Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-09-05 - 12:03 p.m.

Kids, Manners, and Repression

"Your right to swing your arms ends where my face begins." Or something like that.

We went out for pizza with BF and his kids last night. Some of his kids. He has lots of kids. He has lots of kids, and his kids have lots of friends, and it took me a long time even to be able to tell which of the herd of children running throughout his house were related to him. I'd be hollering, "One child, male, second bedroom, don't recognize him, hasn't had dinner!" BF would holler back, "So feed him!"

Anyhow, last night we had only four children from BF's contingent, plus my two for a total of six. But at various points, it felt like more. At points it felt like we were juvenile correction officers providing an outing for the hardcore cases. Burned-out corrections officers, too - more interested in getting off-shift and taking our damn gun belts off. The kids ran wild.

Let's put a fine point on this: HIS kids ran wild. Mine pretty much sat, in a mix of horror and admiration. Titillated, they were. They know this about BF's kids, but they haven't seen them in a while. They're fascinated by hearing "fuck" out of other kids' mouths at the dinner table, by watching the kids wrestle and throw food and turn over benches. They almost seem to want to join in, but they don't want to lose their position of observing and making snotty comments to me later about poor behavior, either.

My two hellions looked almost prudish, sitting there.

BF holds that his children are "loving life", and I'd agree with that. They're also triggering every repressive repressed tight-ass instinct that I have, but that would be MY problem, wouldn't it? I don't HAVE to go out with them. I don't HAVE to take my kids over there for sleepovers when I know no one goes to bed before one a.m.

After dinner and a trip to Baskin Robbins for an ice cream (kids were left free to order what they wanted - mine ordered regular cones and sat to eat them outside; his ordered the giant ones and dropped them in the dirt while horsing around or threw them away half-eaten) the girls and I wandered through Safeway to pick up a few grocery items. Older Daughter came up with a few keen observations: "BF's kids fight and get hurt, but then they just cry and get over it and start playing again." "When they told those stories about Billy, he didn't get embarrassed, he thought it was funny."

Resilient. BF's kids are resilient. I don't tell funny stories about my kids in front of them (and you must know how much it costs me NOT to, because they are very funny kids) because it embarrasses them and makes them angry. When they play and get hurt, they have sulks and major drama. They think BF's kids play too rough and so do I. My kids are sensitive and considerate and generally mannerly or at least bearably self-contained, but I am not at all sure they're resilient. And resilience would be a nice thing to have in one's pocket, for later life.

So I do take them for the sleepovers, even though BF's house is loud crazy chaos that goes on way too late. Even though they will watch things on the bedroom TV's that I won't have in MY house, even though they have learned they have to push in to get enough to eat before everyone else snatches it all, even though they sometimes get overwhelmed and retreat to a quiet corner of the house to get a rest. There are other parts of the world besides our relatively quiet female household. There are other ways of living. There are places where you have to look after your own feelings and no one will chase you down to talk you into coming back to play - you have to make up your own mind. And these places aren't rare.

I thanked my kids for their behavior, at dinner and after. Thanked them for not ordering more ice cream than they knew they could eat, for not turning over benches or chairs, for saying courteous thanks to BF for dinner. I'm still an advocate of civilization. Can't help it; I think a small amount of repression makes living in the world more pleasant.

But I do wish I could lay my hands on some of that resilience.

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