Kelly Poe Wilson

A few weeks back I ran across a study which stated that “mothers who worked outside of the home in 2006 spent approximately 3 hours more per week ‘directly engaging’ with their children than their stay at home counterparts did in the 1970’s.” Of course, this piece of counter-intuition caused a fair amount of hand-wringing and consternation, especially among the “daycare=dysfunction” set, who wasted no time in pointing out that the 2006 mother got those extra three hours by cutting back on things like housekeeping and meal preparation. (They did admit, grudgingly, that perhaps some of those extra three hours came about because the modern mother also spent less time watching TV, sleeping, and spending time with her partner).

As someone who has experienced both of these extremes (not only was I a child in the 1970’s, but a mother in 2006), I can vouch for the study’s correctness concerning the cleaning and cooking part of the equation (when I was growing up, the only person I knew who had a house as ill-kept then as mine is now eventually got medication for her problems). And as for getting less sleep and watching less TV; well, my mother always seemed to do both at once, so I’m sure she was more efficient about it than I’ll ever be.

Not that issues of cleanliness and sleep deprivation really make all that much of a difference, though, because the way I see it the study itself is something of a red herring: instead of asking questions about which set of mothers spend more time “engaging” with their kids–the slovenly, hungry, sleepy, and largely celibate ones (us), or the–you know, good ones (them)–it should be asking which kind of mom did the kids prefer. Again, having been both a child and a mother, I’m going to have to say that they preferred the moms who “directly engage” with them the least.

Think about it: when you were growing up, wasn’t home the last place you wanted to be? Wasn’t home the place where you got yelled at for your muddy shoes, where a sibling/narc lurked around every cookie jar, and where the least bit of bored whining was greeted with the dreaded words, “If you’re bored, I can find you something to do”? Wouldn’t you always have rather been running free out in the woods, desert, alley or vacant lot; stepping on rusty nails, chasing down (mostly) non-poisonous snakes, building forts and falling out of trees?

When I hear the words “directly engaging with her children” all I can picture is some poor mother setting up the Monopoly board over and over again, or worse yet, supervising some highly structured craft “activity kit.” I also picture her equally miserable kids who–even though they might not know it, and even though they were the ones who begged and pleaded for both the Monopoly board and the “craft activity”–would much rather be dragging pieces of scrap lumber out into the back yard to build a “cat trap” that will eventually be tripped over by their dad in the middle of the night when he goes out to investigate the sounds of anguished yowling.

Again, not that I would expect them to understand this now: it took me years to appreciate my own “free range childhood,” where I not only learned that you don’t actually need stitches if you have enough butterfly bandages, but also what the inside of a golf ball looked like when you cracked it open in a vise. And I’m sure that, had my mother been “directly engaging” with us over the Monopoly board (as opposed to “watching” Marcus Welby, M.D.), I would never have found out the best way to hand over the rent when you are losing to an infuriatingly smug opponent (A.K.A. “your sister”): chew up the money and spit it at her.

Sir Thomas More was of the opinion that pleasure must be more than the mere removal of pain: eating, drinking, sleeping–none of these could truly qualify as pleasurable, since none of these could ever be enjoyable without their twins of hunger, thirst, and fatigue. In theory I agree with him; in practice, however, it is quite another matter. It must be: how else other than pure pleasure could you describe the feeling you get when, in the five minutes between putting away the groceries and heading back out the door, you check your messages and find out that soccer/karate/hockey/baseball/violin/girl scout/cub scout(Am I forgetting something here? Oh, yeah–4-H) is cancelled for the evening?

When I find out that, despite all of my children’s extracurricular efforts to the contrary, I actually have an evening free to sit on the couch in my pajamas and watch Law & Order reruns, I am sure that my joy is equal to the joy I would feel if I got home to a message from the doctor saying, “Whoops–my bad–you don’t have terminal cancer after all.” Actually, I would probably be happier with a cancelled soccer game than the cancer misdiagnosis, because not even terminal illness can excuse you when it is your turn to bring snack.

The same, to a lesser degree, can be said about any children’s event you manage to sneak out of early, whether it is the two-hour long awards ceremony where your child actually gets their award first (and where you had the foresight to sit at the table nearest the door for a quick, unobtrusive exit), or the girl scout meeting where, either through a) being completely prepared and having your paperwork filled out ahead of time or, b) being completely unprepared and not having brought the right paperwork at all, you get to go home early.

