I hope, one of these days, when the Human Genome Project has finished the important work of isolating the genes that cause breast cancer and heart disease and birth defects and whatnot, and perhaps treated themselves to a nice vacation afterwards (or at least a friendly little single-malt Scotch served in non-beaker glassware and a medium-rare porterhouse), that the fine minds involved in the mapping of human DNA then bend their attention to The Make-Up Gene. It’s too late for me, of course; born with the maquillage equivalent of Turner’s syndrome, I can neither apply make-up correctly nor force myself to give a shit about learning how. I’ve never had the tools. But maybe one day I’ll have a daughter, and it’s my wish that modern science come up with a way to help her. I proceeded through the seventh grade looking as though Tammy Faye Bakker and Debbie Harry had taken massive doses of horse tranquilizer and attacked me with Cray-Pas, but you want better things for your kids, you know?

When I say I don’t know how to put on make-up, I mean it. I don’t know how to put on make-up. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I do know that it’s intended for my face and not my elbow. I know that eye shadow goes on my eyes, and that lipstick goes on my lips, but seriously, if a sympathetic marketing type hadn’t named them “eye shadow” and “lipstick,” I’d have gone to that first sixth-grade mixer sporting awfully pouty ears indeed. Because, let me tell you, not knowing the second thing about how to apply make-up never for one second stopped me from applying it anyway.

I’ve always liked make-up, at least in theory. Well, maybe “liked” isn’t the right word — “revered,” maybe. It seemed grown-up, the kind of grown-up thing you whined and begged to try but then felt relieved you wouldn’t get stuck doing all the time, like helping Ma with dinner. But that’s exactly the kind of thing you get obsessed with as a kid, and like a lot of little girls do, I thought of make-up as a wonderful mystery full of secrets not mine to know. My friends and I prowled through our mothers’ cabinets and drawers like cat burglars, and when we found the make-up stash — always carefully hidden for exactly that reason, but never quite carefully enough, because adults never seem to understand that nothing short of a concrete-reinforced safe and motion sensors will keep pre-adolescent children from finding, looking at, and touching their shit, so let me take the opportunity here to clue the parents of the world in on a few basic facts. Back of the drawer? Not going to get it done. Under the mattress? Please — first place they looked. “High up”? Kids climb, you know. Climb like monkeys, kids do. If you don’t want them reading the Erica Jong or cracking open your grandfather’s pocket watch to see how it runs or pouring Coco all over each other in a fit of sinus-impacted abandon, you have to pack that shit up, drive it two towns over, put it in a safety deposit box, and store the key inside one of your vital organs, because maybe you think you’ve hidden that shit, and maybe no other adult could begin to find it, and maybe you yourself don’t remember where you put it, but if you’ve got a kid and your kid’s got a pulse, said kid is going to find said shit, guaranteed, so you can get cute and try to hide your eyelash curler in a can of paint, but it ain’t gonna work. Hi, Ma. Ever wonder how those cookie crumbs got stuck in the spine of Wifey? Uh huh. Hi. The prosecution rests.

And — okay, I fully intended to write an essay on make-up and how much like a cracked-out Velvet Goldmine extra I have often looked while wearing it, but it’s going to have to wait, because after all these years, I still don’t understand the way our parents treated us. I don’t mean rules about TV-watching or shoes on the bed or any of that stuff, and I certainly don’t mean that our parents treated us badly. My parents treated us fine — better than we deserved, probably. But my parents, like almost every other parent I came in contact with over the course of my childhood, seemed to have no memory of their own childhoods, at least in relation to us at the time — sure, they could remember schools they went to and fights they had with their siblings and how much a Coke cost Back Then. They didn’t have amnesia. But…see above. My mother’s idea of “hiding” a book she didn’t want me reading? Turning the book around so the pages faced out and I couldn’t read the spine. Did she think that would work? Because it did work, if by “work” you mean “told me exactly which books had dirty parts and prompted me to pull them out and skim them when she went to the grocery store, then put them back and look innocently engrossed in a Nancy Drew upon her return.”

