Kelly Poe Wilson

Ever since she was small, my daughter, Clementine, and I have been engaged in a war of incompetence. Here’s how it works: whenever I ask her to perform a household chore, she makes sure to comply in the most ludicrously incompetent manner she can think of.

A request for her to make her bed might end up with all of the blankets wadded up beneath the mattress; emptying the dishwasher usually results in a massive search for dishes that can last well into the next week, with every meal becoming a sort of culinary scavenger hunt; and cleaning the toilet? Well, let’s just put it this way: your toothbrush needed replacing anyway, didn’t it?

For the most part, however, her tactics haven’t worked: the cycle of chore life continues on unabated. I assign the chore, Clementine does her best to not do her best, and I assign it again. This means that some chores need to be done over and over again, until finally they only achieve completion under direct and constant supervision. Frustrating? You bet.

The other day, though, there was a breakthrough on the chorefront of such magnitude that it just might possibly change the whole nature of chore assignments in my house forever. No, Clementine didn’t finally give up and just start doing the chores correctly the first time; on the contrary, she performed a chore in such a spectacularly incompetent manner that I am the one who is ready to admit defeat.

It all started with the bathroom. There are so many ways to screw up cleaning a bathroom (leaving the cleanser in the bathtub, so that the next person who takes a bath gets a nice, gritty crack full; cleaning the mirror with wet toilet paper, and then it leaving it there so that it adheres and dries in a sort of poor man’s papier-mache; even scrubbing out the sink with the toilet brush) that I was sure that there was nothing she could shock me with–after all, this was the same child who once used a wash cloth to clean the toilet, and then hung that same wash cloth back up in the shower to dry. (To this day I sniff anything I put anywhere near my face).

And so, thinking I was safe, I once again assigned her to clean the bathroom. Unfortunately, however, I had failed to take into account the fact that, as technology evolves, so do the ways to misuse it. In other words, I hadn’t reckoned on the Floor Mate.

A few months ago my mother got me one of those mopping vacuums, the kind that scrubs the floor and then sucks the dirty water back up. It’s great. It works like a charm. It’s so simple even a child can operate it–anybody else’s child, that is.

After filling the machine with solution and demonstrating the different settings (you need to flip a switch to go from wet to dry), my husband gave it to Clementine. Twenty minutes later she was back, pronouncing that she was “done–to the best of my abilities.” Not liking the ominous sound of that, my husband went to check her work, and found … nothing. The floor looked like it hadn’t been touched.

“Did you even use it?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” she replied angrily. “I’ve been using it for the last half hour–it doesn’t work.”
Thinking back, and remembering the distinct lack of noise coming from the bathroom, a lightbulb went on over his head. “Did you turn it on?”

“What?”

She had pushed the silent, non-functioning machine around the floor for the better part of twenty minutes.

It was at that point I gave up–it’s hard enough to clean a bathroom with a recalcitrant child standing in the middle of it; add in a husband who is prostrate from laughter, and it becomes nearly impossible.

The other weekend, my husband and I went on a lovely road trip to Tucson.
The above sentence is almost true. We did go on a road trip. And it was to Tucson. Whether or not it was lovely, however, is up for debate, since our children went with us. Inside the car. (It’s a state law or something. Turns out, the man says that it’s illegal to strap one or both of your children to the roof, no matter what kind of bungee cords you use.)

Here’s the thing about traveling with one of your children: it’s the best. Maybe it’s because you aren’t staring directly at one another, but suddenly you’re having the kinds of conversations that you always dreamed about having with your kids (before you had kids, that is). Conversations about clouds, state license plates, and, even, ( thanks to the prevalence of bumper stickers) politics and religion.

You’re telling them the story about the time you got stood up for the 7th grade dance, and they’re telling you that they’re not sure that they’re ready for long division. The silence in between topics isn’t awkward, because there’s always something to look at out of the window, and the shocking revelations they make (like the fear of long division) don’t draw anything other than mild parental concern, because, after all, you’re driving, and you can’t keep your eyes on the road and whip around and look at the back seat at the same time. (Or at least, I can’t. I have seen it done–once–unfortunately while I was in the passenger seat. We nearly rear-ended the car in front of us during the process.)