Recently I attended a practice violin recital with my son Clyde where–in what was such a reversal of the usual laws of the Universe that I’m surprised the space/time continuum itself didn’t split apart and start issuing forth men in Victorian topcoats riding on dinosaurs–Clyde was one of the first to perform. Not only that, but after he played his piece there was just enough confusion up on stage to give us enough time–if we were quick about it–to make a hasty exit. (I know–very bad violin manners–but something came over me as I watched the next performer fumble about up on stage: I felt like a canary that had just spied the cage door swinging shut, and, not thinking about what might be waiting on the other side, jumped off of my perch and flew. “Run, Clyde, run,” I hissed as I gathered up purse, car keys, violin, violin case and bow in one untidy heap and sprinted for the door. “Run!”)

As we burst out into the parking lot, I felt giddy with my new freedom. The air smelled sweeter than it had when we had gone in, and I swear I could have reached into Clyde’s backpack, grabbed the mealiest, the waxiest, the left-in-the-bottom-of-the-lunch-box-for-three-days-iest apple, and it still would have tasted as sweet as the one that tempted Eve.

Bluebirds fluttering above my head, I nearly swept a passing NAU student up in am embrace that would have been worthy of a sailor on D-Day; as we pulled out of the parking lot with the sun still shining brightly in the sky (“Mommy, what’s that doing up there?”) I realized that tonight I would actually have time to make the kind of dinner that has become, for us, somewhat of a rarity–in other words, cooked.

It wasn’t until I found myself whistling the theme to The Great Escape, however, that I realized I was feeling exactly like Steve McQueen must have felt when he rode his stolen motorcycle across the German countryside: free.

Last year, my son Clyde played Micro Soccer for the first time, and while he loved every minute of it, there were definitely some minutes he loved more than others (snack time, for one). However, unlike his sister Clementine, who loved snack time so much that she was willing to give up playing in exchange for the promise of more of it (well, her version of playing, at least: lying on the sidelines and crying), Clyde actually enjoyed a few things about soccer that didn’t involve juice boxes and fruit roll-ups. Unfortunately, the one thing he enjoyed the most was the fighting. Or rather, as Clyde calls it, the “wrestle-fighting.”

“Wrestle-fighting” is the term Clyde uses to explain the full body tackle he likes to perform on the members of his own team, the opposite team, and, in fact, anybody who seems like they might be the least bit willing (as well as those who clearly are not). It is a type of play that almost always happens off of the field (particularly when the coach is trying to signal Clyde that it is his turn to come in), and involves tackling, yelling, and–usually–some sort of crying. It is by far his favorite part of soccer, and it is also what makes me believe that Clyde might actually have a future in the world of major league sports; unfortunately, it is also what makes me believe that this future will most likely take place off of the playing fields.

When your favorite thing about organized sports is that they give you the opportunity to pummel passers-by, it would seem that your life in the sporting world could only follow one of two paths: you could either be that three hundred pound guy who paints his face and shouts obscenities in the end zone, or you could be a soccer hooligan. Except for the fact that blood is a lot easier to get out of clothes than the combination of greasepaint and mustard, I think that of the two I prefer the former. For one thing, it’s a lot less expensive. (Sure, both the fanatic and the hooligan have to shell out big bucks to fly in and watch their teams compete, but only the hooligan has to budget in enough money for bail.)

So how do I steer Clyde in the right direction? If I wanted him to be a hooligan it would be easy: there’s plenty of kid’s activities that would help him develop the aggression and quick reflexes he needs to throw bottles at the opposing team’s hooligans. But what about being a fanatic? Unless I find a Dungeons and Dragons club for six-year olds, it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be able to develop the kind of deep-seated social awkwardness that he’ll need to fit in as a #1 fan.

For a while there I thought that maybe I could find a nice compromise, and sign him up for something like tennis, or cricket, but then I heard about that the recent Australian Tennis Open, where–in what was possibly the world’s first instance of tennis hooliganism–roving gangs of Serbian and Croatian nationals traveled to Australia in order to mix it up with each other before the match between their two respective countrymen.

