“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!