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When I was in college, I had a roommate that was fanatical about the bathroom. After every shower she would wash down the walls, clean the mirror, scrub the sink and mop the floors. I wasn’t sure if she was bathing in there or doing surgery (and, given the amount of time she kept the room occupied, it wouldn’t have been too surprising to find out she was routinely performing several open-heart surgeries in a row). The thing about her, though, was that as neat as she was about the bathroom, when it came to the kitchen she was a complete slob: moldy dishes in the sink, uncovered food in the fridge, ancient withered apples hanging in baskets by the door. It was like she was working with lasers and microscopes in her pristine bathroom surgery, while in her ramshackle witch’s hut of a kitchen she was still prescribing leeches.

So which was it? Was she a neat freak, or was she a slob? Felix or Oscar? I think the truth of the matter was that, just like the rest of us, she was a little bit of both. She was a Felix in the bathroom, and an Oscar in the kitchen.

It’s not that odd, really: like Whitman said, we are all vast; we all contain multitudes. In other words, we all are good at some things, and not so good at others. It makes the news when a space shuttle pilot is also a violin virtuoso for the very reason that it is so unusual and unexpected. Why then, if it is such a given that no one should be expected to be good at everything, is there such a double standard when it comes to being a mother?

I have never met any mothers who are good at everything; conversely, I have never met any mothers who did not feel incredibly bad about this. It’s ridiculous. I would bet you anything that most plumbers don’t go to bed at night castigating themselves for not being better at dentistry, and yet most mothers do the equivalent of that very thing each and every night. The ones who are good at coaching soccer kick themselves for not sending homemade cupcakes to the school party, and the ones who can knit an entire sweater in two weeks beat themselves up for not planning a two week summer vacation at the same time.

The worst part about it is that it isn’t the kids who are making these demands; on the contrary, we do it to ourselves. I have yet to meet a single child who preferred Beef Stroganoff over Hamburger Helper, and yet on those nights when it is all we can do to make sure the hamburger actually had time to cook all the way through before we dumped the cheese powder on top, we act as if our kids are sitting in the dining room with their little blue notebooks, trying to decide whether or not we are going to keep our one Michelin star.

It would be so easy to blame Martha Stewart and her ilk for this phenomena, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this was the case with mothers long before the Food Network was on the air. I certainly remember my own mother muttering under her breath often enough about “goddamned June Cleaver.” And, as far as I know, her mother probably complained about some perfect mother on a radio show or something. (And before that, there were always perfect mothers in books.)

Maybe it’s time to let go of the idea of the perfect mother—or at least the mother who’s perfect at everything. And if we have to worship some fake mom on TV, let’s at least let’s make her someone the rest of us could possibly one day be.

Personally, I’m picking Roseanne.

The first point I need to make is this: never, not once in my life, have I thought that I would end up involved in extreme sports. For one thing I never really had the opportunity: I grew up out on a dirt road, so skateboarding was out of the question. And I was eight hours from the nearest ocean, so you could forget about surfing. It’s true, I do live in a mountain town now, but unfortunately (or, depending on how you look at it, fortunately), I moved here after I had discovered how nice it is to have the full use of my knees and ankles, and so snowboarding and mountain biking were never my thing, either.

Not that any of this has ever bothered me; in fact, I’m quite happy to have reached middle age with all of my cartilage and extremities intact—especially since my deductible has risen at nearly the same rate as my age. Imagine my chagrin, then, when I realized that I had not, in fact, escaped from the icy/hot hand of the extreme sports reaper, but instead had only delayed the monster from finding me for a few years.

This is because of my foolish choice to involve myself in the most extreme sport of all: parenting. To be precise, Flagstaff parenting. To be even more precise, springtime Flagstaff parenting, with all of the sunburn, frostbite, windchill and heat prostration that that entails (and usually in that order.)

I know, I know: I could have it a lot worse. Climbers on the face of Everest probably face harsher conditions, but at least climbers on the face of Everest get some kind of psychic reward for reaching the top—what do we get for sitting out in the cold for an hour and a half at soccer practice? Grumpy kids, fast food for dinner, and the announcement, half an hour past bedtime, that there is a ton of homework yet to done. Math homework.

