My daughter (13) and son (16) attended a homeschool dance last night. Yes, homeschoolers have dances, and from what I am told they are heavily monitored with moms perched like hawks along the perimeter of the dance floor, vigilant for scurrying sins.
Debriefing the evening afterward, my kids spun tales of young hearts spurned, hot tears spilled, and treaties forged and shattered set to a score of Christian EDM. The sheer volume of stories and insignificant soul-cleaving slights was so awful and cliche that it approached a kind of grandeur.
As a father, it is easy to scoff at the silliness of the real experiences of many of the young women in attendance. My daughter, for what it’s worth, generally floats on top of the deluge of tears hauling victims into a row boat of reality (“Why don’t you just go talk to him…”). But this is drama too, just acting in someone else’s play. Speaking wisdom into situations like this is necessary to help your kids navigate the emotional geysers erupting around and within them.
As an adult, drama is offensive to me. Not offensive in the sense of being emotionally offended, but offensive like getting a whiff of last week’s hot diapers. And that is really what drama is: people emotionally soiling themselves.
But drama, like incontinence, has to be evaluated in the context of age. We all messed our pants as babies, and anticipating this mess our parents wrapped us in diapers to catch the inevitable. This is a reality of human growth and development and is something to be accepted by a caregiver unemotionally as a point of fact, while at the same time instructing the child in the magical arts of potty training. When the child masters this skill, relapsing into incontinence is inappropriate, wrong, or an indication of serious physical impairment.
In the same way, drama is what happens in young hearts that have not yet learned to control themselves. Emotional training starts young in the home but the young person must learn to apply those skills to new environments and often with peers whose unpruned emotions have grown wild. The teen years are the potty training of emotions in social settings. Soiling is expected – that is, it is not yet wrong or inappropriate. They are learning. However, if not taught to control the bowels of emotions, teens, particularly young ladies, will grow into incontinent adults who stink of drama.
Thought Butter 