One of the things I do every morning in our house is walk around to all of the rooms and collect the various glasses of water that have sprouted like mushrooms on top of every flat surface(and some not so very flat). I then pour the remaining water into a pitcher that I use for my plants. Given the desperate nature of our current drought situation, this has always seemed like a win-win situation to me: firstly, because this means that I no longer feel the need to hound my kids every time they come into the kitchen for a new glass of water (which is approximately every fifteen minutes), and secondly because my plants are thriving off of water that otherwise would have gone to waste (or at least have gone to the wastewater treatment plant, where, in the fullness of time, it might have suffered the ignomity of one day becoming the tiny little bump of artificial snow under some Phoenician’s Gore Tex-clad butt–an unnecessarily humiliating ending, I think, even for a product that did start off as at least 20% kid spit).
Sometimes, though, I start to feel as if all my efforts at saving water are for naught: it’s hard to feel too good about saving a few ounces of water everyday when the guy up the street is hosing off his sidewalk. Unfortunately, the same can also sometimes be said of child-rearing.
I have always liked to think that if my children have only learned one thing from me, it is to be tolerant of other people’s differences. My technique–developed way back when my daughter, Clementine, was just getting to the age when she would point at people in the grocery store–is as follows: as soon as my children start in on the “why is that person short/tall/thin/fat/in a wheelchair/wearing a veil/etc.”-type questions, I tell them that it is because if we all looked the same it would be impossible to tell each other apart, and, as nice as they might think it would be if we all looked like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, just imagine the how difficult it would be to find each other in a crowd: we’d have to start sniffing each other’s butts, like dogs. ( I then go on to point out that, if they thought it was embarrassing for me to pick them up from school now, think how embarrassing it would be after I started sticking my nose into their butts every afternoon in the school parking lot–right in front of their most recent crush, no less.)
Not too surprisingly, this argument (or perhaps the dread of hearing the words “butt sniffing” again) has always been quite effective, and so far both of my kids have turned out to be fairly kind and tolerant individuals. Which is why, just as with my efforts at water conservation vs. the hose guy up the street, it is that much more disheartening to see what other people are teaching to their children.
For example, there’s this new Palestinian kids’ TV show which features not only a Mickey Mouse-like character being beaten to death by an Israeli, but also the subsequent calls for the other characters to avenge Mickey’s “martyrdom.” (I bet it was hard to figure out where to put the laugh track on that one). I know: we all watched questionable TV when we were kids, but come on–it’s not like Bugs Bunny ever declared a fatwa on Elmer Fudd.
It’s almost enough to make me wonder what’s the point of teaching tolerance to my children when they have to live in a world that is clearly filled with intolerance. But, just like with the water I save, I guess when it comes to teaching tolerance every little drop counts.
Still, I wonder how well “butt sniffing” would translate into Arabic.