Children Keep You Humble

They'll Embarrass You Whether They Mean To Or Not

originally published November 29, 2006

Mother always said that having children is humbling. As in so many things, Mother was right. At the time, I didn’t truly understand what she was saying. I thought she meant something else… something not so - well - humbling. For the uninitiated, you should know that after the moist festival of exposure and pain that is childbirth, further indignities await. (I know there are droves of you out there, you mothers who say that it didn’t really hurt too much, that epidurals are not necessary because you can manage the pain with breathing, that you invited your friends and neighbors to wade in your home-birthing pool as you prepared placenta stew, etc., etc. I know you’re out there, and I don’t understand you at all, and my pain-avoiding self does not want to hear from you. Nope. Give me an epidural - I’d take one, right now, just for fun. I would rather sit on an egg for nine months than even consider - or hear about - natural childbirth.) It would not do to fear these inevitable postpartum humiliations, and it is pointless to try to avoid them. They’re out there, like lurking coral reefs, and you just have to deal with them. I don’t blame my darling offspring, not too much. There are consolations. The offspring really are nice to have around, and when they’re little they smell good, and when they get older they do really funny, really bizarre - and occasionally stunningly charming - things. No, it’s not totally thankless and morbidly embarrassing. Not really.

Food

However they arrive, you have to feed them. I nursed both my children and have, as a consequence, lifted my shirt more around Athens, feeding children, than I ever did in my happy carefree college days in Virginia. And, despite the fact that I’ve nursed two children, nursing mothers make me amazingly uncomfortable. It is just too intimate - not creepy - just so personal, that seeing someone else sharing that makes me squirm. Also squirm-worthy - at least to me - are the children who have apparently been grandfathered in, and merrily continue nursing when nursing is not relevant to nutrition. For example, I had one friend whose child was nursing, then popped its head out from under her shirt and said, and I quote verbatim, “I want your lip balm.” Yow. Later, when they take solid food, it gets worse. Dutifully, you design a diet rich in protein, vitamins, organic veggies and high-fiber grains. Once you’ve satisfied their nutritional needs, however, you realize that you should have tossed them a crust of bread and some water, as their healthy diet only gives them the energy to embarrass you in public places, usually over food you’d never allow them to consume. Tumultuous fits of pique in Kroger over the purchase or non-purchase of a live lobster. Vociferous arguments about why they cannot subsist solely on Asian baby corn cobs from a can. Car seat-bound weeping when the fruit roll falls to the floor and transforms into a lint-sicle. If only they were photosynthetic.

Clothing

Food need not be present for parental humiliation to occur, however. One of my boys has a penchant for unusual clothing, and once decided that appropriate garb for a trip to the library comprised overalls and boots, capped off by a white cotton pillowcase, worn over his head. I thought this was fine - he was so happy. It never occurred to me that it might be objectionable. It did to my fellow library patrons. As I began to notice their glares, I realized that they were identifying me as one of the following: 1) an over-zealous mother punishing her child, or 2) an abusive mother concealing scars and bruises from previous punishments, or 3) a deranged mother training her child to be a teeny, tiny KKK Grand Dragon. Although I am not a fan of slogan-bearing T-shirts, I longed for some sort of explanatory shirt, although what it would have said, I don’t know. The other child prefers to be naked, whenever and wherever. One of our neighbors calls our house The House With The Big Naked Baby, as this child removes his clothes whenever I turn my back, and delights in frolicking naked in the front yard while armed with a garden hose and nothing else. He is able to explain his behavior, however, with a clear and succinct summary of what he’s done: “Take off pants.” Well. In carpool line one day, a humorless and always crisply-pressed mother approached us. She greeted my child, who responded: “Take off pants.” Oh lordy. Judging from her horrified expression, Mrs. Crisply-Pressed did not take it as an explanation of what he’d done, but rather as a request or even - gasp of horror - an order. Heaven knows where she thought he picked up that gem.

