Enigmatical

Shouted at for 2 hours

Our youngest daughter had been going out with a young fellow in our congregation. At first that was fine, but over time we became concerned about his behaviour. Eventually, I started to read my daughter’s diary while she was at school. I found that they were engaged in “heavy petting” , so we realised that we needed to end this relationship. Bear in mind that my daughter was only 16 at the time.

There was some other matter that happened soon afterwards that gave us a reasonable pretext for asking them to split up, without giving away the fact that we’d been reading the diary. It soon became apparent that they were not going to listen to us, so we further told our daughter that she was not allowed to go any function that he was at, unless either her father or I was present. This cut down on her social life, of course.

Soon after that, we were giving a lift to a girl who had become friendly with my daughters. She was saying that she wanted to have a party, and told the girls who she wanted to invite. The list included this young fellow. I said nothing.

One of my daughters explained that if he came, then Rowena would not be allowed to go. The girl immediately said that she would far rather have Rowena there than this boy. She said she didn’t like him anyway, and was only inviting him because she wanted to ask his sister. I had said not a word throughout this conversation.

A couple of days later, the boy’s mother turned up on my doorstep, then proceeded to stand in my lounge room shouting at me for the next two hours for “deliberately causing people to leave her son out of activities”. Of course, all I had actually done was quite reasonably keep my own daughter at home.

I found out later that the woman had also been to the girl’s house while her mother was out, and torn strips off her as well. Shameful conduct towards a girl of 15 or 16.

These days, I’d turf the mother out fairly promptly, I hope; it makes me feel quite foolish to have allowed such grossly unreasonable behaviour to continue. For most of my adult life, I have gone quite jelly-at-the-knees whenever someone has been angry with me, no matter how unreasonable – mainly due to how I was raised.

What a contrast between her behaviour, all because her dear boy was not invited to one party, whereas when we found that he been interfering with our underage daughter, I had been on the one hand very clear that he was to stay away from her, but very calm in the way that I spoke.

In the end, because it was all becoming problematic, we simply organised to move 2 states away, so that he would have no likelihood of following us. Our daughter has thanked us for doing that, and agrees that she was caught up in one of those teenage crushes at the time. Of course, she then turned around and started going out with Daniel, eventually marrying him – from one devil to another.

December 11, 2011