Growing up

This article was really cute.

It was linked on one of the lady subreddits, and a bunch of the comments were things like "why can't we talk to our kids about attraction at eleven?" and "I don't like the jokes about people wanting their kids to be virgins until they're thirty."

But, like, you're missing the point here. I don't have any kids, but I have a couple of much younger siblings that I took care of, and am super protective of. (It's a joke in the family that I'm the mom who nags, and our actual mom is the mom who's more relaxed, if that helps put our relationship into perspective.)

It isn't that they actually want their kids to remain alone and single until they reach an arbitrary age. (At least not mostly. Possibly there are some people who are serious when they say this.) It's about that the change from a little kid who thinks the opposite sex is kind of icky to a teenager with crazy hormones is a really bittersweet one.

My baby sister (Alex is 15 and isn't dating, so this will be about Kelly) is 17, but I find it really hard not to see her as the two-year-old who would wear a "baby soup" (her words for "bathing suit," since she couldn't say it properly) as her underwear and then five layers of clothing on top of that, which made any need to use the bathroom an extreme sport. Will she make it in time, we asked every single time as we removed the five layers to allow access to the bathing suit. She had a thing for shoes, especially shiny ones, and would wear whoever's, and lick the shiniest ones. She loved the colour purple. When she fell and hurt herself, she believed I had the magic ability to make her ouchies feel better with a kiss.

Now, at seventeen, her hurt is so much different. When she first slept with her boyfriend, her first time sleeping with anyone, he wasn't her boyfriend, just a friend. And he told her after a few times on top of that that it was "getting too serious" and he "couldn't see [her] for a while." And he told her this over our late Thanksgiving, and she cried. So much. And so hard.

And I couldn't kiss the ouchie and make it better. And that made me want to cry. I want to protect her from the world. I always have. That's why I'm the naggy one. But you can't protect them from those sorts of hurts. They're just a part of life. I mean, I experienced almost the exact same hurt, only my friend in this situation stopped being a friend, and hers eventually smartened the fuck up and is her boyfriend now, and it felt like being stabbed in the gut to see my little sister hurting that same way.

And that's why parents (and older siblings) are so likely to make jokes about "no boyfriends until you're thirty." You know they'll get hurt and you'll be powerless to stop it, or to make it hurt less. And you can't help but see that little girl who had never had any cares or worries and you wish you could roll back time to the point where everything is happy and all people are good and no one is ever mean unless you don't clean up your toys, but you can't, you just have to hurt right along with her because you never want to see her hurt.

And I'm so proud of her, because she is smart, and practical, and at seventeen, she has been in a longer-term and more stable relationship than either of her older sisters. (Sad, right? I've never been in what you could refer to as a "relationship." I think there must be something wrong with me, but I can't figure out what that is. Neither can my friends or family. Anyway.) So I have much less cause to worry about her than I do about my other sister and myself.

But I can handle being hurt myself. Maybe I did something to deserve it. But I know Kelly didn't, and never would, and I can't handle that unfairness for her sake.