The Fresh Smell of Old Books

Erma Bombeck doesn't write books anymore and let's face it, we live in a world now where people don't read. So all the books I ordered from Amazon are a little long in the tooth. They are a little younger than I am.

But when you see titles like The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank and Someday You'll Have Kids of Your Own, you should be thinking, "I need to read this!" And you do. (People consistently tell me I understand nothing of what it is like to be a parent, but I read and I communicate. While I don't have the day-to-day understanding in a super-personal way, I am not stupid and I do get it.) When parents say that this is all so great and his or her kids are angels, you know he or she is lying. Parenthood has its rewards, but like everything in life, you are going to work and work hard to get them.

If you can look me in the eye and tell me your 4-year-old is an angel and keep the straight face, you should be in politics. You have mastered the art of lying and making it look good. When you do it with a teenager, there is a space in Hell with your name on it. I was (relatively speaking) a not-terrible teenager - no drinking, no going out all hours, no trying on a life of crime. Did I speed up my parents' aging process? You better believe it. Just because I never made one phone call from the county jail doesn't mean I didn't take my surliness seriously and drive them crazy without making the effort little kids make really well.

If you can survive that, the relationship will eventually work itself out to a point where conversations progress beyond the standard monosyllabic answers that inevitably occur between a teen and his or her parent. Of course, I married well for this, so I still get practice:

Parent: "Hi, name. How was your day today?"

Teen: "Fine."

Parent: "What did you today?"

Teen: "Nothing."

(Parent is thinking, "Wow. Two syllables. I must be getting through.") Parent: "What did you learn today in school?"

Teen: "Stuff."

And like a glacier, the teen has gone two steps back to move forward one.

Luis is not one to get lost in the details, so you can imagine how stunning those conversations are. When I ask how his day was I get much of the same feedback. But that is training. He knows never to ask me how my day was, because getting through the first hour of it is a 20-minute dissertation including facial expressions, what I was thinking and did not say and pheromonal responses to questions.

This is why husbands the world over don't want to know how your day was. Fathers of small to teenage children? Even less. Like Bill Engvall said, your wife will say now, "Oh, your day was hard? Do you want to know what went in this house while you were at your job?!" I never wonder why executives spend 12 hours a day in their offices. It's not the time management, it's because they have kids and if you time it right, they'll be in bed when you get home so you missed all the internecine fighting that happens after school.

That's right. No matter what you do for a living, raising children is harder. The time off is extremely limited and the benefits stink. There is no danger pay. The overtime rate is very low. I got lucky - I figured out before I did it that you can't pay me enough to do it.

Years ago Luis' father sent him a letter (one of far too many) from Colombia, telling Luis he would pay him $5,000 if we had a child. I wrote him back and told him he can't find enough money in the free world to pay me to have a kid. (Of course, that was before all the e-mails from Burkina Faso, promising me many millions of dollars to hand over information about myself to get a piece of the action...) He did not get the hint. When he made his next pilgrimage to the United States to drive us crazy for a spell, I finally told him he can attempt all the conversations he wants to with Luis on the subject but it is a closed one with me. He never brought it up again.

See that? You can train old dogs new tricks.

Anyway, these books are great. Parents, parenting and kids have not changed between 1945 and now. Just the surroundings have changed.