This Blog is Secret

My parents are good parents. I love and respect them. And I wouldn't tell them about this blog for all the tea in china. That they might discover it on their own is a risk I'll have to take, but they won't hear about it from me.

Ever since I was a kid, I kept huge swaths of my life secret from my parents. Well, not so much secret as just apart. We weren't a family that talked much about personal stuff--feelings, problems, boyfriends and girlfriends--and while I got more adept at revealing myself to my friends over the years, I'm still not always comfortable with my parents in the loop.

There are reasons for this. Both of my parents refer to age-old incidents as though they happened yesterday and are still relevant. I cannot emphasize enough what a huge pain in the keester it is to have your mother bring up your college boyfriend who drained his antifreeze on the driveway (where it ran into the lawn and killed the grass). This happened over twenty years ago. I think it is safe to drop it as a topic of discussion. My mom believes otherwise, and mentions it every six months or so.

My dad is a worrier. If he read one of my posts where I was stressed out or sad or confused, he'd worry it to death. Five years from now he'd be bringing up our bad carpool situation ("So whatever happened to those boys who made you so miserable? Did they ever get straightened out? Do you think it had to do with how they were raised?"), social situations at Our Fine School ("I remember how you felt so insecure about the other mothers there," he'd say. "If I recall correctly, they tended to dress more fashionably than you did and were quite a bit younger.")

I can't live like that. Five years from now, I'll only halfway remember why something got my undies in a bundle, what gave rise to it, why it bothered me so much. But my father will remember. And my mother will bring it up in the middle of a perfectly good conversation ("You'd be surprised how fast antifreeze can kill a lawn, it's really only a matter of minutes"), and I'll roll my eyes like an eleven-year-old and bite my lip to keep from being rude (or not--sometimes I'm perfectly rude with my mom, like Sunday, when we were driving my parents to the airport and she said, "I think your first novel is your best one"--something you never, ever say to a writer--to which I responded, "No, no it's not. You're totally wrong.").

Sometimes I feel badly about not telling my parents about my blog. They'd enjoy it, I think (though my mom would think my first post was my best one). If Jack or Will have a blog when they grow up, I'd want to read it. But the fact is, there are some things you're happy to share with people you've never met but not with your nearest and dearest. Or maybe it's just me. Eternally 14, hiding my diary under my pillow.