Barry has a heart-breaking post about his son’s difficulties fitting in at school and the role that his strict (compared to other children, anyway) household plays in that. It is, unfortunately, a very familiar story. It’s also likely to be the source of an inevitable conflict between Clancy and I should we have children down the line.

Clancy is one of three super-children. Clancy is a doctor, her middle sister is a lawyer (married to a doctor, no-less), and the youngest just got out of college with 4.0 GPA honors degree from the University of Carolina. Only the youngest doesn’t have an upper-level degree and she’s only 23 and I’m sure will get one someday. Her parents, a college professor and a CPA, expected no less.

I come from a slightly less ambitious family. My brothers and I are all middle-professionals just as Dad was. The oldest works with databases, the middle is an engineer like Dad, and I am a general IT person. We all graduated from college (middle bro has a master’s). This was expected of us as well.

I am disinclined to criticize my parents because all things considered they did a phenomenal job. Our successes are theirs and our failures are our own. But if I am inclined to do anything differently than they did, it’s to push them a little harder. I’m not sure if there’s any reason my family couldn’t have been as successful as Clancy’s. Not successful in the monetary sense, but in the sense of living up to our full potential. At least two of us Truman boys haven’t. Instead of living up to our full potential, my oldest brother and I have instead lived up to our parents expectations of us. Had those expectations been set higher, we would have achieved more. Had they lower expectations, we probably would have achieved less. Even successful middle brother got where he is by following in Dad’s footsteps. No more, no less.

While there are exceptions to every rule, this is the case more often than not.

I won’t speak for my brothers any further, but I will say that I was a problem child waiting to happen. I like to push all the wrong things. I have a scientist’s curiosity to find out “what would happen if?” Add a peculiar personality and more difficulty reading than a lot of people my age. Drugs, alcohol, and quitting school were all waiting for me, but by the grace of good parenting.

My parents wouldn’t get me a Nintendo because my grades were bad. I couldn’t watch Rated R movies. We didn’t have cable except in the main room and even then not until I was in the fifth grade. Dad sat with me every night after dinner to walk me through the homework that was giving me great difficulty. Small disciplinary infractions were treated sternly and so they never became larger ones.

But I look back at how hard I didn’t try in school and how well I did (better than “smart” people that tried a lot harder). Maybe I could have been a lawyer or a doctor instead of in the middle of a dead-end career that stopped interesting me long ago. Don’t get me wrong, I like my life, but I would want better for my children. Isn’t that what every parent (or in this case would-be parent) wants?

Which brings me back to Clancy’s family and what it took to get them where they got.

The Himmelreich family wasn’t allowed to watch television to the extent that most families, including the Trumans, were. School was their job, as their father used to say. Clancy is an avid reader, but most likely couldn’t tell the Star Trek from Space Ghost. Also, intense focus on academia necessarily diverts energy away from socializing and acculturating yourself with your social environment. There are some people who can do it all (including Clancy’s youngest sister), but it requires a special gift that very few people have.

Clancy doesn’t have it. Her childhood was miserable. To this day I want to go back and kick some junior high butt because those kids were so cruel.

Now Clancy is an odd duck like myself. Even if she had been availed of the newest games of the day and popular television shows, while she might not have her current animosity towards it, she would never have completely bought in to pop culture.

While I think there’s a lot that Clancy would do differently than the way that she was raised, those are the values (work hard, play productively) she was raised with and she’s taken to them. I definitely get the sense that she would want similar guidelines in any family that she’s raising. It’s certainly hard to argue with the results.

But I don’t want any children we have to go through what she went through. While I don’t want them to be cheerleader popular, I don’t want them to be unpopular either. I don’t want them to go through what Clancy went through, what I went through, and what Barry’s son is going through.

And yet what choice do parents have? Do they let the kids buy in to the superficial, materialistic culture that is leaving a lot of kids emotionally unequipped for the “real world?” Do we let them slide on grades so that they can spend more time on frivolous activities just so that they can conform to the backwards priorities of youth?

Barry’s right, what the other parents let their kids do has a direct bearing on those households that won’t buy in to that. So do you give in? Do you fight it, letting your child take the brunt of the damage?

It’s really a no-win situation.

I may not be as concerned about violent movies as Barry is, but the older I get the more puritanical and less of a libertine I seem to be becoming. I’ve seen what permissive parents, overly accomodating teachers, sexual promiscuity, drugs (including alcohol first and foremost), and sexual promiscuity have done to a lot of my friends. I consider myself lucky to have (mostly) moved beyond that. I admire the wall that Clancy has managed to built between herself and all of that. I’d want the same for my children.

But at what cost? And to whom?

You give in a little and it doesn’t do much good. My classmates didn’t care that I finally got to see Nightmare on Elm Street 13. They just noted that I’d missed the first twelve. They didn’t care that I managed to get ahold of one killer trendy outfit, they just noted that the rest of the time I wore slacks and polo shirts. They didn’t care that I finally started wearing jeans because their opinions had been formed by my stubborn insistence of wearing slacks until I was thirteen.