Hearing about this gave me pause–obviously, it doesn’t matter what your sport is: when the spirit is willing, the fistfight will follow. After all, didn’t Bobby Fischer come pretty close to blows with Boris Spassky during the 1972 world chess championship? And wasn’t a cricket coach just murdered in the Caribbean? I’m sure that if you looked hard enough, you could even find examples of shady dealing in the competitive world of shuffleboard or badminton.

And then, who knows what some people would do to get their hands on a +14 Elvish crossbow of accuracy–maybe even take a full body tackle.

Over the years, there have been many occasions when I have noticed that my children seem to be headed inexorably down the road to law school (this, of course, begs the question: “If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, then what is the road to law school paved with?” One answer: “White Ford Broncos and empty cans of Red Bull”). This tendency of theirs towards “lawyerosity” is perhaps at its most obvious when it comes to their adept use of what they see as “loopholes” in the parental justice system. An example of this would be when they argue that they are not breaking the rule against having a bowl of cereal right before dinner because they are, in fact, eating it right out of the box.

Then there is also their use of the “if there is no law against it, it must be ok” defense. This usually manifests itself in the use of such closing arguments as “But you never said we weren’t allowed to tap dance naked on top of the TV while juggling a pair of cats!”. (It is at times such as these that I understand why cities pass arcane laws like the one about it being illegal to walk an alligator down the boardwalk after noon on a Sunday. Surely any parent that has had to institute such rules as “there are to be no more than 2 people and/or animals–including aquatic ones–in the bathtub at any one time” can envision the exigent circumstances that could lead to an otherwise sane city council passing a law against whistling “The William Tell Overture” while eating a bowl of spaghetti.)

Recently, though, due to a spate of excuses that have been downright Clintonian in their disingenuousness (“You told me not to hit my brother, and I wasn’t; I was kicking him.”) I have come to realize that my children are not just headed down the subpoena-slicked road to law school, but are in fact headed somewhere even less wholesome than that: they are headed into politics. (Question: “What is the road to politics paved with? Answer: “Nothing yet–it’s a Halliburton contract.”)

It was the upcoming presidential election that first alerted me to this. (OK, I’ll admit that I’m using the word “upcoming” rather loosely here. Let’s just say the presidential election is “upcoming” in the same sense that any foreseeable ending to the Anna Nicole Smith saga is “upcoming”). The thing about the presidential election is that nobody just announces their run: first there is the establishment of an exploratory committee, then there is the announcement of the intent to announce, followed thereafter by the announcement of the actual time of the announcement itself, all of which is followed finally, and somewhat anticlimactically, by the actual announcement. (As a sort of denouement, this is usually followed sometime later by the announcement that the candidate, due to lack of support, has decided to withdraw from the race.)

This is exactly the same series of events that emerges whenever my children are asked to clean their rooms. First there is the “exploratory committee.” This is what is happening inside their heads directly after they are asked to perform the chore, and involves vital, pressing questions like, “If I just pretend I didn’t hear her, will she go away?” Next comes the announcement of intent to announce (“I’m going to do it! Just give me 5 more minutes!”) followed by the announcement itself (“OK! I’m doing it! Sheesh!”), and then, just like in the real presidential race, the withdrawal due to lack of support ( “I can’t do it; it’s too hard.”)

And then, of course, there is the final, and most damning similarity: if you decide to watch either event all the way through to the end, then you’re most certainly going to be wading through an awful lot of crap.

As anyone who has ever read this column with even semi-regularity can tell you, I have a problem with children’s movies. I don’t like their insipid little story lines, their precociously cynical pre-adolescents, or their parents who exist merely as the straight men for the sarcastic/hostile comments directed at them by their preternaturally brilliant kids. In short, I hate them. Imagine, then, my delight upon discovering that our very own homegrown film festival–Mountain Film Festival–would be offering a “family program” of child-friendly short films. Finally, I thought: children’s movies that would be worthy of being called “films.”

For the most part, I was right: even though some of the films were better than others, none of them could be called insipid. (Except maybe the Swiss movie that was touted as being “James Bond meets Warren Miller.” More like “James Bond Meets Warren Miller…in the Old Folks’ Home”: despite some action shots reminiscent of The A-Team in its heyday, this snoozer never quite made it past 2 on the Excite-O-Meter.)

