OK fellow Catholic parents, this major screw-up needs help!

[blueadept]

Originally Posted by JacarandaPurple

Now I have a 14 year old daughter, just finishing up her first year of high school. I have given her one book that sort of sketched out Catholic womanhood and Theology of the Body in a very basic way, aimed a junior high kids. I plan to give her Theology of the Body for Teens sometime soon. I am trying to do better and give her the education and formation I did not have growing up. I want her to have these concepts in her head from the very beginning of thinking about marriage and her future.

Do you think that I am doing okay in handling this? I don't want her to see me as a hypocrite, because that will discount everything I am trying to teach her in her eyes. I don't want her to lose her faith over me and my less-than-stellar choices.

You're doing well in trying to be an involved parent who isn't leaving the teaching of the Catholic faith to the one hour you drop off your child at your CCD Sunday school and believe you have filled your obligation. I can place a lot of parents in this category.

Your Theology of the Body material is a good start. May I suggest a DVD by Pam Stenzel "Purity is Possible" https://shoppamstenzel.com/p-58-dvd-...ith-based.aspx a very straight-forward DVD on the subject. In my class, I made them do the homework of what they wanted in a spouse. It was a good, worthy assignment that I hope they keep until they do get married.

Other ideas would be to have your daughter involved with the high school ministry where she would be around others who struggle with these issues. Being around a support group with like-minded teens is extremely important for teens.

Another idea is that Steubenville puts on a high school ministry program across the US on the last weekend in July in different cities. Mine attended one in San Diego and it addressed this issue while creating a weekend where the high schoolers encountered Christ in the Eucharist.

Congrats on trying to raise your child differently than how you were raised. I was raised in an active Catholic family growing up but wasn't given the tools to make better decisions when I got to high school and young adulthood which I don't necessarily blame my parents for. In today's times, kids honestly want to learn their faith. The problem is that parents do not know how to teach it. Kudos to you for trying.

[gardenswithkids]

Originally Posted by JacarandaPurple

Ha ha....convenient. Is that the name for the spiritual suffering I've had over this?

Jacaranda, (and others), Paul wrote something about "needing to have a good answer" too. Unlike what you had as a child, you are raising your daughter in the faith and trying to give her a firm foundation. She will face different challenges than the ones you faced.--Her challenges may not seem any easier to her than what yours were to you. Paul's post demonstrated one challenge that your daughter and other children may face.

We want to give our children a sense of "right and wrong" but sometimes we forget how tempting and attractive "wrong" looks. Do go read (as Julianne suggested) the Parable of the Prodigal Son and look at older brother's reaction. Your dd may face temptations as an "older sister". She may not have a parent encourating her to lose her virginity in high school or encourage her to be unchaste, but she might wish she did! She will face temptations against chastity because just about everyone who reaches physical maturity will face temptations against chastity. The fact that you "ran off" and disobeyed the Church teachings may contribute to her struggle, just as the younger brother's actions posed a difficulty for the older brother. The Father had a good response to the older brother in that parable--and as a parent, you should have a good response for your children too.

[Anemone1]

Originally Posted by JacarandaPurple

Some of you may have seen my thread on the Family Life board but since I am new, most of you likely did not.

Here's my problem: I am a Catholic mother of 5 who had her tubes tied. Even though I was under a lot of different pressures at the time, I have read Humanae Vitae, and plenty of works both against it and in favor of it. In short, I cannot claim I was ignorant of Church teaching at the time I did it. I thought it was the best I could do at the time, but immediately had remorse and regret. It took me a couple of months to work up to going to Confession, but I did. So I know that I am forgiven and OK with God on this particular sin.

Now I have a 14 year old daughter, just finishing up her first year of high school. I have given her one book that sort of sketched out Catholic womanhood and Theology of the Body in a very basic way, aimed a junior high kids. I plan to give her Theology of the Body for Teens sometime soon. I am trying to do better and give her the education and formation I did not have growing up. I want her to have these concepts in her head from the very beginning of thinking about marriage and her future.

