“The ‘Chewing With Your Mouth Open’ Theory.”

I have been trying hard to find the simple words to explain this lack of temperance I see in strangers lately. I’m still not sure what to call it. Is it a lack of manners? Decorum? Decency? Hearing? Seeing?

            The other day I was at the pool and I saw some woman tugging on her young daughter’s arm and yelling, “You better hurry your ass up. I’m not going to have your dad mad at me again because of you!” When she saw that I was watching – and covering my son’s ear’s – she glared at me and quickly pushed her little girl, who was still trying to get her toes in her flip flop, toward the waiting car as if she were a piece of property instead of a child.

            Yesterday, at the grocery store I saw another woman yelling at her child who was pushing the cart toward the cart collection area. The young boy had hitched a ride on the bottom rung for the last few feet across the parking lot and allowed the cart to bump into the other carts. The child was laughing at his own effect on the row of carts in front of him, and I was laughing too. There was no danger and I could just imagine the feeling he had of getting a “free ride” at the amusement park. Before I could holler out, “Good one!” and hop on my own cart, the woman he was apparently with started yelling, “Get your ass over here!” as she lit a cigarette and again glared at me for watching. The boy, upon hearing the woman, lost every trace of his smile and humbly walked back to the car where she loudly reprimanded him so quickly that I could not figure out what she was angry with him about.

            Over and over, I see this behavior becoming commonplace in our environment. People yell, they spit on the sidewalk, they litter, they scratch their butts, pick their noses, smack their kids. And they do all of it in front of you and then glare at you when you can’t help but notice. For a while now I have been sadly pondering the reason why? Is it global, economical, or is it just a slow decline in what we are teaching our children.

            Having not traveled very much in my life, I cannot give an assessment on the global perspective.

            As for the economy, I asserted to my husband in the parking lot of the grocery store, must be playing a factor. After all, it doesn’t take a genius, or this writer searching the internet for data to back up her theory, to assert a simply math problem. That being that the increase in the cost of living plus the decrease in family income equal stress on a family. This then results in less tolerance for what seems like the menial problems of our children in comparison. All right, it could be a geometry problem, but I was never good at math. Anyway, that’s not to say that their problems are less important, it is simply to say that Suzie’s loss of her tenth boyfriend this year might seem a little trivial compared to, let’s say, her mom’s inability to keep a roof over Suzie’s head. Am I right? Of course.

            But then, as my husband, our son, and I were loading the groceries into the truck, my husband pointed out the “chewing with your mouth open theory.”

            “What?”

            “You heard me,” he said. “We’ve talked about how many people chew with their mouth open these days.”

            It’s true. You see it in movies, which seem to glorify it as sexy. I can’t hardly watch Michael Douglas anymore without throwing up. You see it in restaurants with men and women who are trying to be sexy. And we see it more and more in our families and our children. Not to be pretentious, but the last time I let my child get away with showing me his food was when he was eating pureed banana off of a baby spoon.

            “You don’t think it’s the stress of the economy?” I asked.

            “No way,” he said. “It’s a nice excuse, but your mom was a single mom, and you guys were poor growing up. I had times when I was poor too. That doesn’t make us act that way.”

            “True,” I agreed.

            “You know how you always complain about the fact that the boys never chewed with their mouth open until they started school?”

            “Yeah,” I said. “They learn it from their friends.”

            “It’s because there is no on there telling them not to. We are a couple generations deep into this.”

            He was right. I remember as a child my mom telling me about the woman who walked around in the cafeteria reprimanding them for not using their manners. I recall her telling me that if she misbehaved in public all that her mother would have to say was, “You just wait until we get home and I tell your father what you’ve done!” I also remember my grandfather poking me in the arm with a fork for putting my elbows on the table. It was practically a cardinal sin if I didn’t wash my hands before a meal – past my wrists and halfway up my arm – and I clearly recall the taste of Irish Spring soap in my mouth if I ever cussed.

            For the most part, I still employ those techniques with my children, but on some things it has become a joke that they, my children, chide me about, just as I chided my mom about bellbottom pants and coke bottle glasses.

            I had to inform them the other day that the reason you don’t put your elbows on the table is because “back in the day” – as we always refer to the past – men used to come in out of the field with their dirty clothes on. They would wash up to their elbows and therefore were only allowed to put their arms on the table up to their forearms because if their dared to soil the only clean piece of linen that their wives had, they would be darn lucky to eat for a week. My son’s response: “Well, it’s a good thing you have a washing machine.” (Note to reader: he did get poked in the elbow with a fork. Just ask him.)

            With my youngest son, since attending school, he cannot seem to close his mouth when he chews, and washing his hands at the sink has become something of a chore because all he wants is magic soap.

            Now, I have digressed from the way parents treat their children into the way children are behaving on purpose. What we teach now has a multi-generational effect. To this day I keep my elbows off the table at my grandparents house, I close my legs when I’m wearing a dress, and I would never in a million years think of screaming at my kid in the parking lot of the grocery store and then glaring at the others around me for calling their attention to it.

