When I was 19 years old, I brought my first serious boyfriend home to meet my family. He was a nice, Italian boy and I knew they’d love him. We weren’t actually having sex so this story will be even more entertaining.
I have written in a journal since I was a kid. Seriously, even as a wee little girl, my first journal was a composition notebook that I decorated in Lisa Frank stickers.
And my family knew I had it and respected that privacy.
My brother never snooped, and my parents always turned a blind eye.
But then there was my grandmother.
She lived with us in the apartment above my room. And being nosy came as natural to her as breathing.
And one night, while visiting from college with that new boyfriend they all loved, she took it upon myself to read my journal. My COLLEGE journal. So you can imagine the stories that were in that baby.
We came home from shooting pool to find my entire family sitting at the kitchen table and my journal smack in the center of the table. Next to the Entenmann’s coffee cafe and a pot of Earl Grey tea.
“You’ve had sex!” my grandmother declared loudly and with her hands smacking the table like a scene out of a John Grisham movie.
No joke, this really happened.
And my poor boyfriend excused himself to the bathroom, and I stood there horrified that everyone now knew my private life. I felt completely and utterly violated.
So much so that I didn’t talk to my grandmother for a few weeks after that.
Now, fast forward twenty something years, and I’m a mother of a 6 year old girl and recently a friend asked if I would read her journal someday. My instinct, of course, was to say no.
But I’m not sure that’s the truth.
I’m not sure if I was faced with a teenager that I could resist the temptation to know what was happening beyond what she tells me.
I want us to have the kind of relationship where she’d share anything with me, but then we also need boundaries and limits.
In my heart though, I think the truth is that I would read it. Of course, I wouldn’t put it in the middle of the kitchen table, though I do love the idea of eating more Entenmann’s, but I can’t say that I could just leave the book alone and never crack open a page.
Do I hate myself a bit for thinking I’d read the journal? Yep.
Am I a hypocrite? Yep.
But it’s the real answer. I wish I could say that I’ll trust my teenage daughter completely, but I know what I did as a teenager and am petrified.
So maybe I’ll just do this. Maybe I have a chat with her first grade teacher and stop this whole “being able to write” thing right now. That seems the perfect way to avoid this whole damn situation someday… Then we can just sit at the kitchen table with mouths full of Entenmann’s coffee cake and talk about Dora the Explorer when she’s 19. Sounds perfect to me.
