Parents must retire to Fuddy-duddy Island
by Kate Zimmerman for the North Shore News, 2005
YOU’LL never know just how stupid you are until you get yourself a kid.
There is some small comfort in knowing that if you’re a parent, it doesn’t matter how accomplished or together you appear to be. You might be Queen Elizabeth II or Madonna, Lance Armstrong or Neil Armstrong, Jerome Iginla or Governor General Michaelle Jean. Your children will eventually conclude that you are a dork. And believe me, this is not information that they are going to want to keep to themselves.
I, for instance, am under constant surveillance for dorkiness. There might as well be a 24-hour camera craning downward from the top of my head. I get away with nothing.
Even my vocabulary is monitored. I will start to tell my family a story that I think is amusing and will discover that the yarn itself holds no interest whatsoever but the way in which I am telling it is mortifying. Recently, I heard an amusing tale from my cousin, who used to be the assistant to Courtney Love. One day, the notoriously notorious alternative rock star-actress pointedly asked her new assistant how she felt about nudity.
“Okay, I guess,” answered my bewildered cuz. Love promptly stripped naked, propped one leg up on my cousin’s chair and proceeded to give her the instructions of the day. She didn’t know where to look.
Despite the fact that this story was about a celebrity, it did not engage my teenager, Petunia, for an instant. That is, until I finished it with a chortle, saying that my cousin could see “the whole kit-and-kaboodle.”
Petunia’s eyes bugged out and she melted into a pool of revulsion. After all, one of her friends was in the car with us at the time. “Mother! Don’t ever use that word again!” she groaned.
“What? ‘Kit-and-kaboodle?’” I said, mystified. Maybe she thought it was a graphic term for Courtney’s parts. “It just means ‘the whole thing.’”
“I don’t care!” Petunia shouted. “Don’t ever, ever, ever say that again, or I swear, I will get emancipated!”
(FYI, non-parents and parents of young children: Teenagers bring up this “emancipation” ruse regularly. They seem to think they can just sign a piece of paper and we will disappear, leaving a stocked fridge, a wide-open bank account and a never-ending stack of taxi chits. Little do they know that even if they do divorce us, there’s no law against us showing up as often as we please at their McDonald’s drive-thru workplace, yelling “I’ll have a kit-and-kaboodle! And a hot apple turnover!”)
Like many misguided parents -- I know, the term’s redundant -- Stanley and I try to get ourselves heard by the youngsters in our house by using what we believe to be their lingo. We figure this shows how groovy we are. (I’m aware that “groovy” is no longer in popular usage. I meant it ironically. LOL!)
Sadly, our strategy has backfired in such a major way that we have been banned from using the word “dude” in Petunia’s presence. It doesn’t matter that Ashton Kutcher and everybody on the O.C. still consider it cool.
Our recent effort to seize on the excellent phrase “I’m going to lump you out” (meaning “I’m going to beat you up”) was also regarded with horror. It wasn’t that our kids had any fear that a real lumping would ensue; the trouble was, we didn’t say it properly. We would wind up muttering things like “I’ll give you a lumping, Junior” or “You’re grumping for a lumping” or “One lump or two?” As it turns out, there is no elasticity in modern teenaged phrases. People with jowls are simply expected to understand they’re off-limits.
I guess we parents have forgotten how embarrassing it was in the olden days of our own adolescence whenever anyone over the age of 25 tried to be seen as “with it.” If I set my mind to it, I can recall the finger-snapping music teacher who tried to teach us to sing Simon & Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy;” the ministers who enlivened their sermons with contemporary references, insisting that “Like you, Jesus had long hair and wore sandals, though probably not Huaraches;” and the pseudo-hip, jeans-clad instructors who informed us teens earnestly that the jeans we all insisted on wearing were just “another kind of uniform.”
As far as these hep cats were concerned, they’d been there and could revisit teen-hood any time they wished. To us, though, the very idea that they’d ever been youthful was insane. We were so appalled by them trying to use our terminology to preach to us that we blocked our ears to anything they had to say.
The children in our house will occasionally listen. For example, shouts of “Does anyone need some money?” get an instant response. It doesn’t matter how we put this particular question; no translation is ever required.
As a result, in the interests of parental sadism, I’ve been thinking that we ought to attach some sort of ultra-nerdy language to this offer, striving for cornier and cornier phrases. We’d go all out when their friends were over, standing at the foot of the stairs, hollering “Who’s dowwwnnn for some dineros?” Or “Who’s jumpin’ for John A. Macdonald?” Perhaps if today’s teenagers could be shamed into cringing whenever money was offered to them, we could cure their consumerist impulses. Better yet, the ordinary things we say might seem refreshingly normal.
Yeah, I know this idea is asinine. And more than a little dorky. But isn’t my every movement an embarrassment? The other morning I tried to tell a story to my children about a few days I had spent at the Cornucopia wine festival. I was trying to demonstrate how oeniphiles like to make a huge display of their wine tasting. Thus, pouring some tea into a wineglass, I started furiously swirling it around as some wine nuts do. Of course, the tea splashed out of the glass, all over the table and onto the floor. “Never mind about that,” I said, as my entire family collapsed with laughter.
I refilled the glass and did it again, shooting more tea around the room. “That’s not the point!” I said desperately. They were supposed to be laughing with me, not at me. So I changed my tack and sucked my tea between my teeth, making those disgusting weasley slurping sounds that are de rigueur among wine connoisseurs ….
Well, that sealed the deal. I was a laughing stock not just for the morning, but for all time. My son -- let’s call him “Bart” -- now imitates my swirling motions whenever he wants to freeze me in my tracks. “Hey, Mum!” he shouts, then mimes my berserk glass-swirling and doubles over in hilarity. When he adds the weasel sounds we’re in for at least half an hour of non-stop ridicule and teary-eyed laughter.
I’m just going to stop speaking or moving. It’s the only way to keep my tattered parental self-esteem from crumbling entirely.
Writing > Humour
