peeking into the dark corners of the internet

One of the hard things about making sure your kids aren’t getting into trouble on the internet and watching what they do, is finding out stuff you don’t want to.

Someone in UpperClass Heaven loves me, because my kids…as annoying as they get, are GOOD kids.

As I am typing this I hear Kara and Marina giggling and goofing around as they avoid getting ready to leave for school.
Normally I would be yelling at them to knock it off and just get ready or the’ll be late. This morning, I’m just listening to them laugh at each other.

I’m counting my “I have teenagers” blessings today.

1. Kara is dressed in all black. Not because she’s goth and suicidal, but because she’s wearing her softball uniform for her game later today.

2. The girls are yelling at each other. It’s not because they hate each other, but because they are trying to help each other find backpacks and jackets so they can be to school on time.
3. The girls are giggling like loons. Not because they smoked a bowl in the bedroom before getting up, but because Kara’s being a dork and trying to make Marina laugh.

4. One of them has a band-aid on. Not because they cut themselves, but because they fell down playing.

5. They talk to me. They don’t post messages that say, “I hate my mom, she’s a fucking bitch” on MySpace for all their friends to see.

It’s one of those mornings that I realize how lucky I am. Or is it luck?

Am I lucky that I don’t have to go through my kids rooms and backpacks to find out what is going on in their lives? Am I lucky that I know when they walk out the door to go to school that they actually end up there and not Mr.C’s pool hall? (sorry mom).
Is it luck that I know when something bad is happening in my kids life they don’t go in their room and cut themselves?

No, this isn’t luck. This is parenting. Holy shit, I’m a parent! I’m a damn good one too!
It takes looking at other kids that are leaving horrible messages, cussing left and right, talking about cutting themselves and wanting to die, that you realize…I did something right.

So what did I do right? I raised my kids just like My Mom, The Fonz did. Essentially, I became my mother…minus the .357 in my purse.

If there was something that I didn’t like that she did, I changed it.
I didn’t like that my mom drank when I was younger, so I don’t get drunk in front of the kids…(well, that one time, but who knew merlot could be so good?)
I didn’t like we lived in a mobile home in the middle of the woods, so I moved to Sacramento.
I didn’t like that she threatened to shoot my boyfriends, so I got a camera and I threaten to put incriminating pictures of their boyfriend on the internet.

It’s all about tweeking what our parents did right and wrong.

Now I’m left with what I do with the information I find out about these other kids…like, “I wish my mother was dead because she’s a fucking bitch.”
I understand that we all thought those things, we said them to our friends, we wrote them in our diaries…but these kids are putting stuff out there for the world to see. I would be MORTIFIED if one of the girls did that to me and I found out another parent had seen it.

I’m debating if I call this parent. She’s a single parent with like 3 or 4 kids. I don’t know what kind of parent she is, but if you read what her daughter writes or heard what she says about her…you would think this woman locks her in her room, beats and ignores her. If I say something to this parent, it’s going to be very clear WHO went to her mother and told her what she was saying on the internet and that means my two teenage girls MIGHT get their asses kicked at school.

What would you do? What would you want to know if you were the mother? What do you think?