Moral Lesson When I Was Just Getting

¶ … Moral Lesson

When I was just getting into my teenage years -- I was 13 going on 14 -- I was getting to the point where I had a lot of opinions about my parents, and some of them were not very kind. But I believed I had justification for the opinions I held about them and their response to me. To explain further, my mom and dad made me go to church, they made me go to boring church youth group meetings, they made me go to this strict fundamentalist church camp every summer, and wouldn't let me hang out with some of my best friends.

Every new friend I brought home from school to play ball in my back yard, or listen to music up in my room (which I shared with a sibling) they wanted to meet, and I had no problem with that. But after the friend would leave and go home, my parents would grill me: "Do his parents smoke cigarettes? Do they drink alcohol? What do his parents drink -- beer? Cocktails? Straight liquor? Do they go out to cocktail parties?"

Sometimes I knew my friends' parents drank but I would always say, "I don't know" because I thought it was absurd for them to judge my friends based on whether my friends' parents consumed alcohol. I resented it and eventually I stopped bringing my friends over.

One time I was asked about a friend's parents' habits and I said, "What difference does it make? Why would you judge my friends based on what their parents do in their leisure time?" My dad hauled off and whacked me for talking back. So I never responded that way again. I always just said, "I don't know" when asked those kinds of questions.

At church camp, my camp director was the pastor in our church and a friend of my dad's. He always told my parents how I behaved at camp, like a little report card. Granted, I did sneak out of the tent sometimes. Of course the camp counselor remembered some of the little problems I caused and made sure to report them to my folks. If the report was bad enough, I got punished.

This is leading up to a time in the fall one year when I was really getting upset with my parents. I was avoiding talking to them after school, though I kept up my grades really well and otherwise got along fine in school. I was being indifferent to them without being obnoxious or talking back. They went on a camping trip my 14th year, and I sat down and wrote a two page letter outlining the things that they did that made me upset (like asking about my friends' parents' habits). I was very blunt in the letter and accused them of trying to dominate my life to the point that I had no freedom of expression. I spent quite a bit of time putting this letter together and I was worried that they would be very upset when they read it but I didn't care because I was tired of the style of parenting from them.

Here was the shocker. They were supposed to come home on Sunday afternoon. They did not come home. Late Sunday night we got a call from a nurse in some hospital telling us mom and dad were in an auto accident and were in the hospital. They wouldn't say how serious it was, but we panicked, my brother and sisters. I felt fearful that they might be dead, and the hospital just wasn't telling us. I was mortified that I had written that letter criticizing them, and had actually put a stamp on an envelope and put it in the mail. Neighbors came over to be with us. The next day a car pulled up and the man got out and helped my dad into a wheelchair. He had two broken legs, a black eye, a broken collarbone and scratches and bruises on his arms. Mom was still in the hospital, about 80 miles away. She came home in a week, with multiple injuries.