Monthly Archives: September 2012

Sometimes, there’s a real disconnect between what we, as parents, say we want for our children, and what we are actually happy about getting. For example: we say we want them to become strong, independent thinkers, but when they use that independence to question some of our deeply cherished beliefs, we tell them to “think again.” Along those same lines, we say we want them to be strong enough to withstand peer pressure, yet when they turn that same discernment on the things we are pressuring them to do (all good and valid, of course), we are taken aback.

It’s a strange balancing act: how do you teach someone not to be sucked into believing something just because “The Man” tells you to believe it, when you yourself are the biggest Man (at least in their lives) of all? I suppose that, just like the Wizard of Oz, all you can do is give them the tools they need (heart, brains, courage, home) and then let them figure out how to use them on their own. Even if sometimes—also just like the Wizard—that means that you get revealed as the man behind the curtain. Which is kind of, sort of, exactly what happened to me just the other day.

Here’s the story. Clementine and I were parked at the Flagstaff Family Food Center, waiting for her shift to start. (When life permits, she volunteers in the kitchen a few hours a week.) It was pouring down rain, so we we were sitting in the front seat of my car, watching a few men who were also waiting out the rain in the same parking lot. I stared at the men without really seeing them for several moments, watching them getting wetter and wetter as they stood huddled under the eaves of the food center, and then I turned to Clementine and said, “You know what I want to do when I get home? I want to watch ‘Winnie the Pooh.’ The scene where it floods in the Hundred Acres Woods. I want to watch that scene: I wonder if Netflix has it on instant queue?”

I pulled out my phone to check, and then began to mutter unhappily when I found that Netflix did not, in fact, have “Winnie the Pooh” or any other Disney movie on instant queue.

“Well, this sucks,” I groused. “I guess even from beyond the grave it’s not a dollar until it’s in Walt Disney’s pocket…I wonder if I can buy it on Playstation?…”

“You could watch something else,” Clementine suggested.

“I don’t want to watch something else,” I whined. “I want to watch this. I want to go home, put on my pajamas, get under a fluffy blanket and drink a cup of Earl Grey tea while watching ‘Winnie the Pooh.’ And now I can’t.”

Clementine looked at me, sulking in the driver’s seat, and then she glanced at the men huddled under the eaves, and then back at me again. “I’m so sorry to hear about your First World problems,” she said. “They sound really terrible.”

And just like that, instead of me being the one that needed to remind her how lucky she was to have all of the things she took for granted, she was the one who was reminding me. The curtain had come down.

I considered for a moment making some kind of “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” type of remark, pointing out all of the times when she, too, had made some kind of “first world complaint” in my presence, but, wisely (and, for me, surprisingly) I didn’t. I guess sometimes even The Man knows when they have been bested.

There is an old adage that says that if you sit by the river long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float by. This, I think, perfectly describes how I feel about other parents.

Not that I want to see their bodies literally floating by. No, not at all. It’s just that this is the image I always amuse myself with when I find myself on the receiving end of another parent’s judgement: it is a powerful reminder to myself that it doesn’t matter what they might think (or say) about my parenting style right now, because, if I am patient enough, sooner or later they will be faced with the same decisions that I was—and then it will be my turn to judge them.

Or not. Honestly, for the most part I try really hard not to judge other parents (at least not out loud). I’d like to believe that in my best version of myself I am rooting for every parent to be successful in their parenting, no matter how uptight they are, no matter how profoundly their parenting style differs from mine, and especially no matter how many really nasty things they have said about me behind my back. I’d like to believe that, but the truth is I get a not-so-secret glee when I am down by that metaphorical river and I see I-would-never-allow-my-child-to-play-video-games float by on a bier made of Wii paddles, or My-Child-Will-Be-Raised-A-Vegan float by on a barge made of Happy Meal toys.

It’s not that I want to see something bad happen to the child—never that—it’s just that it’s hard not to experience a certain amount of schadenfreude when a fellow parent who delighted in judging you suddenly hits the same rough patch that you had to navigate, and ends up flailing just as badly as you did.

I find that this is especially true of the parents whose children are a few years younger than mine; the ones who watched my family struggling with all of the standard issues of adolescence and smugly asserted that, when the time came, their child would never act that way. The same ones who asked if I had tried giving a twelve year old “a timeout.” The ones who didn’t believe me when I replied that timeouts get a little more complicated when you are no longer able to physically pick up your child and carry them into another room. When the threat of “no more Playstation” has the same effect as “no more juice boxes in your lunch.” (Speaking of Playstation, my advice to all young parents is to GET ONE IMMEDIATELY, and make sure your kids start playing it ALL OF THE TIME. Discipline is so much easier when you still have something that you can take away.)

