by being once lost, may be ten times found

My 5-year-old grand-niece calls me Auntie Anne, which I love. Tonight I joked to her that she should not talk to boys until she’s 25, to which my mother-in-law said, “yes you should be like your Auntie Anne, remember?” Which made me laugh, but then I realized that my mother-in-law must hold me up to the kid as a sort of paragon of virginity, because I didn’t have a baby til I was done with my education, as she points out. And, as I told my grand-niece, it’s true that I didn’t even date in high school. It is amazing to me that I could be viewed as a role model for young people given the rebellious path I took as a teenager, but it’s true that I was very lucky. And it’s cool to be in a position to inspire now. There are so many reasons to be "good" that I now understand and that I wish I could figure out how to convey to my son. Trent recently posted about his admirable drug-free record and commented--with a remarkable lack of discretion--that he wasn’t sure what we could tell our son about me. I’m not the least bit worried about that though. I’ve processed that particular journey pretty thoroughly and I like to think I’ll have no problem explaining it to Nugget. The only question to me is, will he hear it? I tend to think that I wouldn’t have listened no matter what anyone told me. I’ve been thinking about faith lately … I guess that’s where it comes in. My mom once asked me, when my sisters were still young, how she could teach my sisters not to be like me? And my response at the time--my faith was much stronger then--was, don’t you believe in god, mom? Isn’t that what faith is for?