Sometimes I drop things.
No, I don’t mean that symbolically. I don’t mean that I “drop” relationships, responsibilities or grudges. What I mean is that sometimes I literally drop things: physical objects simply fall out of my hands. And when I drop something, invariably, unless I catch it again, it hits the ground. Every single time.
When this happens to me I sometimes blame other people (“You bumped me!”), I sometimes blame a cold and uncaring Universe (“Why? Oh, why?”), and I sometimes even blame myself. What I don’t blame, however, is a temporary malfunction in the law of gravity: not once have I accused gravity of being a fickle rule, something that, while it might work just fine for other folk, is too simple for a complex person such as myself. At no point have I ever said, “Well, sure, other people might use this gravity thing, and I suppose for them it works just fine, but as for me it all seems like a bunch of rubbish: a bad idea from the start.”
In this, of course, I am quite different from my children.
It’s not that they have a specific problem with gravity, per se (although, from the number of dishes that have failed to make that short trip from the dishwasher to the cabinet unscathed, it would sometimes seems as if they do), it’s just that it seems like whenever something goes wrong n their lives they are likely to blame the unlikeliest of sources. Sources I would never even have considered blaming. For instance, in the case of the many, many broken dishes, gravity.
Here’s another example. Let’s say that they are assembling something that came from a country where it is very cold and everyone is very blond. The pieces of this unassembled thing have been delivered in a whole bunch of big, flat boxes, with the instructions printed in the same kind of pictographs the very cold, very blond people probably decorated their caves with a few thousand years ago. Since my children are neither cold, nor blond, it is not too surprising when they begin to have trouble putting this thing together. However, what is surprising is that instead of blaming their troubles on the fact that they are neither cold nor blond, they blame them instead on some poor nameless factory worker (who, in all honesty, is probably not cold or blond either) who maliciously left out some vital piece, therefore making the whole endeavor “impossible.” (At least impossible for them—for some reason, when the next person comes along and tries to build it, the part is mysteriously present, making the nameless factory worker not only malevolent, but magical. The Voldemort of Ikea, as it were.)
The same is true with recipes (“It was written wrong,”) cars (“It doesn’t have third gear,”) and washing machines (“I know I put the soap in; the machine must have taken it.”)
I suppose that this attitude is better than its opposite—the feeling that everything is always your fault—but I can’t help but think that there must be some kind of happy medium out there. There must be some place where—when your Ikea dresser won’t fit together—you are neither convinced of your own stupidity or Ikea’s cupidity, and instead opt to go out to the driveway to look for the screws that might’ve fallen out when you were carrying in the box.
I’m hoping that place is called “adulthood,” but from the number of “adults” out there who are willing to blame the hypothetical gay marriage of people they’ve never even met for their own marital troubles, I’m not so sure. I guess that, for some people at least, gravity is destined to fail them their entire lives.