Of course, true to my (sometimes) better nature, there are also those times when I feel like I am being judged and there is another image that brings me comfort: it is the one where I sit by the river and watch nothing at all float by; in other words, sometimes I am sanguine enough to be able to imagine a time when we have all of us moved past the stage of parenting where we are so insecure that we feel the need to sit in judgement of others, and have begun to realize that, one way or another, we are all in this together, and it is in all of our own best interests to help other parents succeed, whether we agree with their particular style of parenting or not.

And besides, sooner than we know it none of this stuff will matter anymore, and we can all start concentrating on the really important things in life. Like sitting around and judging each other’s grandparenting skills.

The other day I had the misfortune to be home when someone I really didn’t want to see came over to my house—not just came over, mind you, but actually came inside. Now, as as any rational, well-adjusted adult will tell you, the only thing to do when confronted with a situation like that is to calmly, firmly, and politely tell the interloper that their presence is not wanted. It is, after all, the mature thing to do. Which is probably why I jumped out the window.

It’s not as bad as it sounds: my house is only one story. But the side of the house I jumped out of is the side that is squished up against my neighbor’s house, and it is the side where we both have tried to rectify this lack of privacy by planting lots and lots of lilac bushes: so many lilac bushes, in fact, that while it is very private, it is also a rather impenetrable jungle—impenetrable, that is, unless you happen to jump out a window.

Which I did.

Since the window was rather large (that’s how I fit), once I was outside I thought that the best thing to do would be to get out of sight, because, really, the only thing that could possibly be more embarrassing than jumping out a window to avoid someone is getting caught jumping out a window to avoid someone. And so that is how it was that I came to be crawling along the side of my house, leaving clumps of hair and pieces of skin in the lilac bushes, and it is also how it came to be that I eventually arrived at the small spaces underneath my children’s windows, where I discovered, to my chagrin, that I have been falsely accusing them for over a year now. I have been accusing them of losing all of my dishes, but, as it turns out, they hadn’t lost them at all: they had just thrown them out of their windows.

Suddenly I understood the frantic sounds I had heard behind closed doors every time I threatened to come in for a surprise room inspection. “I’m coming in,” I would warn, “and there better not be any dishes in there.” When I would burst in I would always find them sitting on their beds, the pictures of innocence, not a dish in sight. I now realize, of course, that it was actually the picture of deviousness. Unfortunately, however, for both of our sakes, it was not really the kind of deviousness that is very clever.

Because, if it had been the clever kind of deviousness then than they would have gone outside and picked up the evidence at least once in the past year—if not to bring them in and wash them then at least to throw them away. (Preferably somewhere I wouldn’t find them; a strategy they might also consider using when trying to hide other kinds of evidence. Here’s a hint, for any of you that may be needing to hide something in the near future: the very top of the garbage can is not the best of hiding places—especially when the person you are trying to hide the object from is also the one who takes out the trash.)

The funny thing, though, is that while it is true that I was not at all pleased to find a pile of my dishes outside of their windows, I was also a little impressed: throwing the dishes out the window definitely implies a certain level of “outside of the box”—or rather, window—thinking. And isn’t that exactly the kind of problem solving we want our kids to develop?

And, after all, it could have been worse: at least when they got an unwanted visitor they threw something out of their windows besides themselves.

Ernest Hemingway once famously made fun of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that “The rich are different from you and me” by replying, “Yeah, they have more money.” With that in mind, I am sure that Ernest Hemingway would probably make fun of the statement that I am about to make, too, but that won’t stop me from making it. Here it is: “Fathers are different from mothers.” (Yep, I can hear ol’ Ernie now: “Yeah, they’re different genders.”)

Yes, I know that mothers and fathers are different genders. And yes, I know all about “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” but the differences I’m talking about go way beyond talking vs. grunting and socializing vs. retreating to “the cave.” The differences I’m referring to are at once way more complicated, and yet also much more basic, and are based, mostly, on how men and women see the world. And, apparently, we see the world in vastly differing ways.

I found this out (again) quite recently, soon after my son, Clyde, started middle school. It seems that one of Clyde’s first acts as a newly minted middle-schooler was to get in trouble for talking during the lunchtime announcements. His excuse? He was talking about the lunchtime announcements: since he was having a hard time hearing what the announcement was, he had thoughtfully taken it upon himself to ask his neighbor for clarification.

