Published Tuesday, April 08, 2008 1:29 PM
Updated Tuesday, April 08, 2008 1:30 PM
The Baileys
Uncool parent rushes in her angel’s worldI just came face-to-face with a new reality at a seven-year-old boy’s birthday party. During the unwrapping of the gifts, the feted child reached into a gift bag and pulled out a DVD of a Marvel Comic. “Iron Man!” the boy’s mother delighted. You know what happened next.
Watching ninety-eight percent of the adults in the room bob their heads while sputtering, “Dunh, dunh, dunh dunh dunh…” it became painfully clear that we all had reached a new milestone. While at one time we had simply been parents, we now had crossed the threshold of being uncool parents who think they’re cool. Actually, I’m sure we crossed it some time ago, but now some of us have children whose faces communicate that reality to us with a disgusted corner-of-the-mouth lift. But even if I didn’t have a snarley-mouthed child, the mirror of the birthday boy’s dad playing air guitar to a chorus of aging, groaning dolts reflected my own teenage struggle to be respectful to my mother when she would me ask if I thought something was “cool.” Um, yeah, Mom.
The birthday party was a wake-up call that had me searching through the backlogs of recent memory for further evidence of whether or not I was a cool adult. Let’s see… there was the day last week when I went to a friend’s house to sip tea on her patio while a mess of kids played baseball in the backyard. There were a few middle school boys, and they had a CD player on the table which played maybe four songs in endless rotation. “I know what will be fun,” I thought, and I ran to get some CD’s from my minivan. The kids gave me the furrowed brow when I began messing with the CD player, but I assured them that they’d “love what I put in.” Then from the speakers came the art-school synthesizers of the Talking Heads. And it was badly scratched. I got only a couple of mouth-lifts before the oldest kid suggested they play basketball in the driveway.
“Talking Heads were never cool, Tara, unless you edited the literary magazine,” Jim later told me.
“But I edited the literar…oh.”
Hmmm, what else? My darkest confession is that I like the newest Hannah Montana CD. Of course, the only reason I have it is that my daughters love the newest Hannah Montana CD. So as my oldest and I were driving to West Ashley for a doctor’s appointment, we listened to it a few times.
“Mom, could you please stop singing?”
“What, you don’t like my voice?” I’m so funny.
“No, it’s fine. It’s just that you’re ruining the song.”
Translation: I had dipped an uninvited toe into her world. Better I listen to NPR and have her complain about it than try to taint her fantasies of teen life by trying to participate in them. There would be no Best of Both Worlds.
It brings to mind the time my mother opened my bedroom door while I was playing “Black Dog” on my own air guitar. My subsequent humiliation stemmed from her discovery of my secret world in which I rocked. In my public world, I played the viola and used my manners. But I had a burning desire to shred a guitar and later discard it by smashing it all over the room. No one was supposed to know about it, least of all my mother. “Could you PLEASE KNOCK???!!!” I screamed, hiding my red face behind indignation.
Maybe what makes a parent actually cool is recognizing the dual worlds of aging parent and growing child and knowing when to enter each one. There are appointed times when the two worlds should collide: after school, bedtime, and the dinner table. But there are times when coming over unannounced can lead to fewer invitations. As a parent, nothing is sweeter than letting a child into my world, and I feel honored when a daughter invites me into snippets of hers. I just can’t force my way in – especially with an air guitar.
Jim and Tara Bailey are the parents of three young daughters. They share their stories in this space weekly.