That’s how it is driving with one of your children. One. Singular. Here’s the thing, though, about driving with two or more of them: it’s hell. The same kid who, on her own, is the most delightful traveling companion–the kind that will cheerfully agree to wait another hour to stop for lunch, or to turn down the volume on her iPod–becomes completely intransigent when you add another child to the mix. Add a third–thereby making it necessary for legs to touch in the back seat–and you may as well be hauling livestock. In fact, I have traveled in a car with 1 goat, 12 chickens, and 2 rabbits (don’t ask), and I can tell you that they were much more agreeable traveling companions than my two children. And yes, each of those animals relieved themselves at some point during the trip. (Of course, so have my children, so that doesn’t really change anything.)

Anyway, towards the end of our road trip to Tucson (for those of you who haven’t done the math., that translates into about 300 miles of driving, or, in parental figures, about 12,624 fights), a series of billboards started to appear on the side of the road. Mixed in with the usual ones advertising truck stops, fast food, and, always curious to me, subdivisions (as if buying a house were an impulse decision: “Honey, do you want to stop at Burger King or McDonald’s?” “Oh, I don’t know. Let’s just buy a house instead.”), there were billboards from a local church asking you a series of deep questions.

Questions like “When did you stop loving your wife?”; “When did you stop having fun?”; and, finally, “When did you stop enjoying your children?” When we passed the last one my husband and I turned to look at each other and spoke simultaneously. He said “Mountainnaire,” and I said “Kachina Village,” and we both smiled, because it was nice to know that even after fourteen years of marriage, there were some things we could totally agree on.

Like the fact that neither one of us wants to be in the same car with both of our children for more than five miles ever again.

The other day, while cleaning up after my daughter, Clementine, I found something very disturbing: I found a list she had been compiling of all of the swear words that she and her friends knew. While there were many things that were disturbing about the list, one of the worst was the sheer number of words that were left off of it–including some of my personal favorites.

Now, I know that times change, and that nothing changes as fast as slang, but I find it hard to believe that a word that Lenny Bruce once described as “a ten letter word describing any woman I would like to meet or possibly some day marry” could ever fall so far out of favor that it would fail to pass muster with today’s hip swearers (what I like to think of as the “curserati”).

And then there was the word that has been such a staple of the curseworld for so long that if it were ever to disappear entirely an entire swath of the English-speaking world would be left speechless. (I am referring, of course, to the word used to such good effect by Monty Python in their sketch about the man who confused his c’s with his b’s; I think the name of it was “Silly Bunts”).

But, disturbing as it was to see which cursing classic didn’t make the list, it was even more disturbing to see the ones that did. Words like “crap.”

Crap.

Ever since my children were small I have allowed them to watch shows like “South Park” and listen to music from the likes of Mickey Avalon, and this is how they repay me? With “crap?” Crap is so far from being a swear word that I can even write it in the pages of Flag Live without having to make either Lenny Bruce or Monty Python allusions. I mean, just watch: crap, crap, crap. You see? I just wrote it three times, and Ryan (Flag Live’s beloved editor), hasn’t once reached for that bottle of Scotch he keeps hidden in his “special editor drawer.” (Actually, I’m making up the part about Ryan, and the Scotch. We all know that, like all editors, he drinks nothing but Appletinis and Fuzzy Navels.)

But enough about girly drinking habits. My point is that, if now, at the prime swearing age of twelve, Clementine thinks that “crap” is an actual swear word, what happens when she hits middle school? “Bull Puckey?” “Cheese and Rice?” I shudder to think about the consequences: if she doesn’t learn to swear–and more importantly, if the newness of it doesn’t wear off soon–she’ll end up like one of those guys. You know, the ones who always sit behind you at the movies; the ones who only learned how to swear in the last two weeks? (Or so it would seem.)

Why else would they think that every single word they speak (or rather, shout), needs to be preceded by the gerund of a certain word describing fornication? In fact, their use of this word is so prevalent that it is almost as if they are trying to speak pig Latin, and just got a little confused. (“No, no, no: it’s end every word with ‘ay,’ not start every word with ‘ef’.”)