But before that there was an entertaining short about a couple of pieces of produce that were trying to escape from the crisper of an old refrigerator. Unfortunately, they are brutally attacked by various household appliances, until finally, only the lettuce leaf makes it outside to the freedom of the woods beyond (all it needed was some whistling and it could have been The Grape Escape.)

Then came a film about a day in the life of an Iraqi boy. At first, this seemed like a peaceful little movie, with charming scenes of young Iraqis enjoying a snowy day. Since the boys were near my son Clyde’s age (five), I was happy when Clyde asked me to read him the subtitles–after all, this was what I was here for: to see a child of mine attentively watching a film that involved neither ninja turtles or talking cows. With a fair bit of pride, therefore, in the discerning nature of my own little Renaissance boy, I confidently started whispering into his ear the words that appeared on the screen.

Now, after years of reading Good Night, Moon ad infinitum, I must admit that I am somewhat of a master at reading out loud without paying too much attention to what I am saying. And so it was that we were well into the story of how the boy lost his father before I started to wonder if maybe I should’ve been editing all along. It wasn’t too bad when the mother was explaining how there had been no work in the village and the boy’s father had gone looking for something to sell. But then she started to elaborate on how he had found a “cannonball,” and before I knew it I was whispering things in Clyde’s ear like: “there weren’t enough pieces left to wash…we put the pieces in a bag…and buried the bag…over there.”

After the movies were over I began to get a little worried: how would Clyde handle the information that somebody’s daddy could be found in so many pieces he needed to be buried in a bag? (As for the Swiss “action” flick, the only worries I had were that he might grow up to think you can shoot ten thousand rounds at someone running six feet ahead of you in a tunnel and still not hit them).

Later, when Clyde looked over at me with concern and started to ask me a question, I thought to myself: Here it comes. War. Life. Death. Everything. As it turned out, I was only right about the last part. “Mom?” he said. “Is the orange going to be ok?””

Skiing assassins, exploding fathers–thankfully, all Clyde really still cared about was the plucky produce. “Don’t worry,” I said, grateful for a lie I could live with. “It was just a movie.”

H.L. Mencken once famously defined puritanism as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Add to that the words, “and making a mess” however, and what you have instead is the definition of a parent. Or, at least you have the definition of a parent like me.

I’m not sure when it happened–maybe around the time Clementine starting walking–but at some point the “sweet sound of children at play” began to take on menacing undertones for me. For most people, I’m sure, passing a house in the summertime and hearing screaming laughter coming from the back yard only brings back reminisces about the summers of their youth–the tire swings they swung from, the swimming holes they splashed in, the dilapidated forts they painstakingly pieced together. As for myself, however, all I can hear are the warning signs that someone is having fun; in other words, that a mess is being made.

Maybe the hose is being used to create a mud puddle that will be rolled in, tromped through, and eventually relocated to every surface under six feet in my kitchen. Maybe a pair of cats are being harnessed–one to a Malibu Barbie convertible, the other to a RC Hummer–in preparations for a chariot race that will leave a swathe of misery and destruction that’ll make Sherman’s march to the sea look like a walk in the park. Or maybe every single one of my gardening tools is being carefully taken out of my gardening shed, lined up from smallest to largest, methodically inventoried by color and size, and then left to rust under the last spring snow.

I know, I know: these are all very creative, very playful schemes, and I should be happy that my kids are using their imaginations out in the yard as opposed to slowly having their brains sucked out through their eyes in front of the TV. But still, the devil parent on my other shoulder can’t help but whispering that “you never have to get out the shop vac when they sit on the couch watching Dora.”

At least with the TV, the worst of the messes usually involve nothing more toxic than congealed yogurt, ground up Cheetos, and strawberry milk–oftentimes appearing all together somewhere under the couch cushions. Add the Great Outdoors to the mix, however–add in a 50 lb. bag of peat moss, a lipping full rain barrel, and 200 feet of extension cord–and you soon have a mess worthy of FEMA. (Every time my kids are left to their own devices in the back yard
I’m a little surprised it doesn’t all end in the governor flying over in a helicopter).

