No Guru, No Method, No Teacher

Purity dads:

It was an elbow in the ribs from his wife that drove Ken Lane to his first purity ball with their daughter Hannah, now 11. Tonight is their fourth, and they are sitting in the gold-and-white Broadmoor ballroom, picking at the chicken Florentine and trying to explain what they’re doing here. "My kids are on loan to me for a season; it’s important how I use that time," Ken is saying as a string quartet plays softly. "There’s a lot for us to talk through–the decisions she’ll have to make are more complex. I want to be close enough to her that she can come talk to me. That’s what my wife understood. I didn’t understand the role dads can play to set her up for success."

In the face of the hook-up culture of casual sexual experimentation, he explains, with its potential physical and emotional risks, he wants to model an alternative. Even with older teenagers, many of these families don’t believe in random dating but rather intentional dating, which typically begins with a young man’s asking a father for permission to get to know his daughter. Lane was so stymied by how exactly that conversation would go that he even asked Randy Wilson if he could sit at a nearby table and listen in one day when Wilson met one of Khrystian’s potential suitors at a local Starbucks. "We’re trying to be realistic," Lane says. "I’m not ready to be like India–have arranged marriages. But there is some wisdom there, in that at least the parents are involved."

This, of course, is the kind of conversation that makes critics howl. What about a young woman’s right to date whomever she pleases, make her own mistakes, learn from the experience, find out who she is and what matters to her? To which the Wilsons and their allies reply: If you still think this is just about sex, you are missing the whole point. The message, they say, is about integrity, being whole people, heart and soul and body.

[...]

After dinner comes the ballet performance, when seven tiny ballerinas in white tulle float in; then seven older dancers carry in a large, heavy wooden cross, which they drape in white, with a crown of thorns. Four of the five Wilson daughters are among the dancers, and they offer a special dance to their father, to the music of Natalie Grant: Your faith, your love And all that you believe Have come to be the strongest part of me And I will always be your baby …

Then Randy and his friend Kevin Moore stand in front of the cross, holding up two large swords, points crossed. Fathers and daughters process beneath the swords to kneel; the girls place a white rose at the base of the cross while the fathers offer a quiet blessing.

Finally. A subject on which I can speak with some authority.

I am a father.

Specifically I am  the father of a teen-aged girl/young lady/woman. I think that she is a special kid, but then most parents tend to think that their kids are special (and not in that Lucianne Goldberg somebody-hire-my-idiot-son way). I don’t live in some backwater town where we fear the encroachment of "the culture" infecting our kids via the TV or the internets or the jungle rhythms of that crazee hippity-hop music. I live in the belly of the beast with enough bars and tattoo parlors to make Richard Cohen shvitz himself stupid. On Sunday mornings when you’re watching your neighbors hop in their minivans to go to church, we watch "recent acquaintances" of our neighbors stumble out of apartments or condos trying to remember where they parked their cars the night while attempting to make the best of Saturday night’s clothes – usually sans  underwear and only God knows where that is and, as usual,  he ain’t talking.

Which is to say: we don’t live in Mayberry R.F.D.

And yet, somehow, without any SuperJesus instructions, moral coaching, or deep dark  midnights of the soul, the Lovely & Talented Casey  has managed to grow up into a smart, confident, relatively normal human being if you can get past her sense of humor  which, if you believe my wife, is exclusively my fault. No Purity Balls, no Stadiums Full O’Losers Promise Keepers , no invocations of stern-faced SkyDad, no grim navel-gazing, no life plan until marriage takes her off my hands.

Here is my secret to being a good dad:

Don’t be an fucking idiot.

No. Really.

Just because they are the fruit of your loins doesn’t mean you have to lose your shit and start panicking.  Use common sense. Talk to them a lot, but listen even more. Realize that they are just like you were when you were their age and they will try to get away with things. Don’t be surprised when they do that;  you’re weren’t that special. Let them make mistakes, but let them know that there will be repercussions and, no, it won’t be a bolt of lightning from the Hairy Thunderer above. You can’t always be there to catch them when they fall, but you can teach them and equip them to save themselves. Kids have incredible bullshit detectors and you are a lousy liar: never forget that. The first step to being honest with your kids is being honest with yourself.  Not everything that happens is a matter of life and death  so quit acting like it is.

And if you think a vow of chastity made by a twelve year-old during a farcical virgin pageant in a  Holiday Inn ballroom is going to hold up against the tidal wave of teenage hormones to come, well, you’re a bigger fucking idiot than even your kids think you are.