Old-Fashioned for me -- straight up!

There are days when I think I’m incredibly old-fashioned. Well, ok, if you listen to my older daughter, I’m ALWAYS old-fashioned but that’s beside the point. I’ve been on a bit of a tear lately about manners… etiquette… consideration… let’s just call it “NOT being incredibly self-centered.” I’m trying to raise my girls to be good people. Good citizens of society in general. They respect their elders – but they also respect their peers. They say “please” and “thank you” and remember to say “one moment please” before calling someone to the phone. I don’t think it’s asking too much of a child to expect them to behave appropriately in any given situation. We were out shopping the other day. In Wal-Mart, actually. Ahead of us at the check-out was a woman and what I presumed to be her son. A devil-possessed little cretin, mind you, but I’m sure his momma loves him. He was waging war with her over a toy he wanted and wasn’t getting. Poor woman was doggedly standing her ground but what a losing battle. The boy decided to scream… a long, painful, ear-piercing, unending, if-you-don’t-shut-him-up-I-WILL, experience for everyone in the store. This was not a toddler throwing a tantrum. This boy was at least ten years old. He screamed. His mother screamed. The cashier screamed. And ‘nary an ice cream in sight. (If you’re old enough to have sung the “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream” rhyme, you got that). The situation actually turned comical when the kid caught sight of something hanging on the “impulse buyers beware” rack, near the register. He picked up the little trinket, turned it over in his hands, examined it carefully and even appeared to fully read the packaging – all the while screamin’ like a banshee!! He just kept his mouth wide open and let ‘er rip while he busied himself trying to find something else to want. He might want to consider a future in opera, the way he can hold a note. Anyway… after all this, what did his mother do? Not… a… single… friggin… thing. He trailed her, and her 32 rolls of t.p. and 16 rolls of paper towels, out of the store -- still screaming. I had briefly considered offering to mummify the lad with all that paper but I didn’t think it would be appreciated. I’m sure that many will tell me that he was just being a kid. Yes, he was. A rude, obnoxious, disrespectful kid. Some people dig that kind. I prefer the ones that come with volume control. Control – of any kind – is really at the heart of the issue these days. I don’t know who runs some households – the parents or the kids. Parents suffer from guilt pangs about working, sending kids to daycare, spending evenings doing housework and paying bills instead of playing Barbie or baseball. To make the average lifestyle more palatable for the kids, they decide to discard the bitter pill of discipline and sugarcoat everything. What message are they sending to their kids? I’ve had discussions with parents who justify their kids’ tantrums by telling me that they are teaching them a lesson. Making them realize that they can’t have everything they want. Umm. No. Primarily, what you’re allowing them to do is to utterly and completely disrespect other people. Those of us in the line behind you at Wal-Mart are JUST as stressed, JUST as pressed for time, struggling to meet the demands of every day life JUST like you. The last thing we appreciate is listening to your kid’s aria. When my girls were young, they learned that, if they pitched a fit in a store, they got pitched too – right into the car and we went home. I guess that lands me firmly at the opposite end of the parenting spectrum from Junior Pavaroti’s mom. But, when we go out in public now, I appreciate that people will sometimes take a moment to smile at my children, rather than rolling their eyes or clucking their tongues. All these years, I’ve been trying so hard to teach them to be thoughtful and consider others. In recent days, I’ve begun to question the effort. We live within a 1.6-mile radius of the elementary school. My 11 year old doesn’t “qualify” for bus service and, with my husband working an early morning shift, I have no car to drive her to school. Sometimes she walks with a friend, the rest of the time I walk with her. In the last week alone, that same friend has passed right in front of our house, with her mother, IN THEIR CAR, on their way to school. We walked. Two driveways to our right, there’s a little girl who attends the same school and knows my daughter. Her mother drives her EVERY day. On my walk back home, the mother’s van passes right by me and pulls back into her driveway. The same driveway that is maybe 200 feet from my own. Neither one has ever offered my daughter a ride to school. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not up to them to transport my child. But I know, if the tables were reversed, I’d be happy to include theirs. So, what does this teach the kids? Well, it tells the one in the back seat of the car that it’s ok to ignore people when you want to but then call them up when you need something – like someone to walk to school with when you’re not allowed to walk alone. To my daughter, it’s confusing. The same mother who welcomes her into their home to play one afternoon can drive right past her, never so much as glancing in her direction, the very next morning. With the wisdom of all of her 11 years, she looked at me and said, “Well that’s not very nice.” That was the moment that I realized, I’ve taught her to be old-fashioned too. In this day and age, we’re still expecting “nice.”

