RSteve
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- Feb 9, 2008
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Yesterday, I had a heart to heart talk with a family friend's soon to be 17-year-old daughter. The girl went through puberty quite early and became very curvaceous. Although extremely bright and an excellent student, her maturity (and street smarts) don't match her physical presence. She's been getting a lot of unwanted comments from other teens. Her way of stemming the comments was to alter her body by quitting eating and has been diagnosed with anorexia. Ordinarily, in the fall, she'd be a H.S. junior, but she's taking advantage of MN's Post Secondary Options program and will become a full time college student at the U of MN. Hopefully, she'll look like thousands of other co-eds and the comments will be history.
With continued therapy and away from the high school environment, I think she'll be fine. We talked about being an adult and learning to shut out the unwanted noise. I related some of the comments and hate mail that I received during my years in radio. At first, those comments made me question my competence and whether I should look for another vocation. But, as time passed, I realized that if there were no comments, no one was listening.
Although the girl isn't a relative, she has always called me grandpa. She asked, "Grandpa, when did you start thinking of yourself as an adult?" I thought for a moment and gave her the easiest answer, but not the real one. "When I was nineteen and my father died. Both of my parents had passed and I was forced to be an adult."
In reality, I began to think of myself as an adult the summer after my mother's death. She'd died the previous December and I'd been farmed out to one relative after another. I'd turned 10-years-old. My father had taken a job that kept him on the road for several weeks at a time. I was angry that my father had bailed on my brother and me. After an incident at a relative's home where I'd been placed, I told my father's sister that I'd made arrangements to stay with the family of one of my mother's friends; no more relatives that didn't really want me there. My father got the message and came home.
That summer I wanted to play Little League baseball. I had good skills, but there was no Little League Organization in the neighborhood where we lived. My father took me to Little League tryouts in a neighborhood where he had a sister. He'd filled out all the paperwork with our residential address. After a couple of days of skills tests, when my father came to pick me up from the ball field, he was approached by one of the league officials. I was standing next to my father. The official said, "Your son, for his age, is a very skilled ballplayer, but you live out of our district, so I have to disqualify him from our league."
My father began a monologue on how my mother had died a few months earlier and couldn't he just put his sister's address on the application. I remember as though it were today when I yelled, "Stop. I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me." I told my father to go home, that I was going to walk. That was the point when, in my mind, I became an adult.
How about you?
With continued therapy and away from the high school environment, I think she'll be fine. We talked about being an adult and learning to shut out the unwanted noise. I related some of the comments and hate mail that I received during my years in radio. At first, those comments made me question my competence and whether I should look for another vocation. But, as time passed, I realized that if there were no comments, no one was listening.
Although the girl isn't a relative, she has always called me grandpa. She asked, "Grandpa, when did you start thinking of yourself as an adult?" I thought for a moment and gave her the easiest answer, but not the real one. "When I was nineteen and my father died. Both of my parents had passed and I was forced to be an adult."
In reality, I began to think of myself as an adult the summer after my mother's death. She'd died the previous December and I'd been farmed out to one relative after another. I'd turned 10-years-old. My father had taken a job that kept him on the road for several weeks at a time. I was angry that my father had bailed on my brother and me. After an incident at a relative's home where I'd been placed, I told my father's sister that I'd made arrangements to stay with the family of one of my mother's friends; no more relatives that didn't really want me there. My father got the message and came home.
That summer I wanted to play Little League baseball. I had good skills, but there was no Little League Organization in the neighborhood where we lived. My father took me to Little League tryouts in a neighborhood where he had a sister. He'd filled out all the paperwork with our residential address. After a couple of days of skills tests, when my father came to pick me up from the ball field, he was approached by one of the league officials. I was standing next to my father. The official said, "Your son, for his age, is a very skilled ballplayer, but you live out of our district, so I have to disqualify him from our league."
My father began a monologue on how my mother had died a few months earlier and couldn't he just put his sister's address on the application. I remember as though it were today when I yelled, "Stop. I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me." I told my father to go home, that I was going to walk. That was the point when, in my mind, I became an adult.
How about you?
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. But that was the first real self acknowledgement that I had passed over and was an “adult”.
