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.