The teenager has just started his final year of High School, and having spent the summer with an expanding wombat splodged on his head plus a smattering of fuzz across his face, he arrived upstairs from his lair the night before his first day back with a blonde crop, a clean shave and decent clothes.
“It LIVES!” I yelled with genuine, unbridled joy, “it LIVES AND BREATHES LIKE A PROPER HUMAN BEING!” He looked good. Sharp. Handsome. My low-key sarcasm over his summer-sartorials had finally paid-off, at least that’s what I told myself.
“I was always going to do this before school started back,” he snorted, “I was just waiting until right before I went back to do it.”
Teenagers and appearances are a bizarre enough combination. Let’s face it, we all committed major fashion faux-pas as youths, and I certainly remember indignantly staring at my Mother when she viewed my long, puffy black mop, thick aviator-style glasses and Weird Al-like moustache as though it looked horrific. “What’s wrong with you? I look cool!” I remembering yelling as I walked away in my red canvas super high-tops and my white- padded -cotton- jacket -with-belt. Thinking about it, I could get angry that she didn’t have me wrestled to the ground and kept under house arrest. Somewhere in there, this knowledge had kept me from going on too much about the teenager’s summer wombat. Aside from which, with teenagers you have to choose your battles, and marsupial mulletry was not worth the combat.
I am already lamenting the return to my day-job as taxi driver (I got half a summer off) and the fact I still have to be his alarm call (like a hotel receptionist) still grates me (in fact, combine the two and I realize why I can be such an asshole before 8 am unless infused with coffee almost immediately upon waking up). But in all fairness, it is a filthy evolutionary trick that sees your first years as a young adult awash with those pesky hormones that render you stupid (and immune to common sense/ working/ giving a shit) coincide with high school, early starts, intensely important periods of grading and your entire future potentially being decided. Rare is the teenager who is functional, let alone coherent, before 11 am, thus I was always amazed that no-one proposed 11 am starts and 7 pm finishes. It would seem to suit everyone, but alas, it’s probably too frightning for the cookie cutter society we live in, so instead, let’s just beat our teenagers into conformist cubes as best we can, suck the life out of them, stuff any dormant enthusiasm they might have into a far-off mental recess and then tell them they screwed up if (as many do) they, err, screw up. You don’t need me to explain my personal theory on this stuff, needless to say, I don’t eat cookies and conformist cubes piss me off.
BUT in order to live comfortably outside a system, you must first learn how said-system works, thus I keep the teenager firmly on the straight-and-narrow, repeating ad nauseum how putting in maximum effort for this small period of his life will enable him to remain in TOTAL CONTROL of it for the forseeable future, as opposed to having some frustrated middle management wanker chipping away at him and telling him what’s what.”THAT,” I roar one morning, under-caffeinated and grumpy, at no-one in particular, “would make me very unhappy!”
I return from dropping my daily fare off (around $44 per outbound journey, thus the total owed to me since middle school began and based on 292 school days a year would be approximately $73, 584) to encounter the pre-schooler running around the house giggling and waving her finger in the air.
“SNIFF MY FINGER, SNIFF IT SNIFF IT!” she screams with unbridled joy, and just as I am about to bend forward and proffer my nose to the raised digit, she squeals through her unbridled glee that, “I PUT MY FINGER IN MY BUM, HEE HEE HEE!”
I have long-known that children have a deep fascination with bottoms, Lord knows many adults do too, but for a child it is most certainly a bizarre and wonderful piece of apparatus that is yours to keep for free! Think about it from a 4 year old’s perspective. Your bottom makes these extraordinary sounds, unleashes ferocious short-hit odors which cause entire rooms to groan and then, as a bonus, it delivers this mysterious yet intriguing brown squidgy stuff which adults refer to as ‘poo’, which smells like a concentrated version of those noisy odors and which causes absolute pandemonium should it be shed anywhere but into that big ‘pit’ seat called a ‘toilet’. Indeed, the panic if some of this ‘poo’ ends up in, say, your underwear is really something! Seriously, try and put yourself in this child’s mind place for a few minutes, and all that I’ve just said will make perfect, perfect sense.
So it was that I found myself with a high degree of resigned tolerance for the act just described. I believe the teenager did it (at that age!) although not with the same degree of intense joy. This is one of the joys of parenthood that you won’t find in those What To Expect…books, though a chapter which outlines interests of this nature might help some parents who will otherwise think their children are weirdos.
I explained to my daughter that putting your finger in your bum is not a good thing, either from a social perspective or for cleanliness. “You’re not a monkey!” I said, feeling that such a phrase would close the deal, when instead, she tried digging for brown gold again whilst making monkey noises. “GO AND WASH YOUR HANDS IMMEDIATELY!” I yelled…”WARM WATER!” I furthered.
She obviously didn’t use warm-enough water. Two days later, she complained of eye irritation, and a close inspection revealed that had a stye in her left eye.
“How on earth did she get it?” I mused to my wife as we applied yet another hot compress to clear it up. She replied by raising her right hand and wiggling her index finger. “In the bum,” she mouthed so as not to attract attention.”
“And this stye,” I later told the victim, “came about because you didn’t wash your hands properly after the bum escapade.”
“What’s ‘escapade’?”
“‘An ‘escapade’ is a small adventure, or escape, from conventional behavior to something which is not mainstream, and in this case, putting your finger in your bum was an escapade. Don’t do it again. Aside from anything, it’ll give you crappy eyesight ” I giggled from behind a straight-expression. At least I didn’t go all the way and say what I really wanted to about having ’shitty vision’…I’m slowly maturing it would appear…slowly.
