The other night I got a letter from the principal of my daughter Clementine’s school. Now, receiving a letter from your child’s school is never a pleasant thing, but as I opened this one up my trepidation quickly turned to disbelief. At first this was because of what the letter wasn’t about: namely, it wasn’t about Clementine’s recent choice to turn her “Just Say No” ribbon into one that said “Legalize It.” (What did they expect? You can’t spend the first seven years of a child’s schooling encouraging them to use critical thinking and creativity and then, when they hit middle school, all of a sudden tell them they have to “Conform—now!”) After I gave the letter a closer look, however, my disbelief was because of what the letter was about.
It seems that there had been an “incident” in one of Clementine’s classes (again, amazingly not centered on her), wherein certain students had been caught sharing . . . (here I held my breath, prepared to strip Clementine bare and search her for track marks) a bowl. And no, not a “bowl” in the “legalize it” sense, but a “bowl” as in . . . a bowl. Of noodles.
That’s it.
The students shared a bowl of ramen at school, and, apparently, the bowl and spoon were not properly sterilized between servings. This, of course, naturally led to the fear that perhaps there might be some cooties (I mean germs) clinging to the edges of said bowl, and that the students might have passed these germs around in a process that, in most parts of the world, is simply known as “lunch.” This fear seemed even more ludicrous when you take into account the fact that, since almost all of these students are currently going through the change (and no, not menopause—the other one), they really don’t need to share eating utensils to be able to swap spit—they’re swapping spit all the time, if you know what I mean.
I mean, really: they were sharing a bowl, for crying out loud. And this not only merited a letter home, but also a follow-up phone call (for all those students who were so humiliated by their role in the bowl-sharing that they didn’t give the letter to their parents). The worst part of the whole incident (hereafter referred to as “Ramengate”) was that, as a parent, I felt like it had an extremely detrimental effect on my parental authority. Not because someone was able to feed my child something that I didn’t personally vet, but because it made all adults—and by extension, me—look like complete and utter doofuses.
Seriously: one of the hardest jobs the parent of a teenager has is trying to convince them that we are not all blithering idiots. That maybe we know just a little, and that when we say something like, “You should try wearing gloves in the snow—they really keep your hands warm,” or “If you put your math homework in your math homework folder, then you’ll be able to find it more easily when your teacher says it’s time to turn in your math homework,” we might just know what we’re talking about. Who knows? These small victories might even lead to larger ones later on, so that when we say something like, “Any guy who won’t wear a condom isn’t worth a second glance,” they might actually listen to us.
Unfortunately, however, the first step to getting a teenager to believe that we are not all blithering idiots is to stop acting like ones. And that means not freaking out if two people end up eating out of the same bowl.
No matter how many cooties they might end up getting.