It has been said that there is nothing more uncommon than common sense, and as my children get older I find this to be truer all of the time: I am constantly and consistently amazed at the number of things they are simply clueless about. I’m not talking about the things that, while obvious in retrospect, still take most people years to figure out (if they ever do). Things like eventually understanding that, in the long run, it’s cheaper to pay your car insurance than it is to pay the fine, or finally realizing that it’s highly unlikely that a Nigerian prince would ever even have your email address in the first place. No, I’m talking about things such as knowing that leaving a wet towel in the corner will cause it to grow mold and attract bugs every single time (the first lesson is free—all those thereafter can rightly be chalked up to stupidity), and that milk will have a short and unhappy life (but a long and vengeful afterlife) if it is left somewhere other than in the fridge for an extended period of time (like in a glass beneath your bed for a month).
But then, even in the midst of picking up the various bug farms and blue cheese experiments, (muttering all the time under my breath about “colossal ignorance” and “criminal neglect,”) I sometimes find myself thinking back to those fuzzy cans of frozen orange juice that I left (and forgot) under the beds of my youth, not to mention the leftover cow’s eye from science class that I stashed in my underwear drawer (“But Mom! They were going to throw it away!”), and I remember how at one time I, too, was “colossally ignorant” and “criminally neglectful,” and that, since I no longer keep bovine body parts in my dresser or store OJ with the dust bunnies, chances are good that one day my children will stop doing such things as well. The question, of course, is when? And that’s when I really start to ask myself the all important question: what did I know, and when did I know it?
What I mean is: at what age did I finally understood that every action has a consequence, and that in all likelihood the only person who was going to suffer that consequence was me? This is a question that is very important to me as I pull the half-eaten jar of Alfredo sauce from the back of the cupboard where it has languished for who knows how long. And, as I toss the sauce into the trash (where it nestles up next to the milk left out on the counter overnight and the six pieces of toast which were made but never eaten), I find myself desperately trying to remember at what point I understood that there was a direct correlation between not reading the part of the label that says “refrigerate after opening” and spending the next 24 hours next to a toilet?
At what point did I stop making fun of instructions such as “do not use hedge trimmers while swimming,” and start wishing that everything came with them? (Warnings such as “Do not lose homework after finishing,” that appeared magically on math assignments would be particularly welcome.) At what point did I change from someone who bemoaned the nanny state that gave us warning bells when you didn’t put on your seat belt, and start saying that they should take it one step further and make cars that won’t even start without everyone being buckled in? And, more importantly, at what point will I change back?
I’m thinking it will be in a couple of decades or so. Right around the time common sense starts to become a little more common in our house again.