“We Need to Talk About Kevin’s Ability to Read and Process Necessary Information”
Do other pregnant women (and probably expectant fathers) wake up at night completely horrified by the sheer weight of data about the universe that their kids will have to somehow figure out? The really, really stupid stuff? Like, “this is what you should do if you back up a toilet at someone else’s house,” and “you should smoke just a little bit from time to time, so you don’t look like an idiot when you have one while drunk at a party” and “the McDonald’s ATMs in Vegas only charge a dollar, versus, like, five dollars in the casino.”
I was flipping through a book a couple of years back in which a woman said “blah blah represents blah blah” to her kid, and her friend said, “represents is too hard a word, you should say stands for,” and the first woman was all “what makes you think that’s actually easier? The kid doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t get stands for, it’s all blah blah Ginger blah blah like that Far Side cartoon until it suddenly makes sense.”
Which I always liked, but now I’m picturing my kid as Jodie Foster in Nell, you know? Making me whoever the dude in Nell was, or, alternatively, making me the WATER WET WATER teacher from The Miracle Worker.
And then, right, there’s the careful balancing act between “ensure my child shares her mother’s love of literature” and “strong desire that my child actually winds up becoming a theoretical condensed matter physicist like her dad,” because I feel terrible whenever I see articles by Linda Hirshman about how feminism died because my education chiefly prepared me to a) be superficially entertaining at cocktail parties, and b) enjoy motion picture adaptations of eighteenth century novels on a slightly deeper level than people who can actually add and subtract without using their fingers.
And then there’s “my kid is totally going to become a vegan for a period of time, like I was, in college, and she’s going to say if you love animals so much, how can you participate in their wanton, senseless slaughter? and send me all these articles, and I’m going to have to explain that, sometimes, when you’re a grown-up, you just don’t care about things anymore, and are perfectly content to live with moral inconsistency in a way that seems insane and vapid to you as a college student, and probably actually is.”
And what about “can we actually raise children in Utah, or, in our current political climate, is that like raising kids in that weird rabbit warren from Watership Down where everyone is secretly participating in a campaign of silence about being raised for meat because 90% of them will just have super-easy lives and not get caught in the snare?”
And then you ask your excellent mother how SHE SLEPT AT NIGHT, WITH THESE CONCERNS, and she reveals that she smoked a lot of weed on all those weekends she went to her friend’s cottage, and that our favorite game as children was finding a handful of pennies she would bury in the sandbox at the playground. And, truth time, she would bury the exact same handful of pennies every time, because we had the attention span of gnats and never noticed.
And that seems like something you could handle.
Photo via Flickr