On Losing Your Cool(ness)

My parents are fond of reminiscing about their own parents, though "reminiscing" might be too kind a term.  My parents admit that they had great childhoods with loving parents who raised them well, but there seems to be no end to the inside jokes, the stories, the anecdotes that crack them up. 

There was the time my northern-bred grandmother walked into a men's restroom while on vacation in New Orleans, commenting afterward that they "sure have funny toilets in the south."  The time my grandfather, thoroughly exasperated by my grandmother's flightiness, told her, "You don't even know you're alive."  My mild-mannered grandfather's fondness for calling people he didn't like "skunks," the worst thing he ever called anyone.  And so on and so on.  Not a situation in present-day doesn't remind my parents of something hilarious said or done by their own parents.  Three out of four of my grandparents are deceased now, but the laughing at them -- and not with them -- has gone on for as long as I can remember, stemming way back to when they were all alive.    

When I was an old enough kid to catch on, it pissed me off.  "It's not nice to make fun of your parents!" I scolded my mom and dad. 

"We know, but it's funny.  They don't know we're talking about them," they reassured me.  "You'll understand when you're older." 

"What if my brother and I made fun of you guys like that?"  I countered.

"Please," they rationalized.  "What could you possibly make fun of us about?"

Oh, mom and dad.  You have no idea. 

My parents are wonderful people.  They're intelligent, loving, and kind, but there is an endless supply of things they do that crack us up, and probably not in a way they would find flattering.  Whenever my brother and I get together with our spouses, inevitably, something will come up that reminds us of something hilarious my parents said or did.

"Remember the time Dad couldn't find the restaurant we were taking mom to dinner to for her birthday, and decided that he'd had it, and drove us all back home?"

"How about the time Mom told me she was having a medical procedure, and when I asked about it, she told me, with no trace of irony in her voice, 'Have you ever heard of a colonoscopy?'"

And so on and so on.

This has got me wondering lately: at which point do you cease to become off-limits to your kids?  When do your kids start laughing at you, not with you?

My husband and I are pretty cool, in my opinion (he might disagree).  We're witty, abreast of pop culture, self-deprecating -- all the things that, in my mind, make us impervious to ridicule.  And yet.  There has to come a day when our kids will sit around with their own spouses, chortling over the dumb things we say or do.  It's one situation in which, truly, perception is reality.

I can only hope that in our case, our kids will decide not to laugh at us, but merely near us. 

An original DC Metro Moms post.  Diana regularly engages in ridicule of just about everyone she knows at Caffeinated.