I know teachers aren’t fazed by much that kids come up with.
If they’ve been teachers for any length of time, they’ve probably seen just
about everything there is to see. Be that as it may, I still feel a twinge when
I realize I’ve sent my daughter off to school without brushing her hair. For
the third day in a row. To counter this, I’m thinking of coming up with a new
line of t-shirts, or possibly stickers that could be stuck on kids without
their knowledge, with explanations that will cover for me on days when I’m sure
the teacher is compiling notes to pass along to CPS, and it looks like today’s
transgressions might seal the deal.
The first one in my line is for my daughter and others like
her. It will say “I refuse to let my parents brush my hair.” This will go a
long way toward explaining the snarls and mats. Beyond hating to have her hair
brushed, my daughter loves hats and hoods. She won a polyester hat (at the
fucking carnival) that looks like the face of a cow, with two long flaps that
hang down over her ears. She wears this hat day and night. She sleeps in it,
she wears it to school. The only reason she takes it off is for baths, and then
under protest, so you can bet taking it off so I can brush her hair isn’t a
priority. Plus wearing a hat or hood causes hair to snarl up and get ratty, and
since she won’t let me brush it, that just makes things worse.
The next one will also be for my daughter, but also for
slightly younger kids. We’ve all seen kids in outfits that were clearly of
their own design and consist of Ninjago pajamas, a tutu and three winter
scarves (and maybe a hat that looks like the face of a cow) or whatever. Or
little girls who insist on wearing their Snow White dresses everywhere,
including the pool. But not all adults realize that these outfits stem from
equal parts stubbornness (on the part of the child), and exhaustion and a reluctant
acceptance that defeat is the only option (on the part of the parent). While it
might be a challenge to get them to put them on, for these kids I would offer a
shirt that reads “My mother thinks this outfit is as strange as you do.” They’d
have to be in fantastic patterns or insane colors so that kids would be
inclined to include them in their sartorial repertoire. I suspect this would also
be a big seller in a large sticker that could be stuck on their backs as they
were walking out the door (“Hurry along, little Kyndle, we don’t want to be
late” the parent would say, placing a sticker-covered hand gently between their
shoulder blades).
Another one for younger kids that I wish I’d had when my
children were small will be for those times when their outfit is bizarre or
inappropriate, but not because of the ramrod will of a four year old determined
to wear his or her “favorite shirt” for the 15th day in a row. This
is for those times when a child is dressed by his or her father, and that
father happens to be one of “those” fathers. I don’t want to generalize—not all
fathers have strange ideas about what constitutes an “outfit.” Some recognize
that a child who is wearing a bathing suit and mittens is not a child who is
wearing an ensemble fit for an audience with the Queen (or even a day at
preschool), even if they do happen to be wearing matching socks. I’m fairly
sure that 80% of the time my husband was in charge of dressing our children
they were decently covered in something that didn’t look like he’d upended the
dirty clothes hamper over their heads and called it a day. But for those days
that missed the mark, I would have liked to be able to have them walk around with
the disclaimer, “My daddy dressed me today” somewhere on their person.
Beyond their appearance, I worry about the things that might
come out of my kids’ mouths. I am no saint when it comes to my language, I
freely admit this. I have been known to describe myself as sounding like a
drunk longshoreman with Tourette’s syndrome (note: I am not a longshoreman, and
I have not been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome). As you may have noticed, I
use the word “fuck” the way the English language uses the letter “e” (which is
to say, often, and with enthusiasm). But I
don’t talk like that in front of my children. My children might
occasionally hear, “What the hell is going on here?” or “Go brush your damn teeth right
now!” But these are in extreme circumstances, like when my oldest son knocked out his little sister’s front tooth that wasn’t ready to come out and a
Niagara Falls of blood was the result, or when I’ve sent them to brush their
teeth five times and they’ve lied to
me all five times. Then, yes, I use a mild swear word (mild: damn, hell,
bastard; serious: shit, fuck, asshole).
But apparently they hear this sort of thing somewhere. I
assume from kids who have older siblings. That’s where I picked up all my cuss
words. Thank goodness for Ashely Templeton whose older sister taught her all
the bad words, and she taught them to me. As we all know, that’s where that
kind of thing often comes from, even when they’re very young. When my daughter
was a toddler, there was another girl in her room at daycare who had a 19 year
old brother. When nap time rolled around, and she didn’t feel like napping, she
was known to sit on her mat and yell, “Fuckin’ bullshit! Fuckin’ bullshit!” in
protest. I’m fairly confident her mother wasn’t the source that.
And sometimes it’s not even swear words, but potty stuff or
goofy stuff. One of my twins has been calling his siblings “nose hair” in fits
of frustration (“No, that’s MINE! Give it back, nose hair!”). My daughter went through a phase where she called everything
“suckers.” (“Oh look I dropped those suckers. I better pick those suckers up.”)
However, as a parent, I never want the school staff to think
they incorporate those words into their vocabularies because of exposure to
them at home. So I would sell a shirt that said, “My mother doesn’t know where
I pick these things up either.” An alternative for kids with older siblings
would say, “I get my vocabulary from my older brother/sister.” That one’s a
little sketchy, I suppose, because the teachers may simply assume that the older
sibling is learning from the parents, and passing it on. Still, I’m hoping the
teachers assume that the older kid picked this sort of thing up on the streets
and taught it to the younger kids, since that's probably the reality.
So that’s my idea for a kids’ clothing line. I think it’s
highly functional, and that parents would benefit from it. As I said, a few of
them would need to be offered in sticker form as well as on shirts. They’d make
great birthday presents (for the parents’ birthdays, of course), and I bet
they’d be hot for back to school. Then I could go to parent/teacher conferences
and not feel like I need to spend the first ten minutes explaining why my
daughter’s hair looks like she was fathered by a reggae singer, and that her
gutter mouth is not my fucking fault.
Get to Work
A couple of months ago we decided it was time our children
had some regular chores. Up to that point, we’d forced them to help out
sporadically, usually with the same result: they’d grudgingly do what we asked
badly, and we’d have to do it after them. This time we decided to insist that
they contribute to their own maintenance. Normally I’d muck out their rooms
once a year, when my husband took them on a Boy Scout family camping trip over
Memorial Day weekend. I’d drag everything out from under their beds, and
everything they’d jammed in their closets in the last 364 days, and get rid of
the garbage and the cheap ass fucking carnival stuffed animals. You know the
ones—shit like a stuffed banana made out of crappy polyester that, had they
seen it in the garbage, they would declare their
favorite stuffed animal ever and oh my god how could I be so cruel as to throw
it out?!?!? You know, the one they didn’t even miss when I actually did throw it out
over Memorial Day weekend last year? Yeah, that one.
That used to take me all three days of the long weekend, and it was painful. So now they were instructed that they were going to have to muck out their own rooms weekly, and I would get to spend Memorial Day weekend drinking Mai Tais and having my nails done or, you know, cleaning the rest of the house. I made up a checklist and printed out copies. Each one has the same thing on it: remove the sheet from your bed, take it and all dirty clothes to the laundry room, put a new sheet on the bed, pick up all stuffed animals, pick up and vacuum one room (living room, dining room, mudroom/kitchen or hall), and a couple of lines for ad hoc write-in stuff. Each item has a check box so they can keep track of what they’ve done. Chore time is around 9 a.m. on either Saturday or Sunday (sometimes their sporting events interfere with the Saturday window).
The first two or three weeks went pretty well. It was a new thing, and they felt a sense of accomplishment when they were done. Then the novelty wore off, and that sense of accomplishment wasn’t sufficient to counter the drudgery of actually doing the chores. Congratulations, kids: you’re now prepared for life. These days they go to their rooms, ostensibly to do their chores, but they whine and fight and do everything but pick up their rooms. I think they may actually drag stuff out and make a bigger mess. So we have to ride their asses and make sure they’re making progress. I say “we,” but I think we all know who “we” is. Because interestingly, there always seem to be several “outdoor” tasks that become super ultra high priority and require my husband’s immediate attention as soon as the kids are sent off to do their weekly jobs. But, you know, I get it—those cardboard boxes aren’t going to break themselves down, y’all.
And of course, I hear how mean I am. This weekend my insistence that they pick up and vacuum a single room on the main level was labeled “child abuse,” and “forced slave labor.” I was declared to be the meanest, worst mom ever. (Two superlatives at once; you can imagine my pride.) I pointed out that I do every other fucking thing—the laundry, the cooking, the bathrooms. I suggested that if they were so unhappy about vacuuming the living room, they were more than welcome to clean the toilets. This was met with eye rolls, of course. It’s their most highly developed skill.
I’ve tried a reward system, but it kind of backfired. One week I was planning to run some errands (interesting errands, not just the grocery store, so they all wanted to go) and I said I would take two kids along. Whoever finished first would get to come with me. Problem number one is that of course we only have one vacuum cleaner, so whoever got the vacuum first was going to finish first. Problem number two was that my daughter stopped working entirely, crawled under a blanket on the floor of her bedroom, and started crying. When I finally pried out of her why she was crying, it turned out that she really, really wanted to come with me, just to spend some time with Mommy. This is a radical change from even a couple of months ago, when I would be leaving the house in the morning and would say, “Do you want a hug and a kiss?” and she’d think about it for a second and go, “Nah.” So the fact that she wanted to come with me was odd (although not unwelcome), and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to finish in time to get her choice. Result: tears. So that kinda sucked (she got to go with me, even though she wasn’t the first one done).
These are tasks for which they do not get paid. I’ve had this debate with other parents, asking opinions on if they should get an allowance for maintenance work. I’m on the fence—I think about the “real world” that they’ll have to live in one day, and no one is going to give them a medal when they empty the fucking dishwasher and change their sheets. On the other hand, when you go to work you do get paid for your contribution to the overall success of the organization, and contributing to the success of the organization is what I’m asking them to do in this case. So for now they don’t get paid for making their beds and picking up their clothes, but they do for cleaning windows and dusting baseboards (I hate dusting baseboards, and they’re closer to the ground. They can do it, and I’ll give them a buck for it).
