Gone

Will be on vacation for a couple of days. This is good news as I need a break from the chauffering and monitoring and cooking. Get to share that with someone else for a while. There will be other adults there as well; kids can play together or not but there will be company other than each other for a spell. I am guessing the 13 year old wants to isolate herself from anyone and anything that does not meet with her approval - but she is not judgmental. Hypocrisy is what she looks for and thus finds with everyone with whom she comes into contact. Tough to be judging everyone and everything you know. In the absence of the familiar, one has to fabricate or CREATE normalcy. What does it feel like? What does it look like? Through the eyes of a young woman who is struggling to define and re-define who she is and who she wants to be, this real work.

There are so many pressures that exert themselves on the weakened psyches of our children cum adults. Music, movies, TV, pop culture, religion, drugs, sex and sex appeal, adults, other kids, dancers, liars, and thieves. Some wonder how this generation might make it out unscathed. But perhaps that is not the point. Unscathed might mean unaffected and having given no thought to what surrounds us. Perhaps the best of us take what we can from our society and leave the dregs behind. Those of us who have already come this far have a much altered perspective of what it means to "grow up". We of the Leave it To Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet generation have suffered. We couldn't hear when our parents told us and our children can't hear us....Think of it as inter-generational deafness. We probably can't stop them from making some of the bone-headed mistakes our parents tried to warn us of. They have to meet and face Joe Black on their own terms with their own language in a much different sounding/looking/tasting/feeling context. Let's just be there to support them when they fall and to cheer them on when they fly...and fly many of them will. You wait and see.