Parenting Like Columbus

Today, my four year old son asked me, “Mom, remember when you and dad killed all those Indians?” As I sifted through our recent conversations, trying to figure out what the heck he was talking about, I realized that this past Columbus Day I sat down with my kids and explained a bit about what really happened when Columbus “discovered” the Americas. I truly love nurturing cynicism in my children, however, I also have never killed any Indians, so I may need a new didactic strategy.

We parents are, by nature, hypocrites. It is impossible to raise a child without teaching them the very best morals that we know, though our own morals may or may not come close to measuring up. Likewise, we teach our children to aim as high as they can reach with their lives, while we silently or not so silently endure the thousand little indignities and compromises that make possible our success in society.  We smile outwardly and chafe inwardly. We don’t trample the herds of courtesy deficient strangers that we encounter. Why? To create from our mediocre lives a springboard into a successful life for our children. To live any other way would set them on a path to become the outcasts of society, fringe-dwellers, existing in elderly parent’s basements. Those unfortunates reproduce with the least physically desirable mates available, who only tolerate this because their own paths have taken a turn from stucco boxes filled with princes in shining armor to the swamps of society where frog kissing is the last act of desperate fallen princesses. No such future for my children! They will skim the top of the intellectual, moral, and genetically blessed gene pool to reproduce and make me super grandbabies. Then we will conquer the world together.

Or not.

Isn’t that the same basic ideology that led Columbus to our world, and started all the Indian killing in the first place? How can I possibly hope to can I fulfill my tiny selfish dream of making the world a better place through my conscientious, honest, and loving childrearing, when I myself am no better than the worst of my ancestors?

And this is parenting: we must ensure that our children don’t violate whatever moral code we follow, whether it is spiritually or naturally based. For every answer we carefully provide to our children’s questions, unanswerable questions swarm about us, lurking in our children’s minds and defeating us with the shadows of their presence.  So we hide things from them, we provide so many corrections to their uninhibitedness that finally, one day, they learn to bow their heads and assume the mantle of maturity. Even as I claim this is not the kind of parent I want to be, I see that it is who I am to my own children. So I secretly route for them, hoping they listen to me enough to stay alive and healthy, but ignore me enough to become the people that they were born to be, before I got involved with raising them. We are all Columbus, all of us who are parents, and our children’s spirits are the welcoming natives. Each one of us must decide if history needs to repeat itself.

Meddling with the World

 One who wins the world does so by not meddling with it. One who meddles with the world loses it.

Lao-Tzu (604 BC - 531 BC), Tao te Ching

I can’t help it. I want to meddle with the world. Life swirls around me, loves, hopes, fears, dreams. I sit with only words as my defense. Only words to show that the whole is more than the sum of the parts: a rainbow’s beauty is more than the order of its colors. Come to me world, I am ready for you, take what you need, but leave me my muse, my soul.

"What is man's life for? What pleasure is there in it? Is it for beauty and riches? Is it for sound and colour? But there comes a time when beauty and riches no longer answer the needs of the heart, and when a surfeit of sound and colour becomes a weariness to the eyes and a ringing in the ears.

 Yang Chu (4th century B.C.)

Someday, My Botox Will Come

As a child I loved the story of Sleeping Beauty. I knew all the words to the songs, and I loved the idea that my prince would one day ride into my life and I would live happily ever after.( Ironically, I did meet my husband while he was out riding, but I am not sure that riding scrub in a friend’s green Volkswagen Rabbit counts…)

I watched the movie recently with my little daughter. I was excited to show her something that I had loved so much as a child, but we didn’t even make it through the whole movie for three reasons.

1.      Stupid fairies. They valuedall the wrong things in life. Most specifically Flora and Fauna. If they would have granted Aurora the gifts of wisdom and strength instead of beauty and song, the princess would have been smart enough not to touch any spindles and strong enough to defeat the dragon/witch on her own. Instead, she spent 16 years running around the forest forming romantic attachments to owls and fine tuning her soprano. Dumb. Blonde. You really can’t blame her, I mean, she must have been a superbly ugly baby for Flora to take one look and give the gift of beauty as fast as she could. (As a side note, the original French folklore Aurora was brunette and wit was one of her gifts… thank you Disney for creating a blonder, dumber princess. Mattel will be eternally grateful, as well as trophy-wife seekers across the country. Can I also argue that Disney and plastic surgeons are in business together? Dang you Ariel, I can never wear a clamshell bikini without comparing myself to you…)

2.       My daughter is not waiting around for anyone to rescue her. Period. I don’t even want her to think that’s the way girls behave.  I know this is a societal value shift, as evidenced by more recent butt-kicking Disney heroines such as Rapunzel, but I don’t even want her getting the idea into her cute little head. Since her two older brothers are currently at her beck and call, I doubt her idea of gender roles will be in any way defined by a cartoon, but I don’t want to take any chances.

3.       Did I mention the two older brothers? “Boring. Ew. Let’s go outside and attack each other with ninja swords.” My little girl waddled after them and picked up her own sword, wreaking havoc in our yard and beating up her brothers. She is not yet two years old, but she can wield a plastic weapon a la Xena Warrior Princess, but that is a whole other topic…

America, Land of the Free and the All Powerful Medical Degree

My oldest son got sent home from school today with an ear infection. I ruminate to him about how lucky we are to live in a country where I can take him to a doctor and get his medicine, instead of watching helplessly while his ear throbs and his fever heats up. Secretly I miss the third world country I grew up in, since when I needed antibiotics my mother would walk me down to the local pharmacy and pick one out. Simple. But this is America. We believe in progress, freedom of speech, and the right of the common man to drive to the closest Walmart and buy a gun. We do, however, lock our nasal decongestants behind counters and we need a medical degree to correctly identify an ear infection.