            No, if my kid acts up, I’m going to do what a gal from the generation before me did to her children. I will walk right over to the cashier and ask to borrow her intercom in order to inform the other shoppers that my child wanted to make a spectacle of himself, so could I please have everyone’s attention?

            I laughed forever when I heard that, and had planned for years to do that to my children should they ever feel the need to lose their decorum in public. The fact is though, I’ve never had to do it. Not because my children haven’t acted up in public. They have. Believe me, they have. The reason I have never had to do it is because I still believe for the time being that I am the parent. I am teaching them the same lessons that my parents taught me in the hopes that they will be able to handle my grandchild appropriately in public just as I have them. And just like pushing my mother to change her bellbottoms, my children are doing their best to bring me into the new generation of thinking about how we act among our peers. I only hope this time, it doesn’t work!

            

"I gotta Get Outta This Place!"

Preface: This is not my normal humorous style of writing. I was helping a friend in financial trouble and I just had to share this insight with you. 

When my son was two he broke his femur in half. Yes, in half.  The femur, also called the thigh bone, is the longest and largest bone in your body. Apparently, it is also the hardest to break. It was a harrowing experience to say the least and in many ways it changed my perspective about life, children, and parenting. One of the lessons that I learned was from something that Maxx’s doctor said to me a few years later.

You see, when Maxx started school at age five, he did not know how to go down the slide. No big deal, I thought. I figured that he was probably scared of falling off and breaking his leg again. When he was seven, Maxx still could not ride a bike. Try as he might, fall as he would, Maxx still could not get it. Not being blessed with coordination, I assumed he got it from me and again I was not worried. Then, when Maxx was in fourth grade, his teacher was concerned because he continued to babble and play around on the floor like a second grader. Did he have autism? Asperger Syndrome? We did not know. The odd thing about all of this was that Maxx was not that way at home - and he was very intelligent. Not that autistic children aren’t, but he just didn’t fit the spectrum in all cases like most autistic children do. Therefore, we just chalked it up to Maxx being Maxx. Finally, I talked to his doctor with the caveat that I was NOT concerned, just curious. Goodness knows I didn’t want my son going through a plethora of testing only to find out that he was “a real boy.” What my doctor said, changed my perspective on just about everything. He simply asked if Maxx had ever crawled.

Crawled?

Crawled.

Looking back on it, I could not remember, but with the broken leg and other issues when he was a child, it seemed possible that maybe he hadn’t really ever crawled. It turns out that children who miss a developmental stepping stone, like crawling or walking, often times are unable to do many other large motor skills, such as sliding down the slide or bike riding. The result being that they simply stop where they were and in some aspects of their life they simply stay at that age. In Maxx’s case, he simply needed to go back and relearn that step he missed so that the other steps could fall into place. So, what did we do at age 9? We crawled. We slide down the slide, we swung on a swing, and as a result he stepped the rest of the way up the ladder in a short period of time and has since caught up with his peers.

To this day, I use that lesson in other areas of my life. One being, how we are trained to relax. Some people take vacations, some shop till they drop, other’s have a drink after work with a friend, other people watch television at night, many go camping, play in the garden, some take a smoke break, other’s will even have a “bitch” session with a friend.  

Whatever it is you do, it is usually a learned pattern, from collegues, family, friends, or even just from yourself. Escaping from reality in order to relax is as much needed in everyday life as the need to crawl is as a child. If we are “on” all the time, we get exhausted. As a result, if we do not learn a healthy way to relax and recover our body and mind will find a way to do that for us; be that through anger, depression, hatred, resentment, you name it, your body will shut down to survive.

I write this because I have noticed with this economy and this fast-paced lifestyle we all live, it seems that more and more people are cutting out their “escape” time in order to make more time for work.

I was talking to a gal the other day who was strapped with money problems and devastated because she is too busy working to make money and yet too broke to do anything fun with her kids. Every night when she came home exhausted after work, she and her daughters would argue for an hour - while she tried to clean the house – about how they never got to do anything fun because their mom was always working. My friend said that she had gotten to the point where she was beginning to hate coming home and yet she was too tired and burned out to continue to work another hour.

I suggested an escape. Maybe a picnic, or a hike, on her next day off, but she simply shook her head. All that her children ever wanted to do was to go to the mall and shop. That was it; that was all. The problem was that she could not afford it. She had taken them last week, spent money, and it was fun while they were there, but after ward, the same stresses returned. The girls knew that they were heading back to boredom for another week, and my girlfriend knew that she was heading right to her check register to try and figure out if she had just overdrawn herself for the sake of a little fun.  She did not know what to do. It seemed that her plan had only caused more angst after it was over instead of making them all feel better.

I advised her that her plan was not going to work.  It was never going to work.

