Fear is the primary ingredient in Parent Soup

Until you have kids, you never really know what fear is. I’m talking real fear here, not some drive-in monster movie eek, followed by popcorn and soda, but the kind of fear that brings down giants, that tears at your soul and summons every bad demon within 1,000 miles to live, for a time, in your very heart.

The kind of fear that can be caused by only one thing. A missing child.

Almost every parent has experienced that “Where’s Johnny?” moment at least once, the moment your ears frantically demand an “I’m here, mom!” from across the parking lot.

Among my nefarious offspring, it was my daughter, Aubreii, who was the real escape artist. She went missing so often it was miracle I didn’t just start letting her find her own way home. But I didn’t. I’m her father; I was genetically predisposed to walk the neighborhood in abject terror until she turned up.

She always did. But not always right away.

If you’re thinking I was a terrible, neglectful parent, you probably don’t have kids of your own. I kept a close on eye on the monsters, from birth through tenth grade or so, after which I let up my vigilance, but only in small increments over several years.

By the time she was five years old, my daughter could have escaped Attica or some death row super-max with ease. She once tunneled – yes, tunneled – under a fence surrounding our back yard. She had to move a pile of boulders larger than her head – I’d piled them against the fence specifically to thwart her escape attempts – before she could begin digging her way to freedom. She used a sandbox shovel. She was four at the time.

I swear, the kid carried wire cutters in her diaper.

My sons, Jordan and Jim Bob, were a different story. They followed me around like baby ducks. They’re both grown men now and I can probably still tell you exactly where they are at any time on any given day.

That’s what made it so scary the day Jordan went missing.

He and his sister (James was still several years off) were outside playing hide-and-seek with some neighbor kids. As was usually the case, they were outside, then inside, then outside, then inside, outside-inside-outside-inside – you get the picture. There was a lot of door-banging going on, but most of that was drowned out by the sound of screaming first-graders. So it didn’t bother me much.

It was summer vacation, getting on toward dinner time. Eventually, Annie, Kristen, Leonard, Sam and all the other kids were hollered home for supper.

Aubreii rolled into the kitchen (literally; she wore little pink, plastic roller skates that entire summer) with winded enquiries as to what Chez Dad would be serving that evening. She was gratified to learn pizza was again on the menu, since I was on deadline for a small magazine article and hadn’t had time to cook.

“Get your brother and wash up,” I told her. She was gone a couple minutes. When she returned, she said the words every parent fears more than zombies, the apocalypse, and reruns of “Dancing With the Stars.”

“I can’t find him.”

“What do you mean? Did you call outside for him?”

She admitted she hadn’t, so I did. Nothing.

“Did you check his bedroom?” I asked. She had, but I checked again anyway. Nothing.

I walked around the house, then around the neighborhood, bellowing his name every five seconds or so. A few neighbors stepped out their front doors.Then a few more. This was a neighborhood made up of young families and it didn’t take long for the search party to form.

The search expanded, block-by-block, the panic growing. Doors were knocked on. Questions were asked. “Have you seen this little boy? Blonde hair, blue eyes, six years old? Probably picking his nose?”

The police arrived and joined the search. Two cars, four officers. Going door-to-door, asking questions which, frankly, nearly killed me: “Have you seen any strange cars in the neighborhood? Anyone driving slowly? Any strangers?”

Lord, I’ll tell ya, it’s been 30 years and I can still barely write about it without a trace of that old, familiar terror rising like a bubble in my throat.

One officer asked to see his bedroom, even though I’d already checked there. It was while picking through the laundry hamper that the cop found Jordan, napping soundly among the towels and sheets.

If you’re a parent, you already know what I felt at that moment. If you’re not, no words of mine can ever convey that feeling.

Fear. It goes part and parcel with parenthood. And here’s the part that’s most awful, that nobody tells you about until it’s too late: It doesn’t end when they grow up and move out. Like life itself, it endures.

Now go hug your kid.

mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 730-1414

Chickens or kids, there’s really not that much difference

I mentioned a couple weeks back that Mrs. Taylor (formerly Lori Frankforter) had lost her mind and we are now raising chickens. Turns out I may have overstated the “losing her mind” part.  The idea wasn’t as crazy as it at first seemed.

We have eight hens (pullets, if you’re a chicken person; I’m not; I have no idea what a pullet is, other than it eats a helluva lot of chicken feed). They’re still living in the guest bathroom, ensconced in heated plastic bins with chicken wire tops on them.

I have to admit, at first I thought the idea was ridiculous. Mrs. T (fLF) and I both grew up in the city and have absolutely zero knowledge of anything ag related. Everything I know about farm life I learned from reading “Charlotte’s Web” and watching the movie, “Babe.”

Neither of those sources went into sufficient detail to give me the knowledge needed to establish an agrarian lifestyle. Fortunately, it’s not exactly rocket science.

Rising chickens, it turns out, is a lot like raising kids. When Aubreii, my first child, came along, I was practically a kid myself. At least from the neck up.

I had no idea what fatherhood would entail. Does anyone? And if they did, would anyone be crazy enough to go through with it? Sometimes, ignorance can be a good thing.

Then came Jordan and, via marriage, Jim Bob. It took all three of them and over 20 years before I felt I’d gotten the hang of the whole parent thing. By then, of course, they were grown. God knows I made mistakes along the way. Still, none of my offspring have climbed a water tower to take pot shots at student nurses, so I guess I did OK. Or maybe I just got lucky.

Either way, I’m hoping the same formula holds true with raising these dumb birds. The learning arc is accelerated, of course, but so far, it all feels very familiar.

