There comes a point in every parent’s life when they look at their children and say to themselves, “Why did I even bother?”
Not necessarily, “why did I even bother having them?” (although that is definitely a subject for another column) but rather, “why did I bother making sure they were safe, well-fed, and warmly dressed when they were toddlers just so that the moment they hit their teen years all three of those things could fly out the window?”
Take the issue of “safe” for example. Do you remember putting foam bumpers on the corners of your coffee table, buying the latest car seat, and asking for child-proof lids on all of your prescriptions? All that, only to have them, little more than a decade later, stumble out of the open bed of someone’s truck, clutching the goose egg they got from learning to do an ollie (sans helmet, of course) and then telling you they feel a little queasy because someone at the skatepark gave them a pill for their headache. (“What kind of pill?” you ask in alarm. “I dunno. It was yellow. Or pink. Or maybe both.” “’Maybe both’ as in you took two different pills, or ‘maybe both’ in that you took one pill that was two different colors?” “Huh? Were we talking about something?”)
Then there’s the issue of warmly dressed. Recently, one of my daughter Clementine’s friends was diagnosed with frostbite of the toe. Frostbite. This wasn’t someone who was homeless, or whose parents had lost their jobs and couldn’t afford to buy him new shoes. Nor was this someone who was trying to set the record for the youngest (and stupidest) person to climb Everest. No, this was someone who chose to walk around barefoot in the snow right here in Flagstaff because it “felt more freer.” (I’m letting you know right now that if ‘freedom’ means giving up on learning the proper use of comparative adjectives, then you can count me out right now.) And, in case you’re thinking, “Well, boys will be boys,” know this: it’s not just the boys. I can’t tell you the number of times Clementine has come home from school wet and shivering, only to step over the parkas lining her floor so that she can change into a dry short sleeved t-shirt to go back out in the snow.
But I think that out of all three of the above issues, the one that gets me the most is the one of “well-fed, which is actually a little bit ironic since that’s the one that affects me the least. This is all because early on I decided that it didn’t matter if I ended up raising my children on a diet of nuclear waste and slaughterhouse sweepings, as long as it meant I didn’t have to spend an hour at the table every evening cajoling them to “just take one more bite.”
Given the refined palates of the under ten set, that meant that most of their dinners came out of a box. A cheap box. I know plenty of other families, however, who spent the financial equivalent of a round the world cruise making sure that their kids had pesticide free strawberries and organic milk to pour onto their omega/flax/quinoa flakes every morning. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that today, when those same kids are living on a steady diet of ramen noodles and Mickey D’s, I sometimes wonder if every time those parents find a double cheeseburger wrapper in their kid’s backpack if in their mind’s eye they see Morocco slipping past a porthole. I know that I would.
Or, at the very least, have to ask myself: “Why did I even bother?”