And sure, the guy who skied all the way to the South Pole probably faced conditions a little bit rougher than the stinging balls of ice I got pelted with one year during the annual “Easter Egg Hunt” (more like a sugar-fueled feeding frenzy, with little plastic eggs taking the place of chum), but then again, he will probably be able to tell stories about his adventures for the rest of his life. In fact, he’ll probably never have to buy his own drinks again: one look at the frostbitten remains of his fingers and people will be lining up to buy him shots and hear his stories. That’s not likely to happen to me when I tell people about the time I sat on the bleachers in a skirt during a Little League double header and nearly got frostbite on my ass.

I will also admit that trekking to the top of Kilimanjaro might be a little more complicated than organizing a soccer snack list; after all, it does involve hiring (and paying) something like forty porters per climber. But at least you only have to pay them in cash—and you only have to make that payment once. It’s not as if you’re expected to provide each and every one of them with their own juice box and (gluten free) snack every single day. (On a side note: at what age can we legitimately stop bringing snacks? At this rate I feel like the transition from juice box and granola bar to condoms and breath mints is going to occur all in the same week.)

Truth be told, however, I would gladly pay a thousand juice boxes a day to escape the one aspect of springtime Flagstaff parenting that is inarguably worse than Everest, the South Pole, and Kilimanjaro all rolled into one: the wind.

It just doesn’t get much more extreme than that.

Humor writer David Sedaris once wrote a story about his attempts to solve a persistent household mystery when he was a teenager. It seems that someone in his house had developed the obnoxious habit of using the bathroom towels as toilet paper. The hardest part, he said, was that everyone was a suspect, up to and including his 90-year-old grandmother. In fact, the only person who wasn’t on his list was his brother—not because his brother was beyond such a diabolical act, but rather because all of the soiled towels had been neatly folded and placed back on the towel rack, and he knew that his brother was incapable of such a thing.

The first time I read that story my daughter Clementine was still an infant, and so I laughed. The next time I read it I only chuckled, because by then I had two kids, and the thought of someone using a bath towel as a bidet aid wasn’t that far-fetched. This last time I read it, however, I didn’t laugh at all, because by then I had realized that the true horror of that story doesn’t lie in the fact that the towels were used for nefarious purposes, but rather in the resigned way Mr. Sedaris accepted the fact that his brother was never going to be able to hang up a bath towel. I didn’t laugh that time because I realized with a sinking feeling that he could have been describing either one of my own children, and in his resigned acceptance, he could have been describing me.

It’s true: I’ve managed to bring two people into this world who think that towel racks are some kind of freaky modern bathroom art, and that it is their job to show the world the beauty of these art pieces by methodically removing the layers of terrycloth that some Philistine has so callously covered them over with.

Or maybe they’re just slobs. Either way, the outcome is the same: I end up washing more towels than the Holiday Inn. The washing is necessary because the two of them are never content to just throw the towel on the floor and leave it there—they must also trample it, as if the towel, having come into contact with water, is now the Wicked Witch of the West, and must have the bejesus stomped out of it.

It’s true that I could just go in after them and hang up the towels myself, thereby saving myself all of the extra washing. Here’s the thing, though: while in some bathrooms, being trampled on the floor isn’t necessarily a death sentence (or rather, a wash sentence), this is definitely not the case with my mine. For one thing, my bathroom is so small that the toilet is right next to the shower; for another, it contains a boy who frequently loses both aim and focus while standing in front of said toilet. Factor those two things into the equation and you’ll understand why I don’t want to reuse a towel that has been whipped about on the floor. In fact, if anybody were to hang one of those towels back up, neatly, you’d probably have a situation similar to the one that took place in the Sedaris household.

Come to think about it, maybe that was the answer to the Sedaris house mystery: maybe it wasn’t one person who was committing the crime knowingly, but rather two working unwittingly together. Maybe the brother (who Sedaris claims would have been the best suspect if not for the neat condition of the towels) was soiling the linen, and it was the grandmother, the passive aggressive neat freak, who came along after him and hung the offending towels back up.

It could have happened that way. Or maybe, like my house, the mother just had it in for all of them.

