 | Starfightersposted by KJ Hannah Greenberg, Aishes ChayilMonday, January 2nd 2012 @ 2:41 AM |
Adolescents typically grump about their parents’ lack of investment in fashion, specifically, and about their parents’ lack of investment in consumer goods, more generally. Kids’ pouts and other nonverbal protests produce powerful sources of fission, sources that are volatile enough to keep an entire continent glowing past midnight.
When their atomic rhetoric fails to create change, though, they try other strategies. One such ploy is their use of pseudo-logic. Consider the following conversation.
“Mom, did you know that M54 was in the process of disintegration from the SagDEG?”
“I though you were watching M20 in the Sagittarius Arm. Are you getting fickle?”
“Gotcha, Captain.”
“Baseball scores are posted, by the way. Check out M8; same star type.”
“Take me into the city after I finish commandeering the known universe?"
“Now?”
“Later. I’m only up to the Persius Arm. You promised I could play ‘til we got to Orion. However, if you really loved me, you’d let me explore the Halo Globular Clusters, too, and the Andromeda Galaxy. Sam got to adventure there. His Mom is sooo cool.”
“Me too; I’m as cool as liquid nitrogen. If you so much as investigate the Canis Major Dwarf, you will get an extra day’s worth of garbage duty. Comprende?”
“Space is a deep and dark thing, Mom.”
At times, when my children try to push my buttons, I make use of parental defenses. My favorite contingency strategy is to write about my sons and daughters.
Once, for instance, when “school” had become a forbidden topic for reasons not possible for my generation to grasp, I helplessly watched two of my gang alternate between sitting on the sofa and crying and storming into their respective rooms. In response, I ran to my keyboard.
There is weird comfort, for me, in exposing the nuances of my kids’ adolescent behaviors to strangers. Verbs at full mast, I chirped to my unknown audience about my lack of understanding concerning a child who reaped 90s on two major tests but was brought to tears, and about that child’s sibling, who was improving a door slamming reflex because that sibling had maximized the bonus points that child's teacher was willing to offer.
As I filled pages with nouns and adjectives, I was able to find the sort of serenity that enables parents to shove yet one more unmatched sock into an already burgeoning drawer and to collect, without denouncing their scion, the pillows that inevitably land behind the sofas.
Nonetheless, my writing was suddenly interrupted. Having sounded off with tears and crashes, the kids were voicing their remonstrations by parading back and forth to the family fridge and to the family phone. Each time they passed my office, though, they announced their dissatisfaction.
Their pleasure trips became, to me, disagreeable excursions. I became grouchier and grouchier. Every ten or fifteen minutes, someone sought my nonverbal acknowledgement. Every ten or fifteen minutes someone knocked on my office door.
I countered. I shot back with distraction. They were to wash the windows, the mirrors, and the cat. Given that we had no cat, I thought their energies might be redirected for at least half of an hour.
In response, they slid papers under my door. Their pages were filled with tales about turkey hens with a taste for tapioca chips mixed with oil cakes, and tales of an invisible Komodo dragon that pointedly pursued my hibernaculum of imaginary hedgehogs. As well, my kids shoved over my lintel illustrations of gum tragacanth ribboning out of plants and illustrations of a first-class starship exploding in space.
I began to consider the merits of my own supernovaing. New familial constellations could become visible once the obscuring dust clouds shifted. Maybe intergalactic vessels would not be the only items detonating that day.
Just before my cataclysmic meltdown, I chilled. Maybe my children needed hugs. Maybe they needed mussar. Maybe they needed tomato rice soup. Maybe my kids were trying their best to communicate to me.
I dialed the house phone from my office and insisted that my voice be switched to the loudspeaker. “This is your commander. Over.”
“What, Mom?”
“I will cease writing about you, for the benefit of people we will never meet, long enough to cook soup and chop salad. Over.”
“Will you brown the onions first?”
“Maybe. Over.”
“Will you drive me to the mall?”
“Not today. Over.”
“Can you cut out half of our chores?”
“Are you crazy? Over.”
“Can we fly with you?”
“My pleasure. Over.”
