This story is about someone who straddled the line between being a friend and being a friend of a friend. I knew her and her family, liked them, and wouldn’t have minded calling her a friend, but there is no doubt that I knew her mostly through a shared friend. As such, much of this story is hearsay coming indirectly from third parties, but I’ll do my best to retell it accurately.

[Friend] and her husband already had a teenager and a younger child, but they decided to become foster parents, as well. They put in a lot of work, going to training classes, getting their home inspected, and otherwise getting approved to foster. Their first foster child was supposed to be a baby girl with some extra health needs, but at the last minute, they found out they were getting her twin brother, as well.

Then, practically the moment the twins showed up at their door, [Husband] suddenly had something come up that had to be handled out of state. I don’t want to go into details as I suspect I’d get them wrong if I did, but all that matters was that it was completely unexpected, vitally important for him to address, and would keep him away for at least a couple of weeks and potentially longer. Meanwhile, [Friend] had some less severe life issues of her own come up to further distract her.

With the foster kids suddenly becoming a significantly larger strain on the poor foster mother than originally planned, there was serious talk of surrendering the twins back to the foster system, though apparently this region — possibly all regions out there — had a significant shortage of qualified foster parents, so the couple was worried about where the twins would end up.

Then, the couple’s fifteen-year-old son heard they were considering giving up on their first-ever foster assignment, and he wouldn’t hear of it. He begged his mother not to give the twins back and insisted he would step up and use his remaining summer vacation to fill in for the missing husband caring for the twins if his mother would keep them.

Everyone I spoke to agreed on a few things here. First, this was [Son]’s sincere desire, not something forced on him by his parents; in fact, they were the ones hesitant to ask their son to take on such a responsibility. Second, despite his youth, [Son] was great with the twins and really was putting a significant amount of effort into helping his mother to care for them.

Eventually, the foster family was at an event I attended. I’d already been talking [Friend], who was currently burping and trying to put the foster son to sleep. I then found [Son] trying hard to get a fussy and unhappy baby girl to accept her bottle. The kid looked tired in a way that suggested he had not gotten enough sleep last night, likely thanks to the tiny tyrant who was currently refusing her bottle.

Me: *To [Son]* “How are things going helping with the foster kids?”

His response was in a jovial tone but with a bit of strain behind the words that suggested to me that there might be a bit more honesty in them than he was letting on.

Son: “I found out a week ago that I was going to have to play father to two babies without warning, and they haven’t let me sleep yet. I’m still a virgin; I’m supposed to at least get to have sex before I have to deal with babies!”

Seeing he was tired and having heard how well he was helping out, I offered to take the girl from him to give him a bit of a break to enjoy the event. He pulled the little bundle into his body as if to protect her from me.

Son: *Hastily* “She’s fussy about strangers; it’s best for me to care for her.”

He was completely unwilling to give his burden up and acted quite paternal regardless of his complaints. In fact, he quite masterfully managed to get the finicky child to accept her meal and finally go back to sleep without needing anyone’s help.

In the end, the husband came back after about three weeks, and [Son] happily gave some of his duties back to his father — but not all of them. He still played a very active role in helping care for the twins until the day they had to surrender them back to their birth mother as toddlers, and he continued to be a significant help with all the other foster kids to follow until he had to leave for college.

The last I heard, [Son]’s post-college plans include becoming a foster father in his own right. I have every confidence he will be a terrific one!

I am now in my early sixties, still skinny, and do not like cold. I can swim a bit but usually don’t because even the look of our large local lake in summer gives me hypothermia. I exaggerate a bit here, but the story of this failed swimming lesson is etched in my memory and is perhaps why I don’t like swimming. 

My parents put me into swimming lessons. Good for them because that’s an important skill. Unfortunately, the small town I grew up in didn’t have a pool (that came later), so the Red Cross swimming lessons were held during the summer at a local beach. There was not much “beach”, but there was a long dock where they held the lessons. This beach dropped off quite sharply and was known to be much colder than any other on the lake.

Our “teachers” were girls in the Red Cross program. They were about fifteen to seventeen years old compared to my eight years old, so they were old to me. As was the norm in the late 1960s, parents would drop us off and pick us up instead of being helicopters, and I was told to obey my swim teachers. 

I was already uncomfortable because I was a really skinny boy. Skinny means not much body fat, which means heat loss, which means cold. Whales have blubber for a reason. So, having stuck my toes into the frigid lake before getting onto the dock, I was nervous.