The other day my son Clyde got into a wrestling match with two of Clementine’s friends. Now, normally, this sort of fight would have been over in seconds—two sixteen-year-old boys versus one nine-year-old is a pretty uneven match up. But, unbeknownst to Sam and Eli, Clyde had a secret weapon up his sleeve—or rather, down his pants. Yep, it seems that at some point in the wrestling—and with plenty of encouragement from Clyde, I am sure—Clyde’s pants came clean off, leaving him absolutely, one-hundred percent, naked.

Not that this stopped Clyde from carrying on the fight, especially when he noticed that his nudity was helping him turn the tide of battle. And how could it not? What sixteen-year-old boy—or any-year-old boy, for that matter—wants to take the chance of touching or getting touched by a nine-year-old’s junk? And so, what looked like a fight that was going to be a serious beat-down—for Clyde at least—turned into a rout. It was brutal, kind of a cross between the sauna scene in “Eastern Promises” and the creepy little ghost kid scene in “The Grudge.” It was also, after the initial unveiling, totally one-sided: if it had been a professional fight the officials would’ve stopped it in the first round and the bookies would’ve refused to pay up. Actually, it’s too bad there isn’t a bookie living in my house: I could’ve made bank. Especially since at the beginning of the fight the odds were about100-to-1 against Clyde. Once the gloves—er, rather, pants—came off, however, it was no contest.

You’re probably thinking, sure, you would’ve cleaned up if you’d thought to make the bet, but who bets on a nine-year-old against two sixteen-year-olds? Well, I’ll tell you who: me. That’s because, to me, the whole pants-less ninja thing honestly wasn’t that big of a surprise. It’s true: if there’s one thing I know about Clyde, it’s that he revels in his nudity. And yes, I know that lots of little kids like to run around naked, but for most of them it’s something they outgrow. Not Clyde, though: he is as happy being naked today as he was the day he was born—more so, even, because now he is able to fully understand how uncomfortable it can make other people feel. Understand, and revel in it.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Heck, it might even turn out to be a good thing. He might turn out to be a nude model for an art class. Or at the very least, a JC Penney underwear model. But then again, those are the best case scenarios; there’s another, darker future out there that I shudder to even consider. What if Clyde becomes “Naked Dude?”

You know the guy I’m talking about—the guy who never misses an opportunity to get naked in front of strangers. The guy who is always waiting for you at the hot springs, or the remote trailhead, or that special waterfall that you hiked four hours just to reach. Oh sure, I know that, unlike Clyde, all of these guys are in their mid-fifties, but logic tells me that they didn’t start out that way. I mean, they had to have been kids at some point, right? Maybe even “Naked Kid”? But then again, maybe their “Naked Guy” careers didn’t start until they hit middle age. Maybe, in their youths, they were just as repressed as the rest of us.

And maybe that will be the difference between them and Clyde. Maybe they started their lives with their clothes on, and have been slowly removing them ever since. Just like Clyde will maybe start to slowly add more and more on.

Maybe. But in any event, it probably would be a good idea for me to start looking for a bookie, for the next big fight. Just in case.

There are certain things I just don’t want to know.

I don’t want to know what is really in my hot dog (truly, I don’t: please stop sending me those links on Facebook). And I don’t want to know that being in congress increases your chances of being a millionaire by about a thousand percent. (Okay: I do want to know that, but I don’t, you know?) And, believe it or not, I don’t even want to know where my toothbrush has been when it goes missing for the day. (This is not as odd as it might sound—both of my children are not only peripatetic brushers, but they are also opportunistic ones, appropriating the nearest toothbrush when necessary and then casting it aside when they are through. In the future, if you are using my bathroom and happen to notice that all of the toothbrushes are on little chains—like in the bank—you’ll know why.)

There is one thing, however, that I will always want to know, no matter what, and that is where my children are.

With my son Clyde, it’s easy: I just follow the sounds of dying zombies and exploding tanks and, sure enough, there’s Clyde, on the the other end of the gun (or cricket bat, or chainsaw, or flamethrower—whatever the weapon du jour happens to be). Which is another way of saying “on the other end of the PS3 controller.”

Clementine, however, is a little more difficult. She actually goes outside. (To be fair, Clyde will also go outside—at least as far as the signal on his bluetooth will reach.) Clementine, though, not only goes outside, but goes out of the yard, which makes her a wee bit harder to track down (there are also hardly ever any screaming zombies in her vicinity). It was for this reason that I got her a cellphone—to locate her.

