There will always be parents going to extremes to gather intel or spy on their children. They will say it is to make sure they are staying out of trouble or to keep them safe in today’s world. While that sounds like a caring sentiment, boiled down, is it really?
Back in the 80’s and 90’s, parents had to find out about their child’s innermost thoughts and secrets via a hand-written diary or journal. Today, there’s a tiny computer tethered to them that contains written messages to friends, their social media posts across a multitude of platforms, and all of their pictures now that phones double as cameras.
There are maps and apps which tell us exactly where our children are at any given time and some that monitor all of their online activity down to every typed and received message. There are Ring cameras next to front doors to tell parents who is coming over to the house and when their child is leaving the house. Think about that for a second- there is almost zero privacy for the kids of today.
Because of the excessive amount of communication and information that is globally available to them, it does make sense that we have to be very cautious with regard to what our children are exposed to now that technology is bundled up in a convenient little device that fits in one’s pocket. On top of internet predators and safety worries, there will always be the sketchy friends, parties, sex, drugs, etc. to worry about.
While I do understand the need to make sure your child is safe, I struggle with the mindset of invading their privacy at every turn and thinking that it is your right to do so as their parent. I’m more along the line of thinking that open communication and discussions, although sometimes uncomfortable for both parties, is the way to go.
Independence is a necessary part of life; I often wonder what the repercussions will be of this helicopter epidemic. There is a reason this is such a crucial topic for me personally. I am the product of surveillance gone catastrophically wrong. The most painful time of my life was based on a betrayal and overreaction of such significant proportions, it would end up changing my life forever. It is why I will always choose to be forthcoming with my children about my concerns for their safety-even if it involves questioning and story-telling that invokes squirming and embarrassment. It is also why I am a huge proponent of encouraging independence over non-stop virtual investigation. A little thing called trust can do wonders for your relationship with your kids. It can also help your kids to be savvy about their own safety instead of having the parental thumb to protect them from afar at all times.
My Experience
In 2003, my boyfriend of about a year and half was going to be meeting me near one of the baggage claims at Laguardia airport. As I approached the area just before the baggage claim, his features came into focus and I saw that his cheeks were stained with tears and he was holding a bouquet of flowers.
While we had been apart for four days, I was not anticipating such an emotional reunion. I had just gone on my very first family vacation with my mother and sister to the Bahamas at the age of twenty-four; it would have made a lot more sense if he was standing there smiling versus crying.
When I reached him, he embraced me so tightly, I thought I might suffocate. With both hands on my shoulders, he leaned back and looked at my face with a mixture of pity, love, and sadness. “I’m so sorry…I have to tell you something. So, um, I read your diaries. Please don’t be mad at me. I just never knew….I just feel so bad. I love you so much. I need to marry you and love the hell out of you. You need to be loved. I’m just so sorry!”
I didn’t know whether to be pissed at the obvious invasion of privacy or to cry at the beautiful and somewhat poetic profession of his need to love me and give me what he felt I so inherently deserved.
The ride back to our apartment was filled with a question-and-answer session to help him fill in the blanks. It gave me the idea that I should really go back and read through them all, beginning to end.
That night, I dove into those pages of memories. Surprisingly, I had never read through them start to finish. I had started my first diary at seven years old and continued writing regularly until I was about twenty-one. I knew that the most upsetting journal entries were about my father around my first and second years of high school. While my Dad was pretty incredible when I was young, things changed shortly after he got custody of my sister, at the age of twelve, and me, at fourteen.
My memories up until about fourteen are filled with trips to Six Flags, summer visits to the dunes in Michigan, holidays with family friends, several trips to pet stores to snuggle all the animals, mini-golf, movies, bowling, hikes, fishing, camping, and anything that involved moving around and being active. I was of the mind that since he was getting custody, it would change our lives for the better, which is why it was so shocking when things took such a drastic turn.
The summer after my freshman year is when everything blew up. I was grounded with no TV or radio allowed since I had reacted “badly” to the new rule book given to us one day after their return from their Honeymoon. Our new Step monster spent the better part of her first day back at work proudly typing all the rules for her two new step daughters.
With rules like, “If you have the time to suntan, you have the time to clean”, and “Hair must be worn in a bun at all times, if a strand of hair is found, you will be grounded”, you can imagine we were less than thrilled. The sweet, fun girlfriend we knew was out the window, and her new title as Stepmom morphed her personality in mere days. It became evident she had mental challenges that included OCD and bi-polar disorder.
While grounded that summer for the many arguments that ensued surrounding my dad and step-mom’s demand for me to greet them with a home-cooked meal and sparkling home every night after work, as well as a thwarted runaway attempt, I read books and mostly watched T.V.
