YES!
My mom is the eldest of 9, all of her siblings, and her parents belong to a group that broke away from the Church. My dad the youngest of five, one is Mormon, one was a good Catholic but he died, and the rest including his parents don’t practice anything.
My mom’s family considers us so liberal that they can hardly ever talk to us, and when they see us, if the girls are not wearing long skirts (down to our ankles), they won’t speak to my mom for months.
My dad’s family think that we are total trads and think we are ridiculous stick-in-the-muds because we insist on going to mass on Sundays, and don’t eat meat on Fridays.
98% of all people we meet think that we are ridiculous. My brothers are on soccer teams with mostly Catholic teammates and not one of the other families go to mass on Sundays when we travel despite the fact that we give them mass schedules and invite them to go with us. They don’t like the fact that my parents won’t let us watch bad shows, or listen to bad music. Kids in high school tease those of us in highschool because we don’t date, and because we don’t want to know about their latest “sleep-over.” People don’t like to hang out with us because we make them feel guilty for what they are doing. Also, we can’t go see the bad movie with them, or go to their wild party on the weekend.
We are A-OK with it, if my parents suddenly let us do all this, we wouldn’t because my parents have taught us why they don’t let us do these things. That is the thing that we try to explain to people, and the one thing they just don’t get. They don’t understand that because we are this way, because our parents can trust us, we are much more free than they ever will be.
I mean, my parents let me at age 16 and my sister at age 14 go to Germany for six weeks by ourselves. They weren’t afraid that we would do anything bad, they were only worried for our safety, which we were naively unconcerned about.
We are naive about many things because we don’t want to know the dirty details. We are not totally, though, because all we go to public high schools. What is amazing is that people start to stop cussing when we come around, the boys pull up their pants, the girls pull down their skirts, they skip the songs that are full of dirt, they don’t talk bad about teachers, etc…It is amazing how just asking someone nicely not to cuss, will change their whole attitude toward you.
I am not saying that I am great, I have been given so much, but because I have been given much, much is expected of me, so in many ways “innocence is bliss.” Now that I have so much knowledge about right and wrong, I am held to a much higher standard, and it is just as hard as those who were not taught as much and are held to a different standard.
It is hard sometimes not to have friends, but God gave me 3 sisters, 2 brothers and the most wonderful parents in the world, what more could I ask for.
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