Aunt Erma's Cope Book by Erma Bombeck

Author:Erma Bombeck [Bombeck, Erma]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Humor, General
ISBN: 9780449207581
Google: Hn_WupKnSdsC
Amazon: 0449209377
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1984-10-12T07:00:00+00:00

11

bringing up parents the okay way

the TROUBLE with my kids is they had read too many books on Parent Psychology. They thought they knew all the answers, but the truth is they didn't know me at all.

They corrected my grammar in front of my friends, told me my clothes were too young for me, bugged me about my short hair, and never tried to relate to my problems.

God knows, I had problems. I wasn't popular and wasn't with the “in” group. The in group in my neighborhood were women my age who had reentered the job scene. Every morning, I watched them from my window as they swung to their cars dressed in contemporary clothes and teetering in five-inch heels to their day in carpetland.

From my vantage point, I could only fantasize how they answered phones that weren't sticky, had lunch in a place with live plants, and talked to people who didn't respond with the same two words, “far out.”

The high spot in my week was being invited to a luncheon style show where I pilfered five or six sample vials of perfume that lasted five or six minutes before the alcohol burned off.

The friends I liked my children weren't crazy about. They didn't like Yvonne, who was divorced and dated their former orthodontist, because they thought she was a bad influence on me.

They didn't like Gloria, who always came over at dinnertime and hung around while we ate, because she never seemed to have a home of her own.

And they didn't like Judy, who never cleaned her house and schlepped around in grubby clothes and greasy hair. (They said they had NEVER seen her cleaned up and she set a bad example for me.)

Sometimes I didn't know what the kids expected from me. When I needed them, they were never home.

When they were home they drove me crazy trying out their latest in parent-psychology techniques. I could always tell when they had a new theory they were trying out. I had their undivided attention.

They tried every new theory to come down the pike—active listening, effectiveness training, and transactional analysis.

I wasn't surprised to find the manual Mrs. Lutz mentioned, Bringing Up Parents the Okay Way, in a stack of magazines in the bathroom.

On the cover was a picture of a teenager with an insincere smile. He had put down his paper to give his attention to his mother, who was showing him something she had just read in a book.

I leafed quickly through a chapter called “How to Say No to Your Parents.” I knew how. I just didn't know why. Then my eyes caught a heading called “The Middle-Parent Syndrome. What is your position in the Family?”

That was it. I was a middle parent. No wonder I was weird. I was neither the oldest nor the youngest. I was wedged in the twilight zone where no one ever does anything for the first time, says anything original, wears anything new, or is cute.

My position in the family car bore this out.

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