Cleaning Up My Act for the Kids
As I dithered about last month, our oldest started kindergarten this year at our parish Catholic school. We love it and Charlie's having a great start to the school year. But I'm new to this big kid in school gig, and while my child has graduated to wearing the uniform and practicing phonics and Spanish and more, I have yet to graduate to respectable, school mother behavior:
Today I found myself yelling across the parking lot at pickup to a friend that my main man was Kendall Jackson, and making jokes about calling a hit man. I'm sure the Sisters that teach my child are so proud.
Now of course I was joking, but as I pulled out of the lot, it hit me that my fellow parents might not be so sure. Or very amused if their middle school aged tweens and other impressionable children overheard.
On so many levels, this is clearly not model mama behavior. And believe me, I'm capable of a lot worse.
I've been used to cracking jokes around preschoolers oblivious to any quip that doesn't have "toot" or "butt" as the punchline, but now I'm the mom of an intelligent child that's old enough to absorb increasingly mature humor. And now, more so than when he was hanging off me in a Bjorn and all that mattered was that privately I acted as his loving Mommy Mine, my behavior with others has an impact on him socially.
Surprisingly, I don't worry about the consequences of my activity online impacting either of my kids. I don't blog/write about their personal lives very frequently, and I do so obliquely in forums like here at DC Metro Moms, where the audience is adult parents seeking first-person musings like this. I believe that you guys, the readers and fellow contributors, are my comrades-in-arms in the trenches of childrearing. So much of all our writing and comments on each others pieces is of the tone that this corner of the web is a place where we can freely admit that parenting is tough and let our hair down a little. Any whistling in the dark we do about our kids is with the knowledge that we'll be bringing a glass of water with a kiss and making sure the nightlight's burning.
But it's different if you have no idea why that crazy woman is hooting about booze and murder out the window of her minivan in the shadow of a cross...the same woman who might be in charge of supervising your own child during lunch duty. We're not living in the Ya Ya Sisterhood - this is real life, and there really are crazy kooks out there with violence issues and people struggling with alcohol addiction. When parents flap their yaps around kids, they should be speaking like parents.
Now, I totally get that no one cares what other people are doing. We're all too engrossed in our own hectic lives. But it's my blog post and I'll obsess if I want to. And I'd hate if my irreverence effected my kid in some way or called into question my dedication to responsible parenting.
Thank God (and I'm not taking His name in vain, I'm really thanking him) that I have Devra/Aviva and Michelle's books to help me navigate these school year social and guilt issues, as well as the fellow writers here on the SV Moms sites. And thank God for my children. Yet again, they're the impetus for my improving of my behavior.
So without losing my sense of self, or sense of humor, I'm committing to parking lot pick-up conversation topics like the weather, recipes and school activities. And I will try my best to think before I speak. It's only taken me 34 years.
Original DC Metro Moms blog post.
Jessica prefers to keep her cringe-worthy words in formats she can edit later at A Parent in Silver Spring and elsewhere.
Photo courtesy Flickr user bobster via a Creative Commons license.
