I’d like to thank everyone for being so supportive. I had a miserable few hours of nail-biting yesterday while waiting for people to come home from school/work, and it was nice knowing I’d submitted my problem to the Greatest Support Group in the Known Universe. 
I’d like to clarify, for some people who evidently didn’t get it, that this “diary” wasn’t a book labeled “Cat’s Diary” and I picked it up and read it. What happened was, I was looking for an old link in the History folder, here on the family computer, which five people use. So there were a lot of folders in the “yesterday” History folder, and I’m clicking on them all, looking for the URL, not sure what it was called, and here’s one called Open Diary, and I opened it, and here are a whole bunch of links for a file called “common catch phrase which I didn’t realize was a user name”, and I clicked on about 3 of them, wondering what it was (the Better Half does a lot of Web surfing), and after I’d worked my way through about four, I realized whose voice that was. How many other people on the Web have brothers named Bonzo and boyfriends named Himself, and just went to the store yesterday to get X for their moms? And are posting from this computer? Oh.
And then with deep dismay I realized what the suddenly familiar voice was SAYING, and yes, I kept reading, to find out what was going on in this stranger’s mind.
If it’s any consolation, I did not particularly enjoy the peculiar experience of that paradigm shift where you stop seeing one of your children as the “old kindergartener” and start seeing her as “just another person”. You parents out there know what I mean–whenever you look at your child, you always see the 5-year-old, and the 10-year-old, and the 15-year-old, underneath the overlay of the present-day face. Well, yesterday I had to see my daughter as a real person, not as my Own Personal Child, and it wasn’t fun. So you can say I’ve been punished for reading her diary (which, again, was posted on a public message board on the Internet, for millions of other people to read, and in the History folder on the family computer). And no, I will not go back and read her current entries.
FTR, I do not go through her room, not even to clean it [sigh].
She and the BF actually haven’t been dating for a while. This is not a long-standing mature relationship, where two people who are in love decide to move on to the next logical step. They met a year ago, in sophomore P.E. class, they interacted a few times at school dances, then she “ran off” with him for an afternoon, defying her Mom, who had said, “No, you can’t go over to his house this afternoon and be alone with him in his bedroom”, and she hopped in his (cousin’s) car and went anyway. (I will point out that she was only 15). She ignored Mom’s phone call after an hour, demanding that she get a taxi and come home right now. When Daddy got home from work, he went over there and retrieved her, she was grounded for 2 months, which was a long miserable time for her, I know, and evidently Himself was less than supportive about the whole thing, because when she was un-grounded, she didn’t want to talk to him on the phone, she didn’t want to see him all summer, and when school started up last fall she still didn’t want to talk to him.
Then suddenly at the beginning of April this year everything changed and they were talking on the phone for hours. Picture Keanu Reeves, only scrawnier, and (IMO) weenier. :rolleyes: Not what I had pictured for my beautiful daughter. I think we’re looking at “teen rebellion” here, not True Love. He has no driver’s license yet, not clear to me exactly why, and must rely on his girlfriend (my daughter and her dad’s dorky Caravan) for transportation.
Bonzo seems to dislike him instinctively. Are kid brothers hard-wired to be protective of older sisters when it looks like the older sister might be sexually active? Especially when the Kid Brother himself is just finding out that maybe girls aren’t so useless, after all. Or is it just simple jealousy? Bonzo’s been the Man in The Cat’s life for 14 years now. The Better Half does all the interacting with Romeo for the both of us, is unfailingly courteous to him, and assesses him as “your typical horny teenage male”.
So we’re not looking at The Love Affair of the Ages here. We’re looking at a couple of kids experimenting with kicking over the traces. In her diary, it sounds like they haven’t yet gone “all the way”, they’re just fooling around with First, Second, and Third Bases.
Well, as it happens, since we are the kind of family who all have trouble keeping secrets (what everybody’s getting for Christmas is never a surprise, to anyone), as soon as both parties came home, we had it all out, in a fairly amicable discussion. Quite frankly, it never really occurred to me NOT to tell the Better Half, mainly because it’s been 27 years now, and it seemed a little late to do the “don’t tell Daddy” routine, which I always personally detested. The conspiracy with Mom and the kids, etc. Also, the B.H. came from a dysfunctional family in which this sort of thing DID take place (Daddy drank, and Mom protected the kids from him via information control), and if he ever found out that I’d kept something this important from him, well, I don’t like to think about how hurt he’d be.
And anyway, The Cat caught us having the Serious Parental Discussion Without Interruptions down in the basement (our chosen venue for this–he leans on the freezer, I lean on the washing machine, and we talk). Coming halfway down the stairs, she said, “What are you guys doing down there?”
I said, “Um–talking?”
She said, “Oh,” and went back upstairs.
Then when we came upstairs, there she was, sitting at the computer, getting ready to log on. As a member of the family, she wanted to know what the Serious Parental Discussion had been about. We said, “Um…” and looked at each other, and after a pause I said a little sheepishly, “Well, you were evidently not aware that your Open Diary stuff is right there, in the History folder.”
She said blankly, “So?”
“So–anybody looking for something else could stumble on it, and read them.”
“So?”
“So, I’m sorry, but I was looking for a link and I read a whole bunch of your diary entries without realizing that’s what they were, and I’m very sorry. And that’s what we were discussing.”
She said, “Oh.” And then, differently, “Oh.” And after a few seconds, with immense dignity, she stood up and went upstairs.
So she came down again after about 30 minutes, looking like she’d been crying, and got her purse and the car keys. And Daddy said politely, “Um?”
