Nobody Warned Me about This by Nicholas

          Maybe it was because my parents assumed that their kids would just know better, I don’t recall my youth being burdened with parental warnings. There was none of the hectoring others have told me that they got from their parents about do this or don’t do that. My sophisticated mom and dad relied on that mystical bond between parent and child in which good and harm are communicated without words or maybe with the slightest gesture or frown.

          Oh, there were the usual admonitions to drive carefully when I went out. And once when I was about to head off to college, mom asked if I knew about homosexuals in an attempted warning that I stopped short. It wasn’t that I feared I was one and she was going to out me but rather that any conversation about anything sexual at age 18 with my mother was just too creepy to let happen.

          Once I sort of asked for a warning. I was testing out my new independence living away from home at college. Ohio State, like every college campus in the country in 1964, was rumbling with movements of change and I as a freshman jumped right in. It was a battle over the rights of students to hear the free speech of forbidden speakers, namely Marxist political theorists. Talk was there would be a demonstration with the likelihood of arrests the next day.

          I mentioned all this to mom and dad in my regular weekly phone call to see what they would say. Like, no, don’t do it, you’ll ruin your future. But no such warning came. Mom thought about it and said that I should do whatever I thought was best. Now, how was I going to rebel with an attitude like that? I felt almost encouraged to get arrested. Maybe it was a trick. But mom didn’t play tricks; she pretty much said exactly what she was thinking.

          So much for warnings. How is it then, I wonder, that I turned out to be, as we used to say back then, one of the people my parents warned me about. Free thinking, authority questioning, not too impressed with money for its own sake, experimenter with odd drugs and even odder spiritualities, totally supportive of people who go to great lengths to shape their lives, and even their bodies, their way, and, to top it off, queer. It isn’t that I set out to break all the rules, just the big ones. Perhaps mom and dad knew that I was destined to break or ignore just about every admonition they would have given me so they just didn’t bother.

          I joined radical political organizations, didn’t often cut my hair, refused to join the army when told to do so, picked a pretty useless college major instead of a practical one, never got around exactly to having a career (I’ve had a few here and there, actually), ran away to San Francisco twice, went to all-night dance parties when I was 35, and ended up marrying a man.

          And in the end, I can say that taking risks and ignoring even well-meaning warnings almost always pays off. If nothing else, I learned some things I would never do again. I have sown my wild oats and they have grown up to nourish me well over the years. I think Edith Piaf sang a song about that.

          And now, though I went against most parental warnings and admonitions, spoken or unspoken, I can say that the parents I ignored and shocked many times are now my role models. We stayed together and sort of grew up together—me changing and them changing. They too did things their way and they aged well, remaining active though never failing to take naps, and learning new things while steadfastly keeping their old familiar ways so that I say, yes, they are my role models now.

Nobody warned me that I’d come around to saying that.

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.