Even before I became a mother, I knew that the job would entail the wearing of many different hats (most of them the flimsy paper variety usually associated with the service industry). What I didn’t know, however, was that I would also have to wear a wig–specifically, the long, flowing magisterial wig most often associated with English courtrooms and Pink Floyd movies. What I failed to realize was that, with the arrival of children, objectivity was no longer an option: You are called upon to render a judgement–to take sides–every day for the rest of your life. (Although I do find it odd that somehow the same person who can’t be trusted to buy the right kind of breakfast cereal can suddenly be trusted to hand down decisions regarding who called “Shotgun!” first.)
It doesn’t matter how peace-loving you were in your former, child free life–once you have children you can forget about the whole “judge not lest ye be judged” schtick . And, thanks to the advent of the playdate, this is even true for the parents of an only child. Welcome to the life of Solomon (minus the concubines): from now on, each day consists of a million urgent calls to separate the guilty from the innocent, process claims for immediate restitution, and dispense justice of the coldest, hardest sort (preferably meted out by large, shirtless individuals wearing black hoods and holding axes). Even worse, unlike Solomon–who had the luxury of having his judgements immediately transmuted into law–your judgements will run the risk of being overruled by an appellate court ( the time my husband vetoed my very Solomon-like decision to settle a squabble over the clicker by splitting it in half comes to mind).
The hardest part, though, is that so often what we are called upon to do is not so much adjudicate, but punish. The aggrieved don’t want closure–they want revenge. These are no “Truth and Reconciliation Hearings”–they are the “Salem Witch Trials.”
Sometimes in the midst of all this bloodlust I think of the story my husband once told me about being called to appear in court during his younger years in Virginia. It seems that he had had an unfortunate vehicular altercation with a mailbox. Actually, with several different mailboxes. In a row. All in the same night. (He probably would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t have been for the fact that one of the mailboxes, reaching up like an accusing hand from beyond the grave, got tangled up in the back bumper of his car and tore off his license plate.)
When the mailbox owner was called in to court to testify as to the nature and extent of the damages to his property, he replied that, actually, it wasn’t the mailbox that had been damaged at all–it was the paper box, which, as far as he knew, the newspaper gave out for free–but all he had to do in any case was to prop the whole thing back up again and it was “good as new.” And that was the end of that.
Looking at Clementine and Clyde (or, as I like to think of them, defendant and plaintiff) I sometimes wonder whether they will ever reach the forbearing state as that Virginia homeowner, or if they will become the type of people who argue vociferously on The People’s Court for “punitive damages due to emotional distress caused by the wanton abuse of their paper box.” I suppose only time will tell, although, for now, I must admit that it sometimes comes in handy to have a pair of justice-seeking informants on hand, especially when it comes to finding out important information like who opened up the new box of popsicles, took one out and then left the rest on the counter to melt. Sometimes there is no such thing as a victimless crime.