As with the kids, when the chickens first entered our home, they were cute, little bundles of downy sweetness, impossible not to love. The girl at Tractor Supply Company cautioned me to not “cuddle” them. I did anyway, even though they are – according to the literature – lethal balls of contagion just waiting for their chance to transmit the super-flu to every last human being on the planet.

Just like kids.

Contagious or not, they were cute. Super cute! I sat in the guest bathroom for hours on end just watching their goofy antics as they tumbled to and fro in their never ending search for a warm spot in the wood chips. They seemed genuinely grateful for each refilling of the food and water containers, chirping happily day and night.

But as with kids, that baby stage didn’t last long. Within a week the downy, yellow fluff had begun to fall off and was replaced by scruffy feathers best described as the bird version of zits.

Like teenagers, they seemed to have sprung up overnight. They were no longer sweet and cute. They were lanky, unattractive, demanding, moody. Any of this sounding familiar, parents of teens?

They began to squabble among themselves. There’s always an abundance of food and water in those plastic bins, but still they find reason to quarrel. And those sweet, little cheep-cheep noises they made at first? Those have been replaced with angry bawk-bawks that leave little doubt as to their meaning: “Daaaaad! Henrietta is molting on my side of the cage again!”

Fortunately, those “teen” days are almost over already. In another week they’ll be moving outside to the coop I recently built them, which is considerably nicer than the house I live in myself.

I feel ready to let them out into the wider world. Sure, I’ll still feed and water them, just like I did with my kids when they first moved away. But if one of them wants to move back into the house, well, that’s not happening.

Likewise, they can forget about me loaning them any money. Other than that, raising chickens is a lot like raising kids.

I got this.

mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

Mrs. Kedzierski didn’t dig kids

“What if she finds the body? Oh, man, we should never have buried it there!”

This is not a sentence a guy would normally utter over a phone line, especially if he knew Mrs. Kedzierski was listening in.

But I was ten years old; the word “consequences” was not to be found in my vocabulary.

These were the days of the party line, back when four or five families — usually neighbors — all shared a single phone line. It seems impossible now, one step removed from smoke signals or beating sticks on a hollow log, but it happened kiddies, in the Long, Long Ago.

At any rate, every time anyone made or received a call, it was a given that Mrs. Kedzierski was listening in, probably taking notes. As she no doubt was now.

“Why did we kill him?” Jim moaned.

Jim was my buddy from down the street.

“Just keep your mouth shut and nobody’s ever going to find out,” I said, ad-libbing my end of our pre-arranged dialogue. “We buried him deep enough. Don’t worry.”

“But what if Mrs. Kedzierski starts digging around in her old garden? Oh man oh man…” Jim whined, adding just a touch too much breathless trepidation, in my opinion.

I heard a gasp, neither my own or Jim’s. Mrs. Kedzierski, of course, forgetting in her surprise to cup her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece.

Mrs. Kedzierski lived next door. She wasn’t as old as Moses, but she could remember when he played tight end on the varsity football team during her sophomore year of high school. 

She spoke just enough English to holler at the neighborhood kids who wandered too close to her yard (this included walking on “her” sidewalk). She was also diligent about reporting any juvenile transgression to the neighborhood’s parental contingent.

Nobody under 13 liked her and to all appearances that feeling was reciprocated with a vengeance.

Which was why Jim and I were doing our best to convince her we’d buried a dead kid in her garden. 

We’d planned this little caper a couple days in advance and had snuck out the night before with shovels to loosen the soil around the October remnants of her shriveled tomatoes and snap peas.

“Look,” I said, sotto voce. “Just keep your damn mouth shut and no one will ever know.” I figured using a swear would convince her if nothing else did, that we were unaware of her eavesdropping. Heaven knows Jim’s chops as an actor were not going to do it.

“OK, OK,” he said.

“Good,” I said, and hung up before Jim could gum up the works with any more of his over-acting.

Two minutes later Jim’s StingRay bike skidded to a halt in the alley bordering my side door. We watched from my upstairs bedroom window as Mrs. Kedzierski lurched to her garden, shovel in hand. 

She was out there digging for nearly two hours.

I never did figure out why she hated kids.

There may be a few snags in my new business idea

I need a kid. Were I not older than most Mayan temples, I’d just have another one of my own. That’s assuming I could find a willing (and biologically viable) partner to join me in the endeavor.

I have three kids already, or rather, I used to. These days they’re adults with jobs and lives of their own. 

I see them often enough, my sons at least. My daughter lives in Detroit, runs a business and has four munchkins of her own. She’s busy.

And even when I do see them, it’s not the same as when they were children. Because they’re not kids anymore. They’re old, like me.

My grandkids are great, but again, I only get to see them a half-dozen times a year, usually during family events when everyone’s trying to horn in on the grandkid action.

What I need is a kid of my own. Why? Well, put simply, I miss having a playmate.

I miss having someone handy to take fishing, hunting, jogging, bicycling, out to dinner. Speaking of dinner, I even miss the lunatic asylum that is Chuck E. Cheese. I haven’t eaten there in years.

If you’re a middle-aged man you cannot go by yourself to Chuck E. Cheese without attracting a lot of unfriendly stares. Thank you, media, for painting every American white guy over the age of 35 as a potential pedophile.

Not that it matters; Chuck E. Cheese is no fun without a couple toddlers of your own in tow anyway.

I was a single parent during most of my own kids’ childhoods and much of what I miss is the little stuff; frying up Mickey-shaped pancakes in the morning, checking homework, braiding my daughter’s hair at bedtime … dumb stuff like that.

Yeah, I know I’m seeing all this through time’s rose-colored granny glasses. I haven’t entirely forgotten the bouts of flu, the temper tantrums, the shock of a Hot Wheels car crunching beneath my bare feet in the middle of the night.

But the good far outweighed the bