But I Wanted To Be the Popular Parent

Em went on an awake-over this weekend at a friend's house for a twelfth birthday.

Everything seemed to go great. Dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse (I'm jealous), popcorn and movies, staying up late. Church the next day and a cookout/birthday party at the birthday girl's Dad's house. So two parties in one. Wow.

And I heard some of this from Em when she got back. Then the Artist Formerly Known as Frau Lobster heard the rest and felt the need to make a call.

They'd watched The Sweetest Thing. Which I misheard, initially as The Swedish Thing. Which would have been worse, I'm sure.

Here's the thing: Rated R.

I'm a relatively permissive parent. My Dad once cut off a CD we were listening to in the car with my children, saying 'Why do you play this stuff for them?'

And I was taken aback: it was just music. A little double-entendre humor, sure, but harmless stuff.

Full disclosure: at 38, I don't know if I've fully forgiven my Dad's censorship. He confiscated albums I'd bought with money I earned, albums tame by modern standards. He also tried to make me pay for time spent listening to my musical choices with 'Balance Time' spent listening to an annoying easy listening station because he feared the psychological damage AC/DC and KISS would do to me. As it is, truly, the psychological damage was mostly chalked up to Dad's column.

Still, that little deal in the car with Grandpa made me wonder, when I was driving the girls (with one of the other sleepover guests) to the park, if the Jolly Rogers were a bridge too far for this guest.

I prize the innocence of my children. I might play them a bawdy pirate tune about a whore of high re-known or falling into a vat of apple juice (I'm deep in cider), but there are limits. I've allowed Em to watch parts of R-rated movies such as the opening sequence of 'Office Space' with the old man in the walker beating the guy in the car to work. Before that, I showed her parts of Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life' when she was four, a movie I totally understand the R rating on. But the parts that got its R rating, I still won't show her.

In any case: a joke about a woman getting her mouth stuck on a guy's stuff is not twelve year old material. I don't want Em forming a mental picture of a penis in a chick's mouth, so it doesn't much matter that they don't show that in the movie. She understood it, or she couldn't have explained the hilarity to her mother.

Of course, when I was Em's age, I was forbidden from watching R rated movies on HBO at the one house on my street that had it. Naturally, I watched R rated movies at his house every chance I got. So I'm familiar with the impulse.

And the hosting mother had set aside a group of movies as inappropriate, including some Harry Potter because one of the guests is not allowed to watch PG-13s. And despite The Sweetest Thing being in the 'No' pile, it was still what went in the player, at least for awhile.

And it's not the worst mischief twelve year olds ever got up to. When I was this age, my experimentation already included beer and cigarettes.