Monthly Archives: November 2008

There are two phrases that come out of a child’s mouth that have been known to strike fear into the wallets of parents: “Oops” and “We should.” “Oops” because it usually follows such acts as stepping on a sibling’s glasses, dropping a retainer off the edge of the Grand Canyon, or leaving the cage door open when feeding the pet snake–all actions guaranteed to cost a parent money. (Not, in the last example, because you have to replace the snake, but because you have to replace the wall that the snake will eventually crawl behind and die). “We should”, however, is a trickier one; it doesn’t mean that money absolutely will be spent, but rather that whining about money is about to commence. Sometimes–usually–it also means that completely ridiculous whining about money is about to commence as well.

An example of this is when, after staggering through three airports, seven security lines, and a customs line that looks like the entire population of a Caribbean island has just deplaned ahead of you, your child turns to you and says in disdain, “We should really get our own plane.”

At first you ignore this comment, concentrating instead on swearing at the luggage cart dispenser, but the child persists. “Why don’t we?”

Finally, the luggage cart fairy grants your wish; you can now turn to the child and start swearing at them instead. “One, because I don’t know how to fly a plane, and two, because planes cost a lot of money.”

“You could learn.”

“True–but that doesn’t change the fact that planes cost a lot of money.”

“So use your credit card.”

Sigh. This conversation again. No matter how many times you try and explain it, your words will never have precedence over the magic trick they see performed every time you put your debit card into an ATM and money comes flying out. Still, you try anyway.

“I’d have to pay for it eventually. With money I still wouldn’t have.”

Now the child is rolling her eyes. She can’t believe how slow parents can be sometimes. “So get a job.”

“I have a job!”

“Then get a better one.”

Great; now she’s channeling your mother.

“Look, I don’t know how else to put this: we’re not getting a plane. I realize that this is a great disappointment to you, but what can I say? You go to war with the parents you have.”

“That makes no sense.”

“I know.”

Mercifully, the resentful silence lasts all the way through the rest of the airport, and you begin to think that maybe the “we should’s” have gotten left back at customs. Of course, as long as you’re fantasizing, why not include all of the other unwanted baggage that you might have left back at customs as well–like all that new vacation weight–because as soon as your child realizes that she still has to carry her own luggage the “we should’s” come swooping back with a vengeance, and she looks over at you with disdain once more, saying, with a sigh:

“You know, we really should get our own butler.”

This year, the number one item on my daughter Clementine’s Christmas wish list is an iTouch. Unfortunately for her, there are two very large obstacles standing in the way of her actually receiving one (for Christmas or otherwise): first, there is the expense–last time I checked they were selling for slightly more than what I paid for my first car (granted, it was a 1979 Ford Pinto, but still), and secondly, there is the fact that I have absolutely no idea what an iTouch is. Upon hearing the second reason (she didn’t even blink at the first–she’s used to my cheapness), she rolled her eyes and said to me, “Mom, you really should try to get more hip.” I thought about that for a while, and decided that she was right–I did need to get hip–but I was damned if I was going to be told so by someone who as little as five years ago could still be caught singing along to Barney. And so I decided upon a course of action that would lead to both more hipness for myself and an education for my #1 critic: I decided to buy a record player.

My last record player died sometime after Clementine was born–probably from neglect. (For some reason, sharing a house with a demanding infant made the thought of carefully taking an album out of its sleeve, setting it gently on the turntable, and then slowly lowering the needle–only to have to do it all over again twenty minutes later–seem like an incredible waste of time. Go figure.)

Now, however, I decided that if I was going to be lectured about my lack of hipness by someone who didn’t know the difference between Iggy Pop and Ziggy Marley, then I needed more help than could be found in a box of CDs.

I needed a turntable; and so I got one. (The albums I had already; much to my husband’s dismay they have followed me through seven moves.) But then I wondered: where to begin? I looked through my stack of records: should I start at the beginning and work my way up? Where was the beginning, anyway? Finally, I decided that the only way to go about it was to begin at my beginning. And so, the very first record I played for Clementine on my new turntable was none other than The Wall.

At first I was a little conflicted about my choice; after all, Clementine will be starting Flagstaff Middle School next year, and that place already has a reputation of being something of a gulag. Did I really want to encourage her thoughts to go even further in that direction? Maybe, I thought, I should start her out with the Beatles–the “yeah, yeah, yeah” stuff. But then I did the math, and I realized that Clementine is right now exactly the same age as I was back in 7th grade when I first heard The Wall. (I remember it clearly because the dreamy 8th grader I had a crush on–Eric Sellers–played it nonstop on a three hour bus ride to Colossal Cave in southern Arizona. Of course, I also remember that that was the last field trip our class ever got to go on, perhaps because our teacher actually did have a “fat and psychopathic wife that would thrash him within inches of his life” at home.)