The reason: their escape was not fulfilling the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal was to make their time dealing with the stresses of reality more palatable. What I advised her to do was to think of a better escape. Frankly, it seemed obvious to me that the girls seemed more focused on venting than shopping. After all, that is the first thing they did when they hopped back in the car. No one was happier, nor were they refilled or rejuvenated. They were simply more stressed and equally as cranky.

I advised her that taking them shopping when she clearly couldn’t afford it was counterintuitive. It was like taking an alcoholic to the bar and then telling them they could only drink Diet Pepsi. Therefore, what she needed to recognize was that what her girls really needed was some time to vent their frustrations, just like she was doing to me. My suggestion: Allow the girls fifteen minutes a day while she was doing the dishes or straightening house after work for an unfettered, unjudged venting session. The rules. One, at the end of fifteen minutes, they were not allowed to complain any more until the next day. Two, they had to help clean while they vent. By setting this new pattern into place the girls would learn a new way to relieve their stresses and she could get the house cleaned.

She didn’t think they would ever go for it, but what parents forget is that when children are speaking, be that in anger, through tears, or in defiance, they are trying say something too. After all, wasn’t she being defiant when she was talking to me> Of course she was. She was frustrated, angry, and she needed to vent! To this day I’m not sure why that privilege is only recognized after you turn 18, but it is. She needed to listen to them, like I was listening to her, and I promised that things would change.

For my son, his escape was baking cookies and eating them while he vented his frustrations about his day to me. However, given an inch he would take a mile and he would complain himself right into tirade and a chocolate cake. His escape was not working either. Not only was he gaining weight, which he did not want to do when he was in football, but he had also gone past relieving himself of his frustrations to reliving them every day. When I realized this, I suggested that we sit out on the deck together and have a glass of iced tea and some crackers so that he could vent for fifteen minutes. This satisfied his need to munch as well as his need to get his frustrations off of his chest without allowing them to monopolize the conversation. When the fifteen minutes was over, we could continue to hang out and talk about other things, or we could pick up our tea and be done. 

Just like crawling, we take the steps we have learned and apply them to the next phases in our lives. As toddlers we escape by throwing a tantrum, so our parents tell us to go outside and play. This soon becomes our escape until we grow out of that and move on to the next. As a teenager, it could be sports, or music, or painting, but it could also be smoking, drinking, in some cases sex,  or something even worse. My suggestion: figure out what you do to escape. Figure out what your children do to escape. If it is unhealthy, teach them a better way, and you may find that you might learn a better way of escaping yourself. 

Flowers and Rum Do Mix!

I have a black thumb, and apparently black eyes too. I’m a farm wife, and yet I can kill a flower just by looking at it. Therefore, when my girlfriend Shelly came over to visit the other day and saw me standing on my sidewalk staring at my brown wooden house with an empty drink in hand and a stoic look on my face she apparently felt the need to intervene.

“I have no color,” I said to her.

The next day she did what all girlfriends do, she drove back over with a full bottle of rum, some diet Dr. Peppers, a trunk full of clippings from her yard, and the spirit of sight that I was lacking.

Still in the doldrums, she made me a drink, turned on the stereo and instructed me every step of the way on how to add color to my yard. What started out as a mere planting of starts soon turned into an art form born of shear imagination progressively inspired by Captain Morgan!

“So,” she said, “Whatcha got in the barn?”

“Huh?” I asked, straw sticking to my lips.

“Come on,” she said. “Show me whatcha got in the barn.”

“Okay,” I shrugged.

Apparently, an old broken down wagon makes for a cheap and easy potting bed. Who knew? Well, definitely not me. From there we walked the rest of the place, so much so that I feared a sobering up coming on. We went to the garage where Shelly’s eyes beamed at a pile of old broken toy trucks.

“Hens and Chicks!” she said.

Hens and chicks are a great little plant that looks like an artichoke that apparently needs little dirt, water or maintenance to grow. What can I say, the girl has known me for a while now. Within an hour we had rusted out toy trucks full of plants and flowers.

From there, things got almost aerobic as Shelly placed her drink down and drug me into every outbuilding possible, even daring to go into my husband’s shop and rummage around in his stuff only to locate an old blue tool box which we stole and immediately drilled holes in.

She nailed old pots to broken off telephone poles, filled washbasins with dirt, made a broken clay pot into a piece of art I cannot stop staring at, and turned a wood box into a beautiful flower box which I – in my apparently new found inspiration had Jack color flowers all over – into a flower box for the porch.

Thanks to Shelly, her rum, and her imagination, my house finally has a personal touch and I am starting to see things around my house with a new wonder and excitement. As for the black thumb, that has yet to be determined, but I was overwhelmed with possibilities and a renewed sense of hope by the time she left.

“Thanks!” I said. “Really, I would not have done this without you.”

“No problem,” she said. “Just wait until you see what I can do on Tommy Bahamas!”