Is there an immutable law of honesty and accountability that we owe to one another as humans?

Yesterday I was at the salon and overheard a stylist talking about a conversation with an earlier client, a sixteen year girl.  Amidst the lathering of locks and slathering of products, she revealed her escapades with her boyfriend and her friends and all of the measures she takes to misguide her parents and get away with it.  The stylist wondered aloud if she had a responsibility to share this with her mother (also a client), eventually deciding not to.   What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her?  I beg to differ.

Often, we are afraid to be the messenger.  Afraid of reprisal.  Afraid of offending.  Afraid of taking the initiative.  If no one is putting us on the spot, then it is easier to turn a blind eye and not get involved.  But these crossroads in the inner path reflect our true character as we are called to a truth that goes above and beyond.   Gray areas are viral and have a way of spreading their fingers into every area of our own life, which creates a breakdown of moral structures and eventually the faith paradigm.    If we can stand for nothing beyond the societal trends that we are spoon-fed, then we are no better than children ourselves.   When faced with a confrontation to defend the face of integrity, we cannot sort our choices on a table of transient possibilities (which is the base of our fears).  We have no control over others’ response — neither to us, nor the situation.  We often have no control over the outcome itself other than the information that we find dumped in our lap.  But that alone demands a choice; doing nothing is still doing something.

The flip side of this coin is that of the recipient.  The parent or wife or employer who is seemingly uninformed.  As a parent, I would like to think that I am  intuitive enough to know how to discern and use information pertaining to my children.  And I wonder even if this sacred back-and-forth with a trusted informant isn’t actually an intrinsic component of parenting teenagers.   They are so clandestine and mysterious and haphazard anyway.  It seems natural to form a team that supports and strengthens and shores up the many tides of a sixteen-year-old’s ebbing heart.   And then to have periodic swap meets where reports are delivered and theories presented to secure the easiest path, the surest route, the smoothest transaction of adult for child.    Parents can be clandestine as well!

It is important to acknowledge the fallibility of our children.  I am not one to enshrine my child, as these fortresses often turn either into prisons of perfectionism or into insurmountable walls beyond which our children find themselves without a key.   In our navigation of young lives, we must be as wise as serpents, yet as harmless as doves.  And wisdom sometimes requires outsourcing.

When I was sixteen, I had a couple close friends who knew about my relationship with Dan.  Over the years, I have contemplated how the trajectory of my life could have changed if only one of them had embraced the courage to be confrontational.  Whether with me or with my parents or with his.  Would I have been angry and unreceptive?  Yeah.  Would I have cut ties with them?  Possibly.  Would the next five years have been smoother and closer to ideal?  Likely.   I can’t know how all of the what if’s would have played out and whether I would have come to this same conclusion in that telling of my story, but I do know this:  The price of integrity is of equal – if not greater -  value than that of fear or comfort or whatever keeps us from standing.

I have lived on every side of this equation and in the long run, calling the truth to the surface brings about the best possible result every time.  It really will set people free, just sometimes later rather than sooner.   And as a mother of an adolescent daughter, the most that I can want for her is freedom.  Freedom from lies and mistakes and regrets.  And if we each carry our own burden for honesty and accountability, that we can surely find the easiest path there.  The smoothest transaction of yesterday for tomorrow.