Anyway, that’s the position Clementine could find herself in if she doesn’t step up her swearing game soon. If only there were some kind of “swearing boot camp” I could send her to–other than, of course, the entire island of Great Britain. Because sending her to Britain would not only be prohibitively expensive, but she also might come back not only swearing, but drinking and smoking as well.

Although I guess that wouldn’t be so bad–as long as she didn’t come back drinking Appletinis.

I was watching the Suns play the Spurs the other day, and I couldn’t help but start to think about the “art of the flop.” (Yeah, I’m talking about you, Ginobli.) More specifically, the art of the kid flop.

It starts when they are just beginning to walk–as surely as NBA players know which refs will let them get away with a flop, kids know which parent is the most likely to run over and comfort them when they hit the ground. You can watch the same kid fall down two times in a row, and their reaction will be totally different both times: suddenly the same kid that swooned over a paper cut when their mom was there is capable of stoically walking three blocks spouting arterial blood when she’s not around.

Another similarity is that–just like with NBA flops–with “kid flops,” the more history the players have together, the worse it gets. This is especially true of the “sibling flop,” which is a very specific type of flop that only occurs between siblings with a history of battery (which, I suppose, means all of them). The sibling flop is what occurs when you are in the kitchen and hear a loud thump coming from the living room, followed by the (quickest-witted) child screaming “Ow (insert sibling name here)! Why’d ya hit me?” (It’s funny how kids who mumble into their shoes every time you ask them a question have no problem projecting their voices to the cheap seats when there is some transgression to be reported.)

Whenever I hear “why’d ya hit me, (your name here)?” I know that there are three possible scenarios:

1.Neither child was within five feet of the other one when the supposed assault took place; some clever child is just capitalizing on a random thumping sound.

2.The complaining child has launched a pre-emptive whack on the accused child, knowing that any retaliation will just be seen as further evidence of the original alleged transgression.

3.Everything happened exactly as it was reported: the first child was sitting quietly in the corner, serenely contemplating world peace, when the second child swarmed up and viciously attacked them for no good reason.

Ok, you’re right: scratch that last one. There are actually only two possible scenarios–both of which involve flopping.

Of course, the important thing to remember with “kid flopping” is that, unlike the NBA, there is no such thing as “home court advantage”; whereas during a basketball game the crowd will always be on the side of the home team when it comes to flopping (as far as I’m concerned, Steve Nash has taken nothing but charges ever since he left Dallas), when it comes to children the assumption is the exact opposite: parents always assume that the visiting team (child) was the victim of their own child’s aggression. It’s one of those “the devil you know” type situations.

Is this fair? No, but then again, neither is my having to assume the de facto role of “peacekeeper” between all people under five feet tall in my house.

There’s talk in the NBA about possibly instituting a rule against blatant flopping. While part of me thinks that this would be a great idea (yeah, I’m talking about you again, Ginobli), another part of me recognizes that, until referees are given the same sweeping, all-encompassing powers that mothers have (a mother’s power to accuse, convict, and sentence makes the military tribunals at Guantanamo look like The People’s Court), this will just open up the system to even more accusations of abuse.

Especially when the refs starts defending their calls with a very Mom-like “because I said so.” Oh wait–they already do that.

A friend of mine just had his second child. His first is three and a half years old, and he told me that he felt that this amount of spacing between his two children would help to prevent the worst of the sibling rivalry. While I wanted to be sensitive and understanding to someone who was still in the glow of new parent bliss, I couldn’t help but let a little peep of disbelief escape my lips at the thought of someone thinking they were going to escape sibling rivalry. Well, actually, it was a bit more than a little peep. Or even a big peep. It was more like this:

“Ha!”

Just one, but that was enough to make him pause and say, “So you don’t think that’s possible?”

Although I hated to burst his bubble, I kind of already had, so I just shook my head sadly and said, “No.” I could have added that I knew siblings who were born ten years apart, as well as ones who were born ten months apart (“Irish twins,” we used to call them), and that the level of animosity between them was the same: intense. The truth is, thinking that there is some way to avoid sibling rivalry is the same thing as thinking that there is some way to avoid death: think it all you want, but in the end, you’ll be just as dead.

