Confessions of a revolting teenager

In my final school assembly at Kormilda College last year I was asked to speak on “making right choices” (for four minutes!). My role at Kormilda was a funny one: I attempted to address it as a sort of “pre-evangelistic” role, putting out possibilities for life orientation, possibilities to arm everyone from atheist to pentecostal with some basis for navigating through life. Obviously with only about ten minutes per term contact with most students, and that en masse rather than face to face, I am hardly likely to have had life-shattering impact. (Funnily enough I still maintain contact with the chaplain from my secondary school, but he had far more contact with all of us than ten minutes per term).

I am reminded of a story from my atheistic teenage years. My mother was visiting me for the Easter weekend at my boarding school – she was far too poor to stay in a motel or hotel, so she stayed in cabins at the local caravan park (there was no overnight leave permitted). Of course I was a revolting teenager, and of course I found this poverty statement excruciatingly embarrassing – it was bad enough, perhaps worse, that she drove a Vauxhall Viva, parking it amongst all the nice shiny latest model Holdens, Fords and Chryslers and the scattered Daimlers and Jaguars. Oh the shame!

One night as she was reversing out of the cabin parking spot she failed to see one of the caravan power point poles. With a sickening crunch she knocked it over. There was not a soul in sight. She verbalised her angst: “I suppose no-one saw it? No-one would know …” . Though I said nothing I mentally willed her to get the hell out of there, so that I (it was, after all, all about me, for I was a teenager) did not have to endure any further shame. Conscience, though, prevailed, and she went and reported the damage to the park manager.

She emerged from the office chuckling. The manager was tickled pink: in his many years of managing the place he had never before had a driver turn up to confess to knocking over a pole when no one had seen it happen.

Even in the depths of my adolescent solipsism* I was secretly proud of the old girl (as we referred to our parents, of course). Making right choices is not always easy, yet she had battled through and come up trumps. It was 25 years before I ever told her, and when I did she did not remember the event at all. But I think she was kind of chuffed that I did. Oh, and it’s given me a useful four minute reflection for a Darwin secondary school’s assembly.

*Solipsism? Technically in philosophy it is the theory that “the self” is the only thing that can be verified, “all that can be known to exist.”  I use it here to refer to the attitude that the self is the most important thing in the universe, or, as the advertisers woefully express it, “the most important person in the world: you.”