From the local... ice cream parlor? From this unlikely location, a teacher at the school my son attended last year - but where he won't be next year. Not, not because of this -- is calling to inform us a student who was with my son in some classes last year thinks my son is suicidal. We're utterly puzzled by this. Son gets up and goes "Oh, for heaven's sake *Name*. He's so THICK. I'll deal with it." The teacher goes on to PRISSILY inform us it's her LEGAL obligation to call us, when a student tells her this. (I'm fairly sure this is wrong. Or at least I hope so. Please tell me Colorado hasn't gone off the deep end to the point of empowering teachers to bug me during summer vacation? I mean, during school, it might very well be her obligation, though even that I'd consider pushing it.)

My husband gets rid of the busy- old bid- uh... teacher Grundy as best he can, while I go to look at the boy's Facebook account, which occasioned this call. My son, apparently unaware that he's living under a microscope, has been posting... Jazz lyrics. He loves Jazz, he finds the lyrics funny/interesting, and he'd posted some depressive ones with "this makes no sense at all." And THIS is enough for us to get a call from someone who hasn't seen the kid in a month and a half and who hasn't read the kid's page, but who was told by another teen that he had posted something that MIGHT be suicidal.

This bothered me. It bothered me because number two son is at least as "odd" - outlier is the polite term - as I was at his age. In fact, he could be considered a male updating of my own adolescence, except he's much, much better behaved. (How was I? Well... black work boots, black jeans, black t-shirts. You get the picture. People routinely offered to sell me guns in the train station.) I fancied myself just as much of a tortured being... No, far more of a tortured being than he does. All an attempt to be interesting, of course, because I suspected I wasn't.

The best reaction any teacher ever had to my writing a suicidal poem on the blackboard before class was to correct my meter. Taught me two things - that my meter was wrong and that I was a self-important ass. Though correcting the second took several more years and I still occasionally have relapses. When I think of all the other things I did in the silly season of my life - say between 12 and 25 - and I think of the society we live in today, I don't think I would survive now. They would have me medicated, intervened, observed or whatever till I really wanted to kill myself just to escape them.

I had to friend the kid on facebook and actually look at his page periodically to make sure he's not giving Mrs. Grundy the wrong idea, because - what's next? They'll decide he's abused? They'll decide he needs psychological intervention? What?

Maybe I'm more an outlier than I thought, but I don't believe so. I believe most teenagers go through a period of self-dramatization which often includes faking depression or at least deep thoughts and world-weariness. Yes, I do understand some children are truly depressed. Yes, I understand unlike my family, most households have two parents who work outside the house and not a parent who works at a real job and one who works AROUND the house, toting laptop and complaining about people who don't exist. Yes, I do understand that a life could be saved by this type of phone call.

However, I'll hazard a guess that in 99.9% of the cases - particularly cases like this, where the teacher was going on the word of an excitable, probably self-dramatizing, possibly low-reading-comprehension teenager - this is all nonsense. At best you bother a family going about its lawful occasions and annoy the mother who is - I grant you - by nature somewhat excitable. At worst you bother parents who do work outside the home and have no idea of their kid's mental state and worry them into sending the kid to a psychologist for being... a teenager.

In fact, I'll also hazard you're potentially endangering as many lives as you're saving. Do you remember being a teen? I do. You often think you're depressed but you're not sure. Being able to talk to friends or a group of friends or even to act out in a social medium like face book, is very often enough to get rid of morbid thoughts that, were they allowed to fester, could turn into suicide.

But if as a teen you suspect your buddy, your face book friends, your teacher, are all finks ready to turn you in to the authorities for insufficient happiness, which will then become a mark on your record, you will not talk.

The problem as I see it is that the soft paws of a "caring society" a lot of it either aided and abetted by intrusive social structures (Someone please tell me that teacher Grundy only imagines it to be her duty to report on teen gossip!) which empowers the inevitable percentage of little napoleons in the population, is trying to take on the functions of the family.

A properly functioning family is a pain in the behind. They ask you questions you'd rather not answer. They poke the insufficiently healed scabs of incidents you'd rather not recall. They make you clean your room and take medicine even if you don't want to. They also - if the family is properly functioning - know you better than anyone else and can use humor to cajole you and turn the situation around.

Society at large isn't your family. It is grossly unsuited to take on the duties of a family. It doesn't know you, not to that level. It thinks Jazz lyrics are a suicide note, even if you preface it with a mocking comment. It thinks reading or writing horror/vampires/science fiction/elves makes you a strange, dangerous being.

It seems to me we've got the public and private sphere all confused and tangled up. It seems to me we're trying to use the intrusive power of institutions and the more or less forced "compassion" of strangers to do what moms and dads should do.

What? After depriving these kids of climbing structures, of teeter totters, of the ability to go exploring in caves or just walking after dark around the neighborhood (any parent allowing their kid to do half the things in Tom Sawyer would be liable to prosecution under child neglect laws), we're depriving them even of dangers in their own minds? We're depriving them of the opportunity to try on depression? Doomed passion? Suicidal thoughts?

If we don't let them stretch their emotional and psychological muscles, what do we expect them to become? Oatmeal-neutral citizens, going through life with a smiley face plastered on their features? Or infantile children of the mother-society who continuously walks behind them to make sure they don't stumble?

Dear Mrs. Grundy, stop it. Just stop it. I am my kids' mother and I'm adult enough to take responsibility for looking after them. And if I fail it will be tragic but no one else's fault. Society at large has no skin in this game. Don't give me "we all feel it" or "we are all connected" or "every child is precious" or some such nonsense. You do not feel it. You don't know this kid. You do not know me.

Forget what you've seen on Oprah and Doctor Phil and whatever other "caring" show is on right now. We're not all decanted from some mold in the same factory. Some of us are born weird if "weird" is defined as not fitting the majority. Weird does not mean non functional. A healthy society needs outliers. We are the ones who think outside the box.

We reserve the right to be weird. Leave me and the other outliers alone. I'm not a myopic duckling. And you are NOT my mother.