No matter what your thoughts on teens and cellphones are, there is no denying that they are great devices for locating your missing child. Or, at least, they should be. The problem is, however, that for cellphones to function as a locator device two important conditions must be met. (I’m ignoring the GPS feature some cellphones have, because those plans cost money, and I’m already paying enough for the phone.) Anyway, the first condition is that the child actually answers the phone when they see who’s calling (thanks for nothing, caller ID), and the other is that the phone actually be in their possession in the first place.

You’d think that the second part would be the easiest—after all, isn’t the usual stereotype of a modern teenage girl that of one with a cellphone absolutely welded to her palm? And even putting aside stereotypes for the moment, wasn’t this the same child who absolutely begged for a phone of her own? Unfortunately, however, just like the Barbie Dream House you begged for when you were ten, the bloom came off the cell phone rose early on, and as often as not when I call it to try and locate its owner I can hear it chirping plaintively from somewhere near the bottom of her unmade bed.

That’s why I went to Plan B: get everyone’s else’s number. That’s right: I have everyone’s number in my own cellphone. Well, okay. Not everyone’s. But everyone I think Clementine might come into contact with, including the people I rather wish she wouldn’t. And better yet, I’m not afraid to use those numbers.

Even better still, the people at the other end of those numbers are not yet immune to my nagging—unlike Clementine—and will therefore generally do whatever it takes to get me to stop calling them. Including walking over to Clementine, tapping her on the shoulder, and saying, “Dude, answer your phone, already; your mom’s driving me crazy.”

Ah, the wonders of modern technology.

In a way, I was lucky. When my daughter Clementine was born 10 days after her due date, followed, a few years later, by her brother Clyde being born three weeks before his, I was put on immediate notice that, while it may be that I have a child-rearing schedule firmly in place, my children were obviously under absolutely no urge to follow it. Knowing that from the very beginning made it easier for me to accept things later on when they insisted on being the outliers on my imaginary bell curve—way too early to walk and too late to get teeth, not speaking for months past the expected day (and then speaking in full sentences), giving up on nursing first too soon, at one, and then too late, at three. And, of course, most tragically, giving up on naps just when I was starting to learn to enjoy them again myself.

Things haven’t changed much as they’ve gotten older: no matter what I do, what plans I make for them, they insist on being the people they are going to be, when they want to be them. For example, the one I originally signed up for dance ended up playing right field, and the one I bought the football helmet for cheerfully goes to dance class twice a week. Go figure.

But that’s okay. As far as I’m concerned, I would no more try and force my kids to fit into some kind of imaginary little box I started building back in fourth grade (back when I also thought that my husband was going to be a doctor/astronaut/rock star and that we would both live on a quarter horse ranch in Wyoming) than I would try and force them into clothes that were too small for them. Besides, even if it were possible to do such a thing, wouldn’t it ruin the delicious surprise of slowly discovering what kind of people they are going to turn out to be? And so, even though I am at turns excited, frustrated, mystified, and incredulous as I watch them slowly evolve, above all else I am for the most part, quiet.

Sure it’s hard to watch them make some boneheaded mistakes, but then again I am sure that it was hard for my mother to watch me put on pumps and bobbie socks. (Give me a break: it was the 80s.) But still: I am a firm believer that not only do we learn best from our mistakes, but also that we very nearly learn only from them. (I’m not willing to go so far as to say that no one can learn any other way: there very well might be a tribe of people somewhere out there who has managed to perfect the art of listening to—and learning from—the cautionary tales of their elders; so far, however, I have yet to see any evidence of such a tribe’s existence.)

Again, I understand how hard it is to watch someone you care about make the same stupid mistakes you made yourself, but the truth of the matter is they’re not making your mistakes all over again—they’re making their own. And the ability to make—and recover from—mistakes is one of the most valuable skills you can teach your kids, certainly much more valuable than teaching them never to make any mistakes in the first place.

It’s like “Cinderella.” In the original Grimm’s version, the mother was so desperate for one of her own daughters to be the one who ended up with the prince that she cut off their toes to try and make their feet fit into the shoes.

