12.6.00

I'll Be A Sucky Mother

I am going to suck at parenting.

I know it's a statement out of the blue (and no, there will not be the pitter patter of tiny little feet any time soon), and I don't have anything concrete to back this up with, but given my recent experiences with Nathan's brothers, I'm almost sure of it.

I love children. Tiny babies (that you can hand back to their mothers when they need to be changed or fed), toddlers (the ones that are entertained by picturebooks and hide-and-seek and are free of any Dennis-the-Menace type affectations), and primary school age children are just fine. When I was in the sixth grade I was on wet-day lunchtime duty, which meant that whenever it rained during lunchtime (which, for the latter month of autumn and all of winter in Melbourne is almost an everyday certainty), I had to go down to one of the second grade classrooms and help keep the kids there entertained so they didn't cause too much of a fuss for the teachers, who were sensibly ensconced in their staff room drinking coffee and relaxing. It never occured to me at the time that I was pretty much a free babysitter, but even if I had realised it, I probably wouldn't have cared. With the exception of one or two snotty brats, they seemed to like me - I'd read stories to them and play games and draw pictures of cats for them. It warmed the heart like nothing else to have a cute little girl or boy run up to me with a piece of paper and pencil and ask me to draw Garfield for them.

During high school, when I was one of the elder cast members in a school play, the younger girls would cling to me and I'd end up being their piggyback-ride-giver, their couch (for some reason people like to sit on my lap, and I'm not sure why), their older friend. Most of these girls were under the age of fifteen; it seemed that once this midpoint of adolescence hit, they no longer paid any attention to me, or anyone with a vague air of authority from older students up to teachers and parents. From my own experiences of being a particularly heinous teenager (ask my mother or sister sometime; they'd gladly tell you what a little wench I was and sometimes continue to be), I know that the sweetest of children can, with no thanks to hormones and a shifting view of the world, become almost unrecognisable from their former selves between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. This continues until about the end of high school or start of university, and unfortunately, it effects most males until the age of thirty. (Note that I said "most", and although I do generalise occasionally, I do try my best not to tar a large group with the same brush. Hate mail is all good and well, but a note expressing the opinion of a sensitive, intelligent boy would probably be better.)

This is where my theory of sucky parentage comes in. I'm starting to have no tolerance for kids between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. Alright, for Nathan's two youngest brothers, then. I live with a 17 year old who uses his Catholic (so-called) faith to badmouth Baptists and collects gun magazines as a hobby, and a 15 year old who loves Pokemon and worships Tom Green. These things aside, they act like fairly standard teenage boys; they make a lot of noise, they're opinionated, they like to interrupt me when I'm watching tv and movies, they steal the remote control and insist on surfing through 44+ cable channels before even thinking of letting me watch an entire program, they leave their dirty dishes everywhere and refuse to clean up the livingroom and kitchen until at least 48 hours after they've been told to. It makes me want to scream - I've actually found myself telling Andy that if he can't be quiet then he can go to his room until I'm finished watching whatever movie I'm viewing. I wanted to yell at Bobby after he asked for money to go to the movies and accused his mother of being selfish with her money. I settled for telling him to get a job instead.

They're driving me crazy - I'm starting, finally, to empathise with my mother and sister. I know why my sister was acting like a second mother after she moved out of home, always nagging and yelling at me for being rude and disrespectful. I'm itching to discipline and give out groundings and assign chores and to get it into their heads that they have to take responsibility for themselves, because once they move out of home or go to college they're going to have to look after their own business. Mom and dad aren't going to sigh and clean up the kitchen after telling them for the millionth time that they would really appreciate it if they loaded up the dishwasher or wiped the benches down. Neither am I. I cleaned the kitchen and livingroom with all of my effort the first few weeks of living here; then it became apparent that the boys were earning money for household chores and that they should be doing their bit. (That doesn't mean I don't do anything, of course. What sort of a houseguest do you people think I am?!) I just want to yell at them, and in moments of frustration I actually have. Of course, since they just think of me as "my brother's girlfriend" (fiancee, thankyou very much), I just get laughed at.

So how am I going to be when Nathan and I have a family of our own? I don't have faith in myself to be mature enough to handle adolescent boys or girls. Perhaps by the time I'm in the thirty-five to forty age bracket I'll be able to handle the thought of dealing with teenagers (and not only that, but I'll have been raising the little darlings for their entire lives, so I think I just might know them by then); for now, I'm just going to try and control myself from being Substitute Bitch Mother the next time I walk into the livingroom and I'm greeted by Bobby yelling "Bite me!" and Andy muttering, "You've got a so-da!" whilst in the throes of hyperventilation-type laughter because I'm carrying a glass of coke. (It's the exposure to Tom Green. I'd never really seen his show until I came here - we didn't have it in Australia. That's probably a very good thing.)

Of course, I may just be worrying about something I needn't think about for another twenty years. You be the judge!