I remember shaking a bit as I told the librarian that she could call my mother. Twelve years old, I had just made the bold move of rejecting my old stomping ground, the Children’s Room, and venturing instead into the adult stacks. After an hour spent browsing shelves of murder mysteries and thrillers, I’d settled on John le Carre’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” Its black cover with bold white type struck me as quite sophisticated; the jacket references to British double agents, murder, and the Cold War held promise of a world I was eager to enter and comprehend.
But now I’d encountered trouble at the check-out desk. The elderly librarian shook her head in disapproval, looked down at me, and pronounced the book “unsuitable for children.” Taken aback–and then even more determined to walk out of there with that novel under my arm–I blurted out the first thing that came into my head: “I’m sure my mother would say it’s fine.” And then I held my breath as the librarian, calling my bluff, dialed the number. Truth was, I had no idea how my mother would handle this stern gatekeeper’s attempt to guard my innocence.
A moment later, I was signing my name on a small tan card. My mom, as it turned out, would let me read anything.
Le Carre’s intrigue was pretty much lost on me; I don’t think I even finished the book. But I never forgot that moment in the library, when I realized for the first time that my mother believed I could decide for myself what was appropriate and what wasn’t.
We talked about that the other night, when my son Jack said he’d like to watch “Mad Men” with us. My mom and I got hooked on this series, about an advertising agency in the early 1960s, the last time we were together; this week, she’d ordered season two from Netflix. But I wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of exposing my son to, well, all that callous licentiousness — the drinking, the extra-marital sex, the smoking, the cynicism, the callous treatment of women.
At seventeen, he is definitely not sheltered and hardly innocent. He’s gotten into his share of adolescent trouble and hit a few guard rails, literally and figuratively. I know a lot about his life, but I’m not naive enough to think for a minute that I know everything. Along the way, he’s watched movies, plenty of them, that would make me blanche. I’ve read books that he’s recommended, and then, coming across passages that make me blush, struggled to make peace with the fact that he was there before me, reading the same page. Sex, murder, drugs, depravity — they are part of the typical American’s entertainment diet, and my kids are no exception.
Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that we are the same family that managed to keep our television unplugged and shut away in a cupboard for years on end. One neighborhood boy, shocked to learn that there was no tv to watch at our house, once said to my son Henry, “No tv? What do you DO here?” Having never known anything else, my son simply said, “We just live.” And so we did, for a long time.
But the media crept in as the kids grew up. And my desire to protect my children from the “real” world evolved, over time, into something more pragmatic: the realization that, rather than escape it, they must each be equipped to meet it. We develop the tools and inner resources we need to understand life by experiencing it, head on, both the beautiful and the ugly, the dark and the light, the good and the evil. Growing up means figuring out who we are in relation to everything else, and the “everything else” in our culture includes some pretty nasty stuff.
I remember sitting at a publishing dinner years ago next to the novelist Robert Stone. Someone asked him about his vividly explicit sex scenes, often fueled by drugs and alcohol–did he write all that from personal experience? Stone paused, took a drink, and than answered dryly, “I write all that stuff so that I don’t have to go do it.”
Perhaps it is the same, to some extent, for all of us — we watch the movies we watch, read the books we read, so that we can explore the vast reaches of the human condition without actually having to go out and experience it all ourselves.
My mom laughed at me, when I admitted that the idea of Jack watching “Mad Men” made me a little queasy. It’s been almost forty years, after all, since she herself made peace with the fact that a child’s innocence, precious as it may be, is inevitably transformed by curiosity. We humans hunger to know. And then, knowing, we are called upon to make our own choices about who to be, how to live, what’s right and wrong.
And so it was that the three of us watched “Mad Men,” season two, together. Jack and I piled into my mom’s king-sized bed for three nights in a row, propped up on the pillows, ice cream at hand, and watched a lot of really bad behavior, compellingly dramatized. And I realized, of course, what my own mother already knew: he could handle it. So could I.
Just beginning to cross this bridge ourselves with our 14 yr old voracious reader whose titles we long ago gave up following. We also have no tv and we’re tight around the movies until about last year when things began to shift inside our teen.
For his birthday, we took the big leap and let him watch his namesake film, Say Anything, with the lead character "Lloyd Dobler." We let our LLoyd watch this coming of age film by himself while we sat up in our room imagining the sex scenes, the drinking, the license for freedom It was a milestone.
This week we’ve ordered Gross Pointe Blank–another favorite John Cusack film–to watch together. My son checked it out on line and came back to tell me, "Mom, It’s rated "R." His face was priceless when I said it would be okay. Must have been like your moment at the library.
Katrina, thank you for working to capture the subtleties of this decade of parenting. Not many do, except to complain–and this chapter needs to be romanced too. It is quite a pleasure to climb onto the couch with goodies and watch something together that had always been taboo.
It’s the beginning of becoming friends–and I appreciate you lighting the way.
