They Work Against You In Ways You Never Expected

Unless they were saints, your parents at some point said to you, “Just wait until you have your own children!”

You probably thought (not said, because you knew better than that) Well, when I DO have my own children, I’m going to be cooler than you! I’ll let my kid stay out til dawn/listen to heavy metal/smoke pot/eat ice cream for breakfast/not do their homework/(fill in the blank with the opposite of whatever patently uncool thing they wanted you to do).

Here’s the thing that your parents knew that you can’t possibly understand until you are raising children yourself:

Kids work against you in ways you never expected.

True, on occasion, your kid acts exactly like you did, and you suddenly understand how freaking annoying you were to your parents and marvel that they didn’t kill you.

Then they act the opposite of you. Remember the Keatons from Family Ties? The hippies who birthed a Republican? Yeah, like that.

You envisioned being the kind of parent who would not censor the music your children wanted to listen to, and promised to not overly scrutinize it for profanity, unsavory characters, the expression of strong emotions, screaming, or screaming guitars. Your children like Justin Beiber and anime theme songs.

You decided at age eleven that you would never pull a book out of your child’s hands because it was deemed “too old” for them. Your kids would rather clean their rooms than read a book.

You promised yourself you would not give any girls you had a hard time about wearing skirts with a hemline above the knee. Your girls almost never wear anything other than sweatpants and consider jeans to be “dressed up”.

Even when parents differ on certain issues, kids have an innate sense of how to execute a maneuver that will get to both of them.

Early on after the kids came to live with us, #1 asked me if I would go with her to get her first tattoo when she turned 18. I said yes. Her father rolled his eyes, hoping we would both grow out of it.

But when the time came, she no longer wanted my input.

She came home one day with the words “I now walk into the wild” tattooed on her ribs, in gangsta script.

Her father was apoplectic.

CC: A Christopher McCandless quote? Are you serious? You got the words of a loser tattooed on your body forever? What is wrong with you?

#1: He’s not a loser, he’s awesome!

CC: He went into the wilderness completely unprepared and died. That’s the very definition of losing.

#1: Nuh-uh!

Me: Where did you get it done?

#1: That place at Willowbrook next to Hollister.

Me: You got a tattoo done at the mall?!?! What is wrong with you?

CC: Wait, let me see it again. Did you read this? It says “I no walk into the wlid.”

#1: Daddy!

CC: Hmm, maybe if he had put it like that, he would have lived.

Me: Please tell me they didn’t actually tattoo the quotation marks.

At least none of the kids want to be clowns.

Yet.

How do your kids get to you?

Nobody Ever Accused Me of Being Donna Reed

Early into my new gig as an accidental stepmom, I determined that part of my job description could not include frequent, thorough cleaning of the kids’ rooms. This wasn’t some high and mighty ideal, as if I were somehow above this mundane task. It was more of a recognition and acceptance that I was an abysmal housekeeper before I got kids.

For my 8th birthday, my parents gave me a poster to hang on my bedroom door. It was an elaborate cartoonish drawing of a disturbingly messy room with a caption that read: My Room: Love it or Leave it! They thought it was hilarious.

Right around this time, which was shortly after my mother stopped cleaning my room, my father took up photography. He did a series of shots with the poster placed in strategic locations around my room. Art imitating life and all. I was not at home at the time and only discovered he had done this after the prints were developed.

[For anyone under 30, I’ll explain: you used to have to take rolls of film out of your camera and drop them off at the local photo store. As long as it wasn’t attacked by either terrorists or a time-traveling DeLorean, you’d get your pictures, on paper, back in anywhere from 2-10 days.]

I highly suspect that beer was involved in my father’s art project and have no doubt that he highly amused himself while doing it. Had we the internet back then, he probably would have blogged it.

So I’m a slob. It never really bothered me until there were suddenly seven of us in a too-small rental house and I couldn’t find a single thing I owned because any object I let go of was immediately covered by six possessions that other people placed on top of it for the simple fact that there wasn’t a place to put their stuff either. If the object had the misfortune to be something shiny, it was ferreted away by #5 to his secret collection. Car keys were a particular favorite of his.

The truth is that out of all of us, my husband was the only one with a clue about how to run a household of this size. I tend to keep my mouth shut about that– in my neighborhood, it’s apparently sport to complain about your husband and how he can’t load a dishwasher. I’m afraid that if the women around here really know everything CC does in this house, they’ll take him and leave me alone with the kids.

I could write a whole other post on how my kids came to have a resentment against sheets. Oh, that’s right– I did. Over on Family Circle’s Momster blog: Parenting Confessions: Unmade Beds Don’t Bother Me. That’s why God gave us doors that close, my friends.

Are you a slob, or a neat freak?

The Last Time This Will Ever Happen

We were watching the Miss America pageant last month and #5 was waiting for his turn in the shower, dividing his attention between the television screen and spinning around in circles.

He spends an awful lot of time spinning in circles. He also has abs of steel. I do not believe these two things are coincidental. I’m working on him to make his own exercise video, but I need someone else to do the camera work because I get dizzy just watching him.

I heard his sister leave the bathroom while I was in the kitchen and called out to him that he could go in.

No response.

I walked out to find him standing completely still, transfixed, staring at the screen. Bikini-clad Miss America contestants with their million-dollar-smiles, and other assets, paraded across the stage and down the runway, one after the other. Hot American chicks as far as the camera could see.

Me: Hey bud, the shower’s open.

#5: {silence}

Me: Yo. Shower?

#5: {silence}

Me, stepping in front of him: Do you want to stay and watch all the pretty girls in bikinis?

#5: {looks at me, then back at the TV, coming out of his trance} Eww! No!

He ran out of the room. Another beautiful moment of boyhood, never to be repeated again.

Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I met #5’s friend’s parents because of a pickaxe accident? Yeah, that happened. You can read about in my new post over on Family Circle’s Momster blog: Meet the Parents…the Awkward Version.