A Mother's-Eye View of TV

I understand that some unthinking people are complaining that our television programs are getting worse and worse, and that we’re raising a generation of owl-eyed little monsters who are picking up bad language and worse behavior from the things they see on that silver screen.

But what these people are overlooking are the many benefits television offers to the average mother of a young child.

What seems to have escaped everyone’s notice is that the beauty of television lies in the fact that the children watch it. And while they’re watching, they’re not doing other things, like flushing all your hair brushes down the toilet or tying knots in your pantyhose to make a skipping rope.

It’s true that children form a very uncritical audience. They will sit for hours, in the most backbreaking attitudes, watching anything that moves on that screen. They can’t remember their telephone numbers, but they can recite every commercial ever written. If someone would only put the multiplication tables into cartoon form, SAT scores around the country would change for the better.

Children in general are amazingly hard of hearing, except when you’re saying something nasty about your mother-in-law, in which case they have the recording and reproducing ability of an expensive tape machine. Because their hearing is so defective, they are incapable of enjoying anything on television that is not being broadcast at a volume calculated to shatter glass. They’ve never actually broken any windows, but the mortality rate of our lamps and ash trays is truly alarming.

While they watch, they eat. We’re accustomed to finding apple cores and cracker crumbs in the sofa cushions, and ever since a guest sat on a sharp chicken bone, I’ve made it a practice to police the area before admitting company. I can even cope with the wads of bubble gum with which they glue shut the dining room doors. There’s not too much gum left, anyway, after they’ve worked the juiciest pieces into their hair and ears.

What I’m really looking for is a living-room rug the color of peanut butter and Pepsi-Cola, but I don’t suppose that invention will come about during my lifetime.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. Not a bit. I honestly don’t mind the state of my living room. What worries me is the state of my mind, which is kept on the sunny side of sanity only through the intervention of that miraculous TV set. You see, I can stand any amount of noise, as long as its purpose is not directed at getting some sort of response from me.

For instance, our children’s school never does things in half measures. They don’t simply teach a child one song. They teach him the entire score of one of Broadway’s more ambitious productions; and having gone to great lengths to learn this opus, and all its twenty-seven repetitious choruses, the child naturally comes home and expects you to listen to it, even if it takes the better part of a week. Coward that I am, I say, “Save it for when Daddy comes home. Why don’t you watch TV?”

I use such diversionary tactics often. I’ve found that a TV program can distract a child from anything from a nosebleed to the fact that he had to wear his rubbers to school and it wasn’t even raining, forcryingoutloud.

You see, school is all very well, as far as it goes, but even with a lot of detentions and extra help in long division, the child still arrives home with at least an hour in which to drive you insane before you can decently give him his supper and put him to bed. Whereas, with the advent of cable, TV is forever. From long before dawn, until well after midnight, comfort radiates from that 21-inch screen.

And don’t ever let anyone tell you that television programs aren’t educational. You may not think the bits of knowledge they glean would be practicable for tots of such tender ages, but never fear. They simply store such nuggets away for future use. Like the time my five-year-old waited until I was serving tea to my husband’s maiden aunts to ask, “Mummy, what’s a condom?”

The only program I can honestly say I object to is the exercise show led by a very muscular young man who keeps telling me how physically unfit my children are. I don’t know what neighborhood he lives in, but as far as I’m concerned, I should be as physically fit as my children. As a matter of fact, I once received two prescriptions from my doctor for tranquilizers for me and vitamin pills for them, and through sheer exhaustion got them mixed up. It was days before I discovered my mistake and remedied the situation, albeit reluctantly, because I had never felt better in my life, and the children were behaving like little lambs.

Therefore, you television networks, take heart. Ignore your critics and disdain your foes. Consider this a love letter from every woman who has ever borne a child. Until they make boarding schools compulsory from birth, or send every newborn baby home from the hospital with his very own English nanny, you are the answer to a mother’s prayer.

Green Card

I once saw a movie called Green Card, about a couple who enter into a marriage of convenience. She covets an apartment reserved only for married couples; he wants to become a citizen. The immigration authorities become suspicious about their motives and try to trap them with a quiz about their married life together.

I don't know what possessed me, but I was once foolhardy enough to ask my husband a few of the same questions posed by those immigration examiners. It soon became painfully obvious that if his admission to this country depended on an intimate knowledge of my habits and preferences, he would be exiled to Siberia. As a matter of fact, after witnessing his lackluster performance, I am convinced that he would be hard put to pick me out of a police lineup.

When he tried to list my favorite foods he failed miserably. This doesn't really surprise me. This is a man who once brought me chocolate caramel cremes for my birthday although I'm allergic to chocolate and loathe caramel. He adores both and, as he pointed out with the sort of infallible male logic that drives women to murder, I'm always on a diet and after all, he did remember my birthday.

To be perfectly accurate, he didn't. He was two days early. My birthday is the fourteenth. He got it mixed up with our anniversary, which is a month earlier, on the twelfth. The only bright note is that he can never remember my age either, and seems to be completely oblivious to the fact that I have gradually become two, three and even four years younger than he as time goes by.

However, he did know what side of the bed I sleep on because when he wakes up on the living room couch at three a.m. and comes to bed, there's only one empty side, so even he can figure it out.

But he has absolutely no idea what colour my toothbrush is, no matter how often I explain that mine is blue and his is green. He says he can't understand why this makes me so angry. After all, we've exchanged a lot more intimate body fluids in the past few years than saliva.

The question that had me rolling in the aisles was the one asking what kind of face and/or shaving cream we use. I, of course, know what kind of shaving cream he uses, since I buy it for him along with his razors, underwear, shirts, shoes and winter tires. The only comment he's ever made to indicate that he is even remotely aware that I use face cream at all is to ask, "Are you really coming to bed with all that goo on, or do you intend to swim the entire English channel before morning?"

I can forgive all that. What I can't accept is his not knowing what I look like. I admit he can have no way of knowing how much I weigh. That information is classified material to which no one but the holder of at least two medical degrees will ever have access. But I once insisted that he buy me lingerie for Valentine's Day and he came home with a piece of transparent fluff that wouldn't cover a Barbie doll indecently.

Actually, now that I think of it, I have to admit that it was really rather sweet of him.