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Loco Parentis: An Innocent Abroad
A European tour is sure to change my daughter forever. Right?
By Sandy Hingston
- Illustration by Kim Rosen
I’VE DONE ALL THE WORRYING, really, that can be done. I’ve issued warnings about pickpockets, passports and public toilets. I’ve paid all the goddamned money, and then some. Because when your eldest child is departing for Paris And The Château Country, you don’t want her to come up short of pocket change and be the only one who can’t afford to ride up the Eiffel Tower or go punting on the Seine. And now we parents have waved them off, our little A.P. European History scholars, with debit cards tucked in their pockets and iPod adapters in their backpacks and between them all, all 25 of them, plus four chaperones, the inability to say so much as “Where the hell is the bathroom?” in French.
Should be an interesting trip.
It seemed like such a good idea — the perfect way to reward my daughter Marcy for four years of hard work in high school and admission to a college with enough name recognition that I can hold my head up in front of my friends. She’s a fairly responsible child; she doesn’t drink or smoke or do drugs, and she’s not the type to miss a tour bus or run up the Visa card at Chanel. Besides, she begged. “It can be my Christmas and my birthday present,” she offered last autumn, when it was time to make the first deposit. And now she’s hopscotching across France, and I hardly think about her at all, except for the 10 times a day when I check what the weather is in the Loire Valley today and will be in Saint-Malo tomorrow, and try to figure out whether it actually already is tomorrow there because of that confusing time-difference thing, and visit bbc.com to watch for downed airplanes and terrorist activity.
“Are you crying?” Marcy asked me, right before she got on the bus to the airport. “You’re crying, aren’t you?”
Of course I was. I’m not very good at transitions, and this was a big one, the journey that traditionally, for Anglo-Saxons of a certain class, marked the crossover from childhood to adultitude. And that, traditionally, you didn’t let your offspring take until you were ready to let go, because once they’ve seen gay Paree, how are you gonna keep them down on the farm?
“It was a transforming experience for Sam,” a good friend confides of his 17-year-old son’s first voyage abroad. “When he got home, he didn’t look like the same kid.”
That’s what scares me. I like Marcy the way she is — the way she was when she got on that bus. I don’t want her to be transformed.
She could maybe get a little braver, that’s all.
Should be an interesting trip.
It seemed like such a good idea — the perfect way to reward my daughter Marcy for four years of hard work in high school and admission to a college with enough name recognition that I can hold my head up in front of my friends. She’s a fairly responsible child; she doesn’t drink or smoke or do drugs, and she’s not the type to miss a tour bus or run up the Visa card at Chanel. Besides, she begged. “It can be my Christmas and my birthday present,” she offered last autumn, when it was time to make the first deposit. And now she’s hopscotching across France, and I hardly think about her at all, except for the 10 times a day when I check what the weather is in the Loire Valley today and will be in Saint-Malo tomorrow, and try to figure out whether it actually already is tomorrow there because of that confusing time-difference thing, and visit bbc.com to watch for downed airplanes and terrorist activity.
“Are you crying?” Marcy asked me, right before she got on the bus to the airport. “You’re crying, aren’t you?”
Of course I was. I’m not very good at transitions, and this was a big one, the journey that traditionally, for Anglo-Saxons of a certain class, marked the crossover from childhood to adultitude. And that, traditionally, you didn’t let your offspring take until you were ready to let go, because once they’ve seen gay Paree, how are you gonna keep them down on the farm?
“It was a transforming experience for Sam,” a good friend confides of his 17-year-old son’s first voyage abroad. “When he got home, he didn’t look like the same kid.”
That’s what scares me. I like Marcy the way she is — the way she was when she got on that bus. I don’t want her to be transformed.
She could maybe get a little braver, that’s all.
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