Doin' It For The Kids

One of the scariest things about having children is that they’re a blank slate and I, their mother, am a pen filled with indelible ink-

What’s that? Ink isn’t used on a slate, and slates are meant to be wiped clean and written on over and over again until cracked over the head of Gilbert Blythe for calling Anne ‘carrots’? Hang on, let me try again:

Children are sponges, equally capable of soaking up the milk of human kindness or the liquid faeces of the scum of humanity alike…no, wait! Children are the harshest mirrors, reflecting not our superficial appearance, but the juicy pimples on our character and conduct…

Ugh, I give up. You know what I mean; if I’m not careful, my children are going to end up the kind of slate that’s covered in swear words, pornographic doodles, and chemical formulas for illicit substances.

Bearing this in mind, I try to conceal from them the kinds of behaviour I don’t want them to emulate, and attempt not to burden their fragile developing personalities with my own psychological baggage. Obviously Mr. Lonie and I confine our Bacchanalian orgies with people we meet online at keyparties.com to times when the ten-year-old girl next door is available to baby-sit; and when the children are within earshot I spell out (instead of pronouncing) the obscenities I scream at random passers-by I don’t like the look of, but something I really struggle with is keeping my fears and phobias repressed deep inside where they can manifest at a more convenient time as something less traumatic for the children to witness, such as severe facial tics or trichotillomania.

Maybe if I were scared of unicorns or dodos or space aliens I might be more successful, seeing as we don’t get many of them around here (and even the anal probes aren’t so bad after the first two or three abductions), but unfortunately it’s spiders and cockroaches, with their creeping and scuttling and insinuating themselves into every nook and cranny in the house in order to leap out at me with fangs bared and antennae waving menacingly, that I loathe and fear. I know there are all sorts of techniques to combat such fears, but my preferred method of spraying DDT from crop dusters is frowned upon these days, just because a few scientists started bleating about cancer and birth defects and untold effects on the ecosystem (which sounds like namby-pamby bug-loving nonsense to me).

So I’m forced to suffer the iniquities of a society biased against people who simply want to eliminate all insect and arachnid life within fifty metres of their house. I must fight every natural inclination and actually approach said creatures of hell’s outhouse, and touch them with something less buffering than a ten-foot barge-pole, in order to eject them from my home. What’s more, in the interests of preserving my children’s freedom to cultivate their own bugbears without undue influence, I have to do all this with as much of a psychotically indifferent façade as I can muster, while inside I am screaming and quaking and cursing Mr. Lonie for his absence and his neglect of this basic husbandly duty.

Helping matters still less is the discomfiting realisation that, as I age, what started out as normal dislikes and aversions are amplifying into irrational, paralysing terrors. It seems that I’m doomed to end my days as a twitchy mental patient who can’t even look at the Dewey Decimal number of a book containing a reference to another book with a picture of a cockroach in it, without curling into a foetal ball and clutching to my chest the cans of bug spray I keep holstered on my hips. Death will come for me not with a scythe, but a fake tarantula dangling on a string, and as the massive heart attack sends me shuffling off this mortal coil his dry wheezy laughter will be the last thing I hear.

Nevertheless, I am, as I said, more scared of damaging forever the impressionable young minds of my children with my exaggerated dread (children are malleable clay and I am the potter…?). I’d hate to see them suffer the same unnecessary apprehensions I do, and be reduced to a whimpering mass of non-functionality every time an objectionable creepy-crawly crosses their path.

And besides, if I manipulate them just right, I’ll always have someone around to get rid of that cockroach for me.