And the worse part is that it is always accompanied by peals of laughter. Before I had kids, the sound of children laughing made me smile; now it just makes me alert, like someone working in a nuclear plant who has just seen their radiation badge jump from green to yellow. (As with radiation, children’s laughter has varying levels of danger. A light chuckle means a mess that can still be contained by paper towels; a deeper chortle mean that renting a steam cleaner is imminent; and one of those high-pitched screaming giggles–the kind that sound like a race horse just received a surprise visit from the proctologist–means that perhaps you should consider listing your house on the market–“as is,” of course.)

This is why it is so vitally important for your children to cultivate friendships with other yards–I mean children–in the neighborhood. Only through the filtering lens of distance can you once again appreciate the magical sound of children’s laughter–especially when it is counterpointed so nicely by the enraged bellow of some other parent discovering a hose snaking in the kitchen window, up the stairs, and under the bed–all in an attempt to create the world’s first hideaway waterbed couch.

At my house, one of the many things we fight about is money. I realize, of course, that the same thing could be said about almost any couple, but with us there’s a slight difference: the fighting couple in question consists not of me and my husband, but rather of my daughter, Clementine, and myself. (Don’t get me wrong: my husband and I would love to fight about money; unfortunately, we never seem to have enough of it to make the effort worthwhile.) When it comes to Clementine and myself, however, shortness of funds has never been a barrier to conflict: no matter how little of it there is, I like to watch it come in; she likes to watch it go out. In other words: I’m a miser; she’s a spendthrift.

I’ll be the first to admit that she may have a point: my penny-pinching ways are somewhat legendary both in and out of our family. My husband once even complained that there was not one thing he could buy me that I would enjoy more than knowing that the money had never left the bank. Of course, he was inspired to make that comment by my less-than-enthusiastic reception to his Christmas present that year– a calendar. ( “A calendar? You bought me a calendar in December? But–if you wait until March, they’re practically free!”). (It probably didn’t help that two hours later I was still clutching my new calendar and repeatedly muttering the words, “March… practically free…”).

When it comes to my daughter, Clementine, however (or, as I like to call her, The Profligate Daughter), my Scrooge bona fides aren’t even needed to qualify for miser status–next to her, everyone would be considered a miser. Clementine doesn’t just like to spend money–she burns to spend it. Each penny that remains in her possession is like a heavy weight, oppressing her very soul. She reminds me of those winning contestants on the old version of Wheel of Fortune, where after each round the contestant had to spend their prize money on a revolving dais of crap before they could leave. (If they didn’t, any remaining funds would be put into a gift certificate for some place like “Zabu’s House of Fine Furnishing,” where you just know that the entire showroom floor is filled with objects like life-size ceramic cheetahs and “authentic replicas” of ancient Mayan death masks.) Before the show’s producers wisely changed it so that people could actually take the money they won home with them, the threat of Zabu would cause people to desperately try and spend their winnings on the “prizes” displayed on stage, the obvious theory being that it was better to deal with the devil you know (your very own jukebox!) than the devil you don’t (a grandfather clock shaped like an alligator!). Invariably, this would lead to scenes with grimacing octogenarians saying things like, “Well Pat, I guess I’ll take the Vespa for $5200.”

Or, in Clementine’s case, “I guess I’ll take the hose repair kit for 60¢.” Because even if we’re in a hardware store, if she has money in her pocket, she has to spend it.

I once stood at a pharmacy counter (waiting, I must confess, while the pharmacist checked to see if they had anything cheaper than generic) and watched as Clementine scoured the aisles of four-legged canes, toilet lifts and orthopaedic shoe inserts in search of something in her price range. And then, since her price range consisted of the nickel she had found on the way into the store, watched as she consoled herself with a handful of free pamphlets on such edifying topics as “Alzheimer’s and You” and “Know Your Prostate.”

If only she had seen the pile of calendars by the register–she could have bought a whole handful for her nickel. After all, since it was March, they were practically free.

This year, my daughter, Clementine, spent the week before Valentine’s Day making a card for everybody in her class. Since she’s in a multi-age class, this project entailed making a lot of Valentines–48 of them, to be precise. So it wasn’t too surprising when sometime around Valentine number 20 she started taking shortcuts. Unfortunately, the shortcut she used most often was to abbreviate “Valentine’s Day” into “V.D.” As in “Happy VD.”

