Old Enough To Know Better

My partner and I are expecting the arrival of a sippy cup this summer 💜

I have been writing, but have been focusing on works of original fiction and poetry while preparing for sippy cup (and keeping my day job). Fanfiction has not been my focus in the last 6 months.

I want to clear this up: @motherofqups and I are still very much friends, she is a huge part of my offline life and I hope she always will be. The truth is, the project ended for two main reasons:

Medical issues (which aren’t mine to share).

Mine and @morellanimmermehr 's decision to stop creating Arcana content for the time being.

please try this on for size:

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

Barbara Krafft, Die Familie Anton von Marx 1803

As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it. Several years ago, Musk said that public transit was “a pain in the ass” where you were surrounded by strangers, including possible serial killers, to justify his opposition.

source: new york times

Also: 2024 update, the total length of China's high-speed rail tracks has now reached well over 45,000 km, or 28,000 miles, by the end of 2023.

Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”

I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.

I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”

Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.

Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.

It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.

Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.

Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.

Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.

Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”

TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:

You do not respect their rights as an individual.

You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.

You probably haven’t been listening to them.

You should never, ever go behind your kid’s back - but for small kids, it is reasonable to ask if you can see stuff. Out in the open. And then talk about it. Like your kid is a competent individual with their own thoughts and feelings. It is your job as a parent to keep your kid safe, which means educating them about what danger looks like; privacy, both the need for it and the right to it, grows with age. Parents often get stuck at the level of supervision appropriate to a kid of 5-7; that’s what needs to be addressed with them.

It’s a very straightforward convo. I’ve had it five times, and every time the *relief* is almost palpable.