For Adults Only

The newspapers have recently reported that a couple has filed charges against a restaurant that refused to admit their child. Naturally, this issue has invited a lot of commentary, both pro and con. On the pro side are all those misguided parents who consider it their sworn duty never to be separated from their offspring for a single second unless they’re at the office or playing eighteen holes of golf.

On the con side is non-maternal me. I just don’t understand any parent’s need to bring small children to a fine restaurant. When you stay home all day and night with four kids, an evening out without them has all the appeal of a weekend in Waikiki. I firmly believe that children should not be allowed into a restaurant until they turn forty, or are willing to pick up the tab, whichever comes first.

Actually, my daughters are fairly well-behaved on the odd occasion when we take them out to eat, mainly because my husband sits dining in solitary splendour at the table while I try to placate the girls with take-out in the back seat of the car in the restaurant parking lot.

And I must admit that my son never actually did anything illegal in a restaurant, unless you count the time he swallowed the tip I left for the waitress.

Nevertheless, he is blessed with the kind of physical energy and vivid imagination that will inevitably lead either to the Prime Ministership of his country or a term in the federal penitentiary.

For one thing, he never sits down when he eats. Actually, he never eats when he eats, either. He works fistfuls of mashed potatoes into his hair and drops his peas down the neck of the lady in the booth behind him. He knocks his juice over into my plate and throws all his cutlery on the floor, and then he stands up and flips his string beans into the plate of the poor woman who’s still trying to fish peas out of her décolletage.

I can stand that, sort of. What drives me to tears of frustration is watching him make his way up and down the aisles between the tables begging breadsticks from all the other diners.

However, I must admit that I much prefer this to his crawling under all the tables and undoing everyone's shoelaces, while elderly ladies leap shrieking to their feet and waiters with clattering trays go crashing down like tenpins all around him.

There’s no help for it. Try as I might, I’ll never succeed in socializing him. I’m just going to have to feed him at home until he gets married or joins the army, in which case either his wife or his commanding officer can take over where I left off.

Definitions Re-Defined

Words don’t seem to have the same meaning today as they did when I went to school. A generation ago, when you looked up a word in the dictionary, its meaning was written right there in black and white. There was no arguing about it. Everyone simply accepted it.

Today, the definitions of these very same words have taken on a whole new meaning. To illustrate my point, I’ve jotted down a few of the more flagrant examples. (The definitions associated with these words today are given in brackets.)

MEN: Adult male persons. (Unless they’re being described by a militant feminist, in which case men are male chauvinist pigs driven by an overweening sense of inferiority to disriminate physically, emotionally and financially against all women.)

GO-GO DANCER: An adult female who gyrates to frenetic music on a prominently displayed platform or stage. (Unless the definer is a member of the Women’s Liberation Movement, in which case a Go-Go dancer is a pathetic victim of flagrant sexist exploitation to benefit the physical gratification of men. See definition of “Men” above.)

BABIES: Infants or children too young to talk or walk. (Unles they’re being described by an expert on ecology, in which case babies are unwelcome additions to the ever-growing population explosion, as well as future polluters of our air and water and prospective wasters of our precious natural resources.)

ARSONIST: A person who commits the crime of intentionally setting a fire. (Unless he’s a protester setting fire to a police car, in which case he’s a revolutionary protesting the repressive minions of a totalitarian government.)

BOMB: A container filled with an explosive charge or chemical substance. (Unless it’s planted in the mathematics centre of a large university campus, in which case it’s a protest against the involvement of education with military research into weapons designed to promote warfare.)

LOOTER: A person who plunders or pillages. (Unless he’s taking part in a protest march, and smashes a few store windows along the route, in which case he’s a revolutionary making a valid protest against the bourgeois capitalistic system or protesting his country’s defeat in a soccer match.)

JAIL: a prison for people being punished for offenses such as arson, bombing and looting. (Unless those being detained are protesters, in which case, jail is just another repressive capitalist measure designed to suspend their civil liberties by locking them up in uncomfortable quarters without the comforts of life to which they are entitled to become accustomed.)

Summer Camp

Like any parent worth her family allowance check, I know that no summer camp is good enough for my children. Yes, I remember the brochures, and the visit the owner paid me last winter. But that was months ago, when snow was on the ground and I could look at the whole thing from an objective point of view. After all, what could be wrong with a summer camp in January? But now it’s July, and my little girls are out there in all that vast wilderness!

Our two daughters are away at camp this summer, and I hate it. The trouble is, they’re the only two kids I’ve got that are any help around the house—the only ones who can make their own beds and take a decent message on the phone. Why couldn’t they take the five-year-old who whines, or the baby who still wets the bed?

There are advantages, of course, to having two daughters at summer camp. The laundry load is lighter, and sometimes I can actually see over the pile on the ironing board. Mind you, I paid dearly for the privilege. While other women went gallivanting to luncheons and matinees, I spent half the winter at home sewing name tapes onto everything that didn’t get up and walk away.

We got our first letters from the kids a week after they left—missives that looked as though they’d been written on the high seas during a typhoon. The following (suitably edited) are a few samples:

Dear Mum & Dad,
Yesterday we unpacked quick as a flash and the only thing I have left to do is arrange my shelf. For dinner we had bar-b-q spare ribs and fried rice and chicken wings and lemonade. It was supposed to be Chinese food. Tonight is social and I dont know what to wear. But Im not worrying. Bye now! Please! Write! P.S. My shelf is done now!

Dear Mum & Dad,
As they say in the song, why dont you write me? I am writing my 3rd letter to you and its only the 2nd day of camp and you have not written back!!! Please!! Do not hesitate to write! P.S. Write 5 times a week! Do it!

Dear Mum & Dad,
There is 10 minutes til super! Gotta put on my socks! Hold on a minute! There! Well, I’ve got to go now! Bye! P.S. There is no P.S.

Dear Mum & Dad,
Last night I got a sore throte and a headacke and the nurse gave me asprin. She seems to know how to handle my case. Anyway, I felt much better after the rash broke out.

Dear Mum & Dad,
This isnt going to be my usual jolly letter because I HATE CAMP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It ruins my summer!!! I made a calender so I can cross off each day til I can come home. I do not have time to tell you more because I have to make my counsler a get well card.

Dear Mum & Dad,
Its madning when you cant think of anything to say.

Hi Folks!
Nothing to say exept I have swoln glands. Its probly mumps. I made copper enamel earings for you but the counsler put cuffling backs on them. Anyway, I lost one.

Dear Folks,
TONIGHTS THE NIGHT!! I’ll write you the details tomorrow.

The next letter said they both spent a week in the infirmary for a variety of reasons, any one of which would panic the Board of Health. Then we heard nothing for two agonizing weeks. Their father, of course, was frantic. I wasn’t in the least concerned; I just happened to be passing the phone when I made those seven long distance calls.

I’m not going to give their absence another thought. I’ll just go into their rooms, mess up their beds, throw their dirty underwear on the floor, lock the bathroom door and empty the refrigerator. Then it’ll be a cinch to pretend that they never left home.