My coworker Marnie recently married—for the first time—at the age of 45. She married Paul, a very nice guy she met in her hot yoga class. When Marnie met Paul he was going through a really nasty divorce that culminated with him and his ex-wife sharing joint custody of their two pre-teen daughters.
By all objective accounts the two daughters are monsters: classic “mean girls” who spend their time making Marnie’s life a living hell. I know that many teenaged step-children range from withdrawn to sullen to resentful but to hear Marnie describe them, Paul’s daughters are bona fide sociopaths — but perhaps all children install video cameras in their fathers’ bedrooms.
I have no idea why Marnie did not run like a thief after the video incident, which she and Paul attributed to the kids being “inquisitive”, but perhaps the worst thing that Paul’s daughters are doing is subjecting Marnie to the verbal equivalent of a death by a thousand cuts: They provide a non-stop, negative commentary on her hair, her make-up, her clothing, her taste in music, how she walks, talks, cooks and even sleeps (they tell her she snores) which is turning Marnie into a mass of quivering Jell-O.
“I feel so old,” said Marnie at lunch recently, adding that she also feels ugly, fat and stupid. “I feel so un-cool,” she told me. “The girls won’t bring their friends into the house. They say I embarrass them.”
This last comment made me chuckle, causing Marnie to glare at me, but I could not help but think that when I was growing up my parents simply did not care if their kids thought they were “cool” or not, nor were they concerned about embarrassing their kids. My parents were not the kind of people who cared about currying the favor of 12-year olds; far from it. I believed then (and still do) that they felt that embarrassing their kids was their God-given obligation.
My dad, for example, felt that dressing comfortably was his absolute right, which resulted in some curious sartorial combinations, not the least of which were a curious fondness for bowling shirts and his habit of wearing bedroom slippers absolutely everywhere — to the point that when my middle sister got married she was fairly certain he would wear slippers — and possibly a bowling shirt — with his tuxedo. Dad was also cursed with horrible teeth – many children of the Depression were—and he had terrible, ill-fitting dentures that were so painful that he got to the point where he simply refused to wear them which, when I was a teenager embarrassed me to death, not that he cared.
Mom had perfect teeth and a great sense of style but she found other ways to embarrass us, mainly because when we were growing up our house had a malfunctioning septic tank that was the bane of her existence. During rainy season, when the ground was saturated, the tank overflowed on a regular basis and as a result Mom had to carefully schedule laundry, showers, dishwashing and – yes – flushing for her family of 6 kids to keep the back yard from being awash with raw sewage.
I’m not quite sure why my folks simply did not have the tank drained or sealed or something, but Mom found she was able to maintain a minimal level of sanitary equilibrium by limiting flushing — which she did with a vengeance, to the point that if we had friends over and they wanted to use the bathroom she would simply say “no.”
Since most people expect the question “May I use your bathroom?” to be purely rhetorical, Mom’s vehement refusal to grant permission left people dumfounded. “But I really have to go,” my friend Ken Ketchum once said.
Mom was unswayed. “You live two streets away,” she told him. “Just go home and come right back.” She looked at me. “You go with him. Use the Ketchum’s bathroom. They’re hooked up to the sewer system.”
“I don’t have to go,” I murmured, embarrassed.
“Go anyway,” said Mom.
Once when my sister’s friend Patty McNally really had to go but lived too far away to go home Mom relented, none-too-graciously. “Is it a number one or a number two?” she asked anxiously, and Patty, stunned, assured her it was a Number One.
Ma was visibly relieved. “Fine,” she said. “Just don’t flush.”
Patty came back visibly shaken. “You have flushing instructions on the bathroom wall,” she said, as if we did not know: Mom had commissioned a needle point sign for the bathroom that said, in Olde English script, “If it’s pee, just leave it be. And if it’s ‘scheisse” flush once — not twice.”
My sister was beet red. “I know,” she said grimly.
Now, at lunch, Marnie was not amused by my anecdotes. “It’s a wonder you weren’t scarred for life,” she said primly.
“I was scarred,” I said. “But my parents weren’t.”