For Halloween this year, my son Clyde decided that he was going to be a cowboy; while we could make up most of his costume by tweaking the items he already had in his (very large) dress-up box, there was one piece of equipment upon which he would accept no substitutions: the gun. (I tried to talk him into the Kwai Chang Caine Cowboy model, but to no avail: he wanted to be a “real” cowboy that “really” killed things with a “real” six-shooter). And so to the toy store we went in search of the perfect gun.
Although this was not the first toy gun he ever owned, (How could it be? In the hands of a five-year-old boy everything from half-eaten sandwiches to bent over Barbie dolls becomes a gun), it was certainly the most realistic-looking model he ever possessed; in fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that this gun was tiny, made of plastic, had a green trigger and an orange muzzle, it would have looked downright real. Which is probably why it gave Clyde such a burst of newfound confidence.
“Put your shoes away,” I told him when we got home from the toy store.
“No,” he replied defiantly. “I don’t have to put my shoes away anymore; I’ve got a gun.”
One minute later I had wrestled the gun away from him and threatened to “bust a cap up in his punk ass if he didn’t stop playing the fool and put his shoes away this instant.” Then I sat down on the couch, sighted along the length of the little plastic barrel at a Cops rerun playing on TV, and said to myself, “Sheesh–I wonder where they get this stuff from, anyway?”
I don’t know why it always catches me off guard when my children turn out to be just like me; after all, evolutionarily speaking, isn’t passing on your genes (including your personality traits and habits) the whole point of having children? What I don’t understand, though, is why, out of all my various and diverse strands of DNA, the only ones my children ever seem to acquire are the “obnoxious trait” bearing ones. (I can hear my husband now: “Oh? Do you have any other kind?”)
Of course, inheriting the “good ones” is no guarantee of good results, either: even the best trait can be used for evil. What’s worse is that it can be used for evil against it creator.
Take, for example, the case of my daughter, Clementine. Clementine has inherited from me both a certain cynicism about “Authority” and a strong dislike for ever backing down from a fight she believes in. On the one hand, these would seem like good things, things that will provide her with the skills necessary for dealing with all the difficult people that can inhabit this cold, cruel world. Or, it could just be turning her into the kind of person who still shops at Hot Topic at the age of forty-five; the jury’s still, because, so far, (just like with Clyde and his new gun), the only Authority she ever questions is mine, and the only fights she won’t back down from are the ones with me.
Some may claim that this is the natural order, but if you ask me this is just not right: Darwin himself would be shocked at seeing an offspring use its own genetic inheritance as a weapon against the genetic provider. Case in point: did the above-mentioned Kwai Chang ever use his newly learned skills to attack Master Kan? Sure, he did “snatch the pebble from his hand”–but it’s not like he then went on to flick that same pebble back into his face. Then again, who knows what he would have done if, instead of a pebble, what he had snatched had been a shiny, new, plastic gun.