On a related note, I also appreciate your mention of "why" we might like to watch things that we don’t approve of. It’s the same question that I asked of myself yesterday when I found myself interested in the story of Sandra Bullock’s husband’s affair. The piece that I realized is that these bigger than life characters give us a chance to observe how to navigate life’s complexities. It didn’t occur to me that they also get to do things that we wouldn’t do–but might want to imagine.
I wrote about this complexity of desire, sex and grace here: in a story that begin at the kitchen table with my teen.
Boy do we live on this street. I have another aspect to this ‘problem’, in that our youngest is ten and nine years younger than his oldest two siblings. He has watched movies and heard conversations, that I am sure his more innocent nine year old friends have never been exposed to.
But on the flip side, he seems to be more mature than a lot of his buddies (sat and played Risk for three hours with adults the other night when I cant get his best friend to sit down for a five minute snack when he’s over to play) and he has learned an internal filtering system that works for him. He fully understands what language is allowed ‘only on TV’ and what attitudes stay on the screen.
It is so hard to know at what age each child is ready for ‘something more’ when it comes to purity in entertainment. I was very sheltered as a kid/teen and don’t know if it did me any favors.
Thanks for attacking this issue, Katrina. It will lead to more life pondering the next time I’m in the lawn chair soaking up some sun on my face. 🙂
Hope you are enjoying Florida! I love the mental image of piling on the bed to watch DVDs….my favorite kind of memories!
judy
justonefoot.blogspot.com
I love this, about you facing down the librarian! I, too, was drawn to books beyond my physical age as a young teen. I loved John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, my mom’s racy romance novels. And I think you articulate this well, about using books and TV to gain exposure to some of what life offers. Curiosity is a strong drive!
I love Jack, and I trust his mother completely. Ice cream should always be eaten in bed.
My mom let me stay up and watch Peyton Place with her when I was very young – can’t even remember how old I was – but it was our little secret and as far as I can tell, had no ill effects on me. I loved it! MadMen beats South Park anyday – good for Jack and isn’t Season Two great?!
having been raised by a strict mother i became one too; i appreciate it when i read about others that are/were as well. i have an almost 4 year old and a 1 year old. just thinking about them losing their innocence brings me to tears. hearing what you had to say about that coming of age definately helps me understand it a bit more. thank you for sharing!
We started out with no toy guns, no violent shows, etc. Now my younger son, at thirteen, is an avid fan of "Family Guy" and it’s just so wrong that it’s right. We struggle over the amount of virtual killing they should be allowed to to and I must accept that the world that we share is going to have its way with my kids. Like the wolf at the door in the three little pigs, to individuate we have to trap that old wolf, cook it and eat it (i.e. metabolize the Shadow). Thus watching "Mad Men" in the King sized bed sounds both fun and right as rain… and much better than living that Mad life.
As for le Carre, it made me smile, sort of "Farenheit 439"
It’s funny you should post this today — I just read your chapter on TV in Mittenstrings this morning. No, really. This morning.
My mother never censored my own books that I remember and I struggle sometimes finding a balance of what books and movies and things to recommend to my own children. (Speaking of books – inspired by one of your previous posts we got "Something is Going to Happen" from the library – lovely story).
Thanks Katrina, for the books and the thoughts and the smiles, and even a few tears. My oldest is a teen, my youngest is only four — so I’m finding both books tugging at my heart and my mind and helping me to think positively. I’ve felt a strong connection as I’ve been reading. One of my dear friends is in Basic Training right now and I think she must think I’m losing it as I keep writing her letters filled with what I’ve been thinking as I read Ordinary Day and little snippets and quotes that had me thinking….
I seem to be going nowhere with this post so I’ll stick with — Thanks! and Bless you and yours.
Merrick
I am so grateful for these responses, and fascinated by the range of experiences here. If someone had flashed me forward, from our "no TV" household to life as it is now–laptops, Netflix, entire television series on DVD, Hula–I would have cringed. And yet, children do grow up and every impulse they have is to embrace the world, experience it, understand it, love it. Jack is also a Family Guy fan. South Park, too. Sometimes I have even watched episodes with him, which always leads to an interesting conversation. Long car rides are an opportunity to hear what the kids are listening to; we plug in their iPods and let them play DJ. I don’t always love the music, but I’m glad for the opportunity to hear it, and to hear why they like it. I guess I’ve come to think that we parents reject our nearly grown children’s interests and passions at our peril. And so I keep listening, talking, searching for common ground–and then often find it in the most unexpected places. Our jobs do change as our children grow up. Letting go involves having faith in the foundation we’ve given them, in the values we’ve imparted, and then trusting that they can handle the world as it is, in all its messy, raunchy, real-ness. Of course, I also hope they embrace beauty, tenderness, peace, the greater good. I remind myself to be patient, to remember that they are still in-process, still figuring out who they want to be and what matters in the long run.