Having thus destroyed his dreams of family harmony, I felt like I should at least offer him a few words of comfort–something along the lines of: “Don’t worry–it only lasts a few years.” Alas, however, it seemed as if my ability to lie was all used up for the day, and I couldn’t even do that. Because, actually, if anything, I’ve noticed that the sibling rivalry thing just gets worse. Or at least more creative: the kids who were only pinching each other in grade school are practically hiring hit men to take each other out once they enter high school.

So why, you may ask, does anyone have a second child? If it causes that much strife, why not stop at one? The answer, of course, is the same one we give for every disagreeable thing we do to our children: it’s for their own good.

If there is one thing that is certain in this world, it’s that, at some point, you are going to have to deal with unpleasant people. And what better way to prepare for that then by having siblings: the most unpleasant people of them all?

Think about it: the room-mate who used your toothbrush after every one of her bulimic episodes, and then denied it? At least she was actually using it to brush her teeth. And the coworker who stole your lunch every day? At least he wasn’t farting on it and then telling you about it five minutes after you finished eating it. (Not unless you work at Dominos.)

Seriously, I am convinced that much of who we are–how we handle responsibility, stress, and unfair circumstances–can be traced to our early interactions with our siblings. You show me someone who can endure an ambush-style job review, and I’ll show you someone who grew up with not just one, but several older sisters.

Of course, just like with all of the other things we do for our children, the benefits of having siblings is something that most kids will only appreciate years down the road (if ever), And, I must admit, that when I have to physically separate them for the duration of an entire eight-hour road trip, I have trouble seeing it too.

Someday, however, I am sure that it will all be worth it: one day they will look at the siblings we gave them and then turn and thank us profusely.

Did I just hear someone say “Ha!”?

The other night my husband took our daughter Clementine to see the Plain White T’s perform on campus–a truly selfless act for which I will be in his debt for approximately the next three hundred years.

Not that the Plain White T’s are so bad. (Although their hit song, “Hey There Delilah,” has one of those moronic, looping melody lines that get stuck in your head for days. The kind of song that you find yourself singing under your breath every time your windshield wipers hit a certain speed.) But still: that’s just one song–not enough to taint an entire concert.

No, the reason I owe my husband for the rest of my natural life (and beyond) isn’t because of “Oooooh, what you gave to me; ooooh, it burns when I pee,” (or however that song goes)–they could have played nothing but that song over and over again all night and it would not have mattered one bit. Actually, they could have conducted a highly thoughtful and cogent discussion on the state of the current economy, and that wouldn’t have mattered either. As a matter of fact, nothing the Plain White T’s did would have made any difference to my husband’s concert-going experience at all, because from where he sat the concert consisted of only one sound:

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!”

(This is the sound made by twelve hundred preteen girls screaming in syncopated adoration.)

A lot.

My first thought, when he described the concert to me, was to feel bad for the band. After all, the Plain White T’s aren’t just some jumped up Disney concoction like the Jonas Brothers or Hannah Montana; it only seemed reasonable to assume, then, that when they were first sitting around in their garage and dreaming of hitting it big those dreams didn’t include things like, “Yeah, man, and the chicks are going to go crazy for us–at least until they get old enough to start wearing bras.” A few words with my husband, however, relieved me of my concern. “No,” he said wryly, “they seemed well aware of who their audience was.” Meaning that they said the type of things up on stage guaranteed to elicit more screaming, rather than less. Things like:

“Hey, you guys know what? We were just in”–looks at cue card—“Kingman, and they said that the kids in Flagstaff didn’t know how to rock…*” (rest cut off by screaming). (*Satire alert: this is not an actual Plain White T’s concert quote.)

