The Kitty Circus brings on a new act

Parenting Classes: week one

I think parenting classes are important, and when my kids were little I took parenting classes called "Developing Capable People" and tried to learn to become a better parent. I'm still friends with some of the people I took the classes with, and we have been supportive of each other through some very difficult times in our lives.

I never imagined I'd be teaching parenting classes. I have trouble seeing me, the mom with the dead kid, the failed parent, as the appropriate person to be teaching people how to be good parents. I'm half serious when I say that at any minute someone is going to ask what I did to end up with a dead child. I mean really, it would be helpful to know, wouldn't it? I personally would like to know what I did or didn't do that led to my daughter's suicide. My husband sees our 18 year old daughter as an adult responsible for her own choices and actions. I see our daughter just entering adulthood with the biology and environment we'd given her...so what went wrong?

I think parenting classes could be a wonderful step in building community at Citrus. And since our grant requires us to provide them, Citrus Parenting University, here we come! We invite them personally, we feed them dinner, we provide child care, and six of the nicest people you'd ever want to work with get to teach classes in three languages.

This program features the 40 developmental assets, so my part was to explain that the more of these assets that were a part of a child's life, the less likely the child was to engage in risky behaviors, such as alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, criminal behavior, depression and suicide attempts, and the higher their GPA would be in school.

So the whole time I'm teaching it, I'm like shit, I wonder which ones I missed giving my daughter. Not something that should be going through a presenter's mind. Ten or fewer assets and the child was seriously at risk, 11 to 20 assets and the child was still at a substantial risk, so the goal was to move the children of all of the families present into the 21 to 30 asset range, where the statistics were looking a whole lot safer. The program promises it's possible to get all of the children into this 21 to 30 assets range by the end of the seven week course.

I'm still looking for the magic wand in the supply box, it's gotta be there. How else are we going to keep all these kids safe from all of that?

And maybe it's just because I'm annoyed, but I'm getting tired of talking about assets, it's just an awkward word when you say it over and over in a presentation, you know? It sounds like sets of ass or something. There must be a better term for it.

And I spent way too many sleepless nights last week wondering what I got wrong, what I missed.