It was during one of these days of being stuck in the house that things imploded. I remember it was a perfect beautiful summer day and I was in the basement, lying on the couch while reading a book. Dad came flying into the room, grabbed my two feet and yanked them so hard that I fell off the couch, smacking the back of my head on the basement’s thin Berber carpet. He dragged me by my feet through the sitting area of the basement, all the way down the hall and stopped at the door of my bedroom. I was so confused and terrified that my whole body began to shake.
What was happening? My father had never hit us. At worst, he would drill his pointer finger into the little nook where the shoulder meets the collar bone, but that was it. I shouted to him asking him to please tell me what he was doing. I pleaded, “Why are you doing this? What did I do ?”
No answer.
He told me to stand up and pinned me against the wall. Then he said things like: “You are a horrible child! You are a drunk! You are despicable! How could you do this? I hate you!” A quick unimaginable thought that I might die right here buzzed by. Would I be suffocated by the hands of my own loving father that was having some sort of psychotic meltdown? He was ranting, crying, and spitting at me. I’m sure my brain makes this memory foggy on purpose because it just about broke my fifteen-year-old self.
He told me to get in my room and shut the door. I lay there combing through my brain trying to figure out what I had done. The only hint was that he had called me “a drunk”. I thought back to a party I had gone to recently where I had my first beer. I also remembered a ride I had taken to a liquor store with a friend of mine’s brother. He was this handsome, edgy-in-a-sort-of- dangerous-way type of guy. I barely knew him or much about him since I’d only met him once or twice. He smoked pot and cigarettes and had access to beer. His bad boy looks and vibe scared me in an exhilarating kind of way. My interaction with him involved me waiting in the car while he ran in to buy some beer for himself, his brother, my girlfriend and me. Later that day, we smooched just before I left.
It was the most daring thing I had ever done- kissing my friend’s older brother and having someone buy me and my friend some beer.
I ran Dad’s words through my head again and again. Why would he have said I was a drunk? I thought about the time I was hanging out with my friends Edwin and Brett at someone’s house party. The party was mostly twenty-somethings, and we were all giddy, laughing, and having a good time. Someone there offered each of us a Budweiser. I shrugged, took the beer, popped the top and took a few sips. About halfway through the beer, I started to feel like the room was tilting and while my friends and I were laughing and having fun, I took notice there weren’t too many girls around, and let my friends know I should get going. My ride home was my friend, Brett. He was a year older, but in the same grade as me. This meant he had a driver’s license and a car one year ahead of the rest of us.
I remember thinking it was the greatest thing to have a friend with a car, and a good one I could trust and count on. But how could my dad know these two instances I had with alcohol? Or that I had smooched this rough-around-the-edges guy? It just wasn’t possible, and it certainly didn’t warrant this kind of reaction.
I was a responsible kid, I was on the cheerleading team, I did my homework, I didn’t skip school, I was respectful of my parents, I was petrified of doing drugs, and no matter how often I was offered them, I always prided myself on saying no.
My sister and I were both banished to our rooms “until further notice”. When we asked about dinner, Dad laughed. Fortunately, my sister was allowed to come down and be with me in my room. We held each other and cried, desperate to figure out what we had done wrong to upset him this badly.
In the morning, I was stopped short of buttering an English muffin and told that I was not allowed to eat.
“You’re both mooches. Mooches don’t get to eat.”
Dad said, looking like a total creep, slowly emerging from behind the hallway wall. I remember wondering how long he had been standing there watching me in disgust as I prepared the English muffin I would not be allowed to eat.
I returned downstairs where we would remain for two more days. My cool room in the basement was beginning to feel like a jail cell. My sister and I sat and talked about what the worst thing we had ever done could possibly be. What if it was the one thing Dad found out about? The things we came up with just didn’t seem bad enough to warrant locking us in the basement and keeping us from eating. This feels Impossible-we thought.
Also, if my two dabbles with beer had caused him this much anger, I felt beyond worried for his mental state. We developed a plan to wait until the grandfather clock on the main floor of the house had gonged twice so that we knew it was two a.m. They would be fast asleep, and I could sneak up and steal Saltine crackers for us to eat and a few glasses of water. As the days passed by, each one felt longer than the next.
On the third day of basement banishment, Dad and the Step monster called us upstairs to talk. They unleashed the bomb. For three months, our phones had been tapped, photographs had been taken of us, and a private investigator was hired to follow us. It was then I learned the bad boy I locked lips with was some sort of drug dealer in the community and the police knew him well. While still trying to process that every phone conversation I had had for months had been taped, and that I had been physically followed around, learning details I was unaware of about my friend’s brother didn’t seem like a big deal to me.
