“Cemetery Girl”
http://www.hercircleezine.com/2012/12/13/cemetary-girl/
CEMETERY GIRL by David Bell is about a twelve-year-old girl who goes missing and is returned to her family four years later, at sixteen. The story is told from the point of view of her father. His history is complicated, and has an impact on how he deals with his daughter’s disappearance, and her return. So as to not ruin the plot or suspense, I’ll suffice to say that our worst nightmare may not be the kidnapping of our child, but rather what we learn upon his or her return. While every parent of a kidnapped child wants nothing more than the return of that child, the fact remains that the experience renders every family member changed.
What stays with me as the result of reading this book are the questions that we ask ourselves as parents, as well as the questions we would like to avoid. We all consider when we might allow our children to walk to the park alone, or walk home from school or to a friend’s house. We check with friends, consider our own childhood experiences, and think about the safety of our current block, neighborhood, city or town. We track milestones, possibly mark a wall in a closet or the casing of a bedroom door with physical growth. We keep report cards to measure our children’s academic success and progress. We may cherish and simultaneously regret the first day of kindergarten, graduation from elementary school, the first day of high school and high school graduation. We worry and celebrate the first date, the first time they take the car out alone after getting a license, and freshman year of college.
Some of us talk about sex. We have the “birds and bees” talk, or leave a book on puberty on the night stand in our child’s room. A few of us address burgeoning sexuality, and attempt to normalize the feelings our children may have. How often do we talk about sexual development outside of the girls-develop-breasts-and-get-their-periods and boys-grow-hair-and-get-deeper-voices-and-may-experience-nocturnal-emissions? Yes, it is that awkward and silly, isn’t it? It is extremely challenging for parents to consider the sexual identity of their children. Especially in the United States at this point in our culture and society, our children are no longer children once we consider sex. Or, they remain children and are patronized, even when their burgeoning sexuality becomes obvious. There are the pregnancies and bladder infections that are also discovered to include chlamydia. Even then, most parents don’t address the sexuality of their children. It’s like the pregnancy is the thing we deal with, and we ignore the “how” of it. It’s that we address the antibiotics, and maybe even talk about the importance of condoms, without ever really talking about sex itself. We only talk about sex with our kids as part of reproduction, or when we’re warning them away from it.
What CEMETERY GIRL reminded me of is the fact that there are a lot of unhealthy views of sex and we pass these along to our children. It perpetuates generation after generation. We don’t want to consider that our eleven-year-old children, male or female, may be exploring their bodies, and discovering the pleasures that can be found within them. That’s “too early” for such talks in the minds of most parents. Or, we’re in denial. We say, “Well, other kids may be like that, but my daughter/son is so innocent!” In some instances, that is true. When my daughter took a class sponsored by the local Unitarian Universalist Church entitled “Our Whole Lives,” or “O.W.L.,” there was a girl from her class at school who cried every time the class was held. She was the same age as my daughter, yet was definitely not ready for the information presented.
The point of this article is to encourage us all to know our children. What I mean by that is actually “get to know” our children, rather than assuming that we do. We have to let our children know us, too. No, we don’t have to share details of our sexual lives. Rather, we need to be open, really open, to talking with our children, to figuring out the difference between kids who say, “Oh, no, not more sex talk,” and otherwise handle the information well when we have the talk after talk after talk, and the kids who really aren’t ready for the conversation—truly, and that it’s not us who isn’t ready. We have to make ourselves ready for conversation, too. We have to be honest with our kids. When a friend said she was envious of my ability to talk openly with my own children about sex and sexuality, I told her it was perfectly okay that she wasn’t comfortable, actually. All she had to do was be honest about this with her kids. She didn’t know how to react when her daughter asked questions that she was not sure how to answer. I told her it was okay to let her daughter know that she had no idea how to respond. And, it is. It’s okay to tell our kids that we’re not sure how to answer their questions, or that we may not have the answers, but also that we’ll get them. It’s okay to let our kids know that we want to talk with them, but that while we want a relationship that is more open than that which we had with our own parents, we, too, sometimes may be embarrassed or unsure as to how to talk about topics we find difficult. We must promise them that we’ll work on our own issues with open sex talk as we work on the topics they bring to us. And, we have to uphold that promise.
For a suspenseful read, that will leave you thinking long and hard about what you know about your children, what you may or may not want to know, and how important it might be to have the hard talks, check out CEMETERY GIRL. It’s left me thinking about what I even consider “my worst nightmare” and how having our dearest wish fulfilled can sometimes leave us with more questions, with unanswerable questions, and questions that we don’t really want to have answered possibly. CEMETERY GIRL is suspenseful and compellingly told, from an interesting viewpoint with a very different outcome than the typical thriller in this genre. It will also leave you thinking about your own children, or nieces and nephews, and asking important questions.
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