When I was a teenager there was an immutable rule in our house – no boys in our bedroom.
No Boys allowed
It hadn’t always been that way because I can remember playing with male family friends in my cheerful yellow bedroom. As children of the jet age we played airports, and made Qantas and Air New Zealand planes out of paper darts. It was simple, childish fun, because we were after all, still children in every sense, except perhaps the one – physically.
My father was a parent of the fifties parenting in the 80s, he didn’t believe in girls wearing jeans, boys with long hair and, when we grew to a certain age, he didn’t believe that boys should enter into a girls’ bedroom. Emotionally I was still a little girl, in awe of him, not yet distanced from him as I would be later in my teenage years when he would be effectively lost from my view. Whilst I physically matured early, my head then was still full of heroes and heroines, mainly Batman and Wonder Woman, and none of those dreams were in the slightest way sexual. I didn’t know there was a game called Doctors and Nurses and if I had I would have expected it to involve needles and blood. I didn’t hear the purple lyrics in Grease and thought Sandra Dee was simply a really nice girl.
I didn’t have any brothers and I went to an all girls school, so my experience of boys was limited. At primary school the nearest I’d got to anything vaguely ‘lovey dovey’ was playing kiss chasey but when I caught them, it was all about the win for me, not the kiss. When I was ten I was sent to a private girls’ school and the separation of girls from boys began. Yet it wasn’t until I was twelve that Dad introduced the ‘no boys in the bedroom rule’.
I didn’t really understand why, but I did as requested and never did have a boy in my bedroom (at home) from that point on. It wasn’t until I was 18 yrs or so that I reflected on Dad’s policy and saw the error of his ways. It is possible to make babies in other locations Dad! Where there is a will, there is a way.
I was thinking about this recently, this change in family behaviour and the quiet dissipation of innocence. My own girlish innocence flew away prettily like torn tissue on the breeze. I didn’t have time to say goodbye, and with its passing went my confidence that girls could do anything a boy could do.
My youngest daughter, my Millennium baby is a tom boy, as her mother was, and has had a close friendship with a boy for the past two years. Her friend is my friend Strawberry Muchkin’s son and we often spend time playing and hanging out all together. My baby is, as her mother was, physically mature, but emotionally still innocent. She and A play happily together and share an interest in Lego and computer games. It’s not unusual to find them curled up together on a couch, companionably showing each other cheats for this game or that game, as they were late on New Years night.
The tissue is straining in the persistent breeze. I can see it tearing, see through becoming seen and broken through…soon it will be a thousand white flags surrendering to adult hood, and then it will be gone.
Miss Fliss spent the day with her friend A on Tuesday, whilst I took oldest Son for a tour around Reading University. She had a lovely day, as she always does have with Strawberry Munchkin and her family, and there was a certain amount of kerfuffle when I arrived to pick her up.
“Awwww can’t I stay a bit longer?” she called downstairs from A’s bedroom.
“Just a bit” I called back as I sat down to share a drink with my friend. Strawberry Munchkin started retelling the day’s adventures..
“They’ve had a good day, Miss Fliss had a huge piece of cheesecake at lunch, and they all had fun going on a very muddy walk, ” she said. She paused for a bit and looked down.
“Oh, I should tell you that I had to ask them to keep the door open in the bedroom when they’re both in there. I know they’re only playing games on their DSes but..”
I nodded sadly. I completely understood. Of course it is the right thing, but I can”t help mourning the passing of childhood innocence. Her relationships with the other sex will never again be as free and natural again.
Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw a spot of white as it floated off into the cool dark night sky…
But then again I thought in a moment of quiet celebration; In a world where other twelve year old girls are having contraceptives inserted without their parents’ knowledge, isn’t she lucky we were able to preserve the innocence for as long as we have done?
Happy 12th birthday, Miss Fliss, (we can’t call you Miss 11 on this blog any longer), the next stage of your life may be a little complicated at times but I can promise you that when you come out the other side, relationships with boys/men though different will be wonderful again, as they once were.
What do you think? Should boys be allowed in girls’ bedrooms? Should girls be allowed to meet the boys behind the bicycle sheds? Would you die of shock if your daughter came home with a contraceptive inserted in her arm? And do you think our children are growing up far more quickly than we ever did?
