I remember shaking a bit as I told the librarian that she could call my mother.\u00a0 Twelve years old, I had just made the bold move of rejecting my old stomping ground, the Children\u2019s Room, and venturing instead into the adult stacks.\u00a0 After an hour spent browsing shelves of murder mysteries and thrillers, I\u2019d settled on John le Carre\u2019s \u201cThe Spy Who Came in From the Cold.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
But now I\u2019d encountered trouble at the check-out desk. \u00a0 The elderly librarian shook her head in disapproval, looked down at me, and pronounced the book \u201cunsuitable for children.\u201d 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: \u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m sure my mother would say it\u2019s fine.\u201d And then I held my breath as the librarian, calling my bluff, dialed the number.\u00a0 Truth was, I had no idea how my mother would handle this stern gatekeeper\u2019s attempt to guard my innocence.<\/p>\n
A moment later, I was signing my name on a small tan card.\u00a0 My mom, as it turned out,\u00a0 would let me read anything.<\/p>\n
Le Carre\u2019s intrigue was pretty much lost on me; I don\u2019t think I even finished the book.\u00a0 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\u2019t.<\/p>\n
We talked about that the other night, when my son Jack said he\u2019d like to watch \u201cMad Men\u201d with us.\u00a0 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\u2019d ordered season two from Netflix.\u00a0 But I wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
At seventeen, he is definitely not sheltered and hardly innocent.\u00a0 He\u2019s gotten into his share of adolescent trouble and hit a few guard rails, literally and figuratively.\u00a0 I know a lot about his life, but I\u2019m not naive enough to think for a minute that I know everything.\u00a0 Along the way, he\u2019s watched movies, plenty of them, that would make me blanche.\u00a0 I\u2019ve read books that he\u2019s recommended, and then, coming across passages that make me<\/em> 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\u2019s entertainment diet, and my kids are no exception.<\/p>\n Sometimes, it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 One neighborhood boy, shocked to learn that there was no tv to watch at our house, once said to my son Henry, \u201cNo tv?\u00a0 What do you DO here?\u201d\u00a0 Having never known anything else, my son simply said, \u201cWe just live.\u201d\u00a0 And so we did, for a long time.<\/p>\n But the media crept in as the kids grew up.\u00a0 And my desire to protect my children from the \u201creal\u201d 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.\u00a0 Growing up means figuring out who we are in relation to everything else, and the \u201ceverything else\u201d in our culture includes some pretty nasty stuff.<\/p>\n I remember sitting at a publishing dinner years ago next to the novelist Robert Stone.\u00a0 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, \u201cI write all that stuff so that I don\u2019t have to go do it.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n My mom laughed at me, when I admitted that the idea of Jack watching \u201cMad Men\u201d made me a little queasy.\u00a0 It\u2019s been almost forty years, after all, since she herself made peace with the fact that a child\u2019s innocence, precious as it may be, is inevitably transformed by curiosity.\u00a0 We humans hunger to know.\u00a0 And then, knowing, we are called upon to make our own choices about who to be, how to live, what\u2019s right and wrong.<\/p>\n And so it was that the three of us watched \u201cMad Men,\u201d season two, together.\u00a0 Jack and I piled into my mom\u2019s 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.\u00a0 And I realized, of course, what my own mother already knew:\u00a0 he could handle it.\u00a0 So could I.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I remember shaking a bit as I told the librarian that she could call my mother.\u00a0 Twelve years old, I had just made the bold move of rejecting my old stomping ground, the Children\u2019s Room, and venturing instead into the adult stacks.\u00a0 After an hour spent browsing shelves of murder mysteries and thrillers, I\u2019d settled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,35,8,9,10],"tags":[273,288,326],"class_list":{"0":"post-190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-family-life","8":"category-letting-go","9":"category-parenting","10":"category-parenting-boys-parenting","11":"category-parenting-teens","12":"tag-mad-men","13":"tag-media","14":"tag-parenting-teens-2","15":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}