Let me start off by apologizing to all of you that came here through Google expecting to find something about the senate or president Bush. You’ll find neither. Except for that sentence. Which I guess is something. But it sure isn’t much.
I’m remembering that while growing up I had this technique for getting what I wanted. Let’s just say for example that I wanted to go to a party on the weekend and because of the small size of the town, my parents knew that there would be no adults at the party. Now, taken at face value, you could pretty much be sure that I wouldn’t be going to that party. However, given the nature of my relationship with them, I could get them talking/arguing for days with each other and never really, truly address the issue of whether or not I could go. They would be talking about who was parenting better. Who was a truer Mormon. Who was really on God’s side. Eventually, I could distract them to the point of me getting my own way. I’d go to the party and they’d still be comparing righteousness notes. Then, they’d both throw their hands up and blame the other one.
I believe that is the finest example of filibuster that there is.
My reward? I have spawned 4 offspring that all seem to have inherited my innate ability to ‘work the situation’ to their advantage. Some more pronounced than others. But by the time I realize it, it’s too late and not only did I buy my son Matrix Online, but he’s taken it to his dad’s house to play it and spends 4 hour blocks of time glued to it. Now, in the first place, I didn’t want to buy the stupid game. And if I bought it, it was sure going to stay at my house and not go to his dad’s. And if he did get to have it, he was only going to play it for max 2 hours a day and that was it! The only difference between my son and myself is that I never instigated an argument over video games and that I only argue with myself whereas my parents had each other.
And here’s another revelation that, I have to tell you, really snuck up behind me and bit me in the butt. The original belief was: I’ll never be as fuddy-duddy as my mom. When I am a mom, I will be a cool mom. I will be Queen Cool Mom. I will never make my kids wear the types of embarrassing clothing that I had to wear. My children will thank me for being so darn cool. I will have their friends over practically all the time and we will eat french-fries with every meal.
Well, with the exception of the french-fries part, I’ve recently been alerted that I suck. I am so not the cool parent I had planned to be. Oh, I thought I was. Until my daughter and I went to the mall to try and find any kind of pants that would just, please, in some kind of way, not have the waist band hit 7 inches below the belly button area. For the love of all that is holy, please. And they don’t make them. They are simply not available in any way shape or form. Every single pair of pants we found were some miracle of sewing construction in that there didn’t seem to be any possible way of wearing them without some crack showing and yet, it didn’t. Why? Because my daughter showed me her technique of bending to pick something up. When you wear the pants nowadays, you can’t bend over at the waist and grab your pencil. You have to carefully bend both legs and plie, balancing so you don’t fall over. When I started pointing out that other girl’s pants were so low that you could see their *ahem* hairline, she offhandedly told me that of course she shaves so that is never an issue. Duh. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, because please, I don’t really want to think of my daughter as being old enough to need to worry about that kind of thing (is she really older than 9 yet?!) I told her I needed a moment. And I took it. And did the head shake thingy with my lips blubbering against each other to clear my brain. Reset.
So, then we looked for skirts. Yes, the day just got better and better. My mother told me I couldn’t wear skirts that were higher above the knee than 2 fingers. This is where the swearing ‘I’ll be so cool’ comes in. Because I’m the kind of mom that tells my daughter to go ahead and take a full hand-length. Yes! Go ahead! I’m that cool! And then she rolls her eyes and tells me that that is so uncool because all the skirts are made to be two fingers longer than your butt, which I didn’t believe but then was proved wrong when we couldn’t find anything longer. And as I looked in disbelief at my daughter’s unhappy face which so closely mirrored mine own oh, so long ago, I had a sudden realization that I, in fact, was a dumb, fuddy-duddy mom. That is the curse of being the mom: that you will never be cool. That is God’s way of playing a joke. You only think you’ll be cool. But times change and you can never keep up. And then I realized that my mom probably thought she was being cool compared to the 5 inches below the knee skirts she used to wear when she told me I could go 2 fingers above. And then I laughed.
I shudder to think what my daughter will be faced with, with her daughter. Will they even be wearing clothes? Because the pants can’t get much lower and the skirts can’t get much higher before clothes become completely inconsequential.