I was raised by a bitter lapsed Catholic and a fairly promiscuous atheist (divorced)....so this kind of thought was utterly foreign to me when I made my own marriage. My father ridiculed chastity and my mother made it clear that she expected me to lose my virginity in high school. My 14 year old is very mature and she and I are close. She knows about my surgery as she was 10 when I had it. I have talked to her about how I was not raised in the Faith and how it handicapped me in certain ways in trying to truly live out my vocation of marriage. I also told her that I am a sinner, and I chose to disobey the Church, and had to go to Confession for it, and that I am trying to raise her differently so she won't fall into the same trap I did.

Do you think that I am doing okay in handling this? I don't want her to see me as a hypocrite, because that will discount everything I am trying to teach her in her eyes. I don't want her to lose her faith over me and my less-than-stellar choices.

I think it's good to point out the long term consequences of sin on our souls as well.. When I was a teen I didn't know that certain sins were even mortal sins- and what this means to our souls. Especially because everyone was doing it.. how bad could it be right. If I had known the graveness of some of the sins, and what it means to turn our backs on God through mortal sin, I don't think I would have ever done some of the things in my past. I didn't understand purgatory and that each sin while forgiven has punishment attached too. I think teens should know that contraception, sterlization, fornication etc are all grave matters (mortal sins) In my opinion, knowing that this is turning one's back on God is a pretty strong deterrent in itself.

[JacarandaPurple]

To answer a few points that have been raised:

My husband is most definitely on board with raising our kids with a Catholic sexual ethic, both boys and girls. He is actually the best person on the planet to do so, especially for the boys. (P.S. I have permission to share the following.) He was raised in a nominally Catholic, weekly Mass home. His family was not involved in the parish at all though and his mom was raised Presbyterian and is open about her disagreements with the Catholic Church. They never tried to help him or form him in any way when it came to sexuality. Forgive me if this starts to sound angry, but I really despise their cowardice in refusing to get past their discomfort and throwing him literally to the wolves at 15. When he found his first girlfriend, all his father said to him was, "Don't do anything that will get you in trouble." That was the extent of the sexual and dating education he got from his parents. He had no tools for saying no... I am not sure he even realized it was OK for a teenage boy to not want sex. He had a brief sexual relationship with that girlfriend, realized that he was doing the wrong thing, and broke up with her. She understandably became very angry, and I am sure she felt used by this guy who took her virginity, slept with her twice, and then told her to pound sand. (No he didn't say it that way, but I am sure that's how it felt.) What is not understandable is that she hit him in the face with a handful of keys, giving him a scar he bears to this day, and then tried to destroy his future by accusing him of rape. When he told me about it, it was very clear that she was the one pushing for sexual involvement. Anyway, he hated himself for more than two years. He dwelt in a black depression, and his notebooks from that time are truly frightening. Tons of stories about suicide, abandonment, living in alleys..... I still have a hard time being forgiving toward my in-laws for not seeing what was going on with him and getting him some help.... I could have been robbed of a wonderful man had he gone further with his thoughts than he did! Anyway, he said he knew it was wrong the whole time, and he knew he had used her. He knew he never wanted her to have his child, and that if she had gotten pregnant, he would have regarded that as horrible. His soul was so wounded by how wrong it all was and that his own choices had wrought it.

So he knows very intimately the consequences of misusing our sexual capacity. I can count on him to be an ally.

As to having "conveniently removed myself from the struggle" we did try to use NFP before we had our fifth child. We were able to avoid pregnancy, but we knew we probably only wanted (and could handle emotionally, afford financially) one more child, if we had any more. That left at least a decade and likely much more than that where we would have to struggle through my fertile time, every month. With as hard as it was for the time we did do it, we both became convinced it would ruin our marriage long term. Please don't try to debate this with me, we live in our marriage and you don't. We know ourselves and our relationship, and you don't. Aside from other pressures that contributed, we basically decided that our kids needed a happy, intact marriage more than a morally perfect one.

I will do my best to teach my children the right way and support them in it, but I have to be perfectly honest that I am not sure how they will navigate that particular challenge any better than I did. I hope they can find a way, but that will have to be something they figure out in their own marriages with their own spouses. I can give them the map, but I can't go on the journey for them.