My Terrible Parents

Written by Sputnik Sweetheart Tuesday, 09 February 2010 15:48

For the seventeen years I lived under my parents’ roof, I ate a lot of things I couldn’t stand.

Liver with chopped onions, fried salmon patties, stewed okra, pickled beets, and worst of all, seventeen school years of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. To this day, the smell of peanuts makes me queasy. Those were my parents for you – or in this case, my mom. I ate what was on my plate. Or, there was the alternative: I didn’t eat. Hot-cha! Mothers in this enlightened age cook dinner for themselves and their husbands and go far out of their way to make their children separate “kid-friendly” meals of chicken fingers and fish sticks. So in retrospect, I was definitely deprived.

I remember this crazy rule, too: “You’ll eat in front of the table and nowhere else in this house.”

When I joined the workforce, something came to my attention: My supervisor vanished fifteen minutes before school let out and did not return until the next day. Oh, so this is how it’s supposed to be! See, my mom didn’t take off early from work to pick me up from school just because the was the primary caretaker. She explained that she had an important job tending to very sick people in the cancer ward at the big hospital on the hill, just like Daddy had an important job as a city official. So I either rode in the carpool driven by someone’s SAHM, or my college-aged cousin drove me to and from school. When I got older, I waited in the library until 5 p.m. until my mom could pick me up. How could she–? I could have been kidnapped by the likes of Henry Lee Lucas or molested by the janitor. Luckily, the only thing that happened was that I always got my homework done.

My parents had standing memberships in the Adults Only Club, the selfish old things. So I had a lot of different babysitters growing up – my older cousins who taught be how to do cheesy 70s disco moves (and collapsed in giggles at my childish efforts), the lady down the block who had a granddaughter my age, and the kindly older woman who ran the boarding house where my mom and dad first met. She sewed my Barbie dolls masses of tiny dresses. I particularly liked the zany middle-school-aged sitter across the street who had a chemistry set and read to me, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I have memories of my mom looking like a glamorous Jane Russell in her supper club dress, pearls and pin-up-girl-red lipstick, smelling of Chanel No. 5 (back when the fragrance still contained real civet) and my dad dressed in a suit and tie as they headed out the door. They’d kiss me goodnight and tell me that they’d see me in the morning.

Needless to say, I still have nightmares ...

Even before I was in kindergarten, they’d send me to stay with my grandmother at her house or ship me off to visit my aunt and uncle out on their farm. My parents told me it was because they wanted me to get to know my family, and oh, it worked all right. I have never loved any three family members quite so dearly. But being that they were indeed selfish (as aforementioned), I think that my parent were preventing their own personal nervous breakdowns by giving themselves downtime from 24/7 kid patrol. Parents these days wouldn’t let very young children out of their sight for a private poop break, much less for days. Can you believe my terrible parents actually thought that other people could take care of me just as well as they did?

Funny, but I can’t remember ever having a meltdown in public. My mom drolly told me that’s because I never had the chance. My parents knew how to mitigate the damage before it ever started. They didn’t take me to a sit-down restaurant until I was six, the same year I finally rode on an airplane for the first time. Public places were child-appropriate: swing parks, drive-in burger joints or the kiddies’ swimming pool. Tragically, I never saw the inside of a darkened cinema with my parents while they enjoyed a PG13- or R-rated movie. I never had the opportunity to ruin country club day by racing around with a lobster claw in my hand. That dealt a crushing blow to my budding psyche.

This will shock you: My kid crap stayed in my room – along with me and my playmates. As long as we weren’t cutting each other’s hair with blunt scissors, anything we did was okay as long as we did it (shhh!) quietly. “Use your inside voice” wasn’t even in my parents’ vocabulary. As an adult, I’m a sucker for peace and quiet. And I abhor clutter. Good lord, what is wrong with me? I think I need therapy to deal.

My mom told me that she and my dad rarely had to punish me for misbehaving. Oh, the Evil One said this with a reminiscent smile, but she knew. She and my dad were well aware that the punishment they did have to dole out was enough to straighten me right up without a repeat performance. The ‘rents didn’t make idle threats; they knew just how to hit me where I lived. Screaming and/or running inside of the house meant being sequestered in the boring, stimulus-free “white” guest room until DAD got home so the BOTH of them could decide how to deal with me. Uh-oh. That happened all of about ... twice. An incident of passing notes at school warranted two weeks of grounding, no television and bedtime right after dinner. Need to know if I pulled that again? At least parents these days give their kids a second chance, and a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh before they make good on that forgettable five-minute time-out. The days of my childhood were not so forgiving.

You probably won’t believe this, but I would have never considered interrupting two adults having a conversation unless my head was on fire.

My family life, and that of all of my friends, was a lot like those Atomic Age commercials depicting well-behaved children playing quietly with coloring books and baby dolls while the adults sat and conversed over Sanka. I didn’t feel as though my wings had been clipped because I wasn’t permitted to climb on the furniture or grind Play-Dough into the carpet. My parents were simply preparing me for the demands of the real world. My poor mom is still sad that she won’t have grandchildren, but I think she’s beginning to understand as time passes. I recently told her that part of the reason I made the choice that I did was she and my dad set the bar of exemplary parenting so high, I could never even begin to reach it, much less find a man who was on the same page. And this is true.

Besides, let’s just face it: by the standards of today’s society, I would have made a terrible parent,if I did everything that my own terrible parents did. I would have broken all of the rules of modern parenting. At the sight of my well-behaved, “do not speak unless spoken to” children who never bolted down the hall or talked back, teachers would look askance and assume that I’d drugged them. The other mommies on the block would threaten to call Child Protective Services when I diverged from a topic other than the texture of mini-me’s last spit-up or admitted that children were not allowed entry into the parental bedroom. Or refused to get my kids a stupidly-expensive, noisy-ass Wii, buy them cell phones, let them watch television for more than thirty minutes a day, or permit my home to become an unfettered den of perpetual turmoil accented by high-pitched squealing, thundering of little feet and smashed up Oreos. (Hint to parents: Your kid wants the cookie, she doesn’t need it, and even the American Association of Pediatricians agrees. But if you decide to go there, remember: only at the kitchen table.)

Society at large should thank me for choosing to be child-free. The last thing the world needs these days is more self-sufficient, well-adjusted model citizens. God knows how many of us are mucking up the world with our egregious social courtesies and barely-existent carbon footprints. I have my loving parents to blame for the way I turned out, and it’s only inevitable that I’d just pay it forward if I’d had my own children. It’s largely nurture, not nature, that makes monsters like me.

Add your two cents in The Childfree Life forums!