How did the swimming lessons go? Nothing like when I took my sons to the pool and watched them discover what they could do. Nope. For someone who had never swum, I was reluctant to get into what felt like ice water to me. But the swim lessons were held off the dock, and it apparently didn’t matter what your skill level was; the only option was to jump off the dock into deep water, and I did not want to do that.

Problem solved: the teenage girl in charge just picked me up and threw me in. There’s a thing that I think is called the diving reflex, but whatever, it saved my life. I do not remember hitting the water, but I do remember slowly sinking down to rest on the lake bed, legs crossed for some reason, and looking up at the way the sun was rippling across the waves. It was so beautiful and I can see it now. I was strangely content sitting about fifteen feet underwater.

As a skinny boy, unlike those with adipose tissue, I was what they call a “sinker”. I don’t know how long I was sitting on the lake bed at well over my depth, and the sense of peace I was feeling was only interrupted by the girl who had thrown me in dragging me off the bottom and throwing me back on the dock.

I am pretty sure the episode scared her more than me and, hopefully, she learned that throwing a nonswimmer into water does not make them an instant swimmer. I’m not mad at this girl (now probably in her seventies), but I will always wonder if she realized that she’d screwed up or if she just tossed it off as a kid who couldn’t just magically swim and ruined her day by making her actually get in the water. (That was the first and only time I saw any of those girls get wet.)

I’ve never been much of a swimmer since. Even civic pools are too cold for me. But I have this distinct childhood memory of the ceiling (the lake surface above me) gently rippling and throwing beautiful light all over, and that experience of what could have been my drowning remains clear and strangely comforting. Perhaps that is what the brain does when death is near, but it remains the most calming and peaceful memory I have. Strange.

As an OB/GYN, I often have my nurses come to me with questions from patients that have called them. One day, I got a rather unusual one.

Nurse: “A teen girl called and said she’s one of your patients, but she refused to give her identity. She wanted birth control and wanted to know if you would be willing to prescribe some to her even if her parents opposed it. She also asked whether doctor-patient privacy included your not being able to tell her parents she was requesting birth control or why. She wanted us to email her with an answer.”

The email address was clearly made just for this question; it was something blatant like “GiveMeBirthControlPlease at [website]”.

Me: “Relay to the girl that my requirement for confidentiality means I can’t tell anyone, even her guardians, about anything she doesn’t authorize me to. However, I can’t prescribe anything without seeing her first, and without her parent’s insurance to cover the costs, anything I prescribe to her will likely be too expensive for her to use. If she tries to use her parent’s insurance, then the birth control will likely show up on a statement her parents will see.”

After some back and forth with my nurse, the girl gave her real name and told the nurse she would have her mother bring her in, but she wanted me to know her goal was getting birth control so she wouldn’t have to say that in front of her mother. I had to look into my state’s legal laws about the consent of minors and guardians to ensure I understood what I was legally allowed to do for her when she arrived.  

Sometime later, I had a mother and a sixteen-year-old daughter show up at my office because the daughter was complaining of heavy periods with severe cramping and PMS symptoms. However, both her chart and my nurse reminded me that this was the same girl from earlier. I eventually told the mother that I prefer to have these discussions privately and requested that she leave me and the teen alone. The mother didn’t seem to like that but eventually left us.

Teen: “I do believe that my cramping and PMS symptoms may be worse than others’, but the symptoms haven’t changed recently, and I mostly exaggerated them to have an excuse for my mother to bring me here. My real goal is to get birth control.”

I have to compliment her research, though; if she did have the symptoms she had claimed, hormonal birth control would have been a likely thing for me to prescribe to alleviate the symptoms.

Teen: “I’ve already had sex twice, both times using a condom provided by my boyfriend. We’ve been together for a long time. I intend to keep having sex, but I noticed that my boyfriend’s condoms were expired, and he hadn’t been storing them carefully. I’m worried they may break if I keep depending on them.”

Me: “Did you talk to your boyfriend about this?”

Teen: “I told him I was worried, and he promised to only use new condoms and to take good care of them, but he also thinks I’m being kind of paranoid. I’m worried that he’s not going to take this seriously. I thought about getting my own condoms, but I have no privacy at home, so I’m sure my parents would find them, and they’d respond really badly to that. I want to go on the pill and keep using the condoms so I have two forms of protection in case either one fails. But my mother would never agree to birth control for that, and I can’t afford to pay for it on my own, so my only option is to convince her I’m getting the pills to help regulate my cycle, instead.”

Eventually, I prescribed her an oral contraceptive. When I told her mother, she immediately said:

Mother: “There is no way I am letting my daughter be on birth control! She is not a slut!”