My pediatrician is in the process of achieving sainthood and actually stays late on a Friday to see my son and dash off the coveted prescription. I was dreading sitting in our local urgent care next to middle-aged men with missing fingers, chunky coughing kids, and the scariest of all: silent shaking old women. I pay my $30 co pay with only a smidge of irritation. For a bonus, my son gets a free dose of Advil, which the doctor recommends I pick up for his throbbing ear. I resist the urge to grab a stack of her prescription pads which I see lying unattended on our way out. The system works, I repeat to myself. Really. It works.

I drive to the pharmacy and deposit the precious prescription. It'll be a fifteen minute wait, they tell me, so I run and pick up my other kids from daycare. You see, modern women don't have fifteen minutes to wait. We must fill the time with an errand, an important phone call, a Facebook post about our lives, or, at the least, a quick game of Angry Birds.

Back at the pharmacy I face the extremely unpleasant task of getting all three kids out of the car and ready to enter the public eye. "No crying, hitting, or name calling!" I also expect the kids to behave decently. We march through the store and to the pharmacy counter, narrowly escaping the ever tempting candy and toy displays littered along our path. I lean onto the counter, placing my hands on an ad for a new diabetes medication. I have to move a display of Jelly Beans in order to read the word diabetes. I note the irony of this to the clerk. I receive a blank look in return. I rescue my daughter from a falling stand of reading glasses which surely would have caused instant death, almost break my no name calling rule, then turn back to the clerk, whose look has gone from blank to annoyed. "Your prescription is not ready yet."

We wander up and down the aisles, looking for Advil. There it is! At $7.99 for a small bottle, I decide my son's ear will be just fine with the off-brand Tylenol we have at home that may or may not be a couple months past its expiration date. I check back with clerk. Nothing. The boys spend the next twenty minutes arguing about whether or not the Spiderman Band-Aids could beat up the Batman Band-Aids. My daughter tries on every pair of reading glasses. I stare with envy at a slutty blonde woman waiting for her prescription. She has cellulite free legs, porn stars tits, and obviously spent more than 30 seconds fixing her hair. When the staring becomes awkward, we move over to the ice cream aisle and I try to speed up the Advil’s fever lowering powers by placing my son in the freezer for a few seconds.

When they finally call our name forty-five minutes later, an apologetic pharmacist comes over to let me know that the delay was due to the insurance company calling and rejecting the prescription. She then had to host a war by proxy which culminated in my now canonized pediatrician triumphing over evil PPO and succeeding in getting the liquid gold Amoxicillin into the hands of the sick. I demand it be watermelon flavored. I thump down ice cream for the kids and vodka for myself onto the counter. I try to make one more lame joke to the apparently lobotomized clerk. I feel superior when the blond bimbo returns the counter to ask if she left her keys there. She can’t get into her car. Smugly I pat my front jeans pocket where my car keys bulge attractively like a… well, this is a pg rated blog. OK, I may not be the kind of sexy that has middle-aged women staring at me jealously in CVS, but at least I have quick access to my car keys and my Darth Vader keychain.

Finally, more than two hours after my son came home with an ear ache, I have succeeded in my mom-duty of navigating the health care system and getting his medicine. After strapping three kids into their NHTSA approved child safety seats, dutifully picking up the McDonald’s wrappers that scattered from my car when I opened the doors, resisting the wild urge to bum a cigarette off of the creepy guy who is always standing outside the store smoking, and also resisting the urge to back over that same damn blonde who cuts me off in her BMW as I try to back out of my parking spot, we finally make it home. Time to update my Facebook status.

Wrinklypants

I just finished reading Tina Fey's book, Bossypants. I loved it! I laughed erratically most of the way through, to the great concern of my children. If laughing at inanimate objects is all it takes to start the kids whispering about checking their good old mom into some kind of a program, well, then this may be my last blog. Do they let 6-year-olds commit their own mothers?

I digress. Bossypants ushers readers into Tina's life, and lets us both hold hands with her and laugh while also feeling like we have, just a bit, been bossed around. Since a good mix of humor and self-loathing is how I choose to fill most of my days, I was totally entranced by the idea of being sarcastic, funny, and being respected for both of those things. Now, I do get respect in the classroom for being sarcastic, but lets face it, teenagers corner the sarcastic market and an overtired mortgage paying mother of three can't really compete with hormones and unlimited free time to plan comebacks. Seriously, am I the last person in the world to know what photobombing means? You know you're not cool when you have to google "fml" and then spend half an hour reading the 2011 stock outlook for Finite Matters Lmt. before realizing the true meaning of the acronym.

One question lingers in my mind after reading the book... does she really iron her underwear? Ironing is something that I just refuse to do, along with brussel sprout eating and waxing certain areas. If she can find time to iron not only the outer layer of her clothes but also layer number two, then I feel that she could have answers to so many of the other questions in life that confuse me:

Tina, tell me why my children don't eat without a fight... ever.
Tina, explain to me why if I plan something I will dread it, but if I spontaneously decide to do something, I usually love it?
Tina, why do room fresheners smell so good in the store but smell like epileptic perfume saleswomen when I plug them in at my house?
Tina, how can I build time for ironing into my schedule when toothbrushing is often outsourced to a stick of Extra?

Boss away, Tina Fey! It only makes us love you more while simultaneously going online to make sure we are in good standing with our local libraries. Sadly, I am not.

First Post

As I hide behind the protective plastic wall of my computer, I hope to start something that will bring me peace, friends, and fulfillment. It seems that the Internet is an impenetrable force and while I have been distracted by other things, this giant twisting current has been happily rushing along without me, and my choice to jump in makes no difference at all. I hope to catch a ride, to open my soul, and to find absolution.