Give Me Shelter

I have had one child ask me what the wiggly skin on the backs of my legs was. (Child Who Will Remain Nameless, that would be one unfortunate result of pregnancy.) The other child asked me what that purple line on my leg was. (Child, that would be yet another result of child-bearing - the varicose vein. You could just say thank you.) The fact that both of these incidents occurred in public bathrooms, in clear hearing of others, is only icing on the humiliation cake. I’m just thankful that the children in question did not fling open the bathroom stall door and expose my reproductive battle scars - and all the rest of me - for all and sundry to see. My most humbling child-related experience: We were at school orientation, an affair that apparently requires all women to be dressed to the nines. Child Who Will Remain Nameless was hip to  the bathroom thing, but  was a bit unreliable in stressful situations, such as school orientation. So there he and I were in his classroom with all the well-dressed mothers, and it became clear that Child needed to use the facilities. After much  fevered, whispered negotiation, he agreed to attempt a liaison with Mr. Potty Man. Success! So exciting, but he also succeeded in drenching the floor. No problem. En route to getting some paper towels to clean the floor, and also carrying Child and his beloved Bear so they wouldn't slip and fall and get wet and icky, I managed to slip and fall into the Astounding Lake of Urine. Nice. Fortunately for Child, his seersucker shorts were a very forgiving fabric in terms of concealing urine. I wish that I could say the same for the now-dripping ensemble I was wearing. I wish I could say that I didn’t have to continue with orientation, reeking like a public urinal and with a very sore shoulder to boot. I also wish that I could say that I had some golden-lining moral to cap off this particular embarrassment. I don’t. The whole experience was mortifying, moist and painful (much like childbirth), and one might have thought that those brown paper towels have changed in the years since elementary school. One would be wrong. Before you abandon all hope, you should know that there are compensations for such damp and public humiliations.

The Good Part

Perhaps I’m not fully qualified to speak on this subject - the heart-warming, Norman Rockwell wonderfulness of children. I fear that I am a dog person, not a child person. This is good news for resident canines Colonel and The Lovely Maude, but not so good for children. I horrified my sweet mother-in-law by telling her that one newborn son looked just like that squid/ alien baby in Men in Black. I also will freely confess that I don’t like most other people’s children. Children, as a sub-species and in the abstract, do not interest me. For mine, I’m over the moon. When they’re little they smell so good, even better than that sausage-y puppy smell. Their little fuzzy ovoid heads and curved baby legs make me swoon, as does the fact that the bottoms of their toes are pointy because they’ve never been walked on - unused! Just look at your own flat feet-bottoms and think about that. Once they can speak, their lispy mispronunciations absolutely delight me. I once called my husband Winston at work to weepingly report the sad ending of William’s use of “doh-doh” to denote a window, and the mere memory of the guttural mess that was his word for squirrel (“qqrrll?”) can bring tears to my eyes. Ted has always referred to Winston as “Ga,” which imparts to all utterances a religious import. “Share that with Ga.” “Ga is gone.” “Ga is coming home.” Tremble with fear, boys. Ga is coming, and he’s not happy. As they grow older, they become more and more interesting. William once held forth for more than an hour on the puzzling topic of what it would be like if all the world were made of rubber. Although by the end of his soliloquy I was ready to chew off my own arm to escape, I have to give him snaps for thoroughness and creativity. He also created Snappy White, a modified, jack-o-lantern-esque, semi-formal, toothy Stride-Rite shoebox who sports a button-down shirt, tie and jacket, all made of paper towels. I love the fact that I can make him (William, not Snappy) weep with laughter by telling him what the Yeti would do if he went to Krispy Kreme (severely burn his hands by grabbing the doughnuts cooking in the boiling fat, clearly), or maybe what the Yeti would do if he wandered into a beauty parlor (full facial waxing - not pretty or painless - followed by an ill-fated dinner on the town). Ted once thanked me for being his beautiful girl, and although I question the adjective, I will always treasure the sentiment, even as I anticipate him sneaking out his bedroom window, years hence, to deliver the same cloudy nonsense to some unappreciative, wine-cooler-swilling teenaged girl. Maybe that’s the crux of it, the fact that they will not always think that you are their beautiful girl. (Fellows, substitute Ga, or whatever your sweet children call you. The sentiment’s the same, isn’t it?) They will soon grow away and up, as they’re supposed to, and you will be left with a storage box full of their creations, like Snappy White, and some alarmingly ultrasound-esque self-portraits (how do they know???), and the memory of the time that your sweet baby said that your tummy was almost as beautiful as his own. What’s so humbling is, maybe, the fact that - if you don’t stop and consider what you’ve got back there yowling in the car seat - you’ll end up missing what you once thought was such an embarrassment, or the fact that you didn’t properly savor it while you had it.

Elise White