Parenting may be the biggest bait-and-switch in the history of humanity. The media image of parenthood shows happy couples frolicking in sunny parks with their little loved ones playing, catching Frisbees in their teeth and sniffing everyone on the playground.
Oh. Wait.
Those are dog food commercials. Still, the media image of parenthood isn’t that much different. TV ads show smiling moms and dads feeding healthy, nutritious meals to their children in tidy kitchens filled with designer décor. Everyone is clean and happy and about as believable as the automobile ads where a gleaming car drives through a rainstorm and comes out as shiny as when it went in. In real life the kitchen linoleum would have a permanent stain that resulted from an impromptu dinner-time experiment involving a combination of grape juice and spaghetti sauce and the car’s paint would never, ever be as bright as it was the day it left the factory.
Nobody tells you the truth about parenting because if they did you’d never believe them. By the time you’ve raised your children to self-sufficient adulthood (around the time they turn 35) you’ll have handled substances that would make a hazmat team turn green, seen things that would make a child psychologist run screaming, and dealt with medical emergencies that would make EMTs feel faint.
Really.
On the plus side, you’ll get to see a lot of really funny true things that people will never actually believe happened to you.
For example, there was the time that the policeman woke us by pounding on the door at two a.m. That was a scream! It was also our oldest son’s fault. He hadn’t done anything wrong … not exactly. He’s just been that way since birth, you know? He was born under the sign of chaos.
Clutter isn’t his middle name. He lost his middle name because it’s buried under the pile of old socks on his bedroom floor. Finding his school work required the skills of an archeologist as we sifted through the layers of discarded assignments.
“This looks like your term paper on Shakespeare. Was the missing math assignment given before or after you got that back?”
“Before, I think.”
“Okay. I’ll keep digging. Hand me that shovel.”
I had been warned about the fallout of child raising. I had no idea it included a six-inch layer of discarded papers on my son’s bedroom floor.
When he moved out, the clutter went with him and some of it got stuck in the back seat of his car. That’s what attracted the attention of the cop and resulted in my unanticipated wake-up call.
“Umm….hi?” I asked cinching up my robe.
“I need you to step outside sir,” the nice policeman said. I couldn’t help noticing that he was not much older than my son, but far more neatly dressed.
“Ummm…sure. What’s up?”
“I think your car’s been robbed.” He shined a light in the back seat and I realized more-or-less instantly what was going on. My son was spending the night and forgotten to close the back door of his car. The officer saw the open door, looked in the car and came to the very reasonable conclusion that somebody had burglarized it.
“Is anything missing?” the policeman asked.
Missing? How would I know? I doubted my son had a complete inventory of the college papers, fast food wrappers and energy drink cans in his car. I shook my head, trusting that the camouflage layer of clutter had hidden anything valuable. Besides, I wasn’t going to go digging.
If they put things like that in the parenting brochures, nobody would ever buy children of their own. They also don’t fill the advertising materials with stories of helpful two-year-olds. For the record, nothing can create more work for you than a child who is trying to help you.
When our youngest son was two we took him to dinner at a family style restaurant. I ordered the soup and he took it upon himself to “help.” His idea of help was hoisting a spoonful of soup to a position two inches away from my mouth and rotating it vertically so it poured down the front of my shirt. I ended the meal soup-stained and still starving. He seemed very pleased that he could “help” daddy. Or maybe he secretly knew exactly what he was doing and was getting pre-emptive revenge for all the times I was going to ask him to take out the trash.
Those of you who don’t have children probably said, “Good heavens! Whey didn’t you just take the spoon out of his hand or show him the right way to feed you?” Those of you who are parents just shrugged and said, “At least it was soup. He might have tried to feed you earthworm cookies and mud tea.”
Worse yet, he might have been feeding himself earthworm cookies and mud tea. It sounds disgusting, but as a parent you get used to such things. No matter how squeamish you were before you reproduced, you outgrow it pretty quickly. If you stopped to launder every piece of soiled clothing and boil every dropped pacifier, you’d never have time to get to the really complicated aspects of parenting; like trying to find a store that sells papier-mâché supplies at three in the morning on the day the quarter-scale diorama of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is due in history class. Or trying not to imagine your child crippled for life after you’ve been called at work and told they have a broken leg. Or telling them that they have to learn geometry because it’ll be useful later in life even though you, personally, have forgotten everything you ever learned about it and don’t seem to have suffered any permanent ill-effects. Or wondering if you’ve been a good enough parent now that it’s too late to go back and change anything.
