parental logic?!

if i could poll kids, i wonder how many would question it.

why do parents ask questions they are going to ignore the answers to, or they already know the answer? or kid's answer, they either will not like the answer!

example: why did you do _______ (fill in the blank parent). kid answers: i don't know. (would ignite my mom every time! and if i didn't answer, that would get her too. it's a definite lose/lose situation for a kid.)

i once wrote a letter to my dad stationed overseas. the pen ran out of ink. well, what's a kid to do. fill it. had i done this before? no. did things turn out well? no. you see when you pull up on the lever a nossell like thing came out (something i had not see when mom and sister did it). the next thing the bottle of peacock blue in tipped over! ink, permanent of course, was all over the lace (like crochet) table cloth and onto my mom's expensive (what else) wool carpet. i did the best an 8yo could (not a good job) and went to bed.

now, i was an early riser who had to get up when she woke up. i did not want to get up that morning. i played like i was asleep until i had a horrible headache. if i didn't get up, i would die. the odds were i was not longed for the world anyway. so i got up.

some rotten kids of a friend of hers were visiting. they told me i was going to get it bad! finally we faced one another, me and my mom.

i didn't get killed! she said she knew i didn't do it on purpose and that i had suffered enough (it was after 12 and i used to be up by 6:30 or 7). then she said, "honey, next time just come to me when you have done something you weren't supposed to. it will be lots better."

time passes.

my younger sister and i were doing something in the bathroom when her jade bowl landed on the floor. it broke in 2 pieces and there was face powder all over the floor. we gave each other the look of "we're ganna get it now!" but wait, remember what mommy said? so we elmer glued it together and scotch taped it together so the glue could set (so not the right type of glue or tape). then we scooped as much of the powder as we could and put it into the bowl (who'd have thunk about any dust bunnies. not us.). we swabbed down the floor.

when our mother came home, we were ready! secure in the knowledge all would be well! we were there to greet her and i, the older of the two, told her the entire story; what had happened, how sorry we were and how we had fixed it.

how can i tell you how wrong we were! that is when spankings were not considered child abuse but more a behavior modification technique. we got clobbered!

decades later, i used this as an example of how she confused me. she didn't have an explanation. but i can tell you that at the age of 9 or 10, i learned....parents expect us to know why we do things inconsistently when it turns out they are as just as bad. and they have selective memories of what kind of stuff they did as a child and how their parents reacted to their hijenks.