A few weeks ago someone asked me how long I had been writing this column.
“A while…” I said, trying to look mysterious and enigmatic. Of course they replied with a blank stare, and who can blame them? After all, Twilight jokes are pretty much passe these days. But the truth is I wasn’t really trying to channel Edward: I honestly didn’t remember. And so when I got home I looked in my files (read: dug through the pile of crap on top of my desk) and got the answer. As of last May I have been writing this column for ten years.
Damn. That would have been a good excuse for a party. Or at least a bottle of fancy liquor. Oh well, I was always crap at anniversaries: whenever someone asks me how old I am I always have to do the math in my head, which ends up making me look like I’m trying to decide exactly how much I’m going to lie. Which is all kinds of ridiculous, because I never have to think about how much I’m going to lie—the answer is always the same: a lot.
Anyway, when I started this column I was writing about what it was like to live with an infant and a kindergartener. I wrote about laundry and temper tantrums. Now, ten years later, I’m writing about living with two teenagers, and I’m writing about… um, yeah, still writing about laundry and temper tantrums. The laundry is no less disgusting, and the temper tantrums are more HBO and less Disney Channel, but other than that things are remarkably similar.
And ten years from now? Well, hopefully I won’t be writing about laundry anymore (because we’ll all be living in the future, and there will be Spandex Jackets For Everyone), and hopefully the temper tantrums won’t have landed anyone in jail, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll still be writing about my children. Because no matter how old they get they’ll still be my children. Which means that they will still frustrate me, and amuse me, and horrify me, and impress me, at least once a week, and all I really need is one good story a week to make a column, you know?
If my mother wrote her own column (which I’m sure she could—all of the Poe women have wicked senses of humor) then I’m sure she would feel the same way; I’m sure that I still do something frustrating enough every week to inspire at least 645 words. And I probably always will. I remember when Clementine was born there was a mother and daughter who lived on our block who were 95 and 75 respectively, and they still bickered. And I’m also sure that if the 95-year-old had been given the space she could have written an awesome column about the trials of having septuagenarian offspring.
The idea that my children will ever be old enough for me not to have something to say about them is kind of like saying that one day they will be old enough not to need my (unasked for) advice, and that’s just ridiculous.
Of course, as my children get older it does get harder to write the really embarrassing stuff about them. For one thing, they can read now, and if they ever bothered to read my column they would catch me doing it. For another, the embarrassing stuff that teenagers do is less along the lines of “Kids Say the Darnedest Things,” and more like “You do know that’s still illegal in Utah, right?” Besides, how can I lecture them about keeping their incriminating photos off of Facebook if I then turn around and put a detailed description of those same incriminating acts on my own website?
At least the hypothetical 95-year-old columnist never had to worry about that. Probably.