The Dreadful Dinner (TW continues…)
When we got to Rex’s parents’ house, the three boys immediately rushed upstairs to put their backpacks in Jared’s room. Rex’s mother met us in the entryway and took my jacket. “Hello, Lynn,” she said, “It’s nice to see you again.” Then she yelled up the staircase, “You boys come back down here. What is the meaning of rushing off like that without even saying hello? So anxious to get to your video games that you can’t even be polite to an old lady?”
The boys came back downstairs. “Sorry Mom,” said Jared. “These are some guys I know from school, Sam and Joe.” Read the rest of the story »
I think there is an awful lot of pressure on families (and parents) to put unreasonable expectations on their kids (particularly around mormonism). Case and point, Rex’s Mom’s comment about 5 kids and no missionaries (although I did grin with Lynn’s suggestion about the daughters serving missions).
Parents may feel like they have “failed” when in reality, their kids are good people. They’ve just made different choices about what they want to do with their lives.
I think what happens with the beer also shows that it’s complicated, it’s not a simple one side is wrong, the other is right. LDS parents sometimes struggle having to figure out what expectations/boundaries to set with their kids (and how to communicate them) when their children are no longer mormon. (While they were mormon or faithful, the need to set no alcohol or smoking boundaries was theoretically unnecessary….)
Not all parents of course. Just some – and some of these issues could be found in families with other religious backgrounds. Without the same pressure over mission service for men though.
😉 Maybe it was naughty of me to mix reality and fiction, but you know this was the case with my family — five kids raised in the church, two (atheist) boys and three girls, and no missionaries. Of course the boys were reprimanded for this, for the girls it’s not the same…
Yes, and this was part of what I was writing about, as I explained on my own blog. When you’re taught to draw a hard and fast line in a specific place (eg. no alcohol whatsoever), then doubts come by and erase that line, it’s not always clear where the new line should be drawn, if anywhere. And the road to figuring it out can be a bumpy one…
No missionaries in my family either…I think my parents would have been happy if I had gone to BYU for a year…but you already know that 😉
btw – I didn’t mean to point out the 5 kid thing, I think it’s just a part of having large families in general and could happen in any large(r) family where a parent has expectations (at least one of my kids will go to college!) that may or may not be reasonable…
I’m the oldest of six kids myself…
Of course. 😀
And I imagine your mom is happy that you served a mission. 😉
Yes, but I still shudder at the cynical and negative stream of letters I sent home to my poor parents.
Those letters probably saved your sanity, Seth. Without them, you might have become an apostate.
Yeah, but criticizing the stuff they sent in a care package was probably going a touch far, don’t you think?
Believe me, you have no idea what an arrogant little snot I can be. And I was much worse back then.