Of course, it didn’t work. And more than that, I’ll bet that those sisters never listened to a word their mother said again.

Who knows? Maybe that was the real lesson of the story after all.

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?”

Recently, a friend of mine was telling me about the essay her son wrote for school. It seems that his essay read something like this: “In ‘To Kill A Mockingbird,’ Scout and Jem lose their innocence when an incident occurs that causes them to lose their innocence. This incident occurred the summer they lost their innocence.” Not too surprisingly, my friend made her son 1) actually read the book, and 2) rewrite the essay so that it didn’t reek quite so much of BS. Her argument to him (of course he argued) was that, one day, when the time comes for him to make his way in the real world, the world of jobs and paychecks, people will be much less forgiving of someone trying to get away with such blatant ignorance, and he should probably start preparing for that now.

It was a good argument, I thought. A valid one. And then I happened to be glancing through the classifieds here in “the real world,” and I saw an ad that read as follows: “Wanted. Assistant Manager. The Assistant Manager assists the Manager in managing,” and I realized that BS Essay Boy actually had the right idea after all, and that the painful truth of the matter was that his mother (and by my support, I) were the ones who were guilty of not living in the “real world.” Not only that, but we were also guilty of telling our children yet another big, fat, whopping lie concerning that world.

The lies started in elementary school, when we told them that it was important that they learn to add and subtract without a calculator. “In the real world,” we said (there’s those magic words again), “people are expected to be able to do simple sums in their heads.” Of course it wasn’t long after that that I had to stand by in total agony as my kids watched a cashier’s brow furrow up like an unmade bed when I handed her a ten and a quarter for a purchase totaling $5.19. (I considered covering their eyes to shield them from the horror of it, but I only have two hands, meaning that I could have shielded either one whole child or half of each. It would have been pointless, anyway: there was no way I could have possibly shielded them from the puzzled humming sound coming from her pursed lips as well.)

Then there was the science fair project where we insisted they use their real data, even though it didn’t support their hypothesis, because “that’s how the scientific method works,” and “people who don’t understand the scientific method can be tricked into anything—even voting Republican.” The next day we opened up the paper to find that yet another school district had decided to adopt a set of science books that included a section on “intelligent design.” (Next up: geography books that question the existence of Delaware on the grounds that “no one we know has ever actually been there.”)

This was followed by a stern lecture against playground fighting on the grounds that “violence never solved anything,” only to hear the news that we are getting into yet another war in the Middle East. (Although perhaps the playground lecture should have been “violence never solves anything—especially if you lose all of the time.”)

Perhaps we’re just going about all of this in the wrong way. If we were honest (with ourselves as well as them), we would probably admit to them that what we call “the real world” is actually just a code name for “the world we really want.” But even so: I still believe that in both versions it’s a good idea to actually read “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
–

It seems to me that every winter since I’ve had children has been remarkable in some sort of epic literary fashion. There was the winter of a thousand snow days, (Anna Karenina), the winter of a million lost gloves (Three Little Kittens), and the winter of the endless muddy boots (Long Walk—er, mop). This winter, however, felt more than epic: it felt biblical. That’s because this was the winter that my house took on a decidedly Egyptian feel.

There were several reason for this. One was that we got another cat (a dreadful one), one was that our fridge was always stocked with hummus (hummus being one of the few foods that Clementine will eat), and one was because there was revolution in the air (but that’s nothing new). But the main reason my house felt so Egyptian this winter was because for a while there it felt like we were being visited by the ten plagues, one at a time.

Not the traditional plagues, of course. We didn’t have any rivers of blood, or frogs falling from the sky—but then again, the winter isn’t quite over yet, is it? It’s funny: last winter we just had one enemy to face—the dreaded snow day (or rather snow week, as it turned out). This winter, however, there have been so many different ailments—or plagues, if you will—that I can’t help but think of the ten trials visited on Pharaoh in the Old Testament.

The first plague, for us, was the stomach flu: the kind with puking and moaning. It wasn’t just us, of course: every child I know was stricken with some form of puking illness. And while puking is annoying on many levels, it is mostly for the amount of laundry it generates. (Question: How old do you have to be before you make the connection between “I’m feel like I’m going to throw up” and “I should probably get out of bed”? Answer: Old enough to do your own laundry.)