There is a downside to having them pull their own weight, and that is that I can’t get rid of the crap as easily. When I was doing it over Memorial Day weekends, I’d just dig everything out and make a big pile in the middle of the room. Then I’d pluck out the things that were just garbage, like all the stupid plastic slinkies from birthday party goody bags (have you read Kristin’s rant about goody bags? You should. Go ahead. I’ll wait), the aforementioned crap stuffed animals, random bits of unidentifiable toy (I don’t understand—I have some awareness of every toy that enters our house, one way or another, and yet I’m constantly finding little pieces of shit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before; how is this possible? And what the hell are they?), and other precious gems that they would clutch to their bosom and shriek in outrage if they thought I was even suggesting that we get rid of it. I’ll just have to go into stealth mode to get rid of whatever replaces the stuffed banana.
That used to take me all three days of the long weekend, and it was painful. So now they were instructed that they were going to have to muck out their own rooms weekly, and I would get to spend Memorial Day weekend drinking Mai Tais and having my nails done or, you know, cleaning the rest of the house. I made up a checklist and printed out copies. Each one has the same thing on it: remove the sheet from your bed, take it and all dirty clothes to the laundry room, put a new sheet on the bed, pick up all stuffed animals, pick up and vacuum one room (living room, dining room, mudroom/kitchen or hall), and a couple of lines for ad hoc write-in stuff. Each item has a check box so they can keep track of what they’ve done. Chore time is around 9 a.m. on either Saturday or Sunday (sometimes their sporting events interfere with the Saturday window).
The first two or three weeks went pretty well. It was a new thing, and they felt a sense of accomplishment when they were done. Then the novelty wore off, and that sense of accomplishment wasn’t sufficient to counter the drudgery of actually doing the chores. Congratulations, kids: you’re now prepared for life. These days they go to their rooms, ostensibly to do their chores, but they whine and fight and do everything but pick up their rooms. I think they may actually drag stuff out and make a bigger mess. So we have to ride their asses and make sure they’re making progress. I say “we,” but I think we all know who “we” is. Because interestingly, there always seem to be several “outdoor” tasks that become super ultra high priority and require my husband’s immediate attention as soon as the kids are sent off to do their weekly jobs. But, you know, I get it—those cardboard boxes aren’t going to break themselves down, y’all.
And of course, I hear how mean I am. This weekend my insistence that they pick up and vacuum a single room on the main level was labeled “child abuse,” and “forced slave labor.” I was declared to be the meanest, worst mom ever. (Two superlatives at once; you can imagine my pride.) I pointed out that I do every other fucking thing—the laundry, the cooking, the bathrooms. I suggested that if they were so unhappy about vacuuming the living room, they were more than welcome to clean the toilets. This was met with eye rolls, of course. It’s their most highly developed skill.
I’ve tried a reward system, but it kind of backfired. One week I was planning to run some errands (interesting errands, not just the grocery store, so they all wanted to go) and I said I would take two kids along. Whoever finished first would get to come with me. Problem number one is that of course we only have one vacuum cleaner, so whoever got the vacuum first was going to finish first. Problem number two was that my daughter stopped working entirely, crawled under a blanket on the floor of her bedroom, and started crying. When I finally pried out of her why she was crying, it turned out that she really, really wanted to come with me, just to spend some time with Mommy. This is a radical change from even a couple of months ago, when I would be leaving the house in the morning and would say, “Do you want a hug and a kiss?” and she’d think about it for a second and go, “Nah.” So the fact that she wanted to come with me was odd (although not unwelcome), and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to finish in time to get her choice. Result: tears. So that kinda sucked (she got to go with me, even though she wasn’t the first one done).
These are tasks for which they do not get paid. I’ve had this debate with other parents, asking opinions on if they should get an allowance for maintenance work. I’m on the fence—I think about the “real world” that they’ll have to live in one day, and no one is going to give them a medal when they empty the fucking dishwasher and change their sheets. On the other hand, when you go to work you do get paid for your contribution to the overall success of the organization, and contributing to the success of the organization is what I’m asking them to do in this case. So for now they don’t get paid for making their beds and picking up their clothes, but they do for cleaning windows and dusting baseboards (I hate dusting baseboards, and they’re closer to the ground. They can do it, and I’ll give them a buck for it).
There is a downside to having them pull their own weight, and that is that I can’t get rid of the crap as easily. When I was doing it over Memorial Day weekends, I’d just dig everything out and make a big pile in the middle of the room. Then I’d pluck out the things that were just garbage, like all the stupid plastic slinkies from birthday party goody bags (have you read Kristin’s rant about goody bags? You should. Go ahead. I’ll wait), the aforementioned crap stuffed animals, random bits of unidentifiable toy (I don’t understand—I have some awareness of every toy that enters our house, one way or another, and yet I’m constantly finding little pieces of shit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before; how is this possible? And what the hell are they?), and other precious gems that they would clutch to their bosom and shriek in outrage if they thought I was even suggesting that we get rid of it. I’ll just have to go into stealth mode to get rid of whatever replaces the stuffed banana.
(Not) Playing the Field
We’re going to be out of town for a couple of days next weekend,
and my kids will miss a day of school. They’re bummed out because it’s “Field
Day” they’ll be missing. “Aw, man, I LOVE Field Day!” my daughter announced at
dinner last night when it became clear what would be happening at school the
day they would be out. I’m now trying to figure out whose kids these are. They
can’t be mine, because they would surely have inherited my loathing of Field
Day. Right? (Note: in spite of this, they are mine.)
As an adult, there are things I dislike about being involved with school, most notably the Science Fair and the Carnival. When I was a kid, my school didn’t have Science Fairs (although I’m sure I would have hated them if we had), and I vaguely remember one sort of Carnival-esque thing, but it wasn’t the run around screaming-toss beanbags in a clown’s mouth-get a bag full of cheap plastic shit toys that will clog the vacuum in three weeks kind of affair that my kids’ school has. All I remember about it is that I somehow ended up doing magic tricks for small groups of parents that drifted by from time to time. I was stationed at a table in a hallway and had evidently volunteered to do this. That’s it—wine (and 33 years) has wiped out the rest of that memory. But we had Field Day, and boy did I hate it. In fact, on a list of things I didn’t like about school, Field Day must be about five of them. It doesn’t bother me as an adult, because I don’t have to participate in my kids’ Field Day, or try find a plausible excuse to miss it (and “plausible” was a relative term—I made up some pretty unbelievable shit trying to get out of it in my day).
As you may have gathered if you’re familiar with my rant about camping, I’m not outdoorsy. And although it’s not necessarily a given, in my case not being outdoorsy and not being athletic are parts of one another in the Venn diagram of Things That Totally Suck In My Opinion. In the first place, most sports are played outside. In the second place, as a normal human being, when someone throws something at me, my instinct is to duck, not stick out my hand and try to catch whatever the fuck they threw at me. And to address the obvious question (“Yeah, but wouldn’t you rather have done Field Day shit and gotten to miss class?”) the answer is, actually, hell no. The only thing worse than the academic part of school was the athletic part of school. If they had said, “You can do Field Day, or go sit in the library and read all day,” the wake that followed me as I raced down the hall to the library would have pulled everything off the walls and sent it swirling against the lockers in a tornado of homeroom announcements and “Just Say No to Drugs” posters.
I don’t even remember that much about Field Day (see wine and passage of time, above), but what I do remember about it was excruciating. It was always at the end of the school year, of course. I’m sure this had to do with the fact that they were basically running out of shit to teach us (plus the teachers were as eager for summer vacation as we were, maybe more) so they declared Field Day and it was a chance for the teachers to not have to do a lesson plan and try to teach something to a bunch of twelve year olds who were already checked out and anticipating spending their mornings watching reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” and “I Dream of Jeannie” before they went to the pool for the rest of the day.
I grew up on the East coast, and naturally the day of Field Day was always the first really hot day of almost-summer. The activities were held on playing fields that were twelve miles from the nearest tree, so there was no shade. This was long before concerns about things like sunscreen (we called it “sun tan lotion” of course, which only serves to underscore the fact that it wasn’t about protection, but about cosmetics) and hydration (no one had a “water bottle” in those days, and there was no bottled water, and the school administration apparently didn’t give a shit if we all passed out from heat stroke). As a child, I was often mistaken for Casper the Friendly Ghost, so lacking in pigmentation was I. As a result, I’m very sensitive to excessive exposure to heat. So right there I’m not all that excited about this whole thing.
And then they wanted us to run. I don’t remember anything we did at Field Day other than sprint up and down the field. The 100 yard dash, the 500 yard dash, the 1000 yard dash, the 4,927 yard dash or whatever the fuck. I suppose they had other activities, but I can’t recall what they were. I think we actually signed up for stuff in advance, so it’s very possible I just picked the things that required the least coordination. Of course, it’s impossible to have enough activities going at once to keep 250 kids occupied the whole time, so we spent a lot of time standing around waiting for shit to happen.
Out in a field for four or five hours, with the sun blazing down and with nothing to drink, waiting to get to run a few hundred yards so I could go stand around some more…I can’t quite put my finger on what about this I found so abhorrent.
The logical strategy was to find ways to get out of it. I did my damndest. If I had put as much effort into my schoolwork over the course of the year as I did in coming up with reasons I couldn’t participate in Field Day in the week before it happened, I’d have been a Rhodes Scholar. My first encounter with Field Day was in fourth grade. When the guidelines were explained to me, I immediately knew that this was something in which I would be gracefully declining to participate. Just about that time, I was starting orthodontic treatment. I had some little bits of wire between a few of my molars to make room for some bands they’d be putting on shortly. The pressure these were exerting on my teeth was causing them to ache, therefore I was so sorry, but it seemed to me it would be unwise for me to participate in this “Field Day” thingie.
That one was a failure. I realized that in future years, I was going to have to come up with something better. A doctor’s appointment or a broken bone would have been a godsend, but I was never that lucky. Probably because in order to break a bone, you had to be remotely athletic and perform potentially risky acts that could result in bone breakage. About the most dangerous injury I was ever likely to sustain was a severe paper cut, or perhaps a pinched finger from getting it caught in the hinge of my Barbie carrying case.
I tried a lot of different things, but the one that probably worked the best over the years was simply going to the bathroom, and never going back to the field. That probably wouldn’t fly these days—the schools are much more vigilant about things like where kids are, and visitors to the school buildings and such. But thirty years ago it was no problem. The trick was, I had to pretend enthusiasm up to the point where I allegedly needed to use the restroom. That was kind of challenging for me, since it wasn’t exactly a secret that I hated gym class and anything that resembled it even slightly.