Since Clementine is the type of person who is never satisfied with the short answer to anything, and since she also has the unnerving habit of trying to utilize all new words as often as possible, this was a can of worms I was more than a little loathe to open. And so, when confronted with the specter of either having Clementine ask every sniffling person around her if they “thought they might be coming down with syphilis,”or taking the cowardly way out and saying nothing, I did not hesitate to count myself amongst the chickens.

Besides, maybe she’s on the brink of discovering a whole new era in greeting cards: Hostility Greetings. Her market niche could be break-up cards, with each card featuring a cute, hand-drawn cover, followed by an inside message saying things like “Happy VD–Think of Me When You Pee,” or even “Congrats on Your Chlamydia (look it up yourself, smart guy”). You get the idea: it’s still all very much in the developmental stage–or, at least it could be, if I’m careful not to quash her creativity now with a slew of unnecessary “facts.”

Of course, Clementine’s possible future challenge of the Hallmark dynasty is just one of the reasons I didn’t point out her awkward choice of abbreviations–there was another, more fundamental reason for my silence. The truth is, what she puts on the cards really doesn’t matter, because, as everybody in the grade school set already knows, Valentine’s Day isn’t about the sentiment–it’s about the chocolate. It’s the same for Christmas, Easter, and Halloween–sure, kids know that there’s some kind of holiday involved, but as long as the candy keeps flowing, the specifics just aren’t that important. That’s what doomed Columbus Day–no chocolate. It’s also why all the people who try to stem the commercialization of religious holidays with slogans such as : “Let’s put the ‘Christ’ back in ‘Christmas’” don’t stand a chance. Until they start marketing a solid chocolate Jesus (and that won’t happen as long as there are people in the world who insist on always biting the heads off first), the Easter Bunny will own Easter.

You’d think that at least one of the major religions would have caught on to this by now; after all, it would be a great way to generate new recruits. I know, I know: they already offer eternal salvation and all that–a concept which is fine if you’re into delayed gratification–but if they ever want to attract those who like to live for the moment, those who consider a 15 second commercial break an excruciating interruption (in other words, those born after 1990), religions had better start thinking about handing out some of the good stuff now.

Interestingly enough–even though, historically, they haven’t really been into recruiting–it is the Jews who seem to have the best handle on this: a friend of mine recently told me that there is a Jewish holiday that not only encourages drinking, but eating cookies as well. That’s a start, but if they really want to pack ‘em in, they might consider switching out the cookies for chocolate, and even better, adding in some video games. While I can’t speak for everyone, I’m almost certain that if there were to be a Jewish holiday that offered video games, candy, and soda, my son Clyde would offer to circumcise himself.

Now I wonder if Clementine’s new card line will offer a card for that?

The other morning I awoke to an awful smell. It was one of those smells that are all too familiar to anyone who ever misspent their evenings drinking multiple pitchers of Michelob Dark on the porch at Alpine Pizza followed up by a 3AM Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast run, (eggs over greasy). It was the kind of smell that, for many people, is reminiscent of the last week of school (or, depending on what kind of a student you are, the first); the kind that, in all probability, hastened the invention of the bathroom fan by a good twenty years. In short, it was a smell I had hoped to never experience again, and one that I certainly never expected to be emanating from the confines of my son Clyde’s room–at least not for another ten years or so. (Dear God, I thought–if he’s already drinking cheap beer at age five, what’s next–a Lego bong at age nine?

(Un)Happily, though, it turns out that Clyde was not, in fact, attempting to break the Drew Barrymore record for earliest entry into the Betty Ford Clinic–it was just Day 2 of his science fair experiment–and there were still 12 more days to go.

His experiment was fairly simple: do bean seeds grow better when given water, soda, or milk? In theory, this was a great project: not only was it simple enough for a five-year-old to do, but it also had the added benefit of promoting healthy living. Smugly, I pictured myself at the end of the experiment, one arm draped benevolently around Clyde’s shoulder while we gazed down together first upon the shriveled “soda” and” milk” seeds, and then upon the vibrantly healthy “water” seeds. Using my best Robert Young voice, I would point out to Clyde how obvious it was that water was healthiest for all growing things–bean seeds and little boys alike. And then I would nod in approval as Clyde solemnly vowed to never touch soda again (and maybe milk, too–after all, if he ever hopes to date any of the hippie chicks in this town he had better start learning to drink soy lattes).