Next came the regular flu, the kind with coughing and moaning, which, in theory, should lead to less laundry, but in practice, does not. This is because of the fact that in at least half of the children I know, coughing always leads to puking. (Again, same question: How old do you have to be before you realize that coughing fits inevitably lead to puking? And again, same answer: old enough to do your own laundry.)

After that came the pink eye, something that involves no moaning whatsoever—at least not on the part of the patient. Of course, the problem with pink eye is that otherwise healthy (read: active) children must stay home for twenty-four hours, which doesn’t seem like that long until you factor in that they always manage to get it one at a time, meaning that that initial twenty-four hours can stretch out indefinitely, if you have enough children to infect and reinfect each other over and over again.

This was followed by, of all things, cold sores. Yes, just regular old cold sores, but cold sores of such intensity and duration that they qualified for plague status, too. I’m not talking about little blisters on the lips, I’m talking about huge craters that looked like something out of a Stephen King novel—you know, the one where he runs over a gypsy and gets cursed? That kind of cold sore. The kind that causes you to run a fever, meaning that, yet again, you get sent home from school.

Like I said: biblical. Of course, the nice thing for Pharaoh was that, eventually, his trials came to an end: he just had to let Moses’ people go free first. Believe me, I’ve been trying to do that for years. Unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to let your people go free when they just won’t leave.

It was your typical story of prejudice and judgement: a teenager walks into a store where they are immediately greeted with suspicion and contempt, treated as little better than a common thief for no other reason than their age, their clothes, their hair. And the teen telling this story to me was nothing if not convincing in their tale of woe. Oh, the injustice of it all, the sadness of man’s inhumanity toward man, the stinging shame of once again being unfairly singled out all because of their appearance. With a few dramatic gestures and carefully inflected quivers in their stricken voice they seemed to be asking me the eternal question the persecuted have always asked of their tormentors, Why me, oh lord, why me?

To an outsider, this display of wounded pride and hurt feelings must have been quite impressive. Even I was impressed by what an elegant speech it was: so passionate, so expertly argued, and so full of exquisite little details about the wrongness of judging people based on their appearance alone. To top it all off there was a poignant bit at the end about the narrow-minded prejudice that overtakes those over thirty, before finally wrapping it up with a sincere lamentation about how this, this right here was what was truly the cause of most of the misunderstandings and bloodshed in the world.

Like I said, it was wonderful. It was beautiful. And it would have been great, except for one tiny detail.

The maligned teen in question actually had been stealing at the time.

That’s not the point, I was told. You don’t understand. And while, on one level I could maybe, kind of, sort of, a little bit agree, on every other level I was unable to hold back my disbelief long enough not to come back with, Well, if that’s not the point, then what is?

The aggrieved stare I received in return convinced me that the actual point in question must be this: the ability of the average adolescent to summon up a sense of outrage at the unjust treatment they receive is inversely proportional to the amount of indifference they display at the unjust treatment they dish out. And that while some people might consider that to be a liability, or even a personality defect, in truth it is a trait that will come in handy in all sorts of professions. Televangelists. Politicians. Tobacco company spokesmen. Really, any job that requires the ability to hold two competing versions of reality in your head at the same time and still emerge feeling both unscathed and morally superior.

I’ve noticed this ability in other aspects of teen lives as well; I call it the “Get Out of My Life/ Can I Have Some Money?” syndrome. I’ve also seen it in the argument entitled “Everyone should be allowed to follow their dreams and do exactly what they please—and their parents should pay for it.” (When I point out that the first half of that argument would mean that, presumably, the parents would then also be allowed to follow their dreams and do exactly what they please, and that it is unlikely that the parents’ dreams and desires include “lifelong servitude to ungrateful children,” there is always a long sigh, as if I am yet again missing the point.)

It’s then that I understand the frustration the framers of the constitution must have felt when people brought up the conflict between “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and the slavery question. Of course, at least our Founding Fathers were honest enough to say, “What part of ‘3/5th of a human being’ don’t you understand?”

Then again, Thomas Jefferson was probably never followed around suspiciously by a “loss prevention officer” at Walgreens. Although he probably should have been: he did have long hair.