The "oblivion principle" - perks of a privileged childhood

It’s such an obvious reality that I don’t know how it can still surprise me, but I'm sometimes amazed by how hard I can work and how much I can accomplish without my family having any inkling of what I’ve done.

And it’s easy to become resentful of that. I think often of the recurrent image from the “Rose Is Rose” comic strip by Pat Brady, in which every once in a while Rose descends into her Dungeon of Resentment. How is it that I spent all morning cleaning all four bathrooms and no one noticed? Do they have any idea of how much pollen would be piled on the windowsills right now if I hadn’t dusted this week? Where do they suppose the clean and folded laundry they regularly find in their bureau drawers comes from, anyway? Yesterday we were out of milk and today we have plenty of milk: did anyone notice that I spent two hours at the supermarket and then carried in five bags of groceries myself?

I know there are various ways to address this issue, and I know there are plenty of parents who think I should be more proactive as far as expecting contributions of help from my children. But they do tasks that I consider age-appropriate – they’re almost always responsible for unloading the dishwasher after it runs; they bring their clothes hampers to the laundry room when I ask them to; they clear the table after dinner; they would have helped carry in the grocery bags if they’d been home at the time – and it’s not really a matter of my wanting less work on my hands. It’s just the frustration of how invisible it all is to them, how they never seem to actually see me do any of this or notice what I’ve done.

But when I start to descend into the Dungeon of Resentment, I have to remind myself that this life I’m living in my own choice. I’ve chosen to raise a family, to live in a house, to do the kind of work that generates the kind of salary for which buying groceries is not a problem but having abundant paid household help would be.

What helps more than that, though, is to reiterate to myself my belief that being oblivious to the work your mother does is actually one of the privileges of a comfortable childhood: a privilege that will ideally be passed down from generation to generation. Like my children are with me, I was equally oblivious to how hard my mother worked to keep our household up and running. But every now and then I’ll look back on something from my childhood and be curious enough to ask her. Earlier this summer I found myself thinking about the evening cookouts we used to have once or twice a week at our family cabin in the mountains during our month-long Colorado vacations. The cabin was about thirty minutes away from where we stayed in town: we’d often drive there for dinner, sometimes just us five but more frequently with guests, spend a few hours, and return to our place in town for the night. I remembered happy evenings around the campfire with grilled hamburgers and toasted marshmallows and songs and jokes, but I didn’t remember anything about the sleepy return to town at bedtime. “How did you get all the dishes washed after we got back?” I asked my mother last month. “Didn’t it take hours to unload all the food and cookout gear?”

Of course it did, but I didn’t think about that at the time; it was one of the privileges of my happy childhood. My children may be oblivious to the hours I spent yesterday morning cleaning the house or the 45 minutes it took me to prepare yesterday’s picnic which we took to the pond for an early dinner and swim, and that’s a gift I’m giving them. If they someday choose – and are fortunate enough – to have an adulthood similar to mine, with families of their own and lots of opportunities to have fun, they’ll do this same thing themselves.

Yes, it’s good for them to help out around the house and do age-appropriate chores. But if they’re blind to just how much effort it sometimes takes to make vacations and holidays memorable, to keep the house clean and organized, to be generous hosts to friends and relatives, and to keep everyone safe and happy so much of the time? I may just have to consider that a privilege I’m happy to be able to give them.

Dandelion perfume

Since the kids had an early release day from school yesterday, my friend Nancy and her daughter Samantha came over for lunch, and then we took a long walk in the woods.

As we walked, the girls collected dandelions. Holly loves dandelions. As far as she’s concerned, they’re brilliantly colored flowers, fragrant and beautiful. The idea that some people see them as weeds means nothing to her, proving once again that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Once we were back at the house, the two girls went inside and closed themselves in the bathroom for several minutes while Nancy and I drank ice water and talked some more.

I didn’t give much thought to the situation: the two girls find all kinds of mysterious activities to keep them busy together, and I’ve never yet known them to incur any damage. So when I arrived home after doing a short round of errands later in the afternoon, I was amused to see on the kitchen counter a small glass jar half-full of cloudy water with a few flower petals floating in it. On the label in black marker was scrawled “Holly and Samantha’s perfume.”

“What did you make perfume out of?” I asked Holly.

“Dandelion petals, grass, and some of those little soaps we have in a dish in the bathroom,” she said. “Then we added water. It smells really really good and we’re going to keep it and use it forever.”

It made me smile because that’s something that I used to do at her age also. I remember so clearly the times we would go to my grandparents’ mountain cabin in Colorado for a dinner picnic. While the adults had cocktails and prepared dinner, the kids would wander around in the fields and woods. My sisters and I always collected pine needles, sagebrush, wild grasses, and lumps of pine sap to mix up for a perfume. Each component was separately so fragrant…but the perfume part never really worked, though we pretended it did. We didn’t know that alcohol is the main ingredient in commercial perfume.

But what I remember even better than making perfume was one day when my Aunt Mary said to me while we were doing something quite unrelated to this, “At my grandparents’ cottage on Lake Michigan when I was a girl, every summer I would gather pine needles and try to make a perfume that would last all year and smell like the countryside around their home. But it never worked.”

I’m not sure how old I was when she said that, but I remember being surprised to learn she had had the very same impulse I did – and been equally frustrated when it didn’t succeed very well. From what I understood, she’d even had the same period of denial, pretending that in fact the perfume really did have a lasting scent. I think it was my first inkling that some kinds of child’s play are truly archetypal: they just exist for each child to discover anew; no one needs to teach us.

