Subscription
Enter your e-mail address to receive this newspaper column each weekday.
My strict privacy policy will keep your email address 100% safe and secure.
-
Boundaries
-
The craziness and joy of bringing up children while flying solo….
30 Jan 2007 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
If I were endowed with the power to award gold medals, mothers who stay at home with their young children day after day would be decorated for their bravery. Two days after the curtain closed on my son’s delightful Christmas pageant, and we took our children home for the holidays, I was already fried.
To be honest, it’s finally happened. I’ve gone over the top. Lost it. My entire identity has been dragged through the transforming challenge of sharing the holidays with a 3-year-old. Hook, line and sinker; nose ring; ball and chain — choose whichever metaphor gives you a picture of my being dragged hopelessly through scatterings of toys, buried under mounds of paper, lying on a bed of Legos, covered with dog hair, exhausted and muttering, “Oh where, Oh where has my adulthood gone. Oh where, Oh where can it be?”
These holidays, I’ve done everything I found ridiculous and amusing about other parents when I was a childless observer. For instance, I drove to four Walgreen drugstores covering a radius of about 20 miles from our home in search of a single $3 whoopee cushion, which, on delivery to my son’s grateful 4-year-old friend, burst immediately in their unified search of the ultimate whoop.
All the while, in an attempt to stretch my mind, I’ve been forming a list of the Most Ridiculous Things Adults Say to 3-year-olds. They include “Wait,” “Keep that on the table,” “Keep your shirt clean,” “Put the dog down,” “Lie still,” “Tomorrow,” “Where are your socks?” “Let me show you how to do that,” “Put the food in your mouth,” and “Don’t jump.”
Today, to illustrate just how far off the rails I have gone, I drove 9.5 miles for the sole purpose of picking up two, 2-inch plastic medieval men (one red, one blue) my son left at a Christmas party. Without them he will not launch the plastic bomb from his Lincoln Log castle to bomb the living room that has been perpetually bombed every day since the good reindeers delivered Santa to our rooftop.
Have you noticed that Legos, Lincoln Logs, jigsaw puzzles, Monopoly – the games and toys with lots and lots of pieces – require only the briefest little tug to open the box and you are knee-deep in a colorful mess of stuff? Toys with limited potential to be strewn afar, like Buzz Lightyear, are straddled into multiple packaging, twisted secure, limb by limb with wire, taped and screwed into box within box requiring at least a hammer, chisel and power saw to extricate them for play.
About music and videos: How many times can a 3-year-old watch Toy Story? There is no limit. How many times can he want to hear the Bananas in Pajamas sing about walking down the stairs? There is no limit. How many times can a 3-year-old want to jump off the dresser, onto the bed, onto the floor while shouting, “From here to infinity and beyond”? There is no limit.
I do have limits. There’s a limit to how much stuff I will pick up. This week, I have picked up stuff from morning to night. I pick up the same stuff every day, several times. I’ve packed and repacked drawers my son has, for no reason at all, unpacked.
Yesterday, I picked Legos out of the heating duct, the garbage disposal, the upstairs and downstairs toilets, the blender, the piano, the potted plants, the teapot, the dishwasher, the freezer and the VCR. As evidence of my personal growth, I can retrieve stuff using my bare hands out of toilets, sinks and sewers. These are places I could not even look in when I was a child without feeling squeamish. Now I go right ahead, put my hands in without holding my nose, turning my head or closing my eyes.
I’m holidayed out. I’m done. If my son’s preschool teacher wonders why I am so glad to see her, it’s because I have seen the slow process of my encroaching craziness. I have become irrational, unreasonable, overly emotional, irritable and illogical simply through the tiresome process of removing Legos, Logs and Lightyear from every imaginable, inconvenient place in our universe and I am ready to send my son back to school so I can build the castle, load its cannon with real fire power, aim it at Buzz, and the ridiculous singing, dancing bananas and be rid of them, once and for all.
-
Seven things healthy parents know about teenagers…
26 Jan 2007 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
My teenager —
1. …appears more invested building peer rather than parent relationships. I expect this. Healthy interdependence will not occur if separations are not practiced within primary relationships.
2. … faces change, opportunities, and forms of seduction I never faced. I expect some relational turbulence, questioning of values as my child finds appropriate footing in the adult world.
3. … appears more grown-up than my child is, so sometimes I will get the cold shoulder from a know-it-all. I’ll be kind and forthright when occurs. I will do all I can to avoid embarrassing my child to win control.
4. … may embrace friends other than those I would choose. I will welcome people until there is cause not to. When this happens I will be honest to avoid unnecessary unpleasantness.
5. … is a master of non-verbal communication so I will not to over-interpret what I see. I will ask for verbal clarification when necessary.
6. … wants a parent, not a buddy. My child wants to be cared for, and not have to care for me.
7. … probably feels uncomfortable talking with me about intimate matters. I will not allow discomfort to restrain me from being an involved parent regarding difficult matters.
-
My adult children do not help at home or want to get ahead…
18 Jan 2007 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
“I am a single mother of two (23 and 21). They are good kids but my problem is that I cannot get them to help around the house and they are unmotivated to get ahead in life. They are both in very causal jobs. I have paid for them both to do correspondence studies but cannot get them to study. My son works in a video shop. He ends up in the bar after work until all hours of the morning. My daughter barely leaves the house but to go to work. When I try and communicate they will not talk. What can I do?”
You are working too hard. It appears you are more committed to their futures than your adult children are.
Unless there are substantial unstated mental health issues, I’d suggest you give them a week or two to make substantial changes to their attitudes and level of productivity – or ship them out.
In the long term, I think it better that you clear your comfortable nest of lazy adults who will not contribute to its costs and care. As tough as it sounds – let them live lazy lives elsewhere.
They will thank you when they grow up.
-
To the so-called friend…
17 Jan 2007 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
“To the so-called “friend” (You and Me, January 15, 2007) who wants to tell my husband about my ‘affair’ all I can say is that you are not friend enough to know the facts. You are an acquaintance but I would not describe you as my friend.
“To the outside world we are getting divorced because an illness. The truth is far harder to accept and far harder for me to have lived through. I have been controlled and manipulated to the point where I have lost my own identity and self worth. I was forbidden from joining groups or societies that shared my interests, forbidden from joining a church group, forbidden from joining a gym or running club or any exercise group, forbidden from seeing my friends or going out alone.
“You have no idea of the anguish, misery and heartache I have lived through because I have never considered you friend enough to know the intimate details. The small things I have let slip to you about my unhappiness resulted in condemnation from you, and no sympathy, empathy or support. My true friends were there when I needed them and as such know the truth.” (Letter shortened)
-
The trials of parenting…..
16 Jan 2007 by Rod Smith / 2 Comments
Parenting is no cakewalk. My children (8 and 4) are at an age where it seems everything is a battle of wills. If they are not fighting with each other over who is sitting in whose space at the table, or fighting over one toy that neither has noticed for months until the other happens to casually pick it up, they are debating me over the necessity of cleaning their teeth or picking up clothes.
But these are the passing phases on their unique journeys toward necessary self-definition – and it is my continual challenge to see the larger picture.
I am challenged, on a daily basis, to speak well of others, to be honorable to my word (as far as it is possible) and to guard the words that come out of my mouth.
Clearly, as the primary adult in their lives, I am called upon to show them how adults ought to behave, how adults ought to resolve conflict, be forgiving, be kind and generous.
Fighting over a toy in the back of the car, will, I hope, give them fond memories of these formative years. Watching me face the daily grind of living an adult life, will, I hope, impart to them invaluable tools for successful futures.
-
-
-
Get Rod on FaceBook and/or Twitter
-
Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
-
Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
-
Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
-
Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
-
Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper.
Life inside the Smith household
-