Posted 3:47 PM by Bonnie

When was the first time you surprised, shocked, awed, or in some way made your parents look at you differently?

I was sitting in my bubble bath tonight, sipping on a glass of wine and thinking about poetry. Probably because of the last blog I wrote. Then a memory surfaced. I was 15 and had a reputation for being a bit boy crazy. I had to write a poem for English class and my parents knew I had been working on mine and I am quite sure they thought it would be a sappy love poem or somehow involving boys.

When I finished my father challenged me to read it to him and my mother. I could tell by the tone of his voice they were ready to ridicule me for my poem. So, I read…

The wind is a beauty unseen,
Invisible to the human eye,
For our sight is not so keen,
To watch it as it goes by.

It rocks the birds to sleep each night,
As it whispers through the trees,
Singing sweet lullabies,
In it’s soft and soothing breeze.

I can’t remember all of it, but I do remember how quiet my parents were as I read. When I stopped I looked up and the looks on their faces told me this is not what they had expected. That they had seen a different side of me they had not seen before and their preconceived notions of who I was had been shattered in that brief moment. Their airhead, boy crazy daughter, actually thought deeper than they knew she could. All my father said, with a surprise tone in his voice, was “that was good” and my mother just said “yes, it was.” They both turned and walked into the living room and I stood smiling at their backs somehow feeling victorious in making them see a different me and making them understand that yes, I liked boys, but there was a whole lot more to me than just that.

So, I was wondering if anyone else remembered the first time they made their parents see them differently.