When I was pregnant with my first, I passed many a happy hour thinking about all the things I was going to teach my child someday.
Important, valuable, life-lesson stuff: how to put up a tent and start a campfire, for example, and how to figure out which way was north.
Boy or girl, I’d teach them to sew and crochet. I imagined leaning over them, smiling benevolently and offering quiet instruction while they earnestly set themselves to making stitches with a needle and thread.
Their dad, meanwhile, would surely take them out fishing early on some future summer morning, standing quietly at the end of a peaceful dock.
They’d talk about the birds and the bees, and the value of hard work, and the power of honesty.
Looking back, I can only wonder: was I stoned during my entire pregnancy? Like, just high off some internal pregnancy hormone that did strange things to my sense of reality? Or did I really just have no clue what I was in for?
The truth is, I’m barely keeping up to teaching these kids the absolute basics, let alone the lovey-dovey sentimental stuff that involves quiet mornings on peaceful docks with fishing poles in hand.
And when I say “basics” I don’t mean tying shoes or making beds (both of which require as much work to figure out as the average PhD) but the absolute bottom-rung “basics” that had never once occurred to me I might someday be required to teach another human being.
Here’s a small sampling of things that have come out of my mouth lately:
Don’t open nail polish bottles upside down. No, not even slowly. Never. Ever.
If you start eating the toast at the corner, instead of the very middle of the slice, you won’t end up with peanut butter plastered all over your face. Just try, please. From the corner. Please. That’s … not… a corner. Never mind.
Playing hide and seek behind my car while I’m getting into it is a bad choice. A very huge terrible bad choice.
When your gum lands on the floor of Canadian Tire, you should definitely not put it back in your mouth. No, don’t hide it among the hockey sticks either, please.
Apple cores should not be put in your bedside drawer. Multiple apple cores in your bedside drawer are not a “collection” that you can turn into a hobby.
Don’t stick your finger in the fan.
I SAID DON’T STICK YOUR FINGER IN THE FAN
No, worms don’t like to live inside the house. No, not even in your bedside drawer with the apples.
You don’t need a butcher knife to spread butter on your pancake.
If you can see that your brother’s hand is in the way, don’t close the car door. Or his leg. Or any part of his body.
Did you just stick your finger in the fan? Can you not see that there’s a blade inside of it moving really fast? And also: I’M SURE I JUST TOLD YOU NOT TO.
I guess I assumed that most of the stuff we do in life – like eating toast from the corner and not causing ourselves bodily injury on a regular basis – was somehow just instinct. But no, you have to actually teach this stuff. You have to teach every single thing. And not just once, but over and over and over, before it sinks in even a little bit.
And doing that takes up a lot of time. So much time that I’m not really concerned any longer about whether or not they learn to sew, or have any idea which way is north. “Still alive” is my day-to-day goal around here.
To be fair, we’ve had some sweet moments at the end of a few symbolic docks, but my vision of parenthood as a time of gentle mentoring has been largely erased by the reality of screaming frantically at my children from the far side of the lawn to stop playing with the weed whacker, and to not jump out of the tree fort window.
Thank God for attentive mothers – I’m not convinced children (or my children, at any rate) would survive into adulthood without us.
