Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman

Author:Kyran Pittman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

10.

The Rearview

Ever since I’ve had kids of my own, I’ve been subjecting my mother to random fact-checks over the telephone.

“Did you steal the good stuff out of our trick-or-treat bags?”

“Yes.”

“Did you pretend to be listening when you weren’t?”

“Yes.”

“Did you feel like you knew what you were doing most of the time?”

“No,”

It’s like conducting an exit interview with God. I know there are other ways, besides having children, that people come to terms with their parents’ fallibility, but most involve steep hourly fees. I just have long-distance charges.

Parenthood comes with a rearview mirror. At every new turn, you glance into it and line up what you know now, as a parent, with what you believed then, as a child. You hear your father’s words coming out of your mouth, or you flash back to your mother at your exact age, and it hits you all over again that you are the grown-up, the person in charge. You’re the one who is supposed to know things. You remember how safe you felt in the backseat of the family car at night when you were a kid, watching the raindrops shiver and roll down the side window. Now it’s you in the driver’s seat, white-knuckled at the wheel, praying that all four tires stay on the road. You don’t know shit. And neither, you realize, did your parents.

Mercifully, enlightenment comes in stages. Most of us start down the moccasin mile with minor failures of omniscience and build up to the bigger misses gradually. In the early years, you even get magical fall guys to take the blame. Our tooth fairy, for example, is notoriously unreliable.

“What, again??” I exclaim on mornings I am presented with an unredeemed tooth on an open palm. “It’s the second night in a row! What is wrong with that freaking tooth fairy?”

As far as my kids know, the tooth fairy is a drunk, whose operating funds are either tied to a wildly variable interest rate or the racetrack. I can live with that. The magical beings I grew up with also tended to deviate from the official script. I was twenty years old before I discovered that most other children weren’t leaving rum for Santa on Christmas Eve, which went a long way toward explaining some of his more memorable lapses in wish fulfillment.

Everyone’s childhood disappointments run the gamut between trivial and traumatic, but it’s especially vivid when Santa lets you down. I was nine the year I asked him to bring me a Ken doll. Malibu Ken, Hawaiian Ken, Superstar Ken—I didn’t care. Just a Ken, to go with my Barbies, which in my home fell under the same classification as junk food and television: empty pursuits to be indulged sparingly. I only had two, Ballerina and Superstar. You couldn’t really count the Bionic Woman, a big-boned and flat-footed gal who towered awkwardly over them by a full inch. They shunned her, and she lived out her days as a recluse under the bed.

The girls had nothing to wear but the clothes they had on their backs the day they arrived.

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