What did that have to do with the punishment I was receiving? It had nothing to do with me that he was a drug dealer. I kept rebutting their comments with questions like “Why?” and “I don’t understand what this guy being a drug dealer has to do with me?”
The sucker punch was when they made it clear that it was THE reason for my punishment. If he was a drug dealer, I must’ve been his drug buyer. If I had kissed him, which I giddily had spoken about on one of the recorded phone calls with my friend, Nikki, that must have made him my boyfriend.
So not only was I guilty of doing drugs just for being in the presence of this dude, I was also automatically his significant other.
Also, the hypocrisy was astounding — I had caught my dad on many occasions smoking marijuana, only to be told for most of my childhood it was incense. To my core, I knew he had a problem with it. Was he projecting his regret onto me? Since my mother was a big drinker, was he jumping to conclusions that I had a drinking problem at 15?
Not only had the most extreme invasion of privacy just taken place by the one person in my life I trusted the most and loved so much, but the accusations coming at me were all wrong.
“What do you have to say for yourselves? You owe us the biggest apology of your lives!” they had demanded.
We sat frozen. The word WHY kept soaring through my head. I felt an anger I had never known rise up from my gut and screamed as loud as my raspy voice would allow.
WHY, just WHY had they done this? We were good kids, we hadn’t given them any reason to do something like this. I didn’t understand, and it felt like I was watching myself outside of my body, no longer in control of my emotions.
Dad said he came up with the idea because his boss had hired someone to spy on his kids. Shocked at what he had found out, he recommended it to my father. This was the story they told us, but it didn’t add up. In fact, my fifteen-year-old self didn’t yet know that it would take decades for me to eventually discover the real reason behind his sleuthing.
My heart was so raw and so broken with disbelief, I thought it might fall in two halves out of my chest and break into a million pieces on the table.
Following this conversation, I was sent back to the basement where I would spend more days – and this time in solitary confinement. My sister stayed and spoke with them and was later sent upstairs to her bedroom following their chat.
I journaled during those very dark days to keep myself going. I knew I had to get this information to Mom, but how? The phones were likely still tapped. We needed to get out of this house, something was off, something had snapped in my father, and the look in his eyes scared the hell out of me.
The following day, a police officer came to our home and stayed for about an hour. He explained that my sister and I were on a path to delinquency, that we would end up in juvenile detention and that we should understand that our father and stepmother could hit us, starve us, ground us, verbally abuse us whenever and however they wanted because we were under eighteen and had no rights.
At this point, my sister and I looked at one another, and over to our father, who was the personification of smug.
“That’s right, and don’t think that military boarding school isn’t on the table ladies. We’re strongly considering it.”
My stomach lurched and bile burned the back of my throat as I held it down. My head began to spin as I visualized all the ways out of this situation I could imagine. Ending my life felt plausible in those moments.
They could abuse us legally? We had no rights?
It felt like a lie, but it was coming from a cop, so how could it not be true?
He left and wished us on a better path forward. I made my way back down to my dungeon.
While we had attended religious classes at a place called AWANA occasionally for a few years, I was not a very religious person. I was in touch with my spiritual side though, and I would often pray and beg for a way out of this situation through the writings in my diary.
The Step monster had taught my sister and I how to pray the rosary, and bought us the beads. I prayed that rosary anywhere from thirty to fifty times a day begging for Mary, Jesus, God, or whoever was up there, to help get me away from my psychologically fragile dad and his volatile OCD wife. I begged the mystical powers that be to give me a terminal illness, or for my mom to burst down those basement steps and into my room with a flowing red cape on, whisking me away to a home of safety and love. I wanted to be anywhere but in that basement. I had already spent so much of my summer there.
And then, after about a week, my prayers were answered.
I was praying the rosary for the umpteenth time that morning, while simultaneously planning to shatter the small basement window, shimmy my body through, and run until I couldn’t run anymore, when my dad threw himself into my room and told me to pack one small bag.
The butterflies in my stomach fluttered around maniacally.
“Remove your contacts from your eyes. Leave your eyeglasses behind also. You only get to pack what you can fit into your school backpack. Give me your address book too so I can phone all your friends’ parents to tell them what a bad influence and kid you are. You’re going to wind up in the ghetto, you know. You’ll probably drop out of high school too. What a lazy ass, slob you are.”
My father continued to hurl insults, trying as best he could to hurt me worse than he had with the last. He would make sure I had no friends left in my life, he smiled as he said that one.
“I’ll be calling your cheer coach to tell them to drop you from the team.”
This made me nervous, I loved cheerleading, and I had missed summer cheer camp, so there was already one strike against me.