Here’s the thing: I must confess, that even though I was once a preteen girl myself (long, long ago–back before the term “preteen” even existed), I’m still at a loss to understand the screaming thing. While logic tells me that it must be some kind of defensive strategy leftover from our caveman days (can you think of a better way to drive off a Sabre-toothed tiger?), that doesn’t help explain why, then, those screaming attacks are only used when girls are confronted with something they want to get closer to, not when they are confronted with the things they want to drive away. They don’t scream (at least not like that) at their little brothers; they scream like that at Rob Pattinson. And Daniel Radcliffe. And even, oddly enough, the guy from Napoleon Dynamite. And they definitely scream at bands.

This presents something of a dilemma for parents who are also music lovers: do we tell our daughters to shut up, or do we just let them enjoy the show (screams and all)? In the end, I have to say that I agree with my husband’s decision to let our daughter scream, although I’m sure that it was frustrating for the people who actually came to hear, and not just see the Plain White T’s.

Both of them.

1 In the 90s, the big status symbol was to be “stressed.”

“How’s it going?” you’d ask someone, and they’d say, “Dude, I’m so stressed,” and then they’s list all of the “stressors” in their life: papers to write, girlfriends to break up with, room-mates to clean up after. You were supposed to shake your head in commiseration, and then say something like, “You think you’re stressed? Check this out.” And then you’d list all of your stressors. (Personally, however, I always preferred to pretend that they meant “I’m so stressed” in a positive sense. “Right on!” I’d usually reply.)

This decade, however, isn’t about stress–it’s about being busy (or maybe it’s about both, and the stress is just assumed). Ask someone how they’re doing these days, and they’re likely to whip out their Blackberry and recite that day’s schedule: “I’ve got the dentist at noon, the accountant at one, two music lessons, a soccer practice and a pedicure. Then I have to go to the grocery store, because we are completely out of food…”

The only difference that I can see between the 90s version and this one is that, in the 90s, at least we didn’t feel bad about it: we were proud of our stress. It made us seem important. It made us seem busy. Nowadays, however, we actually are busy, and we feel guilty about it. Especially when that busyness involves our children.

This is because, supposedly, being too busy is one of the symptoms of “Nature Deficit Disorder,” the condition whereby the modern child–due to their hectic, over-scheduled lives–have become cut off from the natural world. I can see their point: my kids do spend a lot less time out wandering the woods then I did when I was their age (or rather, in my case, wandering the fields–I grew up in an agricultural community). And they do have a lot more scheduled activities then I did when I was a child–between the music lessons, soccer practice, Cub Scouts and whatnot (I’m sure I’m forgetting something), they are probably five times as busy as I was at their age.

And yes, I could see how this could be misinterpreted as a bad thing–how it paints a picture of an overly ambitious mom shuttling her kids from one activity to the next, the kids in question looking longingly over their shoulders at the beckoning woods as they are forced, yet again, into the back of the minivan. But, the thing is, it’s not like that: given the chance, my kids would fill their schedule with even more activities–there would be horseback riding lessons, karate, and Japanese language classes on top of everything else, with a barely a break in the middle for a quick playdate and then off we’d go again.

Some people say that this is because kids these days have shorter attention spans, and therefore need to switch from activity to activity like a remote spinning through 600 channels. Maybe. But maybe it’s also because it’s kind of fun to be busy.

I know that I’m supposed to feel bad about all of the activities; I’m supposed to be wringing my hands in despair at the fact that every single waking minute of my children’s lives is crammed full, but somehow, I just can’t. Who knows? Maybe my anxiety plate is just so full already that I don’t have room for anything else. I mean, really: I’m supposed to worry about falling school test scores, the economy, swine flu, and nature deficit disorder? Really?

Of course, maybe this is all just practice for the next decade–the “worry” decade. That makes sense; a few years from now I’ll probably ask somebody “How’s it going?” and, in the most pained way possible, they’ll answer me, “Dude, I’m so worried.” To which, hopefully, I’ll be able to respond: “Right on.”

I always thought that once my kids got old enough to go to school, the era of the playdate would be over.

I really believed that once they started school, and began to make friends with the kids in their classrooms, that eventually all of their friends would be school friends, and therefore all of their friends would live in our neighborhood–just like it was back when I was a wee, paste-eating elementary school-er myself.