And she said testily, “I’m just going out, just to get away somewhere.”
Daddy said quietly, “Driving while you’re upset like that is not a good idea.”
I chimed in, “You’re not in trouble, okay? We just want to talk to you. Come and sit down and let’s talk.”
So she came over and sat down on the couch, and we arranged ourselves in what was hopefully a non-confrontational manner, Daddy way over in the Morris chair, and me leaning casually (I hoped) on the back of the couch.
And we covered the following points:
- Mom is sorry she read the thing. However, it was very useful to find out what you’re really thinking, because you’re so quiet, we never know what’s going on in your head. Even when you were a toddler, you were like that, very self-sufficient… Now, La Principessa, when she’s upset about something, the whole world knows within seconds, and Bonzo, he sulks and scowls for about 10 minutes, and then out with it. But you… You sounded very unhappy in some of your entries. Is there anything we can do to fix things? Is there anything you want, or need, that isn’t currently being supplied? We talked about this for a while, and all she could come up with was that she’d rather drive the little red station wagon than the Dodge Caravan. Evidently a Dodge Caravan is a dorky vehicle for In The Groove Teens to be driving. The Little Red Wagon was a 1987 Aries wagon, which we had all assumed would be the Kids’ Car when it came time, but then it was getting to be on its last Blue Book legs, and the people across the street were looking for something for their cousin’s sister-in-law’s kid to drive, and they offered the B.H. $1000 cash for it, so when The Cat was 15, he sold it and bought the Caravan. I said, “Well, hey, I miss the Little Red Wagon, too, but we can’t get it back, sorry. Anything else?” No.
Do you know what condoms are and how to use them? Yes.
Are you aware that if you did get pregnant, we would almost certainly, 99% Final Answer, work with the New Life Pregnancy Center and arrange a private adoption for the baby? It’s doubtful that Himself’s family would want it, and your mom has personally resolved never to be a grandma raising grandkids. As Daddy put it, “If you got pregnant, you would have to get a job and support yourself.” [Note: yes, she is planning on going to college.] There are lots of wonderful caring people out there who would give a good life to a baby. Yes, she grasped this point, but I dunno how clearly. Teenagers, “it’ll never happen to me…”
No, we are not going to do the “lock you in the room and forbid you to ever see him again” Romeo and Juliet thing. Generations of parental experience teach us that this does not work, in fact, is counter-productive. You can go on seeing him, as long as you are aware that the biggest reasons in our mind to NOT have sex with him are (1) you might make a baby, and (2) take it from one former horny teenage male, your Dad–as soon as you have sex with him, your relationship will change, and that’s virtually all he will ever be interested in doing with you again. No more talking on the phone for hours–it’ll be, “can you come over here and we can, you know, do it?” We know that you’ve heard other friends of yours complain about the same thing with their boyfriends. She said, impatiently, “Okay, okay…”
About the atheism thing: we understand that you feel a need to distance yourself from your parents and their belief system. I pointed out that when I was a teenager, my parents allowed me to distance myself from their belief system by telling me, “You don’t have to go to church with us, but you do have to go to church somewhere. You can’t just sleep in on Sunday morning, and no, televangelists don’t count.” So they went to one church and I went to another church. This was in a small town, so everything was within walking distance, and the problem of who drove which car didn’t factor in. However, nowadays, The Cat has dibs on the Caravan to drive on Sunday morning, because she’s been going to Sunday School and the contemporary Second Worship Service, and we’ve been taking the big-ass Chevy van to First Service (traditional) and Sunday School. We told her, we’re not going to force you to go to church, but if you’re not going to go to church, we’d like to know, because Daddy would rather drive the Caravan to church than the trailer-towing vehicle. She said, “Okay,” but didn’t clue us in as to what her plans for this Sunday are. There’s been some considerable friction in her church youth group for about 6 months now, for unknown reasons, and I’m wondering whether her conversion to atheism and charges that the church is filled with hypocrisy have something to do with it.
I said, “The problem with your friend, that you mentioned in your diary, we would be glad to help out by such and such monetary proceedings, as a gesture of family solidarity.” She said, impatiently, “That was a JOKE, she posted right after that and said she wasn’t really mad.” Um, okay…
I pointed out that if she registered on a different kind of message board, such as the SDMB, that uses different software, nobody would be able to read what she had posted without knowing her user name. I showed her how vBulletin might include the URL of the Reply window for a particular thread in the History folder, so you would know I might have posted to that thread, but unless you knew what my user name was, you wouldn’t know which post to look for in the thread. With Open Diary, the entire text of the post comes up in the History folder. Dunno what kind of software they’re using. She said, “Well…” and didn’t look too enthusiastic. I said, “You’re not interested in having a conversation, is that it? Open Diary is just about ‘hey, look at me, here I am’?” She brightened up and said, “Yes, exactly.” Hmm. Well, at least she knows what she wants.
So after all this, which was actually surprisingly reasonably received on her part (she didn’t sit there and sulk or pout or scream hysterically, which is progress from what happened a year ago when we had this talk), she went upstairs and talked to Himself on the phone for a long time, and then went over to his house for supper, and from thence to her regular Thursday night babysitting gig. And nobody has really said anything else, except that I will mention to her this afternoon that I promise not to read any more of her Open Diary stuff. When it comes right down to it, I don’t REALLY wanna know, I just want to keep her safe.
So, again, thank you to everyone, and it appears that the crisis is over, for now.
[sigh] Why is there no class for this?