Her daughter, who turned out to be an excellent actor, told her mother how terrible her periods were and pleaded with her mom to let her do anything to stop the pain she was having.

Me: “This is the standard treatment for the sort of symptoms your daughter has described. Studies show that access to birth control does not increase the odds of premarital sex in teens.”

This is true; I’ve always been shocked at how negligible a factor access to birth control is in a teen’s decision to have sex.

Me: “Your daughter seems like a smart and responsible young lady, and I think you should trust your daughter to make responsible decisions rather than deprive her of medical care she needs.”

This too was true, though I think my and the mother’s definitions of “responsible decisions” when it came to sex may have been different.

I was very careful to make sure everything I told the mother was factually accurate, even if I may have intentionally omitted a few key details. Eventually, the mother relented, but only after telling her daughter:

Mother: “If I ever catch you having sex, I will disown you.”

As the daughter left, she thanked me, and the look in her eyes seemed to stress how sincere her thanks really were.

I’m sure some people would be shocked that I misled the mother like that, even if my lies were only through omission. However, the mother was not my patient; her daughter was. My job was to get the daughter the care she needed, not to worry about her mother’s failure to recognize that vilifying sex did not change the odds of teens being sexually active.

I was very careful to meet all my legal obligations, but more importantly, I believe I met my moral obligations as a doctor by ensuring that my patient would be as safe and protected as I could make her. I would do it all over again without reservations if another teen ever came to me for help.

This story is part of our Even-More-Highest-Voted-Stories-Of-2023-(so far!) roundup!

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I used to be a grocery employee and was almost always chained to the express lane.

I wasn’t ever one of the “popular girls” in high school, but I wasn’t a wallflower, either. Most people in my class knew me by sight if not by name.

One day, I was chugging away at my store, which was only four blocks from the school, when a guy known to be the Big Man On Campus — handsome, fawned over, popular, etc. — and his posse showed up in my lane.

Big Man On Campus: “Hey, you go to [School], right?”

Me: “Yes.”

I scanned his friends’ purchases. Knowing he was a Big Man On Campus, I suppose I was meant to be impressed he was even speaking to me. I wasn’t.

Big Man On Campus: “And your name’s [My Name]?”

Me: “Yes.”

Big Man On Campus: “Would you sell us alcohol?”

Seriously?! Let’s just suppose I was swooning over the fact that he knew my name; the managers’ station was literally three feet behind me. Any one of the four managers on duty could have looked over my shoulder and seen exactly what I was doing.

Also, all of us were underage for alcohol; I couldn’t sell it, and he couldn’t buy it.

Me: “Uh, no.”

The badgering began. I kept refusing to sell him any alcohol, and he kept trying all the VERY convincing lines like “doing him a solid” and “c’mon.” I saw the manager lift his head and squint at us, so I told Big Man On Campus that he was NOT worth the consequences.

He looked furious but shut up. Right after they left my lane, [Manager] came up to me and asked if I knew them and what they wanted.

Me: “They go to my school, and they wanted me to sell them alcohol.”

Manager: “What did you say?”

Me: “I told them ‘no’ multiple times.”

[Manager] just nodded and walked away, a suspicious scowl on his face. Not two minutes later, he was chasing them out of the store. They’d tried to steal what I wouldn’t sell them.

I never saw any of them in my store again.

One day, when I was fourteen — and looked WAY younger — I was with my dad in a liquor store. As my dad looked at some wine bottles, I wandered around, looking at some bottles with pretty labels. I was wearing a bright pink shirt and a skirt — I had no fashion sense — and the store’s employees wore dark red shirts and black pants.

This lady walked up to me.

Lady: “Where are the vodka and rum?”

I didn’t understand at first.

Me: “I don’t know.”

She looked insulted and raised her voice.

Lady: “Well, you should know that! You should try to be more respectful and help me!”

Me: *Confused* “Well, I don’t know where the vodka or the rum is, and I’m confused as to why I should know that and how it’s disrespectful not to.”

She was pi**ed. She started yelling.

Lady: “You should know the store better, and you should be more polite! I’m going to call the manager!”

And then, she stormed off.

At that point, my father heard a part of the conversation and came to ask what had happened. I told him, and he looked as confused as me.

The lady came back with a man in a store uniform and a tie. The lady was now red and angry.

Lady: “Your employees are rude, and they don’t know anything!”

The man looked at me and started laughing, along with my dad and me.

Me: “You really thought I worked here? I’m not even old enough to drive, let alone drink!”

She looked shocked and then offended. She stormed away without buying anything. We had a great laugh.