Recently our ten year old fell in love with another girl – they are BFF’s. Unlike her older sister, Abby hadn’t found a group of great friends yet – probably because her temperament is unusual among girls. She doesn’t like spending time with boys and she’s fearless, energetic, and physical. She wants to climb the tree first, do flips off the high-dive, and run around in the dense woods behind our house. Her girly friends are more content to be a bit more cerebral.
So when she met Katie, a girl with the same level of energy and fearlessness, we were thrilled. Katie joined us for dinners and sleepovers and even on our family vacation to Cape May, the southern New Jersey Victorian beach community.
Until...
we discovered that Katie’s parents are, well,...uh... swingers. Not trapeze artists. Sexual swingers. You know, drop your keys in the jar, have a few drinks, and...
And not just a little bit. They are the king and queen of swingers. They organize the largest swinging event in the country down in Miami.
Being a psychologist, I’m not all that squeamish about sex – I’ve heard of all sorts of arrangements that couples make to thrive and survive and don’t think I’ve got the magic path, but I do think swinging comes from emptiness and a feeling of hunger.
And I do think that loving and being loved is the nectar of human experience and that monogamy offers safety when the winds of crisis appear.
That’s just my response to the swinging.
Oh, then there’s the strip clubs and web sites Katie’s parents run too.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met Katie’s parents and I like them. I mean, I don’t want to sleep with either of them, but I like them as people. They seem kind of down to earth.
So how do I teach Abby what I want her to learn? Do we prohibit her from seeing her first friend that truly matches her? Little Katie isn’t a swinger, after all. She’s only ten. She does seem to be growing up faster than Abby, but I can’t attribute that to her parents activities, or can I?
A few times a week I drive Abby to gymnastics. It takes about 25 minutes on mostly open highway in central Pennsylvania. And this isn’t Chicago or Denver or Boston – places where I’ve had occasion to navigate during rush hour, the roads are wide open and rural. So we have time to talk.
So I created a “virtue barrel.” It’s a pretzel barrel with moral dilemmas and virtues written on small pieces of paper. Every day on our way to gymnastics Abby picks out a few pieces of paper and answers the problem on the page. Like what do you do if a friend gives you a necklace you like and then tells you she stole it? Or, if a friend asks you to keep a secret and then tells you she’s doing something dangerous, what do you do? So far, her answers have been dead on, so I’m turning up the heat a little.
I haven’t written one that says, “what do you do if your best friend’s parents are swingers?”
I’ll wait a few months for that one.
