Promises to the Rising Generation

I just spent a few minutes reading my Amanda's blog.

She is the youngest of my 5 nieces and is quickly approaching that magical, powerful and frightening 18th birthday. She will cross the legal threshold from minor to adult by the tick of a clock. It will happen while she is asleep, unless she elects to stay up until one second beyond midnight. I hope she doesn't because this is a moment best appreciated in dreams. Walt Whitman may have been thinking of this particular midnight when he wrote in "A Clear Midnight":

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.

Night, sleep, and the stars.

I have witnessed this passage made by three sisters, two other nieces and two daughters. I have also watched my sons take the step. I have another niece, my wife's brother's daughter, who made the journey but I don't know her at all, really. Watching, however, is a poor substitute for experiencing so I write from this point, from my personal experience with the advantage of time and history to moderate the anxiety, hope, fear and anticipation of what lies ahead.

My 18th birthday began one second past midnight on the 15th of May, 1969. I was asleep in my bed in my parent's home in Fort Riley, Kansas.

I was about to graduate from a high school I had only attended for three weeks after being invited to leave Shorecrest High in Seattle, after my family had left the Pacific Northwest in the autumn of the previous year; leaving me behind with the Vails, to complete my senior year.

I was asked to leave Shorecrest not because I had caused trouble by hi jinx, but because I was driven to expose what seemed to me at the time, to be great injustice. The details are in another blog entry somewhere here and they are not really important to this one except as background.

At Junction City High School I was really back in an environment I understood. I had, except for Kindergarten through first grade and the three years in Seattle, always attended schools located either on or near major Military bases. The majority of my classmates had always been other Army brats. The few local kids who attended those schools were the anomaly the rest of us never understood. While there is something to be said about diversity, being one of the minority is never as easy as being one of the crowd.

The Church was strong in Seattle in 1969. At Shorecrest there were a number of LDS kids. This was different for me. I had been accustomed to being one of few, it not the only LDS kid in my school. So at Shorecrest, because I did not enjoy the celebrity that brought, I turned to a quiet version of anarchy. In Kansas, I was one of two LDS kids in the entire school and the only one in the senior class. I had again, the attention that being the Mormon delivered and as able to cash in on being "good" once again.

I do not claim to having been anything more than a shallow teenager in 1969. As shallow as I was however, where grabbing attention was concerned, I did suffer the deep emotional distresses that have plagued teenagers since, I suspect, Cain hit his 13th birthday.

The single most important job I gave myself as a teenager was to hide from the world how broken I really was as a human being.

I did not want anyone to know I came from a family that was fractured. I wanted no one to know my mother was insane nor that my father could be brutal and cruel. I didn't want another human to know how afraid I was all the time or what little talent I had or how really stupid I was. I became very good at making what I imagined the world could love rather than showing the world the real, unlovable, me. This habit made it impossible for me to form deep and lasting friendships because it was extremely difficult to maintain the facade all the time; especially when one becomes tempted by intimacy, to let one's guard down even momentarily.

Where girls were concerned, I fell madly in love with several during the years from 1962-1969. Most of them never knew but there was a small group I actually persuaded to return the favor. In every case, the moment they tried to penetrate my soul, I dropped them and dropped them hard.

I have been told that, while my case was so extreme as to me clinical, feelings of inadequacy are common among young people so this comes my first promise.

You will one day understand how valuable you are. First you will learn that your parents, with all their human flaws, love you the best way they can and that your Heavenly Father loves you without condition and wants, more than anything else, you to be happy.

There will come a day - hopefully sooner than later - when you will begin to feel comfortable in your own skin. You will understand that everyone has something to offer everyone else; that we, to some extent, are all broken... or at least cracked. And that that common bond of human frailty is best healed in groups who love the Lord.

It took me 40+ years to learn this. I pray it won't take you nearly that long.

I suspect that when you see the news, you think the world is a pretty terrible place. When I was 18, Vietnam was raging, the U.S.S.R. was waging a cold and expensive war with the United States, there were tsunamis and earthquakes and tornados and hurricanes and floods and erupting volcanos, murders, rapes, deadly diseases, drug addiction, alcoholism, car wrecks, train wrecks, airplane crashes, suicides, ugly political campaigns, terrible public scandals, gossipy Mormons and mean dogs.

As we age we tend to remember the "good old days" with fondness. I promise that you will too. At the same time I encourage you to follow the prophet who, last month, taught us to learn from the past.

He also encouraged us to live in the present. I know that's really hard when you're 18.

There is so much you want to do and all of it seems to be waiting for us in the future rather than available right now. Perhaps we should focus more on what we can do, right now.

I promise, that when we do, our lives are richer and we are happier.

Finally, a last promise.

Someday, when you're wake up on say, your 57th birthday, you will look back on your 18th and smile. You will wonder why you had been so worried; so nervous... so scared. You will look in the mirror and count the wrinkles and the scars and see them as the chisel marks of a loving God as He has given you a life that sculpts us into people who love Him. You will think of the lyrics to Garth Brook's hit, "The Dance":

Our lives are better left to chance I could have missed the pain

But I'd have had to miss the dance...