Some parents like to let their children know when they are going over the line by addressing them by their full names–all three of them. (Or, if one of your parents is a pop star, all sixteen of them. Maybe this is why the children of celebrities grow up to be so messed up: by the time their parents get through “Fifi Trixiebelle Superhero Moxie Coca-Cola™…” they’ve already forgotten what it was they were scolding them for).
This has always seemed a tad unwise to me. For one thing, what if, in a Pavlovian sense, you’re setting your kids up for a lifetime of cringing every time they hear their own middle names? And, considering that sometimes children are names after older relatives, what if you’re also sabotaging your child’s relationship with that honored family member? After all: what kid would want to hang out with dear old Aunt Gertrude if every time she heard the name she had to fight the urge to duck? The main problem I have with the “full name scold,” however, is that there already exists a perfectly good way to let kids know when you are upset with them: yelling.
Don’t get me wrong: I try not to yell. I try to be reasonable. I try to be calm. But then, after all my attempts at reasonable and calm have resulted in zombie-like stares of noncompliance, I yell. At least with yelling I get a reaction–proof of life–even if it is in the form of an exaggerated eye roll, a lurching out of whatever piece of furniture was being bonded with pre-yell, and an aggrieved, “Geez Mom–you don’t have to yell.” (Which is ironic, since the very fact that they were mired in inactivity up until the point I finally lost it and yelled proves that yelling is exactly what I do have to do.) The truth is, without the yell I would barely register on their consciousness–I would simply be another flyspeck on the Gameboy of their life.
In fact, before the yell they are usually so catatonic that I almost worry about their hearing–or, at least I would–if it wasn’t for the fact that each of my many calm and reasonable entreaties actually do elicit a form of reply: the hated “just a sec.” In the world of yelling, “just a sec” is such a standard precursor to the yell that it is almost as if we were doing some sort of “call and response” series in a church: “Clean your room”; “Just a sec”; “Right now”; “Just a sec.” Aliens watching first a Catholic service and then chore time at my house would probably be left wondering when we were going to get to the “amens.” (Or, conversely, they would think that in our religion , instead of saying “amen,” the high priestess yells.)
So why must we perform this domestic liturgy? Why can’t we cut out all of the middle stuff, and get right to the action? The answer, I think, lies in something my husband once told me way back when we were first dating. I asked him why it was that, despite repeated rejection, some men seemed to find it necessary to hit on every single woman at a bar. He looked at me as if I was kidding, and then answered, “Because, one night, one of them might say ‘yes’. And then all those ‘nos’ become worth it.”
Maybe that’s my children’s rationale as well: someday, worn down under the weight of a hundred “just a secs”, I will be too weary to even yell, and instead will simply get up and do it myself–suddenly making all of those “just a secs” worth it. Somehow though, the idea that child psychology and male psychology are all but interchangeable does not set my mind at ease. But then, that’s a subject for another column.