Our school colors were blue and white, and when you enrolled, you were assigned a color, which was your “team” for the rest of your school career. On Field Day, success in events was rewarded with “points” for your team. The team with the most points at the end of the day was the winner. There was a lot of screaming about “GO BLUE!” and “GO WHITE!” Really, I always thought, who gives a shit? We’re not running for Congress here. It’s not like “winning” gets you anything tangible or important. In fact, about the only thing I can think of that you “got” was that if your team won, you got to say “Ha ha! We won at Field Day!” to anyone on the losing team for the next ten days until school was out for the summer, and everyone forgot about the whole thing until the next year on Field Day. But in order to make it seem like I cared, so I could be struck with such an unfortunate need to go to the restroom about 45 minutes into the whole stupid thing, I had to participate in the inane and pointless screaming. (I was a Blue, for the record.)
My memory of all this nonsense ends by about tenth grade. I don’t know if they didn’t force the older kids to participate, or if I managed to convince my mother to just let me stay home “sick” on Field Day day. Given how much my mother also hated physical exertion, I’ve always been a bit surprised by the memory I have of her urging me to give it a go. I suspect she didn’t feel like she could let a ten year old stay home by herself all day while she and my dad were at work. I know she sympathized with my distaste for all things athletic, especially since her genes were probably where I got it.
I’m grateful that as an adult, the few times I’ve been exposed to something that had a hint of a “corporate Field Day,” it’s always been completely optional. Unlike in elementary school, there’s no shame in saying, “Yeah, not my thing,” or, “You know, I don’t do team sports,” or, “I’d rather perform my own hysterectomy with a rusty corkscrew” (depending on your level of enthusiasm, or lack thereof). Also, when you do team building activities in a corporate setting, there’s almost always alcohol provided. Having to yell, “GO BLUE!” with a glass of wine in my hand is way more tolerable than it was when I was fourteen and empty handed. Also I can walk away whenever I want and drive home and no one can stop me. It’s not always obvious, but there are some really kick ass things about being an adult. Not having to participate in Field Day may be at least two of them.
As an adult, there are things I dislike about being involved with school, most notably the Science Fair and the Carnival. When I was a kid, my school didn’t have Science Fairs (although I’m sure I would have hated them if we had), and I vaguely remember one sort of Carnival-esque thing, but it wasn’t the run around screaming-toss beanbags in a clown’s mouth-get a bag full of cheap plastic shit toys that will clog the vacuum in three weeks kind of affair that my kids’ school has. All I remember about it is that I somehow ended up doing magic tricks for small groups of parents that drifted by from time to time. I was stationed at a table in a hallway and had evidently volunteered to do this. That’s it—wine (and 33 years) has wiped out the rest of that memory. But we had Field Day, and boy did I hate it. In fact, on a list of things I didn’t like about school, Field Day must be about five of them. It doesn’t bother me as an adult, because I don’t have to participate in my kids’ Field Day, or try find a plausible excuse to miss it (and “plausible” was a relative term—I made up some pretty unbelievable shit trying to get out of it in my day).
As you may have gathered if you’re familiar with my rant about camping, I’m not outdoorsy. And although it’s not necessarily a given, in my case not being outdoorsy and not being athletic are parts of one another in the Venn diagram of Things That Totally Suck In My Opinion. In the first place, most sports are played outside. In the second place, as a normal human being, when someone throws something at me, my instinct is to duck, not stick out my hand and try to catch whatever the fuck they threw at me. And to address the obvious question (“Yeah, but wouldn’t you rather have done Field Day shit and gotten to miss class?”) the answer is, actually, hell no. The only thing worse than the academic part of school was the athletic part of school. If they had said, “You can do Field Day, or go sit in the library and read all day,” the wake that followed me as I raced down the hall to the library would have pulled everything off the walls and sent it swirling against the lockers in a tornado of homeroom announcements and “Just Say No to Drugs” posters.
I don’t even remember that much about Field Day (see wine and passage of time, above), but what I do remember about it was excruciating. It was always at the end of the school year, of course. I’m sure this had to do with the fact that they were basically running out of shit to teach us (plus the teachers were as eager for summer vacation as we were, maybe more) so they declared Field Day and it was a chance for the teachers to not have to do a lesson plan and try to teach something to a bunch of twelve year olds who were already checked out and anticipating spending their mornings watching reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” and “I Dream of Jeannie” before they went to the pool for the rest of the day.
I grew up on the East coast, and naturally the day of Field Day was always the first really hot day of almost-summer. The activities were held on playing fields that were twelve miles from the nearest tree, so there was no shade. This was long before concerns about things like sunscreen (we called it “sun tan lotion” of course, which only serves to underscore the fact that it wasn’t about protection, but about cosmetics) and hydration (no one had a “water bottle” in those days, and there was no bottled water, and the school administration apparently didn’t give a shit if we all passed out from heat stroke). As a child, I was often mistaken for Casper the Friendly Ghost, so lacking in pigmentation was I. As a result, I’m very sensitive to excessive exposure to heat. So right there I’m not all that excited about this whole thing.
And then they wanted us to run. I don’t remember anything we did at Field Day other than sprint up and down the field. The 100 yard dash, the 500 yard dash, the 1000 yard dash, the 4,927 yard dash or whatever the fuck. I suppose they had other activities, but I can’t recall what they were. I think we actually signed up for stuff in advance, so it’s very possible I just picked the things that required the least coordination. Of course, it’s impossible to have enough activities going at once to keep 250 kids occupied the whole time, so we spent a lot of time standing around waiting for shit to happen.
Out in a field for four or five hours, with the sun blazing down and with nothing to drink, waiting to get to run a few hundred yards so I could go stand around some more…I can’t quite put my finger on what about this I found so abhorrent.
The logical strategy was to find ways to get out of it. I did my damndest. If I had put as much effort into my schoolwork over the course of the year as I did in coming up with reasons I couldn’t participate in Field Day in the week before it happened, I’d have been a Rhodes Scholar. My first encounter with Field Day was in fourth grade. When the guidelines were explained to me, I immediately knew that this was something in which I would be gracefully declining to participate. Just about that time, I was starting orthodontic treatment. I had some little bits of wire between a few of my molars to make room for some bands they’d be putting on shortly. The pressure these were exerting on my teeth was causing them to ache, therefore I was so sorry, but it seemed to me it would be unwise for me to participate in this “Field Day” thingie.
That one was a failure. I realized that in future years, I was going to have to come up with something better. A doctor’s appointment or a broken bone would have been a godsend, but I was never that lucky. Probably because in order to break a bone, you had to be remotely athletic and perform potentially risky acts that could result in bone breakage. About the most dangerous injury I was ever likely to sustain was a severe paper cut, or perhaps a pinched finger from getting it caught in the hinge of my Barbie carrying case.
I tried a lot of different things, but the one that probably worked the best over the years was simply going to the bathroom, and never going back to the field. That probably wouldn’t fly these days—the schools are much more vigilant about things like where kids are, and visitors to the school buildings and such. But thirty years ago it was no problem. The trick was, I had to pretend enthusiasm up to the point where I allegedly needed to use the restroom. That was kind of challenging for me, since it wasn’t exactly a secret that I hated gym class and anything that resembled it even slightly.
Our school colors were blue and white, and when you enrolled, you were assigned a color, which was your “team” for the rest of your school career. On Field Day, success in events was rewarded with “points” for your team. The team with the most points at the end of the day was the winner. There was a lot of screaming about “GO BLUE!” and “GO WHITE!” Really, I always thought, who gives a shit? We’re not running for Congress here. It’s not like “winning” gets you anything tangible or important. In fact, about the only thing I can think of that you “got” was that if your team won, you got to say “Ha ha! We won at Field Day!” to anyone on the losing team for the next ten days until school was out for the summer, and everyone forgot about the whole thing until the next year on Field Day. But in order to make it seem like I cared, so I could be struck with such an unfortunate need to go to the restroom about 45 minutes into the whole stupid thing, I had to participate in the inane and pointless screaming. (I was a Blue, for the record.)
My memory of all this nonsense ends by about tenth grade. I don’t know if they didn’t force the older kids to participate, or if I managed to convince my mother to just let me stay home “sick” on Field Day day. Given how much my mother also hated physical exertion, I’ve always been a bit surprised by the memory I have of her urging me to give it a go. I suspect she didn’t feel like she could let a ten year old stay home by herself all day while she and my dad were at work. I know she sympathized with my distaste for all things athletic, especially since her genes were probably where I got it.
I’m grateful that as an adult, the few times I’ve been exposed to something that had a hint of a “corporate Field Day,” it’s always been completely optional. Unlike in elementary school, there’s no shame in saying, “Yeah, not my thing,” or, “You know, I don’t do team sports,” or, “I’d rather perform my own hysterectomy with a rusty corkscrew” (depending on your level of enthusiasm, or lack thereof). Also, when you do team building activities in a corporate setting, there’s almost always alcohol provided. Having to yell, “GO BLUE!” with a glass of wine in my hand is way more tolerable than it was when I was fourteen and empty handed. Also I can walk away whenever I want and drive home and no one can stop me. It’s not always obvious, but there are some really kick ass things about being an adult. Not having to participate in Field Day may be at least two of them.
A Study in Compulsions
I’ve recently had occasion to think a lot about my father in
law. Some people have problems with their mothers in law. I’ve never had have
too many problems with her because she’s been dead for most of my marriage. My
problems were largely with my father in law, and mostly they had to do with his
being alive. The reason I’ve been thinking about him a lot is because now he’s
dead. If you’re one of those people who thinks that everything is funny but
death, and death absolves people of all sin and we should just remember dead
people as perfect and saintly, maybe navigate away now, because I’m about to
get snarky about a dead guy.
My father in law was generally a good person, I’ll put that out there now. He didn’t cheat or steal or set fire to orphanages. But hoo boy did he lie. Maybe “lie” is harsh. He exaggerated. Except when you exaggerate, you expand on a story that’s true, and kind of tart it up, make it more interesting. And in retrospect, that’s not really what he did. He just made shit up. So I guess he was actually lying. But they were such patently obvious lies that they were funny.
