A Mother's Confession

Fifty years ago driving home with a brutal hand cramp from a Playtex panty girdle, I wondered, why would a slim, lithe 16 year old need a girdle anyway. A chastity belt advertised on TV, a minor speed bump on the road to teenage sex? Where was this going? In just a few weeks we had gone from our first kiss to grinding each other on the front seat of my car, in her bed and on the sofa for hours. Now the first tentative touches of bare teenage skin, what’s next? That was the beginning of my sexual awakening in high school and little has changed, apparently.

Since I’ve owned DRIVE!, unlike most of my peers, I come in contact with teens every day and most of the boys I can’t imagine even sneaking a kiss from a classmate. Because of the way we operate our school, we customize our training to fit the individual student and that necessitates plenty of parental contact and I have lots of face time with our student’s mothers and fathers.

We have a student who is the size of a 7^th grader and looks like bag of rags. He is pretty cool around the school, but he is driving his mother crazy. He is a child of divorce and his Dad for whatever reason doesn’t discipline him and it’s all put back on his Mom who owns her own business and does the best she can. During one of our parent-school sessions last week, Bag of Rags’ Mom suddenly confessed to catching him in bed with an 18 year old girl he met that day at the at the mall. First of all I was stunned at her confession, then couldn’t get my mind around this little kid, who weighs 120 at best, pimply face and squeaky voice having actual sex. I thought if he was having any sex at all it would be with himself.

After her confession, there was a long silence. Bag of Rags’ Mom was waiting for me to say something. The best I could do was ask, “Ah, what did you do?’ She said, “I closed the bedroom door and told them to get dressed. Then I said I wanted to talk to them in the family room.” I countered with the incisive, “Then what happened?” She said the girl stormed out and her son got mad at her, yelled and screamed and stomped around the room.” She started to cry and asked what she should do. I was thinking to myself, this isn’t any of my business; this is a driving school, not a counseling center. I thought for a moment and grabbed my phone and wrote a number down and told her to call it.

I gave her the number of a psychologist I know on the East Coast; he is an old friend, with plenty of experience and he’s damn good. He lined her up with a strong family counselor here, made some suggestions and told her to tell the 18 year old girl that she could get charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor or any number of sexual charges.

Time will tell. Meanwhile Bag of Rags driver's training is on hold.