Carmen Electra and the Teenager

I was sitting with my 13 year-old in his room when I realized that this was a really good time to talk with him.
"Hey," I told him, patting his knee, "you know how you told me that you went sneaking into the front room to download pictures of Carmen Electra onto your hard drive?"
"Yeah," he told me, looking away. That look away told me that he was already feeling defensive, so I proceeded with caution.
"First, I want you to know that you're not in trouble at all, and second, mom and I don't want you to think you need to sneak anywhere..."
"I'm not going to do that again," he cut me off.
"That's not it at all. It's just when you say that you're sneaking, it tells me that you think you're doing something bad, and mom and I don't think that you are."

My wife and I had talked about it while he and his brother were away at their father's house. She and I had come to the conclusion that we would like him to ask us if he can download pictures, and we would like to say yes, because we like to let the boys do what they want to do and sexy pictures of Carmen Electra aren't going to hurt anyone, especially somebody who just learned how to masturbate. We also talked about what would happen to our 13 year-old if his father found out about any of this-- the pictures, the downloading, the sneaking, the Carmen Electra, oh merciful God! Not Carmen Electra! It's all just too sinful!-- and how he would be punished and made to feel like masturbation was wrong, and downloading pictures made him a bad person, and sneaking around broke some kind of trust between he and his father. At his father's house, this activity would be a gigantic no-no.

I don't truly understand what it's like for the boys. I don't truly understand what it was like for my wife to be married to that man for a dozen years. They have all told me that he's into Hitler and the Nazi army. None of them really know why, but he's got books and collectibles of all of that. And if that wasn't enough to tell you this man is a little unstable, I've heard from all of them that he doesn't communicate, and that he's authoritarian and completely unreasonable. For example, he told the boys several weeks ago that Dungeons and Dragons was evil and the people who play it are evil and will corrupt them. And he knew this not because he had ever played Dungeons and Dragons -- which he hadn't -- and not because anyone had ever become evil from playing Dungeons and Dragons -- which they never did -- but because somebody in his church gossiped about how that game corrupts the youth and turns them evil. It wasn't in a sermon. It wasn't official Church Doctrine. Just gossip amongst Sunday Morningers (my word-- every time you use it you owe me a quarter), and that was all the proof he needed to make his boys feel like they were doing something wrong and were bad people. The rumors of the conservative non-thinkers were the voices in his head telling him how to behave and father his children. Sounds like a quality person, right? But wait, it gets better. So he says that Dungeons and Dragons will make you go to hell, and the boys were slightly scared by that. After all, who wants to be corrupted by a game that will send you to hell? But someplace in their heads, they knew that their father was full of shit, so they kept playing Dungeons and Dragons and found a group of people at the comic book store who were really nice and cool and into those kinds of games. And then the boys found Warhammer, and the guys at the comic books store, again, told them that was a cool game and accepted them and helped them learn a game which is a pretty thinly veiled high school algebra class: it's all about measuring distances with a tape measure and rolling dice and adding up the scores and adding up point values of your pieces and making sure that the guns that are shooting are in the line of vision with their targets (which is a bit high school geometry, too). And the boys' father -- who has never set foot in the store, who has never played the game or even heard of it -- tells the boys that it's wrong that they're playing it. Then, for Christmas, he gives them game pieces that they need to play Warhammer! Then he tells them that it's evil again! Then, when the 9 year-old asks why he thinks Warhammer and the people who play it are evil, father tells 9 year-old that, "it's complicated," and refuses to elaborate! What a mind-fuck, huh?! And then, my 9 year-old decides he's going to get up the courage to tell his father that he wants to go to the comic book store over the weekend, and father says it's not in their schedule. Instead, he ran a few errands and went home. Because going anywhere else other than home would've thrown off his schedule. ...of staying at home... and buying deodorant. He can't even sack-up and say that he doesn't want to go to the comic book store because he doesn't want to encourage the boys to play an evil game, which is what he believes, because if he said that then questions might arise about why he had purchased them game pieces that help them play the evil game. And if he really believes what he's telling them, then why doesn't he try to actively prevent them from playing the evil game, which would save them? Why, instead, does he condemn them, an act which not only doesn't help them, but actively makes them feel bad? It's not only like driving with your eyes closed, it's like being retarded. Fucked. Up.

So back to Carmen Electra and my 13 year-old's budding libido. So I try to talk with him about asking to download pictures, and he tells me that he's not going to download pictures anymore. He only wants to download pictures of war and soldiers marching and Nazi shit. I hear him say "Nazi", and I know that something has happened with his father. But I can't ask him about what, because then he'll get even more closed off and I'll never get him to talk to me. So I tell him one last time to ask us before he goes to download pictures and mom and I will probably say yes and we didn't want him thinking that he was doing anything wrong. He blew me off, and I left the room.

The boys stay with us for 6 days in a two week period. Their father gets the other 8 days. Not because that's what the original joint custody decree says and not because that's what the court said the first time we took him to court to get him to share the boys with us for more than every other weekend (yeah, joint custody with "liberal visitation between both parties" and his interpretation is that we should get every other weekend), but because he's decided that's the way it should be and he won't discuss it any further. So we're going back to court to get our 7th day with our kids. Stupid, isn't it. And when they're with us, you can see them relax and enjoy themselves more. You can hear them saying that they're more comfortable with us. They like it with us better. And we aren't the house where they get their allowance. And we make them do chores. And we set guidelines for them. They like being at our house better because we allow them to be themselves. We allow them to express how they're feeling, we listen to them, and we help them deal with the issues that come up. We never, ever make them feel bad about something that they're feeling or thinking. We don't tell them that wet dreams are evil. We don't tell them that their backpacks have to be zipped up a certain way. And we allow them to do things and take care of themselves rather than doing everything for them because they aren't capable of doing it for themselves. They get to be themselves without judgment. They get to figure out how they are going to play the game of life, and frankly, my wife and I play life pretty dang well. So with us they have really good teachers. And you can see them tense up when the time starts to roll around that they have to go back to dad's. They get grumpy, angry. They start to cry even, saying that they don't want to go back to dad's. That he's a jerk. A dick. A shit. That they don't like him. And my heart breaks for them. And my wife and I do our best to keep their self-concept high and their self-esteem high because we know that after being with their father for only a few hours, they will be thinking themselves "idiots" again, and thinking that it's not good to download Carmen Electra pictures, even when we tell them that it is.

I go to my wife and I tell her about the talk. I tell her about how he doesn't want to download girly pics anymore, just war pictures. I tell her how he didn't listen to me. And my wife listened and nodded and told me that everything would be okay.

What can you do when you try to help somebody as best you can, and then they get hurt when they're away from you, and then they come back, and you help them heal as best as you can, and then they leave and they get hurt again, and it keeps happening over and over again? What can you do? I still don't know, and it's frustrating.

So later in the day, my 13 year-old tells me that he's downloaded some girly pictures. I went to my wife and told her that everything was fine. They had settled into living with us for the week. She asked, "Did he download girly pictures?" My wife is smart and awesome.