Unfortunately, my plan failed on two counts: not only were the soda and milk seeds failing to shrivel and die, but they were also responsible for creating a smell so pungent that it could have been used to hide meth labs. Normally this would have been enough for me to call a halt to the experiment, but this was Clyde’s first Science Fair project–one he had come up with all on his own–and so I was hesitant to stop it mid-session. After all, I reasoned, what if by doing so I was stifling the future career of a brilliant medical researcher? How would I feel if one day, years from now, I were to overhear Clyde glumly saying, “Yeah, I used to be interested in science–until the day my Mom tossed out my science fair experiment. By the way, you want fries with that?”

And so we toughed it out until the end–nearly two weeks of walking into the house every day and yelling at the cat before remembering where it was that smell was actually coming from. Hopefully it will all pay off, and someday, when Clyde has discovered the cure for leprosy, or malaria, or even dandruff, he will thank me in his Nobel acceptance speech.

I do, however, still have one nagging concern: what if the point of the whole experiment was not, in fact, to see whether beans grow better in milk, water or soda, but rather to see how long I would put up with the smell? What if what Clyde was actually doing was some kind of twisted sociology experiment–with me as the subject?

Eh. I’m sure there’s still a Nobel prize for sociology, even if it is the evil sort.

Even though in many ways–and for many hours of the day–she is a delightful person, there is no way that my daughter, Clementine, could ever be confused with a morning person. I used to think that she inherited this trait from my sister, a person who considered the “crack of noon” to be the natural starting point for any day. (Once, after being forced by circumstances beyond her control to get up before dawn, she commented wryly that she had never before realized that 6 o’clock could come along twice in the same day.) This, however, is not Clementine’s problem: on the contrary, she usually wakes up on her own a good two hours before school starts, fully charged and ready to go. This is not a good thing: it’s bad enough having someone snarling at you the first thing in the morning–when they snarl at you for two hours plus it becomes another form of torture altogether.

Actually, if she were at all lethargic it would be a boon to the rest of, since most people would pick “grouchy and slow” over “grouchy and fast” any day of the week. Just think about Jurassic Park, and how the scariest creatures there were the velociraptors: not only did they have bad attitudes, they were scary fast to boot. In my house, Clementine is the equivalent of a velociraptor: not only does she wake up annoyed that the universe has failed to confirm to her expectations yet again, but she also wakes up this way at 6 AM each and every day of the week.

Sometimes, because she does wake up so early, I start to think that maybe the problem really is a lack of sleep, and will shoo her back into bed in the hopes that–in the same way that when you get an unsatisfactory answer from the Magic Eight Ball and you shake it again to try and get a better result–the next Clementine that crawls forth from the crypt will be of a slightly more pleasant variety. Unfortunately, this is usually about as successful with Clementine as it is with the Magic 8 Ball: all you really end up doing is going from “outlook not so good” to “my sources say no.”

Of course, none of this would be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that Clementine’s little brother, Clyde, is her complete opposite. He’s like a character in some 1930’s “plucky orphan with a heart of gold saves the day” movie, so blithely cheerful that you almost expect him to come out of his room wearing knee pants and a bow tie and declaring “I say, what absolutely spiffing weather we’re having.” Seeing the two of them together in the morning is like watching a concert where Huey Lewis and The News opens up for Marilyn Manson: not only is it hard on the audience, but Marilyn Manson doesn’t appreciate it much either. In fact, if pressed to articulate on her morning funk, Clementine would probably say that people like Clyde are the reason mornings are so unbearable for people like her.

In a way I can see her point–when she comes out of her room in the morning she is often no more than taciturn; however, once her own personal “little ray of sunshine” comes beaming out of his own room, all bets are off. It is like seeing a bear that has been peacefully hibernating being driven from its lair by a pack of yelping hounds, and just like with a real bear baiting, the version that is played out at our house is all to prone to turning ugly.

Sometimes I think it would be better if they were both morose morning people–at least it would remove some of the schizophrenia from our breakfast table. But then again, maybe not: I have to live here, too.