Oh, how bad could it be? Well, let’s see—did you know he was responsible for the development of the integrated circuit? He was. He told us a lot of his stories before the advent of the Smart Phone, and he’d tell us shit like this over dinner, so we’d just have to smile and nod and think, “What utter bullshit” instead of whipping out an iPhone and saying, “Let me Google that” and finding out the truth. Which in this case was that the integrated circuit was developed at Texas Instruments during a time when he was in Germany in the Army. So, you know, what utter bullshit.
And then there was Babe Ruth’s Bat. This story was told to his girlfriend (partner, whatever) while my husband and I were in the room. My husband and I keep looking at each other, rolling our eyes in disbelief and incredulity. Because she was hanging on every word, convinced that this was the absolute verbatim truth.
It seems that at some point in the…1940s? I don’t know, the timing wasn’t clear, because my father in law was born in 1939 and Babe Ruth played baseball in the 20s, but clearly this sort of detail was glossed over in the telling of this story because, you know, details. Anyway, sometime in the 1940s, when he was a kid, his dad somehow got hold of a bat that had belonged to Babe Ruth. Where his father found a 20 year old bat belonging to one of the greatest baseball players of all time near their home in Western Massachusetts, and how he was so sure of its provenance, was never clearly explained. Because, you know, details. Anyhoo, his dad brought this bat home, but it was broken. His father fixed it and gave it to my father in law to play with. My father in law, being a kid—8 or 10 or whatever—and not really understanding the significance, played with this bat, but just didn’t get what he’d been given. I think maybe the moral of the story was supposed to be that Kids Just Don’t Appreciate These Things.
But our eyerolling was based on the obvious: Babe Ruth’s bat? Come on. It was broken? And his dad repaired it? And in the 1940s there was a fixative strong enough to repair it so it could be used again? I’m no structural engineer, but even I know that a broken wooden bat can’t be repaired in a way to make it usable again. My brother in law is a structural engineer, and he confirmed that the integrity of the wood would be compromised sufficiently to render it as useful for either kindling or to fix tippy tables at a restaurant, your choice. And in the 1940s there was no such thing as Liquid Nails or Gorilla Glue or whatever, not that those would even work. And yet, his girlfriend believed every word of this preposterous horseshit.
Let me also add that always his lies were harmless. He never lied about anyone’s character, or actions, or motives (well, other than his own). He was never attacking an individual. It was just infuriating because they were so obviously lies, and while you could call him on them, they were always petty and stupid enough that to do so would make you appear…petty and stupid. And yet it was tiresome and sort of insulting to sit there knowing you were being lied to.
Like the Fourth of July Parade lie.
We live in a really small town that every year has a big old fashioned Fourth of July parade. Any group is welcome to march—the Rotary, the Boy Scouts, the roller hockey team, the local animal shelter, the LGBT support group, local businesses—the organic butcher, the organic baker, the organic candle stick maker. Anyone who wants to can march if they get permission from the parade committee. The joke around here is that half the town watches the parade, and the other half is in it. Ha ha.
Last year he and I attended the parade, while my husband and kids marched in it with my husband’s company. As we sat there, waiting for the parade to start, I told him this pathetic little tidbit of humor. He nodded for a minute, and then said, “You know, there’s this town where they have a Fourth of July parade, and one half of it watches it, and the other half is the parade. And then when it’s over, the ones who were watching get up and march, and the other half watch.” So, seriously? You took the stupid one-liner I just delivered, and basically repeated it back to me as a “true story”? Seriously?
What most of his lies had in common was that they were delusions. Either they were things that he’d claim to have done, or facts that he “invented” that he then presented to his companions as unarguable truths. In a way it was sort of pathetic, because most of his stories were intended to make him appear brilliant and successful, or at least wickedly clever, in ways that he never really was. The saddest part is, I think he really believed every story he told. In fact I’m not sure he wasn’t completely out of his fucking mind. This suspicion deepened when we went and saw his house.
We took the kids to see “grandpa’s house.” He had moved from where my husband and his brother grew up to a different state in New England, to a house none of us had ever seen (he had always come to visit us, instead of us going to him). I wasn’t sure it was going to be terribly meaningful to the children, but we needed to get a feel for what was in the house, because of course it would have to be cleaned out and sold.
On the surface, it was very, very tidy. The living room looked fairly normal. His girlfriend had moved some of her things out and taken them to the townhouse in Maine she was moving to, so there were some bare spots, but it was neat and uncluttered. The kitchen was also neat and organized. The basement had lots of metal shelving with big plastic bins on it. Actually, I should say that everything was very neat and organized. What was notable was what you found when you started opening drawers.
Although we’re not anywhere near done, I can offer some preliminary observations.
We are now the owners of five digital cameras (one brand new in the box, most of them simply removed from the box, but never used), plus two MP3 players (again, one brand new in the box). We have three laptops, none of which are new, but none of which is more than maybe 5 years old. We left two there. And that was just the beginning of the Festival of Electronics that was in store for us. Wireless mice. Old keyboards. A couple of old printers. Three cordless phone sets. Miles of various kinds of cable. Four or five webcams. Twenty two power strips, all at least fifteen years old. I have no idea what one retired person planned to do with all of this, but he’d always fancied himself “technical,” and at one point in the 90s he had bought ten or twelve Macs, proclaiming that he would cobble them together in such a way that he claimed they would anticipate Apple’s future offerings by ten years (see: “delusions, comma, lies,” above) so I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been to find that stuff.
I was looking around on a desk in the basement, and it struck me there were six pairs of scissors in my field of vision. I started opening drawers, and started finding staplers. Seven total. Then those little bitey staple puller things. Nine of those. Another drawer held three boxes of 24 pencils, all unsharpened, and four sets of colored pencils. There were thirty six highlighters. There were five (five) Cross pen and pencil sets, all with the logo of a company at which he last worked twenty five years ago, plus a bunch of other pens in presentation boxes. A little more digging unearthed eighteen pocket knives (we later found one more in his car). And that was just one of his two desks.
As I was investigating all of this, my husband came downstairs and said, “Holy shit.” I wheeled around in the desk chair into which I had collapsed as I was counting highlighters and said, “What?” He pointed wordlessly at a set of heavy duty aluminum shelving that was behind me that I hadn’t noticed. On a set of shelves approximately five feet wide, seven feet high, and two feet deep, stacked on four shelves, from top to bottom, were boxes and boxes of train sets. Hundreds of cars, miles of HO gauge track. All purchased from eBay, I presume with the intention that he would build a huge train set in his basement, and his grandchildren would beg to be allowed to visit him to play with the amazing Train Set of Wonder and Delight. Holy shit, indeed.
I couldn’t imagine anything could top the trains. I was wrong. So very wrong.
In his office, I found a fairly good sized travel bag of prescription medication. Because he was in poor health and took a shit ton of various medications and vitamins every day (to no avail, clearly), I wasn’t surprised to find it (and, spoiler, it wasn’t Class 1 narcotics or anything). My brother in law advocated for tossing it, but we decided that since we weren’t sure what all it was, it should go to a pharmacy to be properly disposed of. I volunteered to take it, and grabbed a couple of those S-M-T-W-Th-F-S pill boxes with stuff in them off the table to add them to the pile. Someone suggested I’d better make sure they didn’t belong to his girlfriend. She said, no, they weren’t hers, but told me that there was another bag in the garage that I should take too. I went out to find it.
What I found was a bag, like the kind of bag they’d give you at Bed, Bath and Beyond, or Sheets ‘n’ Shit if you bought a king sized comforter, or one of those “bed in a bag” things. A big fucking bag, is where I’m going with this. This big fucking bag was, I shit you not, half full of medicine bottles. Let me repeat that, half fucking full of medicine bottles. Which all had pills in them. We’re not talking about a bunch of empty bottles, these all had shit in them. A lot of them were vitamins, but that only makes it worse. That means that he’d gone out and bought a bottle of vitamin E, and then two weeks later, had—I don’t know, forgotten he bought it, or was afraid he’d run out, or whatever the fuck he was thinking—and went out and bought another bottle of vitamin E, then did it again. And again. And again. Since I have little need for 34 pounds of vitamin E, it all got turned in to be disposed of.
It’s bad enough that he still has cassette tapes of Laura Branigan albums, and notebooks from classes he took in which the handouts were run off on a mimeograph machine, but he also has dozens of CDs for software that was probably five years out of date when he bought it or got it (AOL install disks with 100 free hours, anyone?), enough pairs of prescription glasses that he could have worn a new pair every week for a year with no repeats, and forty SD cards that may or may not have anything on them.
My brother in law and I started talking about what someone would think if they started cleaning out our stuff. Anyone doing it for me would shake their heads over the number of blank notebooks I had, or the fifteen three ring binders full of recipes. They would look at the big basket of nail polish and say, “How many nails did she think she had?” I think we all have a slight hoarding instinct, whether that manifests itself in the form of family pictures, coffee mugs, or washers and screws. But somehow I think having thirty colors of nail polish doesn’t quite put one into the category of “hoarder” the way having a box of 85 keys to nothing, 6 sets of brand new gardening gloves, 5 disposable charcoal grills, and 36 light switch plates of various configuration does. Holy shit.
My father in law was generally a good person, I’ll put that out there now. He didn’t cheat or steal or set fire to orphanages. But hoo boy did he lie. Maybe “lie” is harsh. He exaggerated. Except when you exaggerate, you expand on a story that’s true, and kind of tart it up, make it more interesting. And in retrospect, that’s not really what he did. He just made shit up. So I guess he was actually lying. But they were such patently obvious lies that they were funny.
Oh, how bad could it be? Well, let’s see—did you know he was responsible for the development of the integrated circuit? He was. He told us a lot of his stories before the advent of the Smart Phone, and he’d tell us shit like this over dinner, so we’d just have to smile and nod and think, “What utter bullshit” instead of whipping out an iPhone and saying, “Let me Google that” and finding out the truth. Which in this case was that the integrated circuit was developed at Texas Instruments during a time when he was in Germany in the Army. So, you know, what utter bullshit.
And then there was Babe Ruth’s Bat. This story was told to his girlfriend (partner, whatever) while my husband and I were in the room. My husband and I keep looking at each other, rolling our eyes in disbelief and incredulity. Because she was hanging on every word, convinced that this was the absolute verbatim truth.
