Home and Raising Boys

One of my very best friends, Melissa, wrote a blog entry tonight that got me thinking about my home town. She wrote about how much she missed it and how funny it is that she spent her youth wanting to leave and her adulthood wanting to go back. I have a lot of those feelings myself and while the option of returning to our home town is not possible for me, I do still think of it as "home". She reminded me of this and I have now been analyzing what it is, exactly, about where I grew up that seems more like a "hometown" than where I live now.

Of course, at first glance, the reason that T-town seems like the perfect hometown is because...well...it IS my hometown! I know that immediately makes me biased to it, but I think it goes further than spending my entire childhood there. My home sits alone without being attached to a big city. It is not the suburb of anything and it is the kind of small town that is big enough to have all the nice amenities you need, but small enough to still feel cozy. We live in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex now and while we live in a wonderful top rated suburb, things here are not the same. Regardless of living in a town with a population of only 38,000, we are a quick drive from huge metropolis areas. We are surrounded by so much, that I know my son will not think of our suburb as his hometown. When people ask him where he is from, I think he will probably say "Ft. Worth". There is nothing wrong with being from a big city, but I think that it was a lot of fun to grow up surrounded by a kind of idealistic reality where you felt like you knew everyone. I think Colin will probably end up being far more sophisticated than I was. :-)

Also on my mind tonight is, shockingly, the MTV Video Music Awards. They aired last weekend and this idiot so-called comedian spent almost the entire show making fun of a very young pop group called "The Jonas Brothers" who wear "promise rings". The boys have apparently made it known that they wear these rings in an effort to show that they are saving themselves until marriage. The host of the show made a running joke about the boys and talked constantly about "joyous unprotected sex" and how "there is nothing wrong with a little sex every now and then" and just a whole bunch of stuff to that effect. This really got me thinking about how hard it is going to be to raise Colin. I was not allowed to watch MTV when I was growing up and it made me so mad. I, of course, watched at friends houses and everywhere else I could. I never could understand, but it has hit me like a ton of bricks since I became a mother myself. How can I teach Colin that having sex is a huge responsibility that should wait until he is older when the practice of waiting is ridiculed so steadily in pop culture? Let me tell you, that whole broadcast made being a "good boy" into being a loser. I hope that I can instill good values in my son and I am going to work hard to do so, but I can certainly see how hard it will be with all that I am up against in society today. I know that is the job of parents and I am up for the challenge. It sure would be a lot easier, however, if we had a little more help from "the village". It is funny...I was watching 90210 tonight, which is a teen show marketed to teens, and the whole thing is about sex and drugs. In fact, in the opening scene of the first show, a teenage girl was doing something very indecent, shall we say, to a guy in his car at school. It makes me laugh that my whole world is now filtered through my "mom vision". I cringed and thought, yet again, "How will I explain that to Colin?". I have my work cut out for me, that is for sure. However, we had lots of stuff like that on TV when I was growing up, albeit not quite so extreme, and my parents managed to turn me into a pretty good girl, if I do say so myself. So all is not lost!