Do your parents embarrass you? Do they call you "hug-a-bunch" in front of people who don't happen to have known you since you were in diapers? Do they ask loudly if everyone has been to the bathroom?
I think I understand how parents get that way - now that I'm a parent who is every bit as embarrassing as mine were.If my mother thought we needed our faces washed, it didn't matter where we were. They were going to get clean, especially if we were out in public.
"Lick my thumb," she'd say. We always did - don't ask me why - and then she'd thumb off all the smears and cookie crumbs. Right in front of everyone on the elevator up to my grandmother's.
Being clean was nothing compared with shelter. She was always looking for loftier roofs to put over our heads. She house-hunted the way cats hunt mice. Once we drove by a big, fancy, white house with tall black shutters and a "For Sale" sign. She just had to check it out. She knocked on the door. What would the people do, we agonized, when my mother, a total stranger, went in and started pacing off their dining room? But the house was empty. We were relieved, but not for long.
"I can just look in the window," she said, and trotted around the side, leaving me and my sisters standing on the front steps. The window was too high. Did she say "Oh, well, I'll call a realtor," and graciously get back in the car and take us home? No. She was a Mom of Action. She found a big rock, dragged it to the window, stood on it, and peered in, shading her eyes with her hands. She wasn't even furtive. She stood there till she figured out exactly where our dining room table would go.
My face flamed. I think the only creature who saw us was a squirrel, but anybody could come along. The police! I was only 6 at the time, but I was pretty sure what she was doing was illegal, and that we were all going to end up in jail.
My father joined in the conspiracy to make us social outcasts by baking all our bread. Wholesome, you say? Caring? Maybe, but he liked to be original, and we had to eat his experiments. Have you ever pulled what looks like peanut butter and jelly on bark chips out of your lunch bag, when everyone else has Wonder bread?
He was also an organic gardener, which meant he needed a lot of stuff other people think of as garbage to encourage our vegetables. For a while, we lived in a town where many people had horses. We'd be out for a walk, minding our own business, and some seventh-grader too cool to even talk to would go trotting by in her hard hat, riding jacket and sleek leather boots. My dad's eyes would light up. "Kids," he'd say, "let's find out where that pony lives." Horse manure, you see, is great for anything that grows. But he didn't just discreetly slip it in between the lettuce and the beans. It had to sit next to our house in his compost heap where anyone could see it till it was ready for the garden.
Somehow I survived all this. We were never arrested for aggravated house-hunting and I never got so embarrassed that I died. In fact, I grew up, had children of my own, and almost immediately started doing ridiculous, unusual, and extra-loud things in front of people I don't know.
The first time I noticed it, I was taking my 3-week-old baby for a walk in his carriage. He got kind of fussy, but he calmed down when we went under a tree. He was lying on his back and he wanted something to look at. Now, another mother might have hung a toy from the hood of the carriage.
NOT me. Just like his grandmother, I'm a Mom of Action. It became an adventure. I'd come to an unforested stretch of sidewalk and scout around. I'd see a really interesting looking oak down the street and dash to it. Then I'd careen from that to a nice orangy-red Japanese maple on the corner, and before you knew it, the baby carriage and I were zooming around like part of a pinball game.
I didn't even think about how goofy we looked. And the baby was too young to notice. I hope.
I was going to start acting normal when I got over the excitement of having a new baby. But you can't act normal and be a mom at the same time. You have to go into a dark dolphin show and reach among the ankles of strangers for a lost mitten. You have to jam yourself into a ridiculously tiny hot rod on a carnival kiddie ride so your kiddie won't be lonely. You have to talk in a squeaky voice, pretending to be his bear, when the post office gets boring. You have to slide down tall, skinny, spiral slides and climb through tunnels in the exciting new playground, even though you are expecting his little brother and don't exactly fit.
I decided to put off being dignified a little longer, and just not think about who might be watching.
That was a while ago. I may have put it off for good. I sing in public and I call my children preposterous pet names. I realize it would be good to pull myself together before my boys are in high school.
The other kids are bound to figure out who lives in the house by the playing field and whose mom looks after the compost heap out back. (It's already a joke. The football players throw their old mouthguards into it. My kids may have to play soccer.)
The problem is, it's just too much fun to be able to look in windows, sing out loud, and toss rotten leaves around without blushing, especially if you spent most of your childhood cringing while your parents acted up.
I CAN say one thing to comfort children of weirdos like me: You're the only one who's mortified. To other kids odd moms are fun. Almost heroic.
I know this because of my aunt. When I was little, someone was showing us their new swimming pool, and it was getting a little boring. "Do you ever just want to jump in with all your clothes on?" said my aunt, and before I could answer, she was streaking along underwater like a human torpedo in her wrap-around skirt, plaid blouse, and sneakers. Bubbles escaped from her smiling lips. It's one of my favorite, happiest, memories.
There's probably no cure for parental goofiness. But maybe someday you'll meet someone like my aunt. I just hope it's not me. So do my children.