It seems that at some point in the…1940s? I don’t know, the timing wasn’t clear, because my father in law was born in 1939 and Babe Ruth played baseball in the 20s, but clearly this sort of detail was glossed over in the telling of this story because, you know, details. Anyway, sometime in the 1940s, when he was a kid, his dad somehow got hold of a bat that had belonged to Babe Ruth. Where his father found a 20 year old bat belonging to one of the greatest baseball players of all time near their home in Western Massachusetts, and how he was so sure of its provenance, was never clearly explained. Because, you know, details. Anyhoo, his dad brought this bat home, but it was broken. His father fixed it and gave it to my father in law to play with. My father in law, being a kid—8 or 10 or whatever—and not really understanding the significance, played with this bat, but just didn’t get what he’d been given. I think maybe the moral of the story was supposed to be that Kids Just Don’t Appreciate These Things.
But our eyerolling was based on the obvious: Babe Ruth’s bat? Come on. It was broken? And his dad repaired it? And in the 1940s there was a fixative strong enough to repair it so it could be used again? I’m no structural engineer, but even I know that a broken wooden bat can’t be repaired in a way to make it usable again. My brother in law is a structural engineer, and he confirmed that the integrity of the wood would be compromised sufficiently to render it as useful for either kindling or to fix tippy tables at a restaurant, your choice. And in the 1940s there was no such thing as Liquid Nails or Gorilla Glue or whatever, not that those would even work. And yet, his girlfriend believed every word of this preposterous horseshit.
Let me also add that always his lies were harmless. He never lied about anyone’s character, or actions, or motives (well, other than his own). He was never attacking an individual. It was just infuriating because they were so obviously lies, and while you could call him on them, they were always petty and stupid enough that to do so would make you appear…petty and stupid. And yet it was tiresome and sort of insulting to sit there knowing you were being lied to.
Like the Fourth of July Parade lie.
We live in a really small town that every year has a big old fashioned Fourth of July parade. Any group is welcome to march—the Rotary, the Boy Scouts, the roller hockey team, the local animal shelter, the LGBT support group, local businesses—the organic butcher, the organic baker, the organic candle stick maker. Anyone who wants to can march if they get permission from the parade committee. The joke around here is that half the town watches the parade, and the other half is in it. Ha ha.
Last year he and I attended the parade, while my husband and kids marched in it with my husband’s company. As we sat there, waiting for the parade to start, I told him this pathetic little tidbit of humor. He nodded for a minute, and then said, “You know, there’s this town where they have a Fourth of July parade, and one half of it watches it, and the other half is the parade. And then when it’s over, the ones who were watching get up and march, and the other half watch.” So, seriously? You took the stupid one-liner I just delivered, and basically repeated it back to me as a “true story”? Seriously?
What most of his lies had in common was that they were delusions. Either they were things that he’d claim to have done, or facts that he “invented” that he then presented to his companions as unarguable truths. In a way it was sort of pathetic, because most of his stories were intended to make him appear brilliant and successful, or at least wickedly clever, in ways that he never really was. The saddest part is, I think he really believed every story he told. In fact I’m not sure he wasn’t completely out of his fucking mind. This suspicion deepened when we went and saw his house.
We took the kids to see “grandpa’s house.” He had moved from where my husband and his brother grew up to a different state in New England, to a house none of us had ever seen (he had always come to visit us, instead of us going to him). I wasn’t sure it was going to be terribly meaningful to the children, but we needed to get a feel for what was in the house, because of course it would have to be cleaned out and sold.
On the surface, it was very, very tidy. The living room looked fairly normal. His girlfriend had moved some of her things out and taken them to the townhouse in Maine she was moving to, so there were some bare spots, but it was neat and uncluttered. The kitchen was also neat and organized. The basement had lots of metal shelving with big plastic bins on it. Actually, I should say that everything was very neat and organized. What was notable was what you found when you started opening drawers.
Although we’re not anywhere near done, I can offer some preliminary observations.
We are now the owners of five digital cameras (one brand new in the box, most of them simply removed from the box, but never used), plus two MP3 players (again, one brand new in the box). We have three laptops, none of which are new, but none of which is more than maybe 5 years old. We left two there. And that was just the beginning of the Festival of Electronics that was in store for us. Wireless mice. Old keyboards. A couple of old printers. Three cordless phone sets. Miles of various kinds of cable. Four or five webcams. Twenty two power strips, all at least fifteen years old. I have no idea what one retired person planned to do with all of this, but he’d always fancied himself “technical,” and at one point in the 90s he had bought ten or twelve Macs, proclaiming that he would cobble them together in such a way that he claimed they would anticipate Apple’s future offerings by ten years (see: “delusions, comma, lies,” above) so I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been to find that stuff.
I was looking around on a desk in the basement, and it struck me there were six pairs of scissors in my field of vision. I started opening drawers, and started finding staplers. Seven total. Then those little bitey staple puller things. Nine of those. Another drawer held three boxes of 24 pencils, all unsharpened, and four sets of colored pencils. There were thirty six highlighters. There were five (five) Cross pen and pencil sets, all with the logo of a company at which he last worked twenty five years ago, plus a bunch of other pens in presentation boxes. A little more digging unearthed eighteen pocket knives (we later found one more in his car). And that was just one of his two desks.
As I was investigating all of this, my husband came downstairs and said, “Holy shit.” I wheeled around in the desk chair into which I had collapsed as I was counting highlighters and said, “What?” He pointed wordlessly at a set of heavy duty aluminum shelving that was behind me that I hadn’t noticed. On a set of shelves approximately five feet wide, seven feet high, and two feet deep, stacked on four shelves, from top to bottom, were boxes and boxes of train sets. Hundreds of cars, miles of HO gauge track. All purchased from eBay, I presume with the intention that he would build a huge train set in his basement, and his grandchildren would beg to be allowed to visit him to play with the amazing Train Set of Wonder and Delight. Holy shit, indeed.
I couldn’t imagine anything could top the trains. I was wrong. So very wrong.
In his office, I found a fairly good sized travel bag of prescription medication. Because he was in poor health and took a shit ton of various medications and vitamins every day (to no avail, clearly), I wasn’t surprised to find it (and, spoiler, it wasn’t Class 1 narcotics or anything). My brother in law advocated for tossing it, but we decided that since we weren’t sure what all it was, it should go to a pharmacy to be properly disposed of. I volunteered to take it, and grabbed a couple of those S-M-T-W-Th-F-S pill boxes with stuff in them off the table to add them to the pile. Someone suggested I’d better make sure they didn’t belong to his girlfriend. She said, no, they weren’t hers, but told me that there was another bag in the garage that I should take too. I went out to find it.
What I found was a bag, like the kind of bag they’d give you at Bed, Bath and Beyond, or Sheets ‘n’ Shit if you bought a king sized comforter, or one of those “bed in a bag” things. A big fucking bag, is where I’m going with this. This big fucking bag was, I shit you not, half full of medicine bottles. Let me repeat that, half fucking full of medicine bottles. Which all had pills in them. We’re not talking about a bunch of empty bottles, these all had shit in them. A lot of them were vitamins, but that only makes it worse. That means that he’d gone out and bought a bottle of vitamin E, and then two weeks later, had—I don’t know, forgotten he bought it, or was afraid he’d run out, or whatever the fuck he was thinking—and went out and bought another bottle of vitamin E, then did it again. And again. And again. Since I have little need for 34 pounds of vitamin E, it all got turned in to be disposed of.
It’s bad enough that he still has cassette tapes of Laura Branigan albums, and notebooks from classes he took in which the handouts were run off on a mimeograph machine, but he also has dozens of CDs for software that was probably five years out of date when he bought it or got it (AOL install disks with 100 free hours, anyone?), enough pairs of prescription glasses that he could have worn a new pair every week for a year with no repeats, and forty SD cards that may or may not have anything on them.
My brother in law and I started talking about what someone would think if they started cleaning out our stuff. Anyone doing it for me would shake their heads over the number of blank notebooks I had, or the fifteen three ring binders full of recipes. They would look at the big basket of nail polish and say, “How many nails did she think she had?” I think we all have a slight hoarding instinct, whether that manifests itself in the form of family pictures, coffee mugs, or washers and screws. But somehow I think having thirty colors of nail polish doesn’t quite put one into the category of “hoarder” the way having a box of 85 keys to nothing, 6 sets of brand new gardening gloves, 5 disposable charcoal grills, and 36 light switch plates of various configuration does. Holy shit.
Wallowing in Their Own Filth
Can someone explain to me the aversion children have for
cleanliness? It seems that my children are not just oblivious to dirt, but
actually actively dislike the concept of cleaning, be it themselves, spaces, or
inanimate objects.
When I was a child, I don’t recall being particularly violently opposed to the habits of personal hygiene. I didn’t squawk about baths, and my parents didn’t have to threaten me with dire consequences to get me to brush my teeth. Or, you know, shit, maybe they did and I just don’t remember it. I do remember my father monitoring my tooth brushing a few times, but in my mind it was more of a tutorial than strong arming me into doing it.
My children, however, actively protest any behavior that relates to keeping them even moderately sanitary. If they had it their way, they would stink, be filthy, and have rotting cadaver breath. They would wear the same clothes for days on end, and in their bedrooms it would appear as though we had chosen a product called “sweat pants and cartoon character shirts” as a floor covering.
Two of them will willingly take a bath as long as I a) let them in the tub together, b) let them use my “big” (soaking) bathtub and c) provide them with 7-10 gallons of foaming soap each to spray on each other and themselves (my daughter spends the entire time in the tub insisting, "I'm ELSA" and making Olaf out of the foam. Oh Frozen, will you never release your grip?). The other two I practically have to physically drag into the shower and hold there until the water washes away the fumes and my eyes stop tearing. Of course these are the two who are the most fragrant if they don’t bathe for a day.
Part of the reason they get so ripe is because they have favorite clothes that they’re loathe to remove from their person. Like ever. The oldest has been known to sleep in his clothes (changing into pajamas is so exhausting, y’all). My daughter regularly changes her favorite shirt (by which I mean she reevaluates her options and picks a new one, not that she removes the old one and puts on a new one. God forbid) and will wear the new favorite for as many days as I will let her. The problem is knowing what shirt she has on. She wears a sweatshirt almost constantly, with a t-shirt under it. It’s the t-shirt she won’t change. Sometimes I just have to guess: “You’re wearing the same shirt you had on yesterday, aren’t you? Go change it.” Her slightly defiant look, and hundred and eighty degree turn to stomp back upstairs are generally the only indication that I was right.
