Sentimentality

Our box of our kids' keepsakes

When you have kids, it’s easy to be sentimental. Sometimes, sentimentality is all you’ve got- when you’re frazzled and stressed and tired, sometimes you need the shot of joy that for a few fleeting moments make it all seem worth it.

A good summary for “sentimentalist” might be “pack rat.” We have a box in our bureau containing various crafts and artwork, projects from school and other bric-a-brac. This box is now a teetering, overflowing morass, threatening to take over the contents of the rest of the bureau.

The challenge is the sheer volume of materials that two young children can produce on a daily basis. Each day, school sends them home with several items each. Each item needs a review, and the review committee needs to answer the eternal question: “Am I supposed to keep this?” A marked up Letter D writing worksheet with “coby” (“Cody” with a backwards lower-case “d”) ham-fistedly written on the top. Am I supposed to keep that?

I am the force behind the pack-rattedness. I am the sentimentalist. Not knowing what will make us gushy down the road, my bias is to hold on to it. Pretty soon every snotty Kleenex, so long as one of my children wrote “I love you Daddy” on the back, becomes a keepsake worth holding onto. We can always re-evaluate after three months of seasoning and discard in the periodic purge. The trouble is, the purge never comes.

Andrea’s feeling is more aligned with Joseph Stalin’s: “Sentimentality is a sickness of dogs.” (Side note: I seem to quote Stalin a lot more since becoming a parent. What gives?) Andrea takes one glance at the send-home papers and shoves them directly into the trash. More than once this has gotten her in real trouble.

“Where’s my butterfly picture?” asks Chiara.

“I don’t know, did you look in your room?” says Andrea as she furiously digs through the refuse.

“It’s not in here!” Chiara starts to whine.

“I found it!” Andrea exclaims.

“Why is it so wrinkly?”

The kids, of course, angle hard in my direction. Never ask your kids if you should keep something. The answer is obvious. I remember once in summer camp in elementary school we had a “swap meet” where you brought items and sold them to the other kids, then used your profits to buy from others. My sister, probably 5 at the time, spent her little bit of money to buy back the fish guide that we had brought to sell. It was an adult book that she had never spent more than 30 seconds looking at, and I doubt ever looked at it again, but that’s sentimental value for you.

I know, or at least I’m desperately hoping, that there will come a time years hence when I will look back on these times with romantic hindsight. In some sense, I’m planning for it. But I never know which letter D worksheets hindsight will show to be of great value, and which will just be snotty Kleenex.

The King Needs an Heir

Prince William is really falling behind on his
Grand Theft Auto V playing time

A woman walks into a room and asks “do you want to have a baby?”

Here’s what is going through the man’s mind: Yes, of course I want a baby. The King needs an heir. Strapping young boys to take the family name and take over the family fortune, preferably. We’ll shoot guns and ride horses and camp in the forest. The boys will probably play in the NFL. Someday all these things will come to pass, and it will be a wonderful time.

…Wait, did you mean, now? Well, er, um, that gets more complicated. No I wouldn’t say now is a great time. I just got Grand Theft Auto V. And bowling is going very well.

Men want offspring in the theoretical sense. Women want babies in the real sense – like now, today.

The problem with the king and horses imagery is that Kings have servants. They have peasants: chambermaids, nannies, cooks, cleaners, bakers, candle shop makers. In the real life, for real schmucks like ourselves, you’re doing all that stuff yourself. You have to change the baby’s diaper and change your chamber pot as well. You have to dip your own damn candles.

Not that women’s imaginations are any more accurate than men’s. Many times I have spoken to women who thought that their kids would be cute, quiet, sweet and well-behaved. Despite all the images and communications to the contrary, many childless women have this bizarre fantasy where kids are easy and inexpensive. They are easy to teach and impart values on for the right mother. There are no stitches and constipation and croup and pee-pee accidents. Just wonderful bundles of cuddley nom nom.

And, in fact, they are for a while…

I’m convinced it’s a trick they pull to ensure propogation of the species. Around nine months old, babies are just about the cutest and sweetest things you could imagine. You just cannot imagine your great fortune of having such a wonderful, beautiful child as your son or daughter.

So you think to yourself: what could possibly be better than one wonderful, sweet and beautiful child? I know! TWO wonderful, sweet and beautiful children!

