I am having about this new step in my life, I think I will end up appreciating him a whole lot more. In a world full of tall little boys, he has always been a real man, and my life with him has turned out better than I could possibly have hoped. He deserves some help, though I know that he will always take the burden of being the rock of our family upon himself, no matter what I do. And there are no words for how much I love him for that.