Handle With Care

My grandparents on both sides allowed their children to learn and figure things out alone. When there was any problem, my maternal grandparents’ standard response was: “Take the dog for a walk and think about it.” That was the extent of it, and (according to my mother) it was an idyllic childhood with quiet sweetness and no hot tempers. Dad’s family was the opposite. They were all confrontational: they lost their cool about parking spaces, and exploded over missing newspapers. When it came to telling their kids what to do, they refrained because they were convinced that they had done a poor parenting job if their kids couldn’t handle life themselves.  

Despite their vastly different upbringings, my parents have made it through the better part of thirty years of marriage, and they have settled on one thing: in our family we talk about everything. While other children were hushed into silence on mystery subjects, my mom used her platform as our teacher (I was educated at home) and took advantage of our student/teacher ratio (3:1) to host all sorts of roundtable discussions on every question she imagined that we would want answered.

One day, while my mom was in the shower, my brother and I politely knocked on the door. I think I was about six at the time, and he was younger. We heard the water turn off, because although our mother liked her personal space she’d agreed to shut off the shower whenever something was serious enough that we needed to interrupt her.

“YES?” she shouted. Our bathroom doors were sound-proof.

My little brother said, “MOM?”

“YES?”

“WHAT IS SEX?”

No hesitation. “I’ll be out in a sec!” The water went back on.

When mom came out, she pulled her hair up into a quick bun, threw on her glasses, AND PULLED OUT THE WHITE-BOARD. I am so not kidding about this: she gathered us around in chairs and gave us a detailed sex ed class right there in the living room, complete with tasteful drawings and straightforward descriptions. When she was done, she said, “Now, not everybody knows about this stuff; if you have any questions, you can ask me, but remember that you’d better not talk to your friends about this: when they have questions, let them ask their mom.”

So yeah. It was like that.

My parents had a mantra called YELL AND TELL, long before it was popular to sit your kids down in a living room and tell them about yell and tell. My skin used to crawl with the awkwardness of it, at first, but they made us sit there, while they instructed us on the protocol.

IF ANYBODY EVER,

EVER,

EVER,

EVER……

Then you,

SCREAM

RUN AWAY IF YOU CAN

STAY WITH THE FIRST RESPONSIBLE ADULT YOU CAN FIND

CALL THE POLICE

TELL MOM AND DAD.

Don’t be embarrassed, they told us. We want to know about anything that happened. If they tell you, don’t tell your dad or I’ll kill your family, they’re lying. They want you to be scared. Don’t be scared. They can never get away with it if you’re not scared.

They made this speech bi-annually until we were no longer squeamish, and until it had been drilled into our heads that if our favorite uncle, our pastor, a clerk at the grocery store, or our next-door-neighbor tried anything, our parents would believe us without question, and would sacrifice anything to help us heal. Plus, in the meantime, they never let us out of their sights, even with adults whom I assumed they trusted. It never occurred to me that other families behaved any other way.

These days, I know that my parents’ strategy came as a result of their own family history. I realize that they were giving their children the luxury of a safety they never enjoyed, and THAT DEVASTATES ME. My parents are both wonderful, sensitive, loving people, and it blindsides me to imagine that they were taken advantage of before anyone could tell them that they were supposed to yell and tell.

This week, my mom got summoned to a jury, and when the judge asked the prospective jurors about their history with the type of case, my mom gave the bailiff a note, and the attorneys called a sidebar to ask my mom what happened, and what she did about it.

Did you tell your parents? The judge asked. My mom said, No. Why not? He asked. She stared at him, not knowing how to answer the question, and then she finally said: Because I didn’t want to upset the family. She had spent forty five years suffering from that day, and the court dismissed her, as they should have. But when she was driving home, she stopped the car, and turned it around, and decided that it was time to tell her parents.

She drove to see them, and struggled through the words, and said, “I just didn’t want to tell you before, because I was so afraid of upsetting the family…”

They told her: “You handled it the right way, and we appreciate that.”

I am a very even-keeled person, and I love my extended family very dearly, but that was maybe the worst possible thing they could have said to her, and this morning when she told me the story calmly, I pitched a fit and got on soapboxes and declared that although kids sometimes turn out the opposite of their parents, I want my kids to have the same kind of mom I did.