It doesn’t even seem like compromise is possible. You have to buy in. And by that point, instead of being what your (older and theoretically wiser) parents tell you to be, you’re what your young and stupid friends tell you to be.

But you do have to acclimate yourself to your surroundings. No matter how much sense it might make to wear an African robe in the desert heat, you wear pants because you’re expected to. It keeps society going. No matter how smart a supergenious kid is, it does him no good if s/he isn’t understood by those around him/her and doesn’t understand the world around him/her.

And somewhere in the midst of all this is an answer that eludes me.

I wrote a comment on an April Fool post talking about loves past and present. Both her post and the comments are worth reading.

The subject got me thinking about one of the women I was going to spend the rest of my life with… and the one that I eventually managed.

All things considered, my ex Evangeline and I dated for way too long. Shortly after we got together one of her exes re-entered the picture. Things got messy when she left me for him, he left her for someone else, and I took her back. They never recovered. We rapidly found the locus of power in our relationship to be firmly on her shoulders. That made me feel powerless and her feel burdened. I was always mad and she was always aloof.

The biggest issue was that she stood me up over and over again. I eventually started keeping a spreadsheet. I can tell you with a reasonable degree of accuracy that in the last six months of the affair she showed up on time 12% of the time, 8% of the time she was within an hour, and 13% of the time she was within two hours. When she wasn’t within two hours, 7% of the time she actually showed, 41% of the time she did not show up but called to let me know she wouldn’t, and 52% of the time she did not show up, did not call, and most of that time (I don’t have stats for this) she would avoid me for a few days.

I’m not trying to demonize her. She was going through a lot herself. My behavior was not helping a thing. On one hand it was obvious that I was completely devoted to her. On the other hand I kept telling her that I couldn’t take it anymore. She said that she might start being more reliable if she wasn’t so worried about making me angry. I said I might stop getting angry if she’d stop standing me up.

So why did we both stick around? Because we loved each other. To this day I believe we did.

Flash forward a couple of years and I meet my now-wife Clancy at a Christmas party. It was a long distance relationship, but we made it work. The most amazing thing wasn’t how much I felt as quickly as I did – and I felt a lot, very quickly – but how easy it was. How she would come down on weekends when she said she would and she was able. How I wasn’t mad at all when she had to cancel. How problems were brought up and remediated quickly.

That’s not to say we never had disagreements. We still do. It’s also not to say we’ve always been perfect to one another. We haven’t. There were a couple times when we almost parted ways. The issues we dealt with were sometimes very difficult, but the relationship itself never has been.

What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that relationships are not just about whether you love someone or how much you do. It’s about how you love that person. It’s about what that love motivates you to do. It’s about who it motivates you to be.

Within weeks of meeting Clancy, I realized that she made me want to be perfect. Or at the least as good a man as I could possibly be. From the moment I realized that to the day of our wedding day was a long, winding technicality.

Clancy and I live in a little basement apartment in a bedroom community just outside of town. The rent is fantastic and our landlords are great. The only problem is that the washer/dryer is located in the basement so whenever it has to be done, they come down.

It also means, as it did this weekend, when I’m revving up to do laundry, the claim can be staked by someone else. In this case it was the Cranstons’ youngest daughter, Becki.

Becki is a pleasant enough person, though it’s obvious from the get-go that she spends an inordinate amount of time on her appearance. So much so that she has an artificial, plastic-like appearance. She’s going into cosmetology at Beck State. A good choice, most likely.

She is also something of a provocative dresser, which is not as unusual in Mormonland as one might think.

Anyhow, her clothes were sitting in the washer when I got up. I checked from driveway and didn’t see her car, so I decided to go ahead and push them through so that I could get to our stuff.

Having no sisters of my own and having a wife who is not very much interested in girly attire, I’ve never handled girly clothes before.

Now, the word “clothing” is derived from the word cloth, but is used more generally to convey anything that we wear in order to conceal and/or to keep warm. Her wardrobe fails at both of these tasks.

There comes a point in the size of underwear that it becomes small enough to become functionally useless. Hers were about half that size. Then there were spaghetti tops and t-shirts that I swear wouldn’t have fit me when I was eight. Becki is thin, but not that thin (though, gauging by the couple of bras that I handled, thinner than she might like in some areas). Part of me wonders how she fits into them. Snugly, I’d guess, and snugly by design.

Last night I had a dream. I was at the hospital looking into that room where all the babies are. My little girl was particularly beautiful. So much so that all the nurses kept telling me how beautiful she was – and not just in a polite kind of way.

The joy of my pretty little girl was replaced by sheer horror at the prospect of her teenage years, looking as pretty as Becki, just as fake, and terrifyingly with a similar wardrobe.