A Familiar Path

Last night I went to see Eclipse with some girlfriends. Emeline wanted to give me a manicure before I went. While she was working, they asked me why I wouldn’t let them go. Several of their friends had seen it, some even younger than they are. Why wouldn’t I let them go?

I explained the best I could, that parents make different decisions for their children for different reasons, and I had made the decision that I didn’t want them seeing this movie yet. My big girls are 12 and 10.

While I was watching the movie, I tried to imagine how I would feel if my girls were there with me. What parts would it make me uncomfortable for them to see? What parts would I want to shield them from?

There’s no nudity. There’s no bad language. There’s some violence, but not much worse than what you’d see on a Bugs Bunny cartoons. And, I don’t fear that after watching the movies, my kids will run away from home and join a vampire cult. So, what’s my problem?

My girls watch Andy Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies, and occasionally some shows on television. I’m not against television or movies. I just am for guarding them against some things until they are older.

Kids are bombarded with teenage sexuality so early in seemingly innocent shows like Hannah Montana and iCarly. Sometimes I can’t even put my finger on exactly why I don’t like them watching, I just know I don’t.

I don’t want their young minds on thoughts of boyfriends, love or any other adult situations right now. Right now I want them to be children.

Some may say, your daughter is 12, when are you going to let her grow up?

I don’t think growing up means having a boyfriend or thinking about falling in love, I think growing up means learning responsibility and self-control. Some things should come before the other. It helps you make better choices.

On my sidebar, I (only half) jokingly say, “disappointing kids on a daily basis.” Sometimes that is what it feels like I do. I say no to cell phones for my children, no to television shows, no to certain movies and no to sleepovers away from home.

But, I say yes to a lot of things too. Yes to imagination, yes to painting with watercolors in my kitchen, yes to pulling out the fabric and creating whatever you want, yes to playing all day instead of school, yes, to painting my fingernails 4 different colors.

The big girls understand and expect me to say no to the baby about so many things. No, she can’t play with scissors, “MOM, she has scissors!”. No, she can’t walk on the wet floor. No, she can’t run free in the parking lot.

I say no because she isn’t mature enough to understand the dangers. And, that’s the same reason I say no to them.

Today I went to pick up my two bags of corn that I get every year to put up in the freezer. On the way home the air conditioning in the van, which has been on its last leg for a few weeks now, seemed to barely be working at all. We were soooo hot.

Boomama, who talked about the heat in the South yesterday, told someone in St. Louis a few of her “Southern Heat Horror Stories,” and it made me think about how every good “Southern Heat Horror Story” should involve at least one air conditioning catastrophe at 100 degrees with a heat index of 105.

As we were speeding down the road (because, and I’m not making this up, the faster I went the cooler it seemed), Clementine said, “I think we are just spoiled. In Little House on the Prairie days they didn’t even have any air conditioning!” And I laughed, because even though she has never known what it is like to live without air conditioning and I have never known what it is like to live without air conditioning, we do realize that it has been done in the past without complaint.

(But, you could argue, they didn’t know what they were missing.)

We, however, are a bunch of heat wimps, in spite of the belief that we have all kinds of Southern Heat Endurance.

When we got home and recovered from our hot drive, a storm blew in and cooled things down nicely, which worked out well for my little corn shuckers. Kids come in so handy sometimes.

Once the shucking was done, I began the blanching and cutting off process. I was working along well with Tess in her high chair (looking admittedly a little out of sorts- this would be foreshadowing, a term we recently discussed in our study of Little House on the Prairie) and the rest of my dear family gathered around the table playing a particularly loud and competitive game of Ker-plunk.

The game ended. Tess was released from her high chair and promptly began vomiting on the kitchen floor.

Times like this, when chaos surrounds me and yet the normal, routine things continue to demand my attention, I always think about that episode of Seinfeld when Kramer finds his girlfriend’s pinkie toe, puts it in a Cracker Jack box, steals a bus to take it to the hospital, fights off a mugger and yet continues to make the bus stops.

“You kept making all the stops?”

Ah, Seinfeld was a great show.

No matter what is going on: a kid vomiting, corn exploding all over the kitchen, someone having a tantrum, I still have to make all the bus stops. Diapers still have to be changed, phones answered, bathtub water turned off, questions answered, drinks fixed, instructions given and the catastrophe dealt with all at the same time.