Don’t get me wrong — my mother is no dummy, and I probably don’t have to take my shoes off to count the things I got away with as a kid. But I can’t believe my parents never went through the grown-ups’ stuff as kids. I anticipate an email momentarily, arguing that point rather strenuously, but that doesn’t mean I’ll buy it, because kids have done the same crap since before dirt got invented. Not bad kids or mean kids or snotty kids, either — all kids. Kids snoop. Kids pry. Kids listen in on the extension, too, oh yes they do — uh huh. “Not your kids.” Tell me, if little Madison isn’t eavesdropping on your ass, how come can you hear the TV in the basement so clearly? Because it’s not turned up that loud. Yep. That’s right. No, you would not “hear her breathing.” She knows how to breathe through her mouth so you won’t know she’s there. You may hear a faint scritching sound as she writes down a few of the names you called the other carpool mom, because she’s going to look them up in the dictionary later and pretend it’s “for school,” but you won’t hear any breathing. She’s good. Know how she got so good? Because she started doing it two years ago, and you didn’t know a damn thing about it until now.

What, did you just get here? Because you know you did that shit as a kid. Kids loooooove the phone. Kids want to maaaaaarry the phone. Kids love getting to dial Grandma on Sundays long-distance, kids love answering all officiously loudly like they learned in school (“BUNTING RESIDENCE MAY I ASK WHO’S CALLING PLEASE HOLD ON I’LL GET HER [clunk] MOOOOOOOOOM PHOOOOOOOOONE,”), kids love picking up the receiver and playing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” with the buttons, but most of all, kids love talking on the phone. Sadly, before a certain age, nobody calls kids. Nobody calls kids because nothing happens to kids that bears rehashing over the phone. In fact, nothing much happens to kids at all, at least not where I grew up — you went to school, you played some four-square, you told your little brother to quit touching your Barbies or you’d step on him, you went to bed. Not much going on there, right? So kids have to live vicariously through you, and listening in on your phone calls is the perfect solution. They get to caress the telephonic device they love so completely, and they get to hear a bunch of shit they don’t understand but they know it’s bad because you said “goddamn” and there’s no greater thrill in the world. And, as I said before, that’s part of the reason the thought of raising a child gives me a chill. I know I’ll never have another private conversation again in my life, at least not until the kid turns thirteen and gets her own line. My mother didn’t. She thought she did, but she didn’t. Did she know? Could she hear me? I don’t think so; she would have told me to get off the line, but I got caught maybe once in the dozens of conversations I breathed so silently through, so I have no choice but to think that she really believed yelling “okay, HANG IT UP” would work. But it so doesn’t.

(And on that note…”but I heard it click!” Of course you did. Doesn’t mean she didn’t pick it up again. Your kid may look short and well-behaved, but make no mistake — she’s a ninja.)

Just to review: Your kid is wily. You may have forgotten your own wiliness, but I assure you, the instant you leave the house, it’s You Only Live Twice in every drawer in your bedroom. Okay, let’s move on.

Of course, sometimes kids get busted, and it’s the questions parents asked post-bust that really made me think they’d undergone some sort of selective brain wipe regarding their own kid-ly doings. I had no trouble understanding why they got mad, in most cases — I’d disobeyed them or broken something, usually. Not a big mystery. But I never got the interrogation, and I still don’t get it. Teachers would do it, too, and I didn’t get that either.

Let’s start with “why.” I cannot imagine asking my own child why he or she fucked shit up, and I don’t know why my parents bothered. First of all, the “why” is usually so obvious as to verge on the ridiculous (and as a subset of that — when you append a “when I specifically told you not to” to the “why”? Come on, folks. It’s right there in front of you). Second of all, who cares why? The kid did something she shouldn’t have. Punish her in a way that makes it stick and get on with your lives, because here’s the third point — what parent in the history of humankind has ever heard the answer to “why” and felt satisfied by it? Yeah, “that one guy in Great Falls.” Nice try. It just doesn’t happen. I mean, clearly, if she’s blowing up neighborhood pets, you should get to the bottom of that posthaste, but otherwise, why would you even ask, except to pass the time? Seriously. “So why did you go to New Providence on your bike, crossing the following seven busy streets which I’d told you to avoid on pain of death and no Dukes of Hazzard for one month? …I see. Lots of hills then, eh what?”

