The Volleyball of Claiming to be Unabashedly Sentimental about Other People’s Children
Sunday, January 29th 2012 @ 3:07 AM
I remain unabashedly sentimental about other people’s children. Perhaps I possess this attitude because I am fortunate enough to enjoy my own sons and daughters.
My crew disagrees. They believe that I prattle about other kids, not because I have learned the glory of offspring from them, but because I am worn down from years of being their monitor.
I counter this deconstruction, and suggest, alternatively, that I am crazy about other boys and girls because I celebrate life. Children, after all, are the continuity of “the great gift.” Alas, my not-so-little ones are a handful in a sea of handfuls.
My scions don’t accept that posture. They maintain, instead, that since my parenting experience has been atypical, I pitch onto other moms’ products in order to enjoy an innocence beyond my experience.
I argue back that I am sufficiently maudlin as to be joyous about each passing day, whether or not I’m in solitude or in a crowd, especially if that crowd is composed of young people. By all surely, my children grasp my affinity for wee ones.
Absolutely, my sons and daughters oppose that premise, too. They see my moods as biochemical, not as contextual. Accordingly, they frame me, their primary care provider, as a woman who is as hyper as a termite high on Tiki wood and who is as reliable of an indicator of causality as a slug.
I respond by telling them that regardless of the source of my feelings, be it parenthood, personhood, or straight out mawkishness, other people’s shoots resonate with me. I’m thrilled by the next generation, inclusive.
My teens have no trouble setting up a counterpoint to that notion, either. They claim that the only things that actually reverberate with me are sleep masks and warm baths. To them, my making exclamations about humanity’s future is no more extraordinary than is my finding the lost mate to a sock, managing not to burn a pot of rice, or figuring out that natural cleaners, like white vinegar, don’t really rock adolescents’ interest. What’s more, my kids seem to take pleasure in pointing out that they effectively crazed me, years earlier, by climbing over our youngest whenever they wanted to achieve the choicest seat in our van. They point out that I am not benevolent as much as I am still having reactions to that trauma.
I challenge their assumption as invalid. It’s not at all unusual for brothers and sisters to scramble over smaller siblings, heeding neither the feet that fly over their babies’ heads, as they nearly kick them during their automobile gymnastics, nor the food, which they drop out of the wrapped packages, while they haul over car cushions. It’s quite normal, in fact, given a car full of single digit children, for at least one person’s shoe to go flying out of a window or for several water bottles and sippy cups to spill all over the upholstery, especially if the arranged transport is meant to cover only the three blocks between preschool and home.
I assert, as well, that it’s typical for a mom, a short decade following potty training, to sit quietly in her car, which is parked outside of her children’s place of learning, lined up nose to fin with other parental hopefuls, who are likewise waiting for the squawk of tremulous voices, to meditate on removing chewing gum from her minivan’s interior roof and ridding her vehicle of the smell of dried fruit leather. As a perfectly everyday parent, I’m not fatigued, odd, or hormonally off-balanced. I rallied when my children’s obsession with animals turned to geckos and to other scaly critters, encouraging them to take possession of a hand-me-down Uromastyx. Analogously, I totally embraced the titles of their personal library which they insisted we read together thirty times in a row. There is absolutely no event from my parenting horizon that could cause me to consider that my appreciation for other peoples’ little monsters, I mean my fascinating for other people’s guys and gals, is due to some strange wiring, circumstantial trauma, or delusional state
Consider, as well, how normal my response continues to be to sudden scarcities of household help. Each time my cleaning assistants go missing, their whispers all that hang back from the teenage energy that moments earlier suffused our rooms, I proffer no tunes, tales or tantrums. A good mama, I “understand” that daily duties instantly put kids into the mood for music, for videogames, for long talks with distant friends, and not for much more. I do rage nor rant when my fruit refuse to feed the rabbit, to clean the toilets, to empty the dish washers, or to pick up their cloths. I merely turn off the electricity. My own computer-based work suffers a tad, but the kids quickly find merit in getting their jobs done.
The passage of time has enabled me to discover and to accept that it’s foolhardy to engage in laborious negotiations with invested pugilists. I do not argue; I demand. If my children whine, I turn away from them to count the bits of kibble in the cats’ bowl, to play bowling for spiders or to try to figure out, without resorting to carbon dating, the age of the caked vomit, which clings to the side of the toilet bowl. I also make a habit of regarding my chipped nails, of looking for portions of broccoli stuck between my teeth and of checking the thermometer, posted by our back door, for signs of sweater weather. Entire metropolises of high school aggregates could fail, entire multitudes of hamsters could go hungry, half of my backyard’s worth of leaves could go unraked and two consecutive nights’ worth of the algebra homework could go unattended before I would deign to raise an eyebrow at their provocations. They can not pin my glorification of other babies, of other children and of other teens on my life experiences.
That said, please note, as well, that youth, by nature, are designed for battle. Such persons thrive on intergenerational war, especially if the end results are worthy of posting on Facebook or on YouTube. Strange adjectives, spewed by little men and women, have been documented as able to suck the vital fluids from even the savviest former-Language-Arts-teacher-mom. It’s never been enough to be skilled with word origami, when dealing with children. Rather, masters of rhetoric are recommended to walk, no, to run, wide circles around youngsters, who are as capable of spitting out diatribes that quicken adults’ hearts and that scald the minds of other would-be-delinquents as they are of snorting chocolate milk through their tender nostrils
The best policy for contending with those lanky legions is to shrug or to immediately schedule a nap. No response ought to be given to little ones who leave ninety-nine or so boxes of unsold scout cookies in the front hall, on the driveway, and next to the dogs’ leashes. Chilled moms, who want to continue to articulate that they love all children, are advised to feign sunburn, to suddenly need to drive resident lady beetles to dance classes, or to abruptly “remember” that the next door neighbor wants to borrow sugar.
Hence, until I am able to ratify familial contracts three different ways, sign, in duplicate, agreements about allowance, or to look a little more fashionable that a down and out medieval troubadour, I will keep on expecting that my kids will disavow my declarations of universal love as bogus.
Maybe they’re onto something. Maybe, I adore other peoples’ children because I can return them, disinherit them, and have nothing, at all, to do with them for as long as I please.