To say I was skeptical of his scrupulous veracity in relating this tale would be an understatement: I found it very hard to believe that his level of commitment to his new school was already at such a fever pitch that he would be willing to risk censure just to get the lowdown on a lunchtime announcement. Of course, it didn’t help that the way he told the story painted both him and his seatmate in the rosiest of hues. From his description of the incident, he had simply leaned over and whispered, sotto voco, “I say old chap, what time did he say the Socrates Club was meeting? I think it might conflict with the Junior League of Nations lemonade and shortbread social.” His partner in crime, meanwhile, had merely been guilty of an equally genteel reply. Yeah, right.

Bearing that skepticism in mind, my immediate response upon hearing about Clyde’s misbehavior and subsequent chastisement had been to tell Clyde that it didn’t matter what he had been talking about, or who he had been talking with—it was his job to keep quiet when one of his teachers was speaking. Period. My husband’s reaction, however, could not have been more different: when Clyde told him the same story he never even got to the part about lemonade and shortbread—my husband stopped him right at the beginning of the story, after Clyde said the words “lunchtime announcements,” and said, “What? Lunchtime announcements? Why are they talking to you about anything at lunchtime? That’s your time.”

He then muttered under his breath about “the one time all day you get to be left alone, when you just want eat your damn sandwich, and The Man has to come up and keep nagging at you…” And then he took Clyde aside and explained to him all of the various tricks for pretending to look interested and concerned when teachers/bosses/wives/mothers were talking to you, along with a little pep talk about not letting “The Man” get you down. It was, I could see, a bonding moment for them. And also a chance for me to see that while, for now, Clyde might still be in orbit somewhere between Venus and Mars, it won’t be long before his feet will be firmly planted on the red planet.

I can only imagine what Ernest would have to say to me about that.

Ernest Hemingway once famously made fun of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that “The rich are different from you and me” by replying, “Yeah, they have more money.” With that in mind, I am sure that Ernest Hemingway would probably make fun of the statement that I am about to make, too, but that won’t stop me from making it. Here it is: “Fathers are different from mothers.” (Yep, I can hear ol’ Ernie now: “Yeah, they’re different genders.”)

Yes, I know that mothers and fathers are different genders. And yes, I know all about “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” but the differences I’m talking about go way beyond talking vs. grunting and socializing vs. retreating to “the cave.” The differences I’m referring to are at once way more complicated, and yet also much more basic, and are based, mostly, on how men and women see the world. And, apparently, we see the world in vastly differing ways.

I found this out (again) quite recently, soon after my son, Clyde, started middle school. It seems that one of Clyde’s first acts as a newly minted middle-schooler was to get in trouble for talking during the lunchtime announcements. His excuse? He was talking about the lunchtime announcements: since he was having a hard time hearing what the announcement was, he had thoughtfully taken it upon himself to ask his neighbor for clarification.

To say I was skeptical of his scrupulous veracity in relating this tale would be an understatement: I found it very hard to believe that his level of commitment to his new school was already at such a fever pitch that he would be willing to risk censure just to get the lowdown on a lunchtime announcement. Of course, it didn’t help that the way he told the story painted both him and his seatmate in the rosiest of hues. From his description of the incident, he had simply leaned over and whispered, sotto voco, “I say old chap, what time did he say the Socrates Club was meeting? I think it might conflict with the Junior League of Nations lemonade and shortbread social.” His partner in crime, meanwhile, had merely been guilty of an equally genteel reply. Yeah, right.

Bearing that skepticism in mind, my immediate response upon hearing about Clyde’s misbehavior and subsequent chastisement had been to tell Clyde that it didn’t matter what he had been talking about, or who he had been talking with—it was his job to keep quiet when one of his teachers was speaking. Period. My husband’s reaction, however, could not have been more different: when Clyde told him the same story he never even got to the part about lemonade and shortbread—my husband stopped him right at the beginning of the story, after Clyde said the words “lunchtime announcements,” and said, “What? Lunchtime announcements? Why are they talking to you about anything at lunchtime? That’s your time.”

He then muttered under his breath about “the one time all day you get to be left alone, when you just want eat your damn sandwich, and The Man has to come up and keep nagging at you…” And then he took Clyde aside and explained to him all of the various tricks for pretending to look interested and concerned when teachers/bosses/wives/mothers were talking to you, along with a little pep talk about not letting “The Man” get you down. It was, I could see, a bonding moment for them. And also a chance for me to see that while, for now, Clyde might still be in orbit somewhere between Venus and Mars, it won’t be long before his feet will be firmly planted on the red planet.

I can only imagine what Ernest would have to say to me about that.