My son and I were coming home one afternoon, and we saw an elderly man loading an ice chest in the parking lot. He was wearing blue and red plaid pants, a bright yellow shirt and his rather wide posterior was at the same level as his shoulders as he placed sodas in the chest.
“At what point do you lose your dignity,” said my son. “At what point do you stop caring what other people think? Look at that guy – he’s bending over from the waist and he doesn’t care what he looks like or how he looks.”
Ah, the impertinence of youth. At the age of 21, my son cannot understand how a person, say his mother, could walk out to the curb in the morning wearing a ratty bathrobe and mismatched socks. Nor can he understand how a person, say his mother again, could walk into the grocery store in broad daylight wearing shorts splotched with dried paint, no make up and water sandals.
The answer to his question is we lose our dignity because children take it away from us. We parents have had our dignity ripped out from underneath us by our darling, adorable and unpredictable children.
Many a morning I dressed the boys for church in their best clothes, only to find them undressing themselves during Mass. Afterwards, when other children were quietly eating their doughnut, my children were running around with sweat pouring down their faces, their shoes untied, their shirt tails hanging out and a red moustache from drinking five glasses of punch.
There are moments when that dignity emerges – our child makes a good grade on a test or hits a home run. But there are the other highlights of parenthood – the day your child burps the loudest in a quiet room and when they are the mischievous child in the school play who refuses to recite his or her line, steps on the feet of the child standing to them at the awards day ceremony and brags they won the contest for making the most obnoxious noise with their armpit and their hand.
Our dignity wasn’t lost – it was taken away by our children. At what point it happens is hard to say. Perhaps I lost it the day my youngest boy decided to ram the shopping cart in the end display at the grocery store and send dozens of boxes of cereal flying. Or maybe it was the afternoon one of them decided to undress completely in a department store.
I could’ve lost my dignity the time I lost track of my son and ran through the aisles of a store screaming his name at the top of my lungs. Or maybe it was when a stomach virus hit and they thought my lap was the best place to be sick.
Or maybe it was the day they decided to give each other haircuts right before a family event. My dignity could’ve vanished the day one of my sons sneezed into my hair as we were walking out the door to a party.
My dignity could’ve vanished that afternoon at the beach when my four-year-old decided to play Godzilla with the sand castle a young girl spent hours building on the beach, and her mother looked at me with a horrified expression as her daughter cried and cried.
I might’ve misplaced my dignity the day my son exclaimed to my parents he knew some new words and promptly let loose with a string of obscenities I still find difficult to repeat.
And just when I thought I’d managed to hang on to a sliver of dignity, I discover I’m wrong. I was at the stop light the other day, and I heard loud music blaring from the car on my left.
With a disgusted look, I rolled up the window and saw my teen-age son swaying to some rock and roll tune. When he honked and waved, I barely turned my head and briefly nodded, not wanting the mortified people around me to know that was my son disturbing the peace.
When we got out of the car, I told my son we parents don’t lose our dignity – we’re robbed of it. He shook his head, stopped and smiled.
“Hey, see that cup over there?” he said, pointing to a fast-food cup on the ground. “Wanna see me hit it with a spit ball?”
Like I said, we parents don’t lose our dignity – it’s taken from us by our children.
This article was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.
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