And I remembered one more thing about that trip–and about my crush–that made the decision as to what albums to play for her next–and what albums not to– abundantly clear. Unlike me, she would get to skip Poison, Styx, Vanilla Ice, and all the stuff that came with them.

True, it might not cost as much as an iTouch, but I looked at it this way: getting to experience the 80s without ever having to suffer through parachute pants? Priceless.

Recently, I read a newspaper story about a woman who was convicted of helping her daughter and her daughter’s friends break into some girl’s house to terrorize her–it seems that the girl and her daughter had shared some kind of unpleasant history together. This story was of course shocking and disturbing, but not for the reasons you might think: not because it was so terrible that an adult would involve themselves in childish squabbles to such a criminal extent (although it was), but because my reaction to it was: that could be me one day. I hate to say it, but as my children get older, such examples of extreme overprotectiveness start to strike me as less and less bizarre all the time.

I remember when the story came out about the Texas mother who tried to hire a hit man to knock off her daughter’s cheerleading competition. When I first heard this story I was shocked, appalled, and even a little bit amused; I couldn’t believe that someone would ever go to such extremes over something so trivial. Now, however, when I look back at that story, I can’t help but wonder if maybe it wasn’t so trivial after all. Maybe it wasn’t just a case of one girl not being good enough to make the team and her mother’s outraged overreaction; maybe the truth of the matter was that those other girls were being really mean; maybe she really was the best, and the others just wouldn’t let her in; maybe…they had it coming. And that’s when I start to scare myself.

I’ve always been proud of the fact that I’m not a “helicopter parent”; I don’t hover over my children’s every move, trying to smooth out the little bumps in life’s road for them. They’ve always walked or biked to school; I’ve never interfered with their playground squabbles; and anytime they have ever come home complaining of unfair treatment at the hands of a teacher my reaction has always been: “Well, if you didn’t deserve it this time then I sure you did deserve it–and got away with it–another time”. In other words, as much as possible, I have let them be. Imagine my consternation, then, when I first realized that I was becoming something even worse than a helicopter parent: I was becoming a felon-in-waiting parent. It’s true: while I’m sure that I would never stoop to writing their college entrance essays for them, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t stoop to stalking the college entrance examiner.

There is only one word to explain how I feel when my kids are getting the short end of the stick: feral. Wolf mothers have nothing on me. This, I think, is an instinct even worse (and much less civilized) than the mere overprotectiveness of the helicopter parent. This is not the instinct to intercede on my child’s behalf; it is the instinct to annihilate.

That’s how it was the other day at soccer, when my son Clyde was reprimanded by the opposing team’s coach for being too rough–this after that same coach’s players had spent an entire game being too rough themselves. What, I found myself thinking, is this guy doing yelling at MY kid?

As I watched this travesty of justice unfold from the sidelines it became clear to me that I had three options: one, I could let it go, and explain to Clyde later that sometimes, life isn’t fair; two, I could intercede, and point out to the opposing coach just how myopic his refereeing was; or three, I could kill him.

In the end, I went with option number one. Not because it was the right thing to do, though; I just didn’t want anybody to be able to place the two of us together in case I later on decided to go with option number three.

Recently, I read a newspaper story about a woman who was convicted of helping her daughter and her daughter’s friends break into some girl’s house to terrorize her–it seems that the girl and her daughter had shared some kind of unpleasant history together. This story was of course shocking and disturbing, but not for the reasons you might think: not because it was so terrible that an adult would involve themselves in childish squabbles to such a criminal extent (although it was), but because my reaction to it was: that could be me one day. I hate to say it, but as my children get older, such examples of extreme overprotectiveness start to strike me as less and less bizarre all the time.

I remember when the story came out about the Texas mother who tried to hire a hit man to knock off her daughter’s cheerleading competition. When I first heard this story I was shocked, appalled, and even a little bit amused; I couldn’t believe that someone would ever go to such extremes over something so trivial. Now, however, when I look back at that story, I can’t help but wonder if maybe it wasn’t so trivial after all. Maybe it wasn’t just a case of one girl not being good enough to make the team and her mother’s outraged overreaction; maybe the truth of the matter was that those other girls were being really mean; maybe she really was the best, and the others just wouldn’t let her in; maybe…they had it coming. And that’s when I start to scare myself.

