I think my sense of humor has been ruined by too much time spent with college children. Yes, children. They are shallow and self absorbed and don't know anything and haven't done anything and think they are interesting enough to be tracking their every move on social networks and insecure about everything. Mind you, I'm talking about college kids I actually like. Smart humor is lost on them. Puns are unintelligible. The games they play are mind numbing and they don't think about anything at all. Except of course how insecure they are and how they can't ever let anyone know that they are not exactly as good and smart and secure as they perceive everyone else to be. It's exhausting.
My Reference teacher in Library School told us that everyone gets only 3 exclamation points at birth, so use them wisely. I wonder if the excessive use of exclamation points to soften the essential flatness of electronic communication has dulled the excitement sensors of our current time and it is more noticeable in the young either because they have used email and texting for a greater percentage of their lives or because they have had fewer actual experiences to offset the hectic happy-face-ness of it or if those are the same thing.
Poor Bumble Bean. On the one hand he has a speech delay compared to normal children his age in this country. On the other hand his parents actively reject most of the normal experiences that define other normal children. There really never was any chance that he was going to be normal.
He taught himself to read when he was three. That's not normal. But not something that needs intervention.
He is over four feet tall and not yet five years old. That's not normal. Also something that requires no intervention. (If this changes, I wonder if we would be encouraged to starve him or shave off his toes or make him sleep in a box? For his own good you understand. He needs to be average.)
He is happy and a boy and four years old. That's not normal. Interesting and should only be tampered with to make him like other children. Not really intervention, just pruning.
He enjoys himself and does not show any signs of experiencing himself as flawed. That's not normal. Every kid needs to experience himself as flawed. How else will he develop the really acute crisis of self assurance when he gets to college? How will he ever learn the crucial skill of sitting through boring lectures at school? He needs that skill to endure a life of meaningless and self-unfulling work so he can have whatever the fashionable mid-life crisis is.
See what I mean about my sense of humor?
Holidays are coming up and that means family. Not so much that family will be around as that family will intrude and tetchiness will ensue. There's the whole question of gifts and travel. There's the whole question of getting together and enduring each other's company. The early part of this month marks the beginning of the 3rd year of family rupture. First there was the hugely hubristic, overbearing and frankly not very intelligent husband of the cousin who started a fiasco based upon his credentials as an Occupational Therapist. Occupational Therapists are not qualified to hold opinions about diagnosis. No therapist ever is allowed to treat someone without consent. He did. See the not-very-intelligent bit above.
Close on the heels of that, the Big Bad Bean, the Bumble Bean and I went to spend the first ever holiday with my siblings and their families. Hmm. Not so bad for me or the Bumble, but excruciating for Big Bad. Then Christmas with recriminations and the Big Bad Bean expected to be the grown-up and make everything right with the cousin's husband (even though no part of it was Big Bad's doing) since no one had high expectations of the cousin's husband: his intelligence, his ability to be decent human being, his ability to be rational, his ability to shut the f__k up to protect life and limb.
Ringing in the new year with the aunts nagging and worrying and giving advice. Summer came and went, no family. Another holiday season, gifts exchanged, no attendance necessary. More lines drawn in the sand. Family members taking sides without talking. It turns out the sand was wet concrete. The lines are now step-on-a-crack, break-your-mother's-back.
My brother's 40th birthday. The Big Bad Bean stays away. After that party a family meeting is convened without me. Concerns are aired. A memo is drafted. I get a letter. I assume they are concerned about the Bumble Bean's other-than-normal development. Not true. It turns out they think he's fine. They think we are lousy parents. My sister asks if this offends me. As I write this, I think "strange but true, it doesn't."
As a life-long holder of less-than-flattering opinions of most of the people in the world and judging them for those same opinions, I am relieved. If I give myself leave to behave this way in my head, then I can be generous and permit them the same privilege. In return, I think "Duh. Obviously our goals for the Bumble don't include him sleeping with us in diapers when he gets to college age."
Though if he does that may catch him up with his normal peers in terms of crippling self doubt and anxiety.
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