Dear Amritsar,
My daughter, Palumbria, has always been a willful child. When she was only six years old, she wrote a will where she gave her best friend, Precambria, all of her Barbie dolls and, for some reason, donated all of her underwear to science. Honestly! I don’t know where she gets her ideas from!
Okay, well, actually, Bud and I had been watching a lot of the Death Network around that time – America’s Funniest Mortuary Videos always cracked us up! – so, maybe it isn’t hard to figure out where she got that idea from. Still, young girls + strange ideas = trouble. I believe it was Stephen Hawking who first codified this ancient bit of wisdom into a trite but true formula. Or, maybe it was Ann Landers.
Aaaaaaanyhoooo…
When she was 16, Palumbria started to have textversations with somebody named “dalek.skrulk.” Bud and I – Bud is a…a close personal friend of mine. I mean, a woman gets lonely and…has needs, and…and, this isn’t about me, okay? – Bud and I, we didn’t think anything of it. We figured it was just some kid around her age enjoying delusions of vast destructive powers. You know how teenage boys are.
Well! Imagine our surprise when she brought a dalek home for dinner!
It was very polite – it hardly exterminated anything at all and, in any case, Floopsie was very old and would probably have had to be put down soon, anyway, so no great loss. Still, you can imagine the row we had afterwards.
“I absolutely forbid you to go out with a sworn enemy of the human race!” I shouted.
“I love dalek skrulk,” she shouted back. “And, he…well, he says he isn’t capable of love, but I know that if he just sees how good I can treat him, how good a person I am, he will find it in him to love me! You just don’t understand us!”
Well! We tried everything. We locked Palumbria in her room, but we soon found that somebody had blasted a hole in the wall that allowed her to leave. We sent her to a psychiatrist, but when she told him that all of his ink blots looked like dead animals oozing blood, he gave us back our money and left town. We even asked for the help of an exorcist, but we all agreed that he was just boring and, after 15 minutes, Bud kicked him out of the house.
We were desperate, so we did what any parents and their significant others concerned about their child’s future would do.
We kicked Palumbria out of the house.
It’s been two months, and we haven’t heard from our daughter. Oh, Amritsar, did we do the right thing?
Aubrey “Bob” Reyes
Hey, Babe,
You would be surprised at how often I get asked variations of this question. My son has brought home a Cylon and wants us to let it stay overnight in his room – what should I do? My daughter has fallen head over heels for a terminator – she talks to him on Skype 50 times a day – what should I do? Our daughter Maxine has been threatening to run away and join the Borg if we don’t get her a pony – what should I do?
I always tell people the same thing: teenagers are at a very delicate time in their lives when they are starting to assert their individuality and take control of their circumstances. They won’t always make the best decisions – remember when you had a crush on that Martian invader when you were a teenager? – but you have to give them the space to make their own mistakes. This is how children learn and grow into the adults that, if not exactly what we would like them to be, we can at least find some way to live with.
At the same time, you need to immediately alert authorities that a threat to humanity has appeared in your dining room and asked for second helpings of mashed potatoes. Helping your children grow into strong, confident adults is much more difficult if their home world has been reduced to rubble by alien invaders. The one exception may actually be the daleks: in their case, a mysterious traveler called “The Doctor” (even though nobody has ever seen a degree from an accredited medical school with his name on it) usually appears to save the day.
Oh, and, babe, since I have you here, I gotta ask: what’s the point of asking me for help after you’ve kicked your daughter out of the house? Talk about closing the barn door after the genetically re-emergent mastadon has escaped! Not much I can do now – your daughter is probably being fitted with a plunger nose even as we speak!
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service’s sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: I cannot stress enough how good an idea it is to submit your question to me BEFORE you take irreversible action. I’m here to help, not to judge. But, in my judgment, I can’t help you if you don’t help me. Deal? Deal.