Little curve balls in life

No sooner had my daughter and I completed our mandatory, pointless class with the Catholic church on relationships and abuse (that turned into a cheesy lecture on not having intimate relations) and I wrote a rant, than my friend, Esme (not her real name, but you knew that) called me up. Her 14 year old daughter was getting really, really close. And she was getting stalked by a boy who she had turned down.

Esme was not hysterical, she had also been at the class at the church in the next town over. The class did not spur the discussion, but rather, her boyfriend getting death threats scared her daughter into sharing. Her daughter is in no way a floozy-- but Esme would be a ding-a-ling to leave her alone with a boy at this point. (I offered to state that my son, Mudd, is to be her paid companion and to join them on dates and she is really considering it. Hey! Mudd is a fun kid!) Esme handled it with humor and has not slept since. Of course she told her husband-- couples don't keep secrets like that from one another. (He, having been sick, took to his bed and to the Wii. For four days. Wii basketball-- the best thing for an ailing person. He decided to make Esme handle it alone and he'd work with what she shared with possibly doing and then he will either agree or not. Esme's daughter swears her father will "want to kill" her, but he didn't when he found out. He was surprised that it was happening 2 years before he had expected it.)

The threats came via her text messaging. I went with her to the police. At first they didn't want to take it, but I have a degree in human services and since I am a mandated reporter, I pointed out that the suicide threats were something that had to be acted on immediately. It sounds like the kids' parents were relieved-- apparently he was already in the system for infractions of which were not elaborated on and they had numbers. His parents were called while we were there, and within the next week, the kid was sent to a residential facility for observation.

The Catholic church was not interested in my views on fixing the problem with the classes being so bad. Basically, they ignored me. I told the moderator of the class why I thought it was cheesy and not enough, and explained that I knew she knew of patterns of abuse and that sharing these with the teens would be another voice when the voices of the parents were being drowned out. Parents who found her class informative probably had their heads in the sand and wouldn't talk to their kids about abuse because they would not think it could happen. No comment from her, or the two people at the church to whom I spoke. I was disappointed, but not surprised. I later had breakfast with a group of moms who feel as I do and I may see about working something through a parent's club at one of the schools. (My party will be cooler!)

As for Esme's daughter, Esme has decided that 16 is the youngest she can be to date. The young man is a sweetheart and I even met him. It's not that he is bad by any means. Does a 16 year old have a better understanding than an almost 15 year old on why it is better to hold off on intimacy? (Does a 25 year old understand it any better?) She asked me about symptoms of pregnancies and I knew that she would be psychologically bringing them on in her worries. I told her of nerve pain shooting up the leg from the right big toe, mental alertness, and a desire to clean her area, be it her room or the entire house. Esme called to report that her daughter indeed is acting as I had spoken. (I am so going to hell for this. LOL) I do not think that she wants to be pregnant, but like many women, the posibility of a pregnancy is the posibility of potential and the sweet girl has names picked out!

I brought Esme some chocolate and tea and we knitted for a bit. She is still confused, but at least she has chocolate and yarn.

Pathetic Hype: The First Daughter with a First Grand Baby

I was not going to write about this but I am anyway. Our governor's 17 year old daughter is pregnant.

On one hand I am happy for the Guv. I am looking forward to grand parenthood but I am happy for the sake of my children who are of child bearing years that I won't be blessed soon. With what the Alaskan court system put my daughters through in a custody battle, they told me that they would have an abortion if they thought they might have to deal with that. Yes, there were times that they wished they'd not been born with what my ex & his lawyer pulled on them.

I think back on my own life and I was pregnant and married at 18 and divorced with 2 kids by the time I was 21. My ex and I were both American Evangelicals (not a denomination-- just a term that I am using for the movement of people who belong to Protestant churches, much less demeaning than Fundies or, "Christian Fundamentalists.") I was on the Sponge which has an 89% effectiveness rate-- too low for a college-bound girl, I think.

The Gov likes abstinence education. Abstinence education is a crock of nonsense; it teaches girls to ride bareback because their hormones are going crazy but they don't want to get birth control because they are good girls. I have a good friend in Israel and she is an Orthodox Jew. They don't need to worry-- starting from an early age, girls and boys are not left alone together. She was raised in Wisconsin and went over there and liked that. She wasn't alone with her husband until after they got married. I like that! Do I think it should be mandated? I think it should be taught; abstinence education doesn't work unless you don't have sex! You have family and participants who are committed to practicing it which means that temptation and opportunity are not issues.

I have no doubt that Bristol will succeed in life. Having a baby this early, she will probably be like a lot of teenagers, myself included, who literally give birth and can bounce in and take a test the next day without hardly studying. Her figure will come back fast and everyone will think she's an au pair. She will graduate from high school, go to college and hopefully like her husband and their love will mature and they will have a long marriage like her mom has with her dad. I hope that the two of them, Levi and Bristol, bring out each others' strengths. Will he be intoxicated with his mother-in-law's job and the fame and pressure that goes with it?

Am I successful? My mom says I am. The woman who was running a company at my age says that my teen pregnancy was fuel for some of my work, and she says that my 9 children are well behaved and fun to be with. My teen pregnancy shaped me-- I didn't become the commercial artist or Christian counselor that I'd hoped to be, living in a condo in San Diego with a yellow Miata and not having sex until I married at 36 ;) , but it didn't define me. I am nothing compared to what she was at my age, but she says that she comes to Alaska to meet her grand kids, not run around and revisit places where she struck business deals.

I think that Bristol being pregnant at 17 hurts her mother's push for abstinence education. It just doesn't work once the hormones hit and you have to be able to monitor them all the time if you honest to God expect it to work until they are 18. One of my kids accused me of just not trusting her. I cackled, "Damn right I don't! You are my daughter!" Later she told me that when they did get some time alone that he was an octopus and she told him that she was glad that he wasn't afraid of having unprotected sex with the daughter of a woman who had conceived her ninth child while on birth control. I trusted my daughter after that, but not the boyfriends, although it did have a good effect on him that things cooled off right away!