“I’ve been thinking about you having my last name. I’ve never really been convinced you’re my real daughter. I may write the local papers and tell them you are officially disowned from me and you don’t really belong to me anyway. You should consider dropping my last name. Your sister looks just like me, but you never have.”
The things that came out of his mouth continued to jackhammer into my heart so hard it felt like fragments of my very being were breaking away from me and leaving me forever.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked, afraid to show any inkling of happiness out of fear he’d renege on me being allowed to exit the basement.
“To your mother’s. You two belong together. You’re the same.”
He was emotionless.
As I walked down the hallway one last time to the front door, I looked around confused. Where was my sister?
I had expected her to be standing there, waiting for me, to have her bag slung over her shoulder as I did, and for us to walk out the door hand in hand back to Mom’s apartment.
He shouted to her. Then I saw her, sitting at the kitchen table, a forlorn look shadowed across her face.
“Have you decided what you’re doing? Will you go with your sister back to your mother’s or will you stay here? Make the decision right now, we are leaving!”
My sister looked at me and looked away.
“I’ll stay here.”
I opened the door, crossed the threshold and never looked back.
***
We pulled up the steep hill of their driveway to exit out to the main road and the Step monster said, “Take a long last look at this beautiful dream home because it is the last time you will ever see it. You are going back to the poorhouse with your scum of a mother.”
Whenever my dad’s wife was angry, she would climb up on the passenger seat in a squatting position. This is the stance she was in when she threw a giant 536 page book at me and said,
“Here! You’re gonna need this!”
The enormous book was entitled Take Care of Yourself: Your Personal Guide to Self-Care and Preventing Illness by Donald M. Vickery, James F. Fries.
The rest of that twenty-five-minute ride, I stared out the window trying my best to drown out the insults that came my way from the two of them.
At last, when he pulled his Jaguar into Mom’s apartment complex, he opened the trunk, grabbed my backpack and threw it past me, toward the main building door. The last words I would ever hear from my dad were something to the effect of
“Have a nice life you fucking piece of white trash! I’m sure you’ll marry a loser and you’ll never amount to anything!”
Harsh words for a 15-year-old that had had some beer and unknowingly kissed a drug dealer.
Mom hadn’t been expecting me. She answered when I buzzed her apartment, but she was nervous and wary. She distrusted anything my father ever did and thought it was a trick.
At first, she refused to buzz me in until I wailed through the intercom that he had dumped me there and I had nowhere to go. I had never been happier and more relieved in my entire life when my mother opened that door and embraced me. I crumpled into her and sobbed for hours telling her everything. The reality also settled in that I’d likely never live with or go to school with my sister again. I also didn’t know at the time that I’d rarely see my sister after that dramatic day.
Mom wasn’t sure how we’d make it financially, and she had valid reasons to feel concerned. She wasn’t prepared to have to buy me all new clothes, glasses, contacts, a bed, food, etc. We’d have to figure out next steps.
I didn’t care, I was just elated to be away from two unhinged people and feel the beauty of my freedom, not to mention a full belly of food.
As for my stance on parents going behind their child’s back to spy on them, as you see from my story, it can rip families apart. Things can be taken out of context, you can jump to conclusions that aren’t really the truth about your child, wreaking havoc on your relationship.
Your child has friends so they can say the things they can’t necessarily say to their parents. Parents are not meant to hear every thought or experience their child has. Kids need to fall down, have experiences with toxic people, get their hearts broken, and take risks. It takes a village, remember? Not an overprotective or overbearing authoritative figure.
The perfect analogy is the story of the caterpillar- it cannot use its wings to fly once it becomes a butterfly unless it struggles out of the chrysalis first. The struggle is what makes its wings strong enough to lift off and carry itself.
Invading your child’s privacy can cause them to turn on you, to have trust issues, to never let their guard down in life. Let us not forget there is also a sting of betrayal that is very hard to wash away.
This July, in the year 2024, marks 30 years without my father in my life. I wonder if I ever cross his mind, and if he still thinks it was all worth it.
My oldest son turned 15 this month. He is exactly the age I was in exactly the month it was when all of this happened with my family. I’m beyond proud of him. That pride will remain, regardless of the mistakes he’ll make. Failures will never impact the love I have for him; that goes for both my boys.
A parent’s love is supposed to be unconditional, and I feel an immense sense of peace knowing I will not continue the cycle of mistreatment, verbal abuse, and abandonment for my children.
***
I remember closing my diaries after reading them through for the first time after returning from the airport. I appreciated my boyfriend’s immediate honesty and apology for reading them. His reading my diaries was the catalyst that prompted me to read them and to share this story from my childhood.
Now, as my husband, and over 20 years later, he still seems to love me in a way I did not think was possible from a man.
Amber Colored Glasses 