Life goes on

When I was a Freshman in high school they had a little thing called "Freshman Initiation."  It was a day when the senior class made all the freshman boys wear skirts and girls wore their clothes inside out. We had to race grapes down the halls of the school with our noses as the only means of propulsion and stuff like that. It wasn't quite "hazing," but still, it wasn't much fun to be a freshman for that day (especially if your brother was a senior as mine was).  The only thing that got us through was knowing that in three more years we would be seniors and justice would be done.  That was, until the class of '85.  When we became seniors the school administration decided freshman initiation was getting out of hand (perhaps the squirt guns filled with bong water had something to do with it) and festivities were scaled back to the point of having the senior class dressed formally and the freshman class dressed foolishly. Our turn was abruptly taken away from us.  What a gyp.

In the bigger scheme of things, I remember being a kid and yearning for the freedom of adulthood.  Having been raised by a single mom, there wasn't much catering to the whims of a pre-teen.  I lived in a grown-up world that I didn't have access to as a child.  And when the grown-ups said, "jump," we asked, "how high."  Now that I am a grown-up, it is my time to be free, right?  My kids will have to deal with the fact that I don't have the time or money for all their childish things, just like I had to deal with it 30 years ago.  But, you know what?  They turned the tables on me again.  

We watched whatever was on TV when I was a kid.  It was variety shows like Merv Griffin and Carol Burnett, and dramas like Emergency and M.A.S.H.  You can't compare Carol Burnett's comedy to anything available in today's TV environment.  What is supposed to pass for Family Comedy (cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy) is completely inappropriate for my kids.  The only comparison to be made between shows like Emergency and M.A.S.H. next to C.S.I. or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is that it used to be that we didn't need to explicitly see graphic violence to be intrigued by a story.  Again, I'm not letting my kids watch that, or the daily news for that matter.  Forget about watching a movie after dinner like I used to before kids.

So have we been gypped again?  Is this one of Life's cruel jokes.  I used to think so.  I used to think, "if not for these kids, I'd rent this movie to watch tonight," or "I'd have enough money to buy that band's CD." But lately I've just been handing it over to them.  All my time and my little scraps of money, and you know what?  I don't miss it.  The times I've spent making a scavenger hunt for my son or watching silly cat videos on youtube with my daughter have been some of the best times I can remember.  I guess raising kids is one of society's ways of maturing parents like me who would otherwise remain as irresponsible as…hmm…I don't know, maybe a high school senior with a squirt gun full of bong water.