Obviously, however, all those years of eating paste have left my brain completely addled; how else could I have failed to make the connection between the long line of white SUVs I see waiting outside the school every afternoon and the fact that nobody lives in the same neighborhood as their school anymore. (There are, of course, a few exceptions to this rule–like us–but for the most part, it’s wall-to-wall SUVs. Sometimes I think that the only reason there are still a few of us left without them is that, somehow, we were gone the day the SUV fairy came by. Probably out on a bike ride or something).

My missing SUV aside, what that long line of cars really means is that my dream of the decline and fall of the playdate empire has been premature, to say the least.

I don’t know what I was thinking: after all, I already knew that the days when “playing” simply meant rounding up a group of neighborhood kids and seeing whose house you could get thrown out of first were as long gone as the days of a kid on a bicycle delivering your newspaper. And I knew that they were both gone for precisely the same reason: most kids aren’t even allowed to leave their own living rooms unsupervised anymore, let alone their houses.

In fact, even if my kids’school friends did live in the same neighborhood as us (and they don’t–two of them don’t even live in the same zip code), they still probably wouldn’t be allowed to walk over to our house on their own–as I mentioned before, most kids these days aren’t allowed to do anything on their own (at least until they turn 16 and get a car that is, at which time it seems that they suddenly have no restrictions whatsoever).

It’s bizarre.

We all claim to want strong, independent kids, but I guess that some parents think that these are traits that can be “organized” into children–as if there was some sort of “Independent Thinking” club you just needed to make sure that they all signed up for in kindergarten. (“Did you get the new “Independent Thinker” t-shirt? Remember: we all have to match.”)

Maybe I’m just grumpy because three years after my last child started school I’m still being asked to get in the car and drive across town so that my kids can “play.” Meanwhile, our own neighborhood is filled with kids my children have never met, either because they don’t go to our school or because, like us, they, too, are always off somewhere else (probably at playdates on the other side of town as well). The worst part of it is that, in those few moments when both sets of children are actually present in the neighborhood at the same time, my kids always resist my suggestions to go out and “play” with them by saying, “But we don’t know them.” And they’re right: they don’t.

I could, I suppose, make the introductions myself, but that would mean that first I would have to go and meet the parents–my neighbors. Who has the time for that? After all, I need all of my spare time so that I can catch up with my friends. By email. Because, of course, we don’t live anywhere near each other either.

Let’s talk about forks.

According to Wikipedia (looking up stuff on Wikipedia is my second favorite way to waste time; my first is watching old episodes of Never Mind the Buzzcocks on You Tube), forks were being used in ancient Rome as early as 200 C.E. However, it wasn’t until the 18th century that they became commonplace in Great Britain. Before that, anybody who showed up at a party with a fork–back then it was strictly BYOC (bring your own cutlery)–was considered either “effeminate,” “Italian,” or, worst of all, “effeminately Italian.”

That means that it took approximately sixteen hundred years for the idea of not using your fingers when you eat (an imminently sensible idea, if you ask me) to travel 900 miles. It thus follows, then, that if x=fork, and y=distance (and accounting for the curvature of the earth and the average air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow), I should reasonably be able to expect my children to start using forks in approximately…let’s see…oh.

Never.

Or at least that’s how it seems.

I did actually teach them to use forks at one point. I remember it well, and even if I didn’t, I have proof: it is written down in Clementine’s baby book. (Clyde, as a second child, of course has no baby book. He’s lucky he has a birth certificate. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on whether or not second children do better in the Witness Protection Program than firstborns, since there’s so much less evidence of their previous lives to erase.)

I’ll admit that I probably didn’t really emphasize the whole fork thing hard enough: my lectures on good table manners are generally limited to the edict thou shalt not gross out thy fellow diners (meaning that elbows on the table are ok, as long as they are not up there to demonstrate to your tablemates how the big scab on your forearm has recently turned all green and puckery), but I’m pretty sure I included something about how that poky thing sitting on the table next to your plate is for picking up food, not for stabbing your sister.

And yet, somehow, in the years that we have been dining together, my children have become less likely to use a fork, not more. Heck, they can hardly even be convinced to use a spoon, and even a 12th century Englishman could use one of those without being called a nancy boy (or worse yet, an Italian).

