Parenting

I've just done a meme elsewhere on parenting. After writing a long post-meme comment on my original post, and then reading other things other people have written in response to the meme questions, I'm beginning to wonder what the hell is going on here.

On the other hand, I'm extraordinarily grateful for several things:

1) Great parenting mentors.

2) I'm not old enough (yet) that I'm saying "Kids these days..." or "Back when I was a kid, things were different, by God!" Or, rather, if I do say those things, I am usually saying things like "We were pure hellions, and kids nowadays are just the same as ever."

3) Sparky is/was an easy-to-raise child most of the time. He wasn't ADHD, LD, ED, BD, sickly, mental, emotional, or name-your-problem.

4) My friends, parents or non-parents, rock. Thank you for your support, those of you who are online, and a general prayer of thanks to the ones offline has been issued to the Universe at Large.

Trust me: my parents were strict. Our friends' parents were strict. We respected our elders on penalty of pain and humiliation. Apparently, I'm the only person who remembers things like this from my family's storybook :

1) [I mention this in my meme] My sister being tied to a pole as punishment for walking to grandma's house without telling anyone. The plan was for a full day; Mom untied her at lunchtime. My sister was three. THIS IS GOOD PARENTING, from the olden days??

2) Another sister went through the garbage one day, found several pill bottles that had been thrown away with pills still inside, and proceeded to dose the neighborhood kids with the outdated drugs.

3) My brother tried to burn down our neighbors' house. Or maybe our house. Anyway, he was caught by our neighbor trying to start a fire between the two houses. The same neighbor who gave all the girls in our family expensive Christmas presents while ignoring him. Because they didn't like boys. That's why they never had kids of their own: they might (gasp!) end up with a son.

4) Every kid in 6th grade in my town lived in terror at the end of the school year--for DECADES--of being scrubbed by the 7th graders. Hazing much? And, after at least two decades, couldn't someone in the school administration have attended to this? My sister was in 6th grade in 1954; I was in 6th grade in 1975. We share this memory.

5) Playing Frisbee across our street was a favored game for my brother and his friends. They consistently tried to scoot the Frisbee under, off of, and THROUGH cars driving by.

And kids today are so horrible? Kids today have no discipline?

Do you know how many times I had comments made to me while shopping because my son was either crying (usually a result of my unwillingness to buy him junk), or because he had stepped in front of someone, or because he was laughing loudly?? If I had left the store immediately on each occasion--and there were times when I did leave the store, abandoning a full cart at least once--we would have never had groceries. Or clothes. Or...well, anything.

Kids, young kids especially, cry. They are noisy. They are impatient, self-centered, emotional little bundles of energy. They somehow manage to move at the speed of light and yet stand perfectly still at inopportune moments. They get hurt, they get annoyed, they are frustrated. And guess what?

Nevermind, you'll never guess what.

WE ALL USED TO BE KIDS!! Yep, even those of you who achieved sainthood as adults, you used to be kids. And I'll bet your angelic mother and wonderful father wanted to murder you (or themselves) at least a couple of times a month. Get over your perfection and get over the neat, tidy little shell you've built around your life.

Kids are messy (unlike we tidy adults), and don't always follow directions (unlike us conscientious adults), sometimes they are just frickin' ANNOYING (also unlike us perfect-in-every-way adults). Get-the-fuck-over-it.

Without kids, we die as a species. There's no other way around it. Kids are the chaos theory of the universe. They are also a joy to be around, beautifully open to anything happening, aware of the amazing things all around them in a way adults have forgotten, and just COOL.

Yes, it's no fun to be around screaming, out-of-control kids, I'll grant you that. Can ya'll perfect people just spare a half-second to be grateful you don't have to go home with those demons everyday, and/or feel a little empathy with the exhausted people who DO have to go home with them, whether they want to or not? In ten minutes, your perfect controlled environment will be back to normal and you can pretend the noise and mess never happened, since you're already living in some sort of weird fantasy that you know best about a subject you are apparently unable to actually tackle yourself. Kinda like George Bush and the military....

/rant