I’ve always been proud of the fact that I’m not a “helicopter parent”; I don’t hover over my children’s every move, trying to smooth out the little bumps in life’s road for them. They’ve always walked or biked to school; I’ve never interfered with their playground squabbles; and anytime they have ever come home complaining of unfair treatment at the hands of a teacher my reaction has always been: “Well, if you didn’t deserve it this time then I sure you did deserve it–and got away with it–another time”. In other words, as much as possible, I have let them be. Imagine my consternation, then, when I first realized that I was becoming something even worse than a helicopter parent: I was becoming a felon-in-waiting parent. It’s true: while I’m sure that I would never stoop to writing their college entrance essays for them, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t stoop to stalking the college entrance examiner.

There is only one word to explain how I feel when my kids are getting the short end of the stick: feral. Wolf mothers have nothing on me. This, I think, is an instinct even worse (and much less civilized) than the mere overprotectiveness of the helicopter parent. This is not the instinct to intercede on my child’s behalf; it is the instinct to annihilate.

That’s how it was the other day at soccer, when my son Clyde was reprimanded by the opposing team’s coach for being too rough–this after that same coach’s players had spent an entire game being too rough themselves. What, I found myself thinking, is this guy doing yelling at MY kid?

As I watched this travesty of justice unfold from the sidelines it became clear to me that I had three options: one, I could let it go, and explain to Clyde later that sometimes, life isn’t fair; two, I could intercede, and point out to the opposing coach just how myopic his refereeing was; or three, I could kill him.

In the end, I went with option number one. Not because it was the right thing to do, though; I just didn’t want anybody to be able to place the two of us together in case I later on decided to go with option number three.

Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover–as long as it’s the back cover, that is. Here’s how it works: count the number of times you look at the author’s picture on the back of the book jacket while reading it; the more times you look, the worse the book is (of course, as I write this I’m picturing 15,000 Flagstaff Live readers glancing up to the photo at the top of my column).

Likewise, the number of times you pick up the Netflix sleeve and reread the plot synopsis while you’re still watching the movie is often a good clue as to how bad the movie really is. When it comes to movies that are still in the theaters, though, there has never been an equivalent method; there is no “book jacket test.” Or, at least, there hadn’t been one, before my son, Clyde, came along. Because now, when you want to know how good (or at least how entertaining) a movie is, it’s simple: just take Clyde to the theater with you, and you can be sure that he will give it the piss test.

No, this doesn’t mean that he will be able to tell you whether or not the movie makers were on drugs when they made the film (although, that, too, is often a good test of quality); but rather that you will be able to count the number of times during the movie that Clyde needs to get up and pee.

For example: during the most recent installment in the Indiana Jones franchise (Indiana Jones and the File Cabinet of Recycled Scripts), Clyde got up to use the facilities no less than seven times. (I say “use the facilities” not out of politeness, but rather out of correctness: not even a dog visiting a new neighborhood could have had enough urine to actually go “pee” each time that Clyde said he needed to “go;” obviously these trips involved things beyond the actual urination process such as: playing with the automated hand dryers, fiddling with the bathroom vending machines, and checking to see whether or not there was anything interesting happening in the lobby.)

One advantage to the “Clyde Piss Test” is that–unlike the book jacket test, which just tells you that the book is lame–Clyde’s test actually pinpoints where, exactly, things fall apart. (He went five times during his viewing of Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, but since these trips all happened during the first 45 minutes of the movie, it was clear that his bladder was saying “Too much Jack Black.”).

Things were different when his sister, Clementine was his age: when she was bored with a movie she would simply turn to whoever was with her and say: “I’m done.” It didn’t matter whether we were in the final five minutes of the movie, or passing out the popcorn during the opening credits ; when she was done, she was done. Sometimes this was exasperating (I never did get to find out whether or not the chickens made their escape in Chicken Run), but for the most part, it was a blessing. (When she declared she was “done” with Racing Stripes I practically jumped up and started doing a touchdown dance).

Not so, however, with Clyde: when he’s “done” he only rescues himself; I’m left sitting alone in the movie theater, literally holding the bag (of popcorn). By the time I clue in and decide it’s time to go look for him (and leave) he slides back into his seat, seemingly happy as can be to be watching the movie again. Until, of course, it’s time for him to go “pee” once more.

I just hope, for the sake of our environment, that the day never comes when he has to sit through a “chick flick.” I don’t think our water supply could take it.