And, before you start thinking that I’m one of those people who think that Buffalo Wings should be eaten with a knife and fork, understand this: I am so not. (Actually, I’m one of those people who think that Buffalo Wings shouldn’t be eaten at all–if I wanted to eat a basket of bones and skin covered in some amorphous goo I would fry up Paris Hilton.)

Really, I’m ok with using your fingers to eat finger food–french fries, pizza, the olive from your martini. And I realize that, thanks to our driving culture, more and more foods become finger foods every day (French toast sticks, anyone?). But the foods my kids consider “finger-worthy” go beyond even Jack-in-the-Box’s wildest marketing dreams. I’m talking about cereal (in a bowl, with milk), spaghetti, and even soup.

Soup.

At this point I’m starting to think that the only way I will ever again be able to eat in public with my children without shame is if one of them someday invents a time machine and uses it to take us all back to the Stone Age.

Of course, even then I get the feeling that when we go to the big Mammoth Feast we’ll still probably be asked to sit in the Neanderthal section. Or at least as far away from the Italians as possible.

If there’s one thing I know for sure about raising children, it’s this: it definitely leads to more questions than answers. For example–is there anyone out there who actually believes that juice bags are less messy than, say, an open bucket of red dye? And how come the inventor of Pokeman cards has not yet been lynched? And, really, why is the sky blue, anyway? But, by far, the question that has been first and foremost in my mind (at least lately) has been this: what kind of a person leaves their tooth lying on the kitchen counter?

I’m not talking about one of those tiny little front teeth that are such delicate little slivers that they look like grains of rice; no, I’m talking about a big old honkin’ molar, one of those things that look so tooth-like that a dentist could hang it up outside his office for advertising.

And no: I don’t rent out my home to the local “fight club”–there is no good reason for me to come home and find a tooth lying on my kitchen counter. What there is, however, are two very bad reasons: my children, Clementine and Clyde, also known as, “the tooth-shedders.”

But wait, you say: what about the Tooth Fairy? Doesn’t the Tooth Fairy solve that whole problem of “dental detritus”? After all, no kid is going to leave their tooth lying around once they realize that they can cash that baby in at the Pillow Bank for a nice crisp one-dollar bill ($5 in some houses, I hear)–are they?

Isn’t that the theory behind bottle deposits? That if you make something valuable enough people will no longer throw it out of their car windows? (Or, in “The Curious Case of the Missing Molar,” that they will no longer leave it on the kitchen counter.) Well, that’s the theory, anyway. But, just like you still see bottles on the side of the road in Oregon and Michigan, so it follows that occasionally, even with the Tooth Fairy, you still find teeth on kitchen counters.

This is especially true with my daughter, Clementine: not only has her supply of teeth far outlasted her supply of naivete, her teeth started falling out so late that there wasn’t even a chance to get the Tooth Fairy scheme started in the first place. (That’s the problem with raising skeptical kids: eventually they become skeptical about the stuff you’re telling them, too.)

With her little brother Clyde it was a bit easier. Although his teeth started falling out even later than hers did, he’s at least moderately willing to go along with the whole Tooth Fairy thing in order to collect the payoff. Maybe that’s because with Clyde I at least tried to put on a good show: I even did the whole “tooth under the pillow” thing. (This lasted until he figured out that having a tired parent fishing around in the dark for change was not the surest way to easy money. “What did the Tooth Fairy bring you last night?” “Eighty-seven cents, a paper clip, and a Dos Equis cap.”) Now Clyde and I just work it as a straight up barter situation: he hands me the tooth (usually–thanks to the school nurse–in a nice, clean baggie), and I hand him the money. It’s like a drug deal, but without the glamour. Or the drugs.

Clementine, however–obviously realizing that the pleasures of money are fleeting at best–has gone for the much bigger payoff: grossing me out. And, I must say, that when it comes to grossing somebody out, it’s hard to beat a tooth next to the butter dish (outside of a morgue, that is). Because, just like they always say: cost of a tooth–one dollar. But grossing out your mom? Priceless.