I received a letter from my daughter today that was helpful in healing. The last year has been absolutely horrible, and it has been made worse by the fact that I have had no support system. I have been lied to, lied about, the subject of a great deal of gossip, disrespected, and called every single word that you can imagine.
The reason? What did I do that was so horrible? One, I do not let my kids party every weekend. Two, I expect their boyfriends to treat family with respect, and not to lie continually and completely belittle the members of the family. Three, I didn't go into massive debt to buy a brand new car for graduation. Four, I expected her home on time. I must note that with that last requirement, I let them decide when they were going to be home, I just make them adhere to it.
I am certainly stricter than some parents (especially in this culture), but am actually not over strict. I have expectations for my children, and I hold them to those expectations.
In other words, parenting.
My daughter's letter acknowledged some of the problem she had had with obeying authority. I figured a drill sergeant would help drive that home, but wish it didn't come to that.
Over the time this was building, I addressed this with some of the parents of the community. I wasn't exactly laughed out of the room, but I wasn't taken seriously, either. "Kids drink, it's what they do"; "Kids are going to be promiscuous; it's natural"; "don't be so strict".
Huh, silly me. And here I thought "Train up a child in the way they should go and when they are older they will not depart from it" (Prov. 22:6) was actually the Christian guideline.
The last year has been hard because we have had to do it completely and utterly alone. Now, before I go further, I understand kids do fail. They mess up. That happens. But we shouldn't set failure up as an expectation. We shouldn't hand them a box of condoms and tell them to go to town, just don't get pregnant (quite literally the response of my daughter's boyfriend's parents, despite their being uber, Glenn Beck worshipping Christians). We shouldn't buy them a keg and tell them to drink up. We should guiide them, we should encourage them to make wiser choices.
As I tell my kids about alcohol, they can make the choice when they are of age, but not ONE person can look at their lives and say they were made better by drinking. If you drink to fit in, you're drinking for the wrong reasons period.
The church, it seems, has a poor understanding of WHY we are instructed to "not forsake the assembling of yourselves together" (Heb. 10.25). It is because we were designed to be a community, designed to build each other up, designed to strengthen each other in areas of weakness.
And the church as a whole has done a poor job of that. The scores of people leaving the church are testimony to that.
These days, my life is a semi hermitage. I come out for church, I come out for work, I come out for shopping. But beyond that, my social contacts are extremely limited, as we've been torn apart by the gossip of people who judged us even as we attempted to raise our children to a certain standard. And that's a horribly lonely way to have to live.
I hope that some day someone reads this and truly understands, truly attempts to rebuild some semblance of community. Until such a time, I don't see much changing.
My daughter has at least come to grips with the reason for some of the problems. But the other people involved are a long way from that point. As for my point, I did the best I could, even TRYING to reach out to others for help even as the issues were getting worse. There was nobody to whom I COULD reach out.
And people wonder why I have trust issues.
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