Getting them to change their underwear is a special struggle. Sometimes I have to stand there and watch them remove the old ones and pull on the new ones. Based on their expressions and the huffing and sighing that goes on during the process, I can only assume that changing their underwear is only slightly less physically and emotionally traumatic than pulling off their eyelids and putting on new ones.
Tooth brushing is another despised activity in my household. I suppose when I was a kid I didn’t feel like I had hideous breath when I woke up. Little did I know I was probably dead wrong, or I was if my own children are any indication. They will go to the most phenomenal lengths to not brush their teeth. I’ll send them back two or three times to do it, and each time they’ll lie and say they have, and I’ll check their teeth and, hey kids, the same brown shit that was on your teeth five minutes ago is still on your teeth, you did not fucking brush your teeth. And then I have to send them back to brush them again and it would be so much simpler and less of a waste of time for ALL of us if they’d just fucking brush their teeth the first time I sent them do to it. And they’re just fucking around—it’s not that they don’t like the toothpaste or don’t know how to do it. For whatever reason, they just don’t want to use a bristled implement and a flavored paste or gel to scrub the foulness off of their various oral protrusions so they don’t have breath that smells like rotten meat rolled in poo.
And their fingernails. One of them regularly comes home from school looking as though the extracurricular activity for the day was harvesting potatoes. The kid has so much soil under his fingernails, that’s the only conclusion I can draw. And when I insist on scrubbing it out, you’d think I was torturing him the way he carries on. It’s ten times worse if I actually insist on trimming his nails at the same time. You remember that scene in “Gone With The Wind,” when Scarlett is standing in the doorway when the doctor has to amputate the guy’s leg and there’s no anesthesia? That guy could take lessons on expressing excruciating pain from my kid having his nails trimmed.
I’m wondering how long it will be before I can look at them and not know the exact contents of their most recent meal or snack. Anything chocolate or tomato-based is particularly inclined to give them away. I’m having a hard time convincing them that it’s ok to wipe your face with a paper napkin. They are not a priceless commodity, nor treasured heirlooms that need to be preserved. Just use the damned napkin.
As a reformed slob (and not always a successfully reformed one) I’m willing to give them a pass on their rooms, up to a point. They have to put all dirty clothes in the laundry room once a week, change their sheets, and pick up all the stuff on the floor, but I don't give them too much grief about the condition of their rooms generally. The only thing I did insist on was that when we got the dog I told them if they wanted the dog to be allowed upstairs, they would have to keep their rooms immaculate, because he would chew and/or eat anything that was on the floor. In a decision that proves they carry more than a fragment of my genetic material, they decided that was way too big a pain in the ass, and the dog just wouldn’t be allowed above the main level of the house. Which is fine with me because there’s no dog hair up there, and as it is on the main level, I sweep up enough hair every other day to make another dog. I can’t understand why this creature isn’t bald by now.
I suppose one day they’ll discover the opposite sex, and then I’ll be sorry I wanted them so clean. They’ll lock themselves in the bathroom and take half hour long showers and I’ll have to listen to the fights about who’s been in the bathroom for how long and that they need to get out. I understand from friends with older kids that the boys will end up smelling like the entire Axe display. But I will say I won’t miss the constant struggle to get them to brush their teeth and change their underwear. The fact that these episodes always seem to happen in the morning is most unfortunate, because they are one of the main reasons that I drink. I think if I started drinking at 7:30 a.m., the neighbors would talk. More than they do now, I mean.
When I was a child, I don’t recall being particularly violently opposed to the habits of personal hygiene. I didn’t squawk about baths, and my parents didn’t have to threaten me with dire consequences to get me to brush my teeth. Or, you know, shit, maybe they did and I just don’t remember it. I do remember my father monitoring my tooth brushing a few times, but in my mind it was more of a tutorial than strong arming me into doing it.
My children, however, actively protest any behavior that relates to keeping them even moderately sanitary. If they had it their way, they would stink, be filthy, and have rotting cadaver breath. They would wear the same clothes for days on end, and in their bedrooms it would appear as though we had chosen a product called “sweat pants and cartoon character shirts” as a floor covering.
Two of them will willingly take a bath as long as I a) let them in the tub together, b) let them use my “big” (soaking) bathtub and c) provide them with 7-10 gallons of foaming soap each to spray on each other and themselves (my daughter spends the entire time in the tub insisting, "I'm ELSA" and making Olaf out of the foam. Oh Frozen, will you never release your grip?). The other two I practically have to physically drag into the shower and hold there until the water washes away the fumes and my eyes stop tearing. Of course these are the two who are the most fragrant if they don’t bathe for a day.
Part of the reason they get so ripe is because they have favorite clothes that they’re loathe to remove from their person. Like ever. The oldest has been known to sleep in his clothes (changing into pajamas is so exhausting, y’all). My daughter regularly changes her favorite shirt (by which I mean she reevaluates her options and picks a new one, not that she removes the old one and puts on a new one. God forbid) and will wear the new favorite for as many days as I will let her. The problem is knowing what shirt she has on. She wears a sweatshirt almost constantly, with a t-shirt under it. It’s the t-shirt she won’t change. Sometimes I just have to guess: “You’re wearing the same shirt you had on yesterday, aren’t you? Go change it.” Her slightly defiant look, and hundred and eighty degree turn to stomp back upstairs are generally the only indication that I was right.
Getting them to change their underwear is a special struggle. Sometimes I have to stand there and watch them remove the old ones and pull on the new ones. Based on their expressions and the huffing and sighing that goes on during the process, I can only assume that changing their underwear is only slightly less physically and emotionally traumatic than pulling off their eyelids and putting on new ones.
Tooth brushing is another despised activity in my household. I suppose when I was a kid I didn’t feel like I had hideous breath when I woke up. Little did I know I was probably dead wrong, or I was if my own children are any indication. They will go to the most phenomenal lengths to not brush their teeth. I’ll send them back two or three times to do it, and each time they’ll lie and say they have, and I’ll check their teeth and, hey kids, the same brown shit that was on your teeth five minutes ago is still on your teeth, you did not fucking brush your teeth. And then I have to send them back to brush them again and it would be so much simpler and less of a waste of time for ALL of us if they’d just fucking brush their teeth the first time I sent them do to it. And they’re just fucking around—it’s not that they don’t like the toothpaste or don’t know how to do it. For whatever reason, they just don’t want to use a bristled implement and a flavored paste or gel to scrub the foulness off of their various oral protrusions so they don’t have breath that smells like rotten meat rolled in poo.
And their fingernails. One of them regularly comes home from school looking as though the extracurricular activity for the day was harvesting potatoes. The kid has so much soil under his fingernails, that’s the only conclusion I can draw. And when I insist on scrubbing it out, you’d think I was torturing him the way he carries on. It’s ten times worse if I actually insist on trimming his nails at the same time. You remember that scene in “Gone With The Wind,” when Scarlett is standing in the doorway when the doctor has to amputate the guy’s leg and there’s no anesthesia? That guy could take lessons on expressing excruciating pain from my kid having his nails trimmed.
I’m wondering how long it will be before I can look at them and not know the exact contents of their most recent meal or snack. Anything chocolate or tomato-based is particularly inclined to give them away. I’m having a hard time convincing them that it’s ok to wipe your face with a paper napkin. They are not a priceless commodity, nor treasured heirlooms that need to be preserved. Just use the damned napkin.
As a reformed slob (and not always a successfully reformed one) I’m willing to give them a pass on their rooms, up to a point. They have to put all dirty clothes in the laundry room once a week, change their sheets, and pick up all the stuff on the floor, but I don't give them too much grief about the condition of their rooms generally. The only thing I did insist on was that when we got the dog I told them if they wanted the dog to be allowed upstairs, they would have to keep their rooms immaculate, because he would chew and/or eat anything that was on the floor. In a decision that proves they carry more than a fragment of my genetic material, they decided that was way too big a pain in the ass, and the dog just wouldn’t be allowed above the main level of the house. Which is fine with me because there’s no dog hair up there, and as it is on the main level, I sweep up enough hair every other day to make another dog. I can’t understand why this creature isn’t bald by now.
I suppose one day they’ll discover the opposite sex, and then I’ll be sorry I wanted them so clean. They’ll lock themselves in the bathroom and take half hour long showers and I’ll have to listen to the fights about who’s been in the bathroom for how long and that they need to get out. I understand from friends with older kids that the boys will end up smelling like the entire Axe display. But I will say I won’t miss the constant struggle to get them to brush their teeth and change their underwear. The fact that these episodes always seem to happen in the morning is most unfortunate, because they are one of the main reasons that I drink. I think if I started drinking at 7:30 a.m., the neighbors would talk. More than they do now, I mean.
Wal-Mart: Lowering the Bar Low Since 1969
A little while ago Steph over at We Don't Chew Glass wrote
about an experience she had at Wal-Mart. I go to Wal-Mart every week to do some
of my grocery shopping, and her post reminded me of all the experiences (read:
nightmares) I’d enjoyed (read: suffered through) at my own Wal-Mart.
I do about half my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart because I am cheap and have four children. I can’t justify paying 30% more (which is how much it is; I did the math) at another grocery store for crap like cereal bars and tortillas. So nonperishables and brand name products I get at Wal-Mart, and then I go to a local grocery store that has higher quality meats and produce.
But saving 30% doesn’t come without a sacrifice. Someday my children will understand what I endured so we could save money on Fritos and yogurt and afford to buy them shoes, take them to Disneyland, and invest our retirement savings in Pokemon cards and Beyblades. And they will listen to my tale, and no doubt they will do what children all over the world always do when faced with the story of the suffering their parents have undergone on their behalf: they’ll roll their eyes and say, “Yeah, so?”
The most important thing about my Wal-Mart is that as far as I can tell, the people in it apparently have nothing better to do than to be there. The way they meander up and down the aisles, stopping to read the labels on the shower curtains, the Miss Clairol hair color, the Cup o’ Noodles. Stopping, I might add, in the middle of the goddamned aisle. Completely oblivious to the fact that there’s anyone else in the store with them.