You conceive a second, and right around the time they are due, the first child pulls off the mask and demonstrates they were a horrible freaking demon child the whole time. The terrible twos are upon you, and now with a second one in your arms, you will be juggling diapers and breast feeding and naps with a screaming toddler tugging on your pant leg. Plus you’re in the tunnel for a long time - stuck in “terrible” two-three-four phase for almost five years. Just to ensure you never rest, they pull this trick where they take turns in their good and bad phases. The moment one enters a good behavior phase, the other exits. You’re always stressed about one or the other; sometimes both. This happens on almost a week-to-week basis.

This is why I can’t figure out how some parents have a third. I would literally rather cut myself than have a third child. And yet we even know people that are working on their fourth. I can only think “you people are still having kids?!?!?” In our later 30’s, the thought of having another is absolutely crushing. The women you occasionally read about in tabloids having children in their 60’s, or the families with like 12 children… I mean, this is a blog, but I just don’t have the words.

There Will Come Messy Kids

In the Ray Bradbury classic science fiction short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” people of the future live (or lived) in a highly automated house. One image from that story has always stuck with me – the ashes from the cigar that the house automatically lights and then burns down because no one smokes it are automatically swept away by robotic mice that scurry around cleaning up even the tiniest mess. It’s an interesting fantasy and probably a great labor saving device. But we don’t need scurrying robot mice in our home. We have Andrea.

Andrea scurries around behind the rest of our family, cleaning up every tiny mess. Crumbs left from your piece of toast are vacuumed up. Tiny bits of leaf brought in from outside are disposed of. Smudges on the windows or floors or counters are wiped away with Windex. Every item has an assigned place, and anything out of place is quickly returned. She keeps a beautiful house. And it’s infectious – after ten years of marriage, I too am an official clean freak.

It was from Andrea that I learned the meaning of the term “spotless.” In a previous life, it was a theoretical construct, essentially a synonym for “clean.” In an Andrea Kimmel household, the meaning is literal. “Spotless” means “No spots.” Not one spot. If you see a spot, you clean it up. If you see a crumb, you vacuum it up. The mice in Soft Rains are tireless, ceaseless, mechanical, robotic. In our house, we’re tireless, ceaseless, mechanical, neurotic.

(Spolier Alert) The house in Soft Rains is cleaning up the mess after a nuclear holocaust, but Andrea is cleaning up after something much worse – Cody Kimmel. Cody is the opposite of Spotless. Like Spot-ful. Many Spots. Cody simply cannot engage in an activity without making a mess. His favorite meal, grilled cheese, becomes a crumb shower for himself and his surroundings. He’s spilled every drink he’s touched. Every trip to the fridge ends with yogurt on the floor. Every dinner can be transferred to sleeve which can then be transferred to wall.

All that is accidental. It’s the intentional stuff that is particularly infuriating.  Let’s face it, kids- especially boys- just destroy stuff. Do you like your stuff? Don’t have kids. Kids take all your nice, lovely stuff – the stuff you’ve worked hard to obtain, lovingly selected and cared for, collected and cultivated – and they break that stuff. Destroy it. Render your priceless collection into worthless crap. Cody loves nothing more than to kick a hole in the door or scratch a big scratch on a wall. Those smudges that Andrea is furiously scrubbing away? He’s planting big fat new ones on the windows.

And Cody’s very favorite activity, which takes him almost no time at all, is making a giant mess of a room. Cody will dump the contents of a drawer full of toys on the floor and then minutes later, with his short attention span satiated, will move on to another room and another drawer. Andrea or I will take a moment to clean a few breakfast dishes and literally turn to see we have a giant mess in the playroom which needs to be picked up before we head out for the day. You can see the self-perpetuating madness in this – in the time it takes to clean the playroom mess, Cody will have created two more in his bedroom.

The title There Will Come Soft Rains is from the poem the automated house reads to itself as the day winds down. It plays classical music and shows colorful animal images on the nursery wall. The house is quiet, happy, clean (at least until it burns down in holocaust fires). It turns out that it takes an empty house to make a clean house, but until the day the kids go to college or they invent robot cleaning mice, we’ll have to rely on Andrea to keep us spot free.