There are moments in one's parenting life when everything is clicking along perfectly. The kids are all excelling at school, they are happy, they are getting along. One of them writes an essay about how you are their hero for an English project. Another admits that you are, in fact, pretty cool.
And then there are the days that you return from a little vacation with your honey to find that your 15 year old has allowed another 15 year old to pierce her belly button. She has done this with the full awareness that none of her parents (biological or step) would condone this action. She has done this in a bedroom, not a piercing studio, where at least there is the chance that it was done safely. She has done this just a few weeks into being ungrounded after the last incredibly stupid move.
Interestingly, Ernest Holmes didn't have much to say on the topics of body piercing or self-mutilation by teenagers. It just wasn't done back in the day. Let's try to find a few useful thoughts, so I don't kill her...
"Psychosomatic medicine has shown that mental disturbances, conscious or subjective, produce physical reactions in the body." Does this mental disturbance take over one's body and force it to pierce itself? Lauren would say yes. Of course, she also cries when I say she has to take it out. I'm not buying it.
"To believe in a just law of cause and effect, carrying with it a punishment or a reward, is to believe in righteousness." Am I an agent of the Law? The most obvious (though clearly not only) consequence is that the jewelry comes out. I want natural consequences, though. What does a loving New Thought parent do here? (I've been informed that I am not allowed to beat her to death, nor to ground her "forever".)
"But we are born to be happy, to be abundantly supplied with every good thing, to have fun in living, to consciously unite with the Divine Power that is around us and within us, and to grow and expand forever."
How much of her "every good thing and fun in living" am I in charge of at this late stage of the game? Does she have a point in saying it's her body and that she's just expressing herself? I was unaware that, fully expressed, she's full of holes in unusual places.
Thank God for the therapy appointment today. I have never so happily paid a $50.00 co-pay!Labels: body, ernest holmes, kill, navel, New Thought, piercing, teenager