‘Tis the Season!

No, no … relax… it’s not Christmas yet! It’s that “other” season that drains your bank account and turns your children into hyperactive little hairballs. Yes, it’s September and that can only mean one thing – back to school. A few days ago, the girls embarked on their new school year. I’m always sad when this happens… partly because I really do miss having them at home but mostly because it means (a) I have to get up earlier on a daily basis; (b) I’m significantly poorer than I’ve been all summer and (c) I’m now faced with creating about 400 reasonably interesting lunches over the next ten months – all of which will be made in the bleary-eyed, early morning hours since I can’t drag myself into the kitchen to make them the night before. Who needs “Zest” when you can have the other invigorating, 4-letter scent – TUNA! – first thing in the a.m.?! Anyway, on the first day of school, I dragged the older one out of bed at about 6:15 a.m. I made her bed – yes, I’m anal about things like that and will generally make a bed while the sheets are still warm from whomever I just chased out of it. I made her oatmeal. Don’t get excited – it was instant – June Cleaver, I’m not. I don’t don my gingham dress, pearls and apron until at LEAST noon. She was washed, dressed, and out the door for the bus, lugging her impossibly heavy backpack, by 7:15. One down, one to go. Before the clock has a chance to move to 7:16 a.m., the next child is awake. Grudgingly. Her place is set at the table, cereal and milk at the ready, and I’m still yelling at her to get moving. When I fail to hear the pitter patter of still-fairly-little-feet making their way to the dining room, I charge in threatening to lick her. I know how wrong that sounds but hold yer horses. One morning she gave me so much grief about getting up that I ran in and, before she knew it, I had yanked the covers off her head and I licked her cheek. She squealed all the way to the bathroom. I won :) At 8:10 a.m., we headed out for opening day. I have to say that I’ve never seen so many happy parents. Moms, giggling like kids themselves, toting their travel mugs and doing their damndest not to jump up and down. Dads, in work attire, looking at their watches and letting us all know that they are FAR too busy to be standing in the same line we are, waiting to match up our kid’s “space-themed sticker” to the poster board in the middle of the playground in order to unlock the mystery of the homeroom teacher. While my daughter and I stood around with the crew of the “NASA” homeroom, I started to look around at the other children. You know, the kids from “Mars” and “Venus” and all those other planets. At that point, I decided that the whole back to school fracas is actually quite hilarious. I saw one little boy running around, feverishly venting his excitement. Somehow, he lost his footing and toppled onto his back on the asphalt. Looking for all the world like a beleaguered little turtle, he was kicking his feet, waving his arms and pleading for his mother to get him up. I’ve been saying for years that kids have to take too much stuff to school on the first day but he proved me right. The weight of his backpack had him pretty much magnetized to the playground. Another boy was zooming through the sand near the swings with his frantic mother lumbering after him yelling, “Honey! Your shoes! Your new shoes! You’ll get them dirtyyyyyyyyy!!!” A little girl not far from us was sobbing hysterically for having fallen off HER shoes. Yes, you read that right – she fell off her shoes. I know I shouldn’t find that funny but who the hell buys heels that high for a first grader? You see… above all else… this is the First Day Fashion Show and it is, by FAR, the most amusing part. Oh… my… word. My brain knows that I took my daughter for her first day of sixth grade. My eyes were frantically trying to convince my brain that we were at Baby Hooker School. Trust me – this only happens on day one. Our school board is putting in place tougher and tougher dress codes. Apparently, they still need to bitch-slap the parents! I mean, who is buying these grade schoolers their platform shoes? Their mini skirts? Their flowy, see-through blouses? These kids spent their summer running around like barefoot little heathens and they show up on the first day of school looking like a cross between Pam Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith – minus the tits. Those are still on backorder.