Five days after what would have been my father's 87th birthday, I sought out Bob the Angel (see my post from August 30,  2015). Bob is the assistant manager of the Orchard Supply Hardstore who hired my father last summer. The man who, in so doing, bestowed upon my elderly dad the greatest gift of all: a dual sense of pride and purpose. 

Bob is much younger than I expected. Intentional stride, kind eyes, firm handshake. Needless to say, I caught him by surprise. We'd never met. I had written a thank you card, enclosed a copy of my Bob-The-Angel post and bought a succulent in a coffee mug adorned with men playing golf (my dad was an avid 2x a week golfer most of his adult life). 

I commenced by singing Bob's praises and thanking him profusely within earshot of his subordinates.

He probably only thought I was a crazy person for the first ten or fifteen seconds.

Yes, he had heard about my father's passing, he allowed. He was sorry for my loss.

"I wish I'd known him longer," he said twice. "He seemed like he had so many great stories."

Yes he did. I wish we could have heard more of them.

Thank you for the closure, Bob, and for indulging me the photo.

​I'm still saying goodbye. Meeting you helped immeasurably. 

"I have breast cancer," my dear friend said, matter of fact, across the dinner table. Nothing could have prepared me. She's the healthiest (emotionally and otherwise) person I know. Isn't that always the case with this dreaded diagnosis? Seemingly unreal. Bad fiction, but worse. She's the first peer in my inner circle to utter those words. I should consider myself lucky. We are women of a certain age. They caught it early and she lives near the best medical facilities on the planet, so she will beat it but her arduous journey has just begun.

There were tears, hugs, chin-up reminders. And some level of shock. My friend stood by me through thick and thin, headwinds be damned. Sisterhood first. She embodies it. I didn't let myself FEEL the sadness until my yoga teacher used Patty Griffin's song, Heavenly Day, for savasana the next day, during which I let the heartache in ... and the tears out. 

In that instant, I had a crystal clear vision of all women truly supporting each other. Following my friend's example.

Seizing each day as heaven sent.

​Not pissed. Not threatened. Not blaming. Not proving anything.

Just holding.

How much healing could happen?

​“I learned the hard way to never disabuse parents of the notion that their child is perfect.”
                                                                                    Marin mother of four young adults
 
We have a perfection problem in my county. That is to say, we expect it. Of ourselves, our children, our partners, our friends. I’m projecting of course (as those who promote the narcissist narrative would say), but as I accumulate experiences with teen truthiness and perfection parenting, I’ve learned a few things:

1. Teens will say anything to avoid having their phone or car taken away. Anything.
2. The smarter, more high-performing the teen, the better, more believable the lie.
3. Parents will want to believe them. Some (head-above-sand) won’t; others (naïve or perfect-just-ask-them) will.
4. Parents are loath to admit—even to “concerned” friends who are just as likely gossip-driven harridans—that their kid has made a mistake. Who could blame them? Brand is everything in these here zip codes.
5. When information is shared amongst the adults whose kids have made a bad choice, parents get comprehensively defensive. Their child will be running/swimming/playing soccer/hoops at Stanford, thank you very much.

 
Adolescents experiment, folks. It’s part of it. We’re in the soup. My litmus on these occasions is to tell the other parent if I would want to know. I’m a big proponent of talking about it. Not from a punitive frame but from a mess-up-and-grow place. Mistakes happen. What can we learn?
 
A couple examples. Let’s say they’re hypotheticals. After cleaning up a girls’ vomit in my daughter’s bedroom (their designated driver couldn’t bring them home because she too had been drinking), I suggest a meeting with parents and kids (including mine) the next night to discuss. I offer to host. Serve tea and cookies! For this, I am informed by one of the parents that it was not my place to suggest such a meeting. Another parent explained that her daughter tells [her] everything and that someone had slipped a drug into the very little alcohol she consumed, which explained the projectile hurling. My response (the lawyer hat) may have been: You will be reporting this felony to the proper authorities, yes? Um, no. She would not. They had “worked it out.”
 
Another parent may have recently blanched when I shared that her daughter had texted my oldest kid with a request to get alcohol for her. The conversation did not go well. She requested (it was more like a veiled demand) a screenshot of the alcohol ask, which was promptly provided. Because the date of the ask was actually earlier than I thought (thanks to teen truthiness), this mother went into a defensive crouch, accusing me of making an inaccurate accusation—wrong date!—regarding her kid. Were I wearing her shoes, I may have replied with something along the lines of "hey, thanks for telling me."

Different strokes.
 
It’s hard to learn that your teen is … being a teen. As in: experimenting, making mistakes, committing teen truthiness.
 
I’m so weary of the perfection premium here. It’s hurting our kids and ourselves. We need to allow our kids to be LTP (Less Than Perfect). And—more important—LTPLU (Less Than Perfect Like Us). Can we be okay with sharing, supporting and letting teens know we have their backs, no matter what, but that they aren’t in charge and we aren’t pretending or enabling?  It might be too much pressure for them otherwise. Just a guess. Not that I'd know. 
 
Growing up is hard. The guardrails will be breached. We can either be waiting on the other side with a vulnerable, loving heart, disabusing one another of the notion of the perfect child or forging ahead, gaze averted, truthiness blinders in place.