I've written two pieces in the last 15 years that I hear about time and again. One was a rant on Santa Claus, the first big lie you tell your children, and the second was an essay on the value of disappointment. Although I wrote it about my experiences as a local community newspaper editor, I sent it to Style Weekly instead where it was published (I'm thinking circa 1999-2000), and the fact that I was writing for another paper is what eventually moved me to the head of the layoff list when the ax came down in 2001. Not to mention pissing my employers off by writing such a piece in the first place.
Anyway, someone just mentioned it again, so I am reprinting it here.
Bring Disappointment Back!
When I was the editor of the Mechanicsville Local, on any given week I reduced half the children in town to bitter tears, or so their parents and teachers would have me believe. I was the Grinch who stole childhood.
Maybe I didn’t run the elementary school six-week honor roll, which included all the names of children who managed to make at least a B average for one report card. Not straight A's as you might think. Isn't a B average what you would normally expect? How is this an honor?
Or maybe they’re all weeping and gnashing their teeth in disappointment because instead of a front page story with several photos of their latest school activity, I just ran one photo with a caption.
Or maybe I have profoundly scarred some little girl because we spelled her name Brittany, except it turns out to actually be Britany, or Britnee, or Brittanee, or Briteney, or Britknee, or Brit’ane. I think it’s the parents who can’t spell. I have plaques and certificates of merit, and even engraved Jefferson pewter cups with my name spelled all kinds of screwy ways on them and if I needed therapy every time this happened, I’d be in a straightjacket by now.
One time, thinking I was at least pleasing one child by running a photo of him with the first deer he had shot and killed, I learned I had variously ruined another child’s appetite, this one’s life, that one’s Christmas, and this other one’s pleasure in the movie “Bambi.” It was now necessary, because of me, for the parents to explain what “shot and killed” meant to children they claimed had no idea of the concept despite exposure to television, and who would be emotionally maimed by the realization that some people on this planet shoot and kill animals.
One irate schoolteacher, who thought her classes’ donation of pennies to a charity deserved more than a photo on an inside page, got into a screaming match with me on the phone over whether or not I thought children and charities were “worth it” or not, and if so, then why wasn’t it a bigger story? I told her it was worth the space it got, which caused her to call her husband, who regularly ran a small ad in the paper. He called his ad representative and threatened to pull his little ad unless the story was rerun, this time with the coverage it deserved.
So now I had the ad salesman coming down the hall to tell me I am jeopardizing his commission and his ability to put food on the table for his own little children, who will be crying bitterly and rubbing their empty tummies. Well, I’m sorry, but we can’t always get what we want, and like the Israeli government, I can’t give in to threats. Even if I was thinking of capitulating a little, now they’ve put me in a situation where I can’t give an inch because that would empower a bully.
That night I thought about the value system of a teacher who, when she doesn’t get what she wants, threatens other people until she does. Is that the value system I would want a teacher of my child to have? Is that what they teach children these days? If you don’t get want you feel you deserve, then make someone pay?
Apparently so, and that’s why the kids are taking guns to school and shooting everyone up.
The morning after all this happened, I saw repeated broadcasts of a news report that a parent who had ordered two game cartridges for his son from toysrus.com was only going to get one. The other was sold out, and instead of the cartridge, toysrus.com was sending him a $100 gift certificate, nearly three times the value of the game. A bonanza you say?
Oh no. The parent went on television to say with a grim face that his child “would not understand” only getting one game cartridge instead of two. They even showed a photo of the poor, deprived child. Call Save the Children now. Call Christian’s Children Fund! Because here is a pathetic child who is only getting one game cartridge and a $100 gift certificate. He is not getting everything he wants when he wants it! Oh, alas! Grab the gun and let’s go shoot up Toys R Us.
The irate parent who wanted to see the honor role printed in the paper said the child’s older siblings’ names had been in the paper when they made honor role, under a different editor, and if I did not carry on the tradition to honor her child, her child would be disappointed.
Oh my gosh. A disappointed child.
Life, I hate to break this news to you, is full of disappointment. It is full of pain and heartache and failure. People we love die. Jobs we want go to other people. Our enemies triumph. Our best efforts sometimes go for nothing. The one we love doesn’t love us back. The one we trusted betrays us. No one will ever have the money they think they need. Only one person can win the race, and everyone else is an also-ran. Someone will always be richer, smarter, prettier, more popular. Every stoplight we come to, someone will have a nicer, newer car. Life will continually suck in a myriad of ways.
And that’s what we need to prepare our children to face: disappointment. Instead, we try to build a buffer zone around them where their feelings will never be hurt and failure never darkens the light. If they cannot make A’s in school, we will reward them for C’s. If the neighborhood children have hundred dollar tennis shoes, we will buy them as well. If Pokemon is the price of self-esteem, then Pokemon it will be. They want cell phones and cars when they’re 16? Get them cell phones and cars! Use them both at the same time!
We shoot them out of the womb and right into daycare centers while we go out and earn money, and then to compensate for not being in their lives, we spend that money on them to keep them drugged up on material goods. We are the first pushers in their lives, getting them hooked on instant gratification as we run in circles, ensuring our child is never, ever disappointed by anyone or anything.
But we can’t protect them from everything and everyone, and eventually they hit a brick wall and the one thing we haven’t given them is the ability to handle disappointment, to deal with it, to suck it up and move on to something positive. Instead they just hit the wall startled and unprepared, and mommy can’t fix it this time. The real drug dealer will help them with their pain, and maybe taking a gun to school and eliminating some more pain will help, too.
So your child is disappointed? Good. Let them feel it, let them soak in the whole essence of disappointment, or else you’ll be teaching them to not feel anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment