Fun With Play-Dough

Every once in a while we make parenting decisions that are, let’s say, not brilliant. I recently noticed the TV Guide’s announcement of E.T, and, remembering it fondly from my own childhood, called my daughter. “E.T. is on television,” I enthusiastically told her, “You should watch this with us. It’s fun.”

Unfortunately, I forgot that I was twelve when I first saw it, and my daughter Isabella is not. She didn’t make it past the first ten minutes; seeing Elliot sneak around in the dark, hearing funny noises, she quickly hid underneath a pillow, all the while begging us to shut it off. It was too scary.

“But there will be Reese’s Pieces!” My husband tried, as if that would make a difference.

Now, in spite of the fact that Isa never even saw E.T.’s face, she comes out of her room every other night to announce that ‘she can’t sleep; she’s scared of E.T., the monster’.

“He’s not a monster,” I tell her, “He’s just an alien. And besides, he’s not real. It’s a puppet. Why would you be afraid of a puppet?”

She looks at me as if I’m the biggest idiot that’s ever walked this planet, and maybe a few other planets in the process. Have I forgotten what it’s like to be six? The concept of what is real is stretchy, fluid; whether something is real is up to her to decide, not me. How dare I suggest that E.T. is not a monster, what do I know?

We bring out the monster spray, which is a nasty old bottle of Fahrenheit, saved by my husband for occasions like this. After all, when little brown Hollywood puppets are around, the power of suggestion is at its strongest. It helps, her room smells up to high heaven and she goes to sleep; how she’s able to breathe with those fumes hanging around, I’ll never know.

To put things in perspective, this is a girl who loves Corpse Bride, who’s seen Modigliani take his last breath many times, and who reenacts whole CSI episodes on the playground, body count included. I admit; we don’t censure her television habits much, except maybe for the Disney channel- I can’t stand Mickey Mouse’s Club House. So why E.T.?

Why does she know most Tim Burton movies by heart, yet seems unable to shake the idea of an alien, ugly, faux Muppet, who she’s never even seen?

But there’s the problem, isn’t it? Not knowing is much worse than knowing; every horror flick is at its scariest when the blonde bombshell goes up the stairs and you don’t know what is coming. So maybe this particular blonde just needs to sit down and watch a few minutes, somewhere in the middle, when E.T. is happy and cute, to get over this unreasonable fear. Perhaps we’ll try tomorrow; I think Starz is showing it again. As long as she doesn’t develop a fresh fear of flying bicycles, I think she’ll be okay. 

Spring is here; the jar that my daughter brings to me says so. Inside, I find a bug and some leafy greens; she proudly tells me she “screwed the lid on extra tight so Mr. Bug won’t escape”. I explain that Mr. Bug probably won’t survive the lack of oxygen, and with a disappointed look she takes her brand-new pet back outside and releases him.  In truth, I don’t have the faintest idea how long a bug can live in a jar, but I’m not willing to find out. There’s a reason I have the exterminator stop by my house every two months.

Fortunately, there are other ways to freak your parents out when the weather gets nice, and my children know them all. We’ve already had the first accident (our daughter Isabella falling out of a tree) and the first really dumb idea (our son Mendel using a rake to play horse while standing in a wheelbarrow). Our kids find that nice weather is best enjoyed in an atmosphere of danger.

            I am not entirely convinced I am the right parent for the season. I hate bugs, and I don’t like swimming. I despise that the maple tree in front of my house seems to drop a hundred branches every time the wind blows, and that the hot sun makes the trashcan smell like something furry died in there; most of all, I hate how by the time my house settles down it is too dark to truly enjoy my garden. Of course, I would love to be a fun mom, and sometimes I think I am, but these days I mostly hear myself say things like Stop stepping on the flowers, That roof is not for climbing, and, most popular of all: Get out of the compost heap! No wonder my children look at me as if they wish I’d turn into a garden gnome. What fun is a back yard if you can’t get dirty and destroy things? Where’s my summer spirit?

            When I was little, I practically lived outside during the summer. I grew up near the woods, and there wasn’t a tree I didn’t climb, an adventure I didn’t have, or a dare I didn’t fall for. The only rule my parents had was: “be home in time for dinner”, and even that I often didn’t stick to (Sorry, mom). Yet now that I am a mother myself, and my children’s outside is the size of a postage stamp compared to the world I used to play in, I am suddenly the biggest chicken on the block. Obviously, it’s time for an attitude adjustment.

            Someone very smart once told me that G-d does not perform unnecessary miracles; if you can fix things yourself, He will not split the Red Sea for you. So now what? I decide I have to set some new ground rules, starting with less interference on my part. This means, if Isabella and Mendel are outside, let them be outside in the fullest sense of the word. So what if they get dirty, so what if their shins bruise until they look like the map of Europe; it’s not the end of the world if they wear the signs of summer. And with Memorial Day just around the corner, we have many warm months ahead of us, so I might as well relax. And they don’t need to know that I peek out the window every two minutes, and then give myself a stern talking to. Maybe I’ll get really brave and introduce some shock treatment: next time there’s a summer storm, we can all go outside and dance barefoot in the rain.

Let’s hope it stays dry until deep into August.

I am walking around the department store, when my six-year-old daughter Isabella stops me and utters the words: “Mommy-Huggy”.

I am absolutely mortified, and ask her: “Honey, how many languages do you speak?”

She thinks for a second, and then answers: “Three.”

Just as I am starting my spiel about how, if one knows that many languages, one certainly doesn’t need to use baby words, she interrupts me: “No, wait; Three-and-a-half.”

“What?”

She goes on to explain that, where grandma and grandpa live, ‘dinner’ is called ‘supper’, and I realize: she’s figured out dialect. When did that happen?

It is true that there are many different variations of English; I found that out myself when, years ago, someone held a door for me, I said thank you, and the other person responded with a hearty You Betcha! Back then, I had to ask my husband to translate on a regular basis. I have learned a little more about the sounds of the region since then, and can understand most of those colorful expressions that you don’t find in any high school vocabulary book. I know, for instance, that Well, I suppose ends a conversation. I understand that Well, I’ll be! expresses surprise, and that Jiminy Christmas has nothing at all to do with the holidays. I also found out, through trial and error, that when people say How are you? they don’t really care how your day is going; it just means hello.

Although these regional oddities don’t bother me much, nothing gets me more worked up than misuse of language in general. A small cup of strong coffee is not an expresso, you can’t substitute of for have, and everybody should learn the difference between then and than. And yes, I’ll say it: text messaging doesn’t help. OMG! LOL! Using these types of abbreviations whenever the mood strikes us doesn’t allow us to express more, it makes us express less. It’s a way to rubber stamp the language until there is no originality left.

Of course, I am anything but innocent; I, too, have moments of word poverty, when my grammar sucks, my spelling takes a vacation, and my colloquialisms are invented on the spot. I, too, color outside the lines.

My biggest weakness is the Hm that I substitute whenever I feel like it. Hm, I say to myself when I walk away from a particularly nasty bit of writing, and it means: Not now.

Hm, I’ll say when I open the fridge and see nothing I like. Hm, when my husband doesn’t clean up after himself, and Hm, when I want to watch CNN but can’t because Lou Dobbs is on. If other people notice it, they might get irritated; I don’t know. Nobody’s ever said anything. Until they do, I’ll happily Hm my way through life, subconsciously abbreviating all my private thoughts, and speaking my own version of baby talk.

   Recently, my daughter has been asking the tough questions. What brought this on, I’m not sure. Children grow in leaps and bounds; they’ll wear a size 5 for six months straight, then suddenly they’ll go through size six, seven, and eight all in three months. I guess their brains are the same way. Just this month, we’ve had to answer inquiries about the Holocaust, Menstruation, and the electoral process, to name but a few. Now she’s added the difference in life span between men and women.

This latest curiosity stems from the fact that both my husband and I still have one grandmother, as well as several great-aunts. Isabella is obsessively fascinated by the fact that there are no old men to be found in our families. We have a picture of my grandparents on their wedding day in the dining room; she often points at it and asks about my grandfather. She wants to hear the story about how he shoved a Nazi soldier’s head in the icebox when he came to steal food they didn’t have. She wants to know where he hid, and even though I’ve told her often I don’t know, she keeps asking. She wants to know why the flowers in the back are so scrawny, why the wedding dress was borrowed. She wants to know if he was in love with her (he was) and whether he was happy (not really, it was 1941; nobody was happy in 1941). She stares at his picture with such intensity that I wonder if she’s seeing something I don’t. Perhaps she wants some assurance that, once upon a time, he existed. I can understand that.

“Women live longer than men,” my husband tells her.

“Oh.” She ponders over that for a few seconds, then asks: “So by the time I have children, Uncle Martin will be dead, but aunt Majorie will still be alive?” Martin is my brother; he is 42.

“Your generations are a little off, honey,” my husband tells her. “When you have grandchildren, Uncle Martin will be dead, and Aunt Majorie will still be alive.” The answer satisfies her enough that she drops the issue for a little while. Sometimes that’s all you can hope for. Still, my daughter having more questions than we can answer is, I have to admit, a luxury problem.

Ever since Adam handed his best girl a leaf, there’s been trouble. I imagine it was at that point that the first lover’s quarrel took place; Adam no doubt picked up the wrong leaf. It was probably too small, and not exactly the right shade of green.

“Don’t you know that lime ruins my complexion?” Eve would have said, “I need earth tones, Adam! For god’s sake, why don’t you ever listen?”

And Adam would have thrown up his hands, sighed, and said: “Fine, find your own,” after which Eve would have stomped off to go pout and read her tattered copy of Mars and Venus, all the while practicing in her head what she’s going to say to him next time he shows his ugly face.

I wonder if things would have gone smoother if Eve would have just put her foot down and said: “Leaf? What leaf? I don’t need a leaf. I am not ashamed, and besides, the weather is fine. Put that down; let’s go for a walk.”

What a different world we could have ended up with. Just imagine, if we didn’t have to worry what to wear to job interviews, first dates, our wedding. There would be money left over at the end of the month, there would be no more need for dry cleaning, and everyone would go to the gym. Maybe, without that certain piece of fabric, Clinton wouldn’t have gotten caught; Madonna wouldn’t have been famous, we would have never had to put up with skinny jeans.

It would have certainly made a difference in our house. While my daughter changes in and out of clothes with the speed of a runway model, my son likes to leave it all behind.

I know; it’s great, they are expressing themselves. It’s just, when I want to go run an errand, and I’m faced with a child in a pink tutu with fairy wings and a purple boa on one side, and a completely naked child on the other, I can’t help but think: is it really so bad to leave very young children home alone?