Parenting

4 days until I have 23 years sober. Kool! Then the next week is my actual birthday! Double kool!

As you know my daughter is trying her hand at modeling and I am helping as best as I can.... most days that means I am hair-dresser, camera-man and wardrobe. Now a week or so ago, my daughter put on something a bit too tight and a bit too short. Here's the funny thing... had I been some famous camera-man at some Hollywood photo-shoot and they had instructed me to take pictures of some random girl with little cleavage exposed, I'd have probably done my job no questions asked. However this being my daughter things are a bit different. I find myself jumping up and down yelling nonsensical things like, “WRIST? Do I see wrist young lady? There will be no wrists showing in this picture! I raised you better than that!” Keep in mind my daughter is nearly 23!

What is it in us as parents that see very little wrong with much of the behavior in this world practiced by most people yet when it comes to our kids is so over-amplified that we tend to be seen as blubbering idiots? Are we trying to live vicariously through them in order to right the wrongs of our own past? Or is the fear that if they get into the same things that we did and the consequences rear their ugly heads, they simply will buckle and shatter into a zillion pieces? Is it that we want to protect them from experiencing the normal growing-pains of life, those rites of passage that turn us all into adults who can function without running back to Mommy and Daddy insisting they fix it? Perhaps it is because we have all been raised to believe that a bad person is synonomous with a pair of really crappy parents.

But I myself think it is more. I think it is our own fear jumping up to show us our reflection. If we let them get into enough trouble they might decide that we are the worst parents ever and so never speak to us again and so consequentially we will end up alone. That having been said we've all seen the old comedies about the interfering, over-bearing mother-in-law that refuses to let the couple live their own life. It maybe good for a laugh but do you really want to be known as that parent? Me either.

Truth is that it really doesn't matter in the end what precautions and warnings we put down. Kids know ways around, under, over and out of our rules. In the end each of us (our kids included) will all have to walk our own path. And even when it comes to our children we can nurture whatever opinion we want them to have of us, but in the end they will see it through their own eyes anyway. We turned out fine and they will as well, the question is really then, “What kind of parent do I want to see myself as?”

That's my side of it,

Angel