When this happens—the twenty thousand times that it happens every time I go there—I say, “Excuse me” and almost inevitably the idiot kind of starts, like he or she is stunned to realize that there’s someone who might want to go down the same aisle they’re on. I give them a small smile, which I presume they interpret as “That’s OK. Have a nice day!” but which really means, “Get the fuck out of my way, you asshole. Some of us have better things to do than hang out in a goddamned Wal-Mart all day.” I actually don’t give a shit if they interpret it exactly as I intend it.
What is it about Wal-Mart that all over the country it attracts the same kind of people? I saw a woman in there one day with a t-shirt on that said, “I used to be fucking stupid, but we broke up.” If that’s not class, I don’t know what is. A couple of weeks ago I saw a woman who quite clearly had the word “Nokia” tattooed across her chest (her boobs were not visible—the tattoo was located right below her collar bones, and she was wearing a tank top. Although I probably wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been across her boobs, and she had been walking around with no shirt on. Because I was at Wal-Mart, after all). She had the name of a cell phone manufacturer tattooed across her chest? Who does that? And why? Another time there was a woman in front of me in line with a little girl. The little girl kept lifting her shirt up to her neck, exposing her chest. Her mother kept telling her not to do that, because, “We don’t show our tatas.” On the one hand, at least she was trying to instill some modesty in her daughter. On the other hand, our “tatas”? What if she’d been lifting her skirt? Would the admonition have been, “We don’t show our hoohas”?
The employees are no better. Every single time I’ve ever overheard anyone ask an employee for help finding something, they preface their response with, “Uh, I don’t usually work in this section.” Every. Single. Time. I actually once had this exchange with an employee:
Me: “Excuse me, where are the seeds?”
Employee: “I don’t know.”
This was not delivered as a tentative, slightly embarrassed, “I don’t know…” about to be followed up with, “but let me see if I can find someone who does,” or similar. This was “I don’t know” delivered as the first part of, “I don’t know; why the fuck are you asking me?” I was kind of surprised she didn’t say the whole thing. When I responded, “Seriously?” she quickly added, “I don’t usually work in this section.” (To which I replied, “Of course you don’t.”) Either the management of the store can’t seem to assign the staff consistently to the same section(s), or when they’re hired, they’re told, “Don’t bother learning where shit is. When someone asks you, just tell them you don’t normally work in this section. Works every time.”
Then there are four types of checkers at my Wal-Mart. Cranky, apparently mentally deficient, out on parole, and Asian women.
The queen of the cranky cashiers is Dolores. Customers, in her mind, are sent to her so she has someone new to share her problems with every three and a half minutes. And share she does. Except it’s not so much sharing as spewing vitriol (takes one to know one, as they say). The subjects of her complaints include: her lazy coworkers who “call out” because the weather is nice, the weather is bad, the weather is just like it always is here, or because they’re hung over, drunk, or on their way to being one or the other (or both); all the new businesses being built in the area around the Wal-Mart, and how they’re all fast food restaurants, mattress stores, or tanning salons, and how incredibly useless those things are (Sweetheart. It’s a Wal-Mart—what were you thinking they’d build nearby? A Neiman-Marcus? Saks Fifth Avenue?); how much her feet hurt; how much it bugs her when people buy any of the following: bedding plants (they make her “belt” dirty), big plastic storage totes (what the fuck else do you buy at Wal-Mart?), bras (hard to get them off the hanger), large electronics (heavy), and anything with a theft sensor on it that she’s supposed to deactivate (I have no idea why this matters—I have seen people walk through the theft detection panels with flat screen TVs that set the alarm off, and no one even looks twice at them, never mind a store employee stopping them and asking to see a valid receipt for the item). So Delores is a gem, and you can understand why when I see her on register 9, I quickly move on to register 14 to find someone (almost anyone) else.
The apparently mentally deficient cashiers all seem to be playing an unending game of, “Try to get one cold thing in every bag.” I get home and unload my groceries only to find that the two pints of ice cream, the heavy cream, the sour cream, the four cups of yogurt, and the buttermilk, are each in a different bag. Now, I am sufficiently OCD that I put all the cold stuff together when I pull it out of my cart. For them to get one cold thing in every single bag means they had to try. I am sympathetic to their challenges, but for the sake of my refrigerated products, I tend to avoid them as well.
The best choices for cashiers are the guys who are clearly out on parole, and the Asian women. Both are reasonably efficient, bag everything in the order it’s presented to them (thank you, cold groceries all in one or two bags) probably because they’re too lazy to bother doing it any other way, and they rarely say much beyond, “Hey, how are you today?” and, “Find everything you need?” Plus if something fails to scan, they’ll take you at your word for the price (“I’m sure that digital camera was on clearance for $2.99”) instead of trying to get someone to find out the real price for them.
I figure with my weekly trip to Wal-Mart I’m sort of eating away at my tenure in Hell for being a sarcastic asshole. Every 45 minutes I spend there is 45 minutes less that I have to spend in the real Hell after I die. Every fucking clueless idiot that I don’t backhand into the middle of next week for hogging up the whole aisle with her cart while she reads the instructions on a package of sponges is one less fucking clueless idiot that I’ll have to encounter in the hereafter. At the rate of 45 minutes a week for the last three or so years, if I were to die tomorrow, I’d only have to spend eternity minus four month in Hell. If I can just find a way to avoid Delores, it might be tolerable, since I’m pretty sure it won’t be unfamiliar.
I do about half my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart because I am cheap and have four children. I can’t justify paying 30% more (which is how much it is; I did the math) at another grocery store for crap like cereal bars and tortillas. So nonperishables and brand name products I get at Wal-Mart, and then I go to a local grocery store that has higher quality meats and produce.
But saving 30% doesn’t come without a sacrifice. Someday my children will understand what I endured so we could save money on Fritos and yogurt and afford to buy them shoes, take them to Disneyland, and invest our retirement savings in Pokemon cards and Beyblades. And they will listen to my tale, and no doubt they will do what children all over the world always do when faced with the story of the suffering their parents have undergone on their behalf: they’ll roll their eyes and say, “Yeah, so?”
The most important thing about my Wal-Mart is that as far as I can tell, the people in it apparently have nothing better to do than to be there. The way they meander up and down the aisles, stopping to read the labels on the shower curtains, the Miss Clairol hair color, the Cup o’ Noodles. Stopping, I might add, in the middle of the goddamned aisle. Completely oblivious to the fact that there’s anyone else in the store with them.
When this happens—the twenty thousand times that it happens every time I go there—I say, “Excuse me” and almost inevitably the idiot kind of starts, like he or she is stunned to realize that there’s someone who might want to go down the same aisle they’re on. I give them a small smile, which I presume they interpret as “That’s OK. Have a nice day!” but which really means, “Get the fuck out of my way, you asshole. Some of us have better things to do than hang out in a goddamned Wal-Mart all day.” I actually don’t give a shit if they interpret it exactly as I intend it.
What is it about Wal-Mart that all over the country it attracts the same kind of people? I saw a woman in there one day with a t-shirt on that said, “I used to be fucking stupid, but we broke up.” If that’s not class, I don’t know what is. A couple of weeks ago I saw a woman who quite clearly had the word “Nokia” tattooed across her chest (her boobs were not visible—the tattoo was located right below her collar bones, and she was wearing a tank top. Although I probably wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been across her boobs, and she had been walking around with no shirt on. Because I was at Wal-Mart, after all). She had the name of a cell phone manufacturer tattooed across her chest? Who does that? And why? Another time there was a woman in front of me in line with a little girl. The little girl kept lifting her shirt up to her neck, exposing her chest. Her mother kept telling her not to do that, because, “We don’t show our tatas.” On the one hand, at least she was trying to instill some modesty in her daughter. On the other hand, our “tatas”? What if she’d been lifting her skirt? Would the admonition have been, “We don’t show our hoohas”?
The employees are no better. Every single time I’ve ever overheard anyone ask an employee for help finding something, they preface their response with, “Uh, I don’t usually work in this section.” Every. Single. Time. I actually once had this exchange with an employee:
Me: “Excuse me, where are the seeds?”
Employee: “I don’t know.”
This was not delivered as a tentative, slightly embarrassed, “I don’t know…” about to be followed up with, “but let me see if I can find someone who does,” or similar. This was “I don’t know” delivered as the first part of, “I don’t know; why the fuck are you asking me?” I was kind of surprised she didn’t say the whole thing. When I responded, “Seriously?” she quickly added, “I don’t usually work in this section.” (To which I replied, “Of course you don’t.”) Either the management of the store can’t seem to assign the staff consistently to the same section(s), or when they’re hired, they’re told, “Don’t bother learning where shit is. When someone asks you, just tell them you don’t normally work in this section. Works every time.”
Then there are four types of checkers at my Wal-Mart. Cranky, apparently mentally deficient, out on parole, and Asian women.
The queen of the cranky cashiers is Dolores. Customers, in her mind, are sent to her so she has someone new to share her problems with every three and a half minutes. And share she does. Except it’s not so much sharing as spewing vitriol (takes one to know one, as they say). The subjects of her complaints include: her lazy coworkers who “call out” because the weather is nice, the weather is bad, the weather is just like it always is here, or because they’re hung over, drunk, or on their way to being one or the other (or both); all the new businesses being built in the area around the Wal-Mart, and how they’re all fast food restaurants, mattress stores, or tanning salons, and how incredibly useless those things are (Sweetheart. It’s a Wal-Mart—what were you thinking they’d build nearby? A Neiman-Marcus? Saks Fifth Avenue?); how much her feet hurt; how much it bugs her when people buy any of the following: bedding plants (they make her “belt” dirty), big plastic storage totes (what the fuck else do you buy at Wal-Mart?), bras (hard to get them off the hanger), large electronics (heavy), and anything with a theft sensor on it that she’s supposed to deactivate (I have no idea why this matters—I have seen people walk through the theft detection panels with flat screen TVs that set the alarm off, and no one even looks twice at them, never mind a store employee stopping them and asking to see a valid receipt for the item). So Delores is a gem, and you can understand why when I see her on register 9, I quickly move on to register 14 to find someone (almost anyone) else.
The apparently mentally deficient cashiers all seem to be playing an unending game of, “Try to get one cold thing in every bag.” I get home and unload my groceries only to find that the two pints of ice cream, the heavy cream, the sour cream, the four cups of yogurt, and the buttermilk, are each in a different bag. Now, I am sufficiently OCD that I put all the cold stuff together when I pull it out of my cart. For them to get one cold thing in every single bag means they had to try. I am sympathetic to their challenges, but for the sake of my refrigerated products, I tend to avoid them as well.