And so it was with Holly and Samantha yesterday afternoon: gathering aromatic scraps from nature to make a perfume, just as I used to do, just as my aunt used to do, just as girls throughout time have probably done, each of us hoping it would work and then eventually shrugging off the disappointment when it didn’t; each of us, or most of us, probably realizing that there’s nothing organic about perfume at all, and to make it successfully you need alcohol plus elements manufactured in a lab, not flower petals and tree sap.

Holly’s perfume jar is still in the kitchen, and I’ll let her leave it there for as long as she wants to. She still thinks it smells of flowers and the forest and soap, even if I’m having trouble detecting much of a scent beyond the detergent with which the jar was last washed. She’ll eventually learn. In the meantime, she can be yet another generation, following dozens of others and probably preceding dozens of others as well, dreaming of replicating a walk in the woods on a spring afternoon in a carefully labeled jar.

Cell phones, nail polish and other requests that throw parents

Amy Suardi wrote an interesting post about children and cell phones on the Frugal Mama blog today. I wrote earlier this fall about our decision to give Tim a cell phone now that he is 11. Tim didn’t ask for one; what he asked for was more afterschool freedom in the form of going to the library or the school’s “homework club” after dismissal, and when Rick upgraded his phone, it made sense to give the cast-off to Tim.

He doesn’t particularly like to talk on the phone, nor do his friends, so I wasn’t concern that he would misuse the privilege. It’s just helpful for making last-minute changes of plans, and eliminates problems caused by miscommunications or other complications that can result in missed connections, such as the day I told Tim he could go to the library for an hour after school and he arrived there to discover the library was closed.

As Amy points out, a lot of people equate cell phones with accelerating the growing-up process for kids. Although this hasn’t been the case for us, in that Tim’s cell phone is strictly a practical aid, there are other ways in which the debate about acceleration of childhood raises questions for me. For example, my 7-year-old loves nail polish, and I have no particular problem with her putting it on occasionally, especially since it’s something she often does as a social activity with a friend, but one of her closest friends is allowed only toenail polish and not fingernail polish. What is the message I am sending her by allowing nail polish? Is it that she has to add artificial color and shine to her appearance in order to look pretty, that what nature bestows on us is not enough? Or is it just that painting is fun, whether it’s on paper or on your nails?

Earlier this week Holly handed me her Christmas wish list, which included the line item “makeup kit.” This, I admit I balk at. Should a 7-year-old be taking an interest in makeup? But upon further reflection, I can see how a case could be made that letting her play with makeup at home wouldn’t be so different from letting her play dress-up, which she and a few of her friends do by the hour. I wouldn’t let her go out in public wearing blush or lipstick any more than I’d let her go out in my grandmother’s floor-length yellow silk gown, but in a way, both seem to me like reasonable ways of practicing the fun of masquerade. I’ll probably veto the makeup idea simply because unlike silk gowns, makeup has the potential to damage rugs, countertops and other hard-to-clean household surfaces, but not because I’m convinced it’s inherently wrong for Holly to play with.

When Holly was five, she started asking to get her ears pierced, something she was finally permitted to do on her seventh birthday. Some of our friends were surprised we allowed this, but for me, the reason to say yes ultimately had to do with Holly’s reasons for asking. It wasn’t that she wanted to look like an adult; it was that she likes the way earrings look and she thought it would be fun to start collecting them. She’s allowed only stud earrings or tiny hoops, no dangling earrings, and I think they look pretty on her. Moreover, getting her ears pierced for her birthday seemed to me a far more satisfying gift for both value and timelessness than a toy or other object easily outgrown. (Holly’s case was also helped by the fact that when I asked our pediatrician for her advice on ear piercing, she responded, “You forget, I’m from a Hispanic background. My daughters had their ears done at nine months.”)

Maybe cell phones, nail polish and makeup all come down to the child’s intent in wanting them. As with so many things, the objects themselves have no intrinsic meaning regarding who should have them and when; the debate really emanates from how the kids perceive them or plan to use them. Is the value of a cell phone in its use for communicating last-minute changes of plans, like in our household, or is it for furtively getting in touch with friends while bypassing the oversight of parents? I heard a commentator on NPR recently speaking about the small but seemingly critical component of etiquette that has been lost now that kids can call each other directly. No more, “Hi, Mr. Hatch. This is Tim. May I speak to Cole?” now that Tim can reach Cole directly on Cole’s individual phone. When I was growing up, if you couldn’t handle the challenge of speaking politely to a friend’s parents on the phone when you called, you didn’t dare call. (But for counterbalance, I read an essay in which the writer described the unexpected joy that his wife’s cell phone brings him: now that her mother can call her directly rather than through a house phone, he is forever free from the obligation of making awkward small talk with his mother-in-law.)

So in a way, it comes down to a riddle. When is a cell phone not a cell phone? When kids want it to send inappropriate pictures, offensive text messages or arrangements for meet-ups they shouldn’t be having, I suppose. When are clothes and makeup not just clothes and makeup? When girls Holly’s age want to feel and act like teenagers, rather than just like children in costume. If Holly wanted to dress like Britney Spears, it would bother me. But she doesn’t: she wants to wear my grandmother’s long silk ball gown. That’s not about growing up fast; it’s about playing make-believe. And as I see it, there’s nothing about make-believe that’s going to do her any damage at all. And Tim has a cell phone he didn’t even particularly want so that he can let us know when the library is closing early. Every decision comes within its own context, and parents learn to assess, evaluate and decide, one request at a time, over the course of many years.