My parents didn’t seem to remember that at all, that feeling of facing their own parents helplessly and casting about for a reason while simultaneously thinking, “What do they mean, ‘Why’? What ‘why’? I just did it, okay? I’m nine, that’s ‘why.'” Let’s take as an example the time I got a stamp set for Christmas (rubber stamps, not philately stamps). The stamps didn’t take quite enough ink for my taste if I just pressed on them, so I put the inkpad on the floor of my room, put the stamp on the inkpad, put the “C-Ch” volume of the Britannica on top of the stamp, and put myself on top of the Britannica and stood there for a few minutes. Predictably, the inkpad overflowed and left a large blue stain on the pink carpeting of my room. Now, that’s not the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard, but it would make the weekly highlight reel, right? Sure. But it’s not like I just dumped the ink onto the floor and whistled out of the room all rebel without a cause or anything. I had a stupid reason for doing it, but I did have a reason. So my mother finds the stain (duh — it’s tough to cover Des Moines with dirty shirts), flips out (duh again), and wants to know why on earth I would do that. Um. Duh.

Now, go back and reread the previous paragraph. The why is, in the end, fairly obvious. I wanted the stamp to work better. Good why, bad execution. Moving on to the second point, we see that it doesn’t really matter why in the second place; the rug is stained, and the staining is my fault. So, what to do as my mom, then — ask why? Or get on with the business of grounding me, preferably by putting a lien on my allowance to pay for a cleaning and locking up the stamp set until I turn thirty? I’ve got to go with Door #2 here. If memory serves, I told Ma the why and she rolled her eyes so hard she fell over. What’s the point?

Don’t misunderstand me. When a kid screws up, the parents should explain why it’s a screw-up so that she grows up with a moral compass, rules exist for her safety, destruction of property is bad, so on and so forth. A short course entitled “That Ain’t How Ink Transfer Works, Short Bus” would have done me good, I think. But I don’t think parents remember that, a lot of times, there isn’t a why. There isn’t a why that translates to the adult world, at least, and often there isn’t a why at all. Why did Agent Weiss and I dress Mr. Stupidhead up as a girl, call him “Anne,” and send him around the block in an old nightie and a hair bow? Well, why the hell not? The boy’s three, lady — if you want him to get postmodern about gender roles, step aside and let us work. Why did I ride my bike to New Providence, anyway? Uh…I didn’t set out to. We just rode along for a while and talked about our gym teachers and how much we hate them, and then we got lost, and then we found ourselves but we saw a sweet coasting hill, and the next thing I know you’ve pulled up next to us in the station wagon and told us in that gritty your-ass-is-grass voice to put our bikes in the back NOW and I can’t go to Reine’s sleepover next week. Why did I send my Barbies into a storm drain? The rain made a river…thing, on the street, and it looked cool, and we got bored with using twigs. I don’t know — why would you do it?

Do parents undergo a biological transformation upon the birth of the child that renders them unable to recall these things? Do they have a beta blocker that kicks in and makes them forget how things work for kids? Maybe you need that, to become a parent. Maybe you need to forget all that stuff or you’ll get bogged down and over-empathetic and say things like “heh heh” when you should say things like “hey, stop!” instead. But I don’t know if I’d want to forget what it’s like to think like a kid, to poke around and jump on beds and do stupid shit just because it’s there for the doing. It’s a parent’s job to discourage that kind of jazz-improv stupidity, I suspect, primarily to prevent the kid from getting killed, but I don’t know if I’d run the game that way. I can think of a dozen other reasons I shouldn’t have the care of a child entrusted to me, starting with the fact that I can’t really talk to kids because we’ve never seen the same movies, and even when the shorties have seen Interiors, they always think it’s overrated, and then of course there’s the smoking and the driving well over the speed limit and the fact that I’d take them to get the tattoos as long as they promised not to wimp out with any of that little-heart-over-the-boob shit, but I think it mostly comes down to the fact that kids and I think too much alike. I’d know they’d gone through my sweater drawer looking for menthols, and they’d know I’d know, and they’d turn into the kinds of kids who call me “Sarah” instead of “Mom” and don’t go to college and get more famous than me, all because I helped them build a fulcrum instead of asking them why they wanted to slingshot a bowling ball over the house.

Wow, how’d we get here?

August 20, 2002

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