They Do it Out of Love
It's story-time!
When I was 19, well, I guess I need to go back a bit. My life was a mess. Or at least, I thought it was a mess, at leat to some extent. I had been in college for two years at the University of South Alabama, studying piano, and I had a delicious boyfriend. Some time in April I think, my parents called me and said, "We're moving to Wisconsin and we're going to build a house." Oookay. So at the end of the semester, I packed up my stuff and my delicious boyfriend and I headed north to Wisconsin together. He had a plane ticket to fly back from Minneapolis. I settled in, Living At Home for the summer, he flew back to Mobile, and I kept on going.
I've probably taken you too far back with all that, but it's nice to reminisce. I decided I wanted a job for the summer, because I was bored out of my mind just hanging around on the farm all the time with nothing else to do. I went to Kelly Temporary Services, signed myself up for I can't remember what, and waited for the call. That first job was, of all things, dumping cartons of liquid soap into a barrel. I kid you not. The packaging was "bad", reacted with the product and the ink-jetted coloring would smudge right off. So they were trying to reclaim the soap and try it again. I thought it was actually kind of fun.
There was apparently lots of this soap to dump, or some other work, that Kelly asked me to do on 3rd shift, I think it was. I said yes, thinking, well, the hours are kinda sucky, but it's a job, here I go.
Well. My dad heard it was 3rd shift, up in Eau Claire, 20 miles away, and he hit the roof. He told me to un-take that job, or, the alternative was to have him drive me up there and back. He wasn't going to have his daughter driving at those hours of the night with all those G-D crazy people on the roads.
Oh. My. God. I was mortified. I was furious. I was seven kinds of sad and angry and devastated. I cried for hours. I missed my boyfriend and my old life like crazy, and now my dad was trying to run my life. Kelly wasn't too pleased with me either, lecturing me that I shouldn't have said yes and then no. Well, duh, I wouldn't have said yes if I'd known my dad was going to pitch such a fit.
I think I'm still mad at him over this, at least a little. I still wish he could have trusted me to take the hard knocks and figure out for myself that this was a stupid idea, a bad job to take. It was, theoretically, only temporary after all.
All I know now, is that parents do that kind of "injustice" to their kids because they love them. They see a different truth than what we see. They do see the crazies on the roads, they read about senseless deaths of young people due to drunk drivers or whatever other circumstance. They see our youth and inexperience and naivete. Looking back, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I might have indeed become another statistic on the road. Even though he sounded like a raving lunatic to me at the time, I now think there was indeed some truth to what he said then. I didn't want to address it, accept it; I wanted none of it. He wouldn't, he couldn't, have said those things to me if he didn't love me with everything he is. If he didn't want better for me.
The hard part at that time, was that for most of my life I had been allowed to do just about anything. I got away with stuff (or thought I did) that they didn't know about, that I really wouldn't have been allowed to do. I had been living "on my own" in the dorms for two years, for crying out loud. To suddenly be prohibited from doing something, to have the rules just change, ooh that sucked. And what really sucked, was that ultimately, he was right. There was that grain of truth in it that I didn't want to acknowledge. I didn't see it then, but I do now. And the larger, more important truth is that he loves me. I am now grateful for his protection, and for his willingness to risk all to tell me the truth about what I was doing.
"If you tell me the truth about me without my permission, I have to make you wrong--so I won't be."
Thanks for reading/listening. I am human, and I am fallible.
When I was 19, well, I guess I need to go back a bit. My life was a mess. Or at least, I thought it was a mess, at leat to some extent. I had been in college for two years at the University of South Alabama, studying piano, and I had a delicious boyfriend. Some time in April I think, my parents called me and said, "We're moving to Wisconsin and we're going to build a house." Oookay. So at the end of the semester, I packed up my stuff and my delicious boyfriend and I headed north to Wisconsin together. He had a plane ticket to fly back from Minneapolis. I settled in, Living At Home for the summer, he flew back to Mobile, and I kept on going.
I've probably taken you too far back with all that, but it's nice to reminisce. I decided I wanted a job for the summer, because I was bored out of my mind just hanging around on the farm all the time with nothing else to do. I went to Kelly Temporary Services, signed myself up for I can't remember what, and waited for the call. That first job was, of all things, dumping cartons of liquid soap into a barrel. I kid you not. The packaging was "bad", reacted with the product and the ink-jetted coloring would smudge right off. So they were trying to reclaim the soap and try it again. I thought it was actually kind of fun.
There was apparently lots of this soap to dump, or some other work, that Kelly asked me to do on 3rd shift, I think it was. I said yes, thinking, well, the hours are kinda sucky, but it's a job, here I go.
Well. My dad heard it was 3rd shift, up in Eau Claire, 20 miles away, and he hit the roof. He told me to un-take that job, or, the alternative was to have him drive me up there and back. He wasn't going to have his daughter driving at those hours of the night with all those G-D crazy people on the roads.
Oh. My. God. I was mortified. I was furious. I was seven kinds of sad and angry and devastated. I cried for hours. I missed my boyfriend and my old life like crazy, and now my dad was trying to run my life. Kelly wasn't too pleased with me either, lecturing me that I shouldn't have said yes and then no. Well, duh, I wouldn't have said yes if I'd known my dad was going to pitch such a fit.
I think I'm still mad at him over this, at least a little. I still wish he could have trusted me to take the hard knocks and figure out for myself that this was a stupid idea, a bad job to take. It was, theoretically, only temporary after all.
All I know now, is that parents do that kind of "injustice" to their kids because they love them. They see a different truth than what we see. They do see the crazies on the roads, they read about senseless deaths of young people due to drunk drivers or whatever other circumstance. They see our youth and inexperience and naivete. Looking back, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I might have indeed become another statistic on the road. Even though he sounded like a raving lunatic to me at the time, I now think there was indeed some truth to what he said then. I didn't want to address it, accept it; I wanted none of it. He wouldn't, he couldn't, have said those things to me if he didn't love me with everything he is. If he didn't want better for me.
The hard part at that time, was that for most of my life I had been allowed to do just about anything. I got away with stuff (or thought I did) that they didn't know about, that I really wouldn't have been allowed to do. I had been living "on my own" in the dorms for two years, for crying out loud. To suddenly be prohibited from doing something, to have the rules just change, ooh that sucked. And what really sucked, was that ultimately, he was right. There was that grain of truth in it that I didn't want to acknowledge. I didn't see it then, but I do now. And the larger, more important truth is that he loves me. I am now grateful for his protection, and for his willingness to risk all to tell me the truth about what I was doing.
"If you tell me the truth about me without my permission, I have to make you wrong--so I won't be."
Thanks for reading/listening. I am human, and I am fallible.
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