The best choices for cashiers are the guys who are clearly out on parole, and the Asian women. Both are reasonably efficient, bag everything in the order it’s presented to them (thank you, cold groceries all in one or two bags) probably because they’re too lazy to bother doing it any other way, and they rarely say much beyond, “Hey, how are you today?” and, “Find everything you need?” Plus if something fails to scan, they’ll take you at your word for the price (“I’m sure that digital camera was on clearance for $2.99”) instead of trying to get someone to find out the real price for them.
I figure with my weekly trip to Wal-Mart I’m sort of eating away at my tenure in Hell for being a sarcastic asshole. Every 45 minutes I spend there is 45 minutes less that I have to spend in the real Hell after I die. Every fucking clueless idiot that I don’t backhand into the middle of next week for hogging up the whole aisle with her cart while she reads the instructions on a package of sponges is one less fucking clueless idiot that I’ll have to encounter in the hereafter. At the rate of 45 minutes a week for the last three or so years, if I were to die tomorrow, I’d only have to spend eternity minus four month in Hell. If I can just find a way to avoid Delores, it might be tolerable, since I’m pretty sure it won’t be unfamiliar.
Lost
My son came to me this morning with a tooth he’d
lost. I flinched with revulsion and said, “Gross.”
Now, before you label me a bad mom (not that you’d necessarily be wrong), this was the 11 year old, and the tooth was one of his molars. Parents of younger children, know this now: tooth loss gets progressively less cute as they get older. I remember well those first few pearly little drops under my son’s pillow. The excitement with which he rushed to me to show me the dollar my husband had left in its place the night before. His anticipation of spending said dollar on yet another pack of fucking Pokemon cards.
I remember when I started losing teeth. And just as my children do, I recall clinging to them until they were just dangling by a single root and my parents were begging me to either pull the tooth out, or let them do the old tie-a-string-around-a-doorknob-and-tie-the-other-end-to-the-tooth-and-shut-the-door gimmick. As an adult, I honestly think that’s one of the grossest parts of tooth loss—the refusal to just have it over with and pop it out. The loose tooth finally gets so loose that it changes position regularly, and can end up at a 90 degree angle to the rest of the teeth, sticking straight out like something out one of those scare tactic pictures at the orthodontist’s office showing people with various dental deformities who did not heed the advice given them and failed to invest thousands of dollars in corrective devices. And it looks nasty.
Only one of my kids was ever brave enough to just have it over with. One of the twins had a really lose tooth that was turning my stomach on a regular basis, and finally one day my husband and I said, “Just pull it out—it’ll come right out.” So he said, “OK” and did it. He got two bucks for that one, and a note from the Tooth Fairy saying that anyone who was brave enough to pull out their own loose tooth (and save their mom a lot of gross out, although she didn’t mention that explicitly) got extra money for it.
We’ve only had a couple of tooth related crises. I’d have expected more with four kids all of whom have big mouths. The first one came when my oldest went over his bicycle handle bars after hitting a rock. He face planted onto a gravely patch and scraped his gums. I took him right to the dentist, who did xrays and assured us there was no damage to the permanent teeth (he still had his baby teeth). Unfortunately what we should have been concerned with was the swelling and bruising around his left thumb which, four days later, turned out to be a buckle fracture that required a cast for 3 weeks. You know I made a point of noting that one on my Mother of the Year award application.
The second incident concerned one of the twins, who was bouncing on the trampoline with his older brother. The twin’s mouth came in contact with the older brother’s head, and it appeared that it knocked one of the teeth loose. Because I am such a wonderful mother (see: broken thumb, four days) I had no recollection of who had lost which teeth (I mean, shit, they do have a ton of them between the four of them), and was convinced that this was an adult tooth. I tried to get him into the dentist, but couldn’t get an appointment until the next afternoon. With strict instructions not to wiggle it, and to eat only very soft foods, I sent him off to school. The next afternoon I was in a panic because the tooth was obviously looser than it had been. When I got him to the dentist, the hygienist looked at it and said, “I’m pretty sure that’s a baby tooth.” “Really?” I asked. “Pretty sure. Dr. Wilson can confirm it, but I’m pretty sure.” Um, oh. Ha ha.
It was.
Well, thank goodness, but I still felt pretty dumb.
The last one (to date) involved my daughter and my oldest son. They were horsing around, and to this day I have no idea what happened, but somehow he managed to knock out one of her front teeth, which was not already loose. Now, one good thing about loose teeth—they really don’t bleed much. Although the blood does taste bad (or did to me), it’s not a very lengthy experience. Rinse your mouth once or twice and you’re fine. Let me assure you that a tooth that gets knocked out, which is not supposed to come out shortly anyway, bleeds like a stuck fucking pig. It seems like it's waves of blood and while it does stop fairly quickly, while it’s happening you’re convinced that the person is going to need a transfusion if it keeps up. My daughter was fine, of course, but she did sort of look like a hockey player for a couple of months.
And I have to confess that almost everything about this process makes me faintly ill, but still I save all their teeth (all that I can—we’ve had a few that got swallowed when they came out. Ew). Why? Every parent I know has a little box of kids’ baby teeth somewhere. Or, in my case, multiple little boxes since I can never seem to find the box I put the previous lost tooth in. And the thing is, even if I had a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you which teeth belonged to which kid (although I suppose I could make it up, because it's not like the guy with the gun to my head would know the difference). What am I going to do with them? Frame them? Mount them and wear them as earrings? Use them for DNA identification? And yet they come out, and I stick them in a box somewhere.
Although I must say, now that the oldest has started losing really big teeth, I think my days of saving his are over, because molars are seriously icky when they come out. They're so disgusting that it's tempting to skip putting money under their pillows and just give them five bucks to not show it to you in the first place. It's too bad: the big ones would probably make pretty impressive earrings.
Now, before you label me a bad mom (not that you’d necessarily be wrong), this was the 11 year old, and the tooth was one of his molars. Parents of younger children, know this now: tooth loss gets progressively less cute as they get older. I remember well those first few pearly little drops under my son’s pillow. The excitement with which he rushed to me to show me the dollar my husband had left in its place the night before. His anticipation of spending said dollar on yet another pack of fucking Pokemon cards.
I remember when I started losing teeth. And just as my children do, I recall clinging to them until they were just dangling by a single root and my parents were begging me to either pull the tooth out, or let them do the old tie-a-string-around-a-doorknob-and-tie-the-other-end-to-the-tooth-and-shut-the-door gimmick. As an adult, I honestly think that’s one of the grossest parts of tooth loss—the refusal to just have it over with and pop it out. The loose tooth finally gets so loose that it changes position regularly, and can end up at a 90 degree angle to the rest of the teeth, sticking straight out like something out one of those scare tactic pictures at the orthodontist’s office showing people with various dental deformities who did not heed the advice given them and failed to invest thousands of dollars in corrective devices. And it looks nasty.
Only one of my kids was ever brave enough to just have it over with. One of the twins had a really lose tooth that was turning my stomach on a regular basis, and finally one day my husband and I said, “Just pull it out—it’ll come right out.” So he said, “OK” and did it. He got two bucks for that one, and a note from the Tooth Fairy saying that anyone who was brave enough to pull out their own loose tooth (and save their mom a lot of gross out, although she didn’t mention that explicitly) got extra money for it.
We’ve only had a couple of tooth related crises. I’d have expected more with four kids all of whom have big mouths. The first one came when my oldest went over his bicycle handle bars after hitting a rock. He face planted onto a gravely patch and scraped his gums. I took him right to the dentist, who did xrays and assured us there was no damage to the permanent teeth (he still had his baby teeth). Unfortunately what we should have been concerned with was the swelling and bruising around his left thumb which, four days later, turned out to be a buckle fracture that required a cast for 3 weeks. You know I made a point of noting that one on my Mother of the Year award application.
The second incident concerned one of the twins, who was bouncing on the trampoline with his older brother. The twin’s mouth came in contact with the older brother’s head, and it appeared that it knocked one of the teeth loose. Because I am such a wonderful mother (see: broken thumb, four days) I had no recollection of who had lost which teeth (I mean, shit, they do have a ton of them between the four of them), and was convinced that this was an adult tooth. I tried to get him into the dentist, but couldn’t get an appointment until the next afternoon. With strict instructions not to wiggle it, and to eat only very soft foods, I sent him off to school. The next afternoon I was in a panic because the tooth was obviously looser than it had been. When I got him to the dentist, the hygienist looked at it and said, “I’m pretty sure that’s a baby tooth.” “Really?” I asked. “Pretty sure. Dr. Wilson can confirm it, but I’m pretty sure.” Um, oh. Ha ha.
It was.
Well, thank goodness, but I still felt pretty dumb.
The last one (to date) involved my daughter and my oldest son. They were horsing around, and to this day I have no idea what happened, but somehow he managed to knock out one of her front teeth, which was not already loose. Now, one good thing about loose teeth—they really don’t bleed much. Although the blood does taste bad (or did to me), it’s not a very lengthy experience. Rinse your mouth once or twice and you’re fine. Let me assure you that a tooth that gets knocked out, which is not supposed to come out shortly anyway, bleeds like a stuck fucking pig. It seems like it's waves of blood and while it does stop fairly quickly, while it’s happening you’re convinced that the person is going to need a transfusion if it keeps up. My daughter was fine, of course, but she did sort of look like a hockey player for a couple of months.
And I have to confess that almost everything about this process makes me faintly ill, but still I save all their teeth (all that I can—we’ve had a few that got swallowed when they came out. Ew). Why? Every parent I know has a little box of kids’ baby teeth somewhere. Or, in my case, multiple little boxes since I can never seem to find the box I put the previous lost tooth in. And the thing is, even if I had a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you which teeth belonged to which kid (although I suppose I could make it up, because it's not like the guy with the gun to my head would know the difference). What am I going to do with them? Frame them? Mount them and wear them as earrings? Use them for DNA identification? And yet they come out, and I stick them in a box somewhere.
Although I must say, now that the oldest has started losing really big teeth, I think my days of saving his are over, because molars are seriously icky when they come out. They're so disgusting that it's tempting to skip putting money under their pillows and just give them five bucks to not show it to you in the first place. It's too bad: the big ones would probably make pretty impressive earrings.
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