Quoting My Kids

Facebook has become the 21st century vehicle for “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” the Art Linkletter/Bill Cosby sketch show that started on radio, moved to television, and now — thanks to social networking — is on the keyboards of friends far and wide.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a challenge to be both profound and pithy in just a few words, but fortunately Facebook gives you more than the 140 characters you get with Twitter. (Twitter is too pithy, even for me.)

I especially enjoy my sister’s status updates, which show a dry wit that recalls my dad. Of course, with five children — two of them still relatively small — she has fresh material on a daily basis.

Now that my kids are teens, I don’t get as much “They said what?!?” material as I once did. Still here are a few gems you might have missed:

A recent exchange with Emma as we drove the obstacle course that is Northern Va.:

— E: I heard it was pothole awareness month.
— 
Me: Do you think they're doing anything about it?

— E (hoping she doesn't fall into one): Funny, Dad. You're funny.

• From Ben: "If a boy can still sing 'Gary, Indiana,' then I'm telling you, his voice has NOT changed."

• Tonight's words of wisdom come from Kate, after drinking a Slurpee to mark getting her braces off: "My tongue looks like my hair did" when it was dyed. "But then, my head looked like a fire hydrant."

• From the boy in the bubble: "I'm confused. What's this about the Giants drafting a Prince and a wedding involving a Prince? They aren't the same thing, are they?"

• From Kate, the visual artist (who also kinda likes science): "Lips are tough, but I hate drawing ears. Every time I try to make them look realistic, they look like my small intestine."

• From Emma: "Sure they tell you that you can eat all the ice cream you want when you have your tonsils taken out. What they don't tell you is you won't want to eat a thing after that happens, and that sucks."

• From Ben, during his brief trip home to Virginia for the 1st time in months: 

— "Have you noticed that British people don't talk like us, but when they sing you can't tell the difference?"

— Upon being told that the conductor would be watching him as he rode unaccompanied on the train to New York: "I don't know about that. I'm not sure I want him watching me watching 'Dexter.' That could be a little awkward."

Of course, raising kids gives you material of your own. Here’s my contribution to the cause:

• Another way you know you have teenagers: You tell them you're cleaning the bathroom and their response is, "Why?"

A Reality Tale

Recently, a friend asked, “Is it wrong to want my child to have the fairytale?”

The reference was to the loss of her son’s team in the semifinals of the local Little League championship. The team had gone undefeated through the season and into the playoffs, only to lose to another squad that had less talent on paper but was peaking at the right time.

Watching your child deal with a tough loss is heartbreaking, because it’s natural as parents to want our sons and daughters to have the fairytale ending. And more often than not, we rediscover over and over again that fairytales are just fiction, that “real life” rarely ends the way we would like.

Still, we try. That’s why we buy lottery tickets and compete in contests with little scraps of scratch off cardboard, hoping we’ll be the 1 in 8,373,722 that gets picked. It’s why parents twist and contort schedules and make them look like the intersections of the interstate highway system, just so our children can have opportunities we did not.

••••••

Call me a cynic, but I’ve always thought something was fundamentally wrong with fairytales. First, the creators start with the premise that the protagonist’s family has to be screwed up, with at least one parent dead or absent. (The word “grim” predates the author, but it seems to be the embodiment of Grimm’s Fairytales.)

Second, the derring-do section of the story always involves the handsome prince — “Here I’ve come to save the day!” — swooping in and rescuing the princess before the inevitable “happily ever after” ending. Except, in fairytales, the prince looks nothing like Mighty Mouse or Andy Kaufman.

Like many of my generation, I love The Princess Bride, which tweaks this fairytale premise in such a smart and clever way. (I still remember the line on the back jacket of the tattered paperback: “What happens when the most beautiful woman in the world meets the handsomest prince in the world, and he turns out to be a son-of-a-bitch?”)

My first exposure to the book was in Mrs. Selman’s 9^th grade world history class; every Friday, she read us a chapter and acted out all the parts.

I don’t remember a thing about World History. I will never forget The Princess Bride. It still is one of my best memories of high school.

•••••••

I’m not so jaded that I fail to understand the appeal of the fantasy, but my worldview tends to tilt more toward the “Reality Bites” side. More specifically, it should be dubbed “Reality is Waiting to Bite.”

That’s why I tell my kids all the time, “Don’t court bad karma. If you do, it will find you. And it might anyway, but you don’t want to go looking for it.”

Someone once told me that children in the throes of adolescence lose 10 years of maturity the moment they reach 13. For some, it starts coming back around age 17 or 18; for others, it never seems to return.

So, emotionally speaking, I’m supposed to be back in the land of 3 and 4 year olds. And there are times when I can see that in all of my children.

For the most part, that’s not the case. As parents, Jill and I are very lucky, but we know it’s not a fairytale by any means.

Still, we won’t stop pursuing the happy ending… You never do with your children.

Transitions

The school-to-summer transition always is a strange time.

May and June, like the holiday period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, always is a crazy period in our lives. Inevitably, we’re dragging the kids to the finish line for school, tired and weary ourselves from getting up early and going to bed late. Meanwhile, all the end-of-year activities jam the calendar, leaving us to rush from one place to the next at a more chaotic pace than usual.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Alexandria. My daughters are up the hill, dancing in the first of two performances of “Grease.” Ben is in New York, performing in the matinee and evening “Billy Elliot.” Jill is in Seattle at her conference. And Nicholas is in North Carolina with his other family and his girlfriend.

For the first time, it looks like our family won’t be able to take an extended summer vacation. As the kids get older, and activities become even more diverse, it’s becoming more and more difficult to string a week of days together that everyone can be together.

This is a transitional period in our lives as a family, a cycle that every nuclear unit goes through to a certain extent. It has been extremely difficult for Jill, much more so than for me, because I find transitions and changes generally come easily. For Jill, this time of year is doubly hard because of the work/family conflict caused by her conference and the recital always falling on the same weekend.

Despite our best efforts, cloning is not something we’ve managed to master.

••••••

At times like this, it’s hard to imagine that we’ve lived in Northern Virginia for 10 years, that my kids really were 3, 3, 4, and 8 when we moved here.

This year, more than any other, I’ve been aware of that transition, which is one reason I’ve been hanging around the auditorium where the “Grease” dress rehearsals took place. Normally, I can’t wait to get out, to the point where my kids have perfected the tuck and roll as the van hits the parking lot.

But this year is different. It likely will be Kate’s last year to dance; she’s planning to play field hockey starting this fall when she enters high school. Over the last few months, her enthusiasm for dance has waned. You can see she wants something different.

Emma, on the other hand, has really stepped it up. If anything, it’s another part of her emergence from the wide shadow cast by Ben and Kate, another example of how she is growing into her own.

Watching the girls and their peers, you can see transitions occurring for other families, too. Some are getting ready to go to college, like Nicholas. Others, the ones you remember from grade school, are driving themselves to the theatre.

Little kids — fortunately I’m seeing a lot more boys this year — are dressed up in their costumes and don’t want to leave. Their parents, having not been through the drill before, can’t wait to go home.

They’ll learn.

The 'Normal' Minority

In our house, being “normal” means you are decidedly in the minority.

Meet Emma — in many respects the most normal kid I know.

Developmentally at the apex of the bell curve, I like to say my 13-year-old twin came out of the womb a 40-year-old adult. More than one person told us, “That one… She’s been here before.”

Sometimes I feel like she has.

In some respects, Emma has gotten a raw deal in the DC-to-NY shuffle. On one front, her twin brother — the person she is most connected to in this world — is away in another city and having a ball. On the other front, she is at home with her sister, who is her exact opposite in life.

Almost since they were born, I have described the Emma-Kate relationship in a series of obscure visual metaphors that only serve to illustrate just how different they are. Among them:

• Some days I feel compelled to introduce my daughters to each other: “Oil, meet water.”

• With apologies to Ted Nugent — never something I thought I’d say — the background music when they go at it should be “Cat Scratch Fever.”

• If there is ever a community theatre version of Jennifer Weiner’s “In Her Shoes,” I know the two girls who could play the leads.

Same sex sibling relationship aside, Emma has taken what could have been a crushing experience — losing day-to-day contact with her twin — and turned it in her favor through sheer will and determination. She has terrific grades in a challenging academic program and, more important, takes charge of her homework, priding herself on not asking for help.

That means she doesn’t enjoy middle school on some days. Example: "I don't like science. The teacher turns off the lights, turns on the movie, and pfffft, that's it. I'm asleep." Say what you will about the teacher, but it also says something about a child who is both nocturnal and needing to be stimulated and engaged.

What also has been amazing to watch is an ongoing physical transformation, which started when she decided to work like a bull terrier to get into shape. Earlier this year, Emma and her mom ran a 10-mile race, and plan to do so again next spring. The girl who used to be proud of her belly now watches everything she takes in, and while she’s not above the occasional ice cream cone, has mostly sworn off fast food.

The thing I admire most is that Emma has thrived at being “normal,” if there is such a thing. She has a sweet group of friends with whom she is sharing life in middle school, is easily embarrassed by too much parental involvement, and upset when there’s not enough. She can’t load the dishwasher to save her life, but is the first to offer to make you dinner when you most need it.

In a family where the only thing mellow is the drama, she is on a steady course, or at least as steady as one gets these days. For the most part, she is very straightforward about life, and knows that she doesn’t yet know what she wants to be when she grows up.

Recently, waiting at the bus stop — at the horrifically early 6:15 a.m. — I looked at my little girl and was struck by how mature she has become. "You've grown up,” I said. “How did that happen?"

Her matter-of-fact response: "Time..."

Yes, Emma is straddling this period between little girl and young woman just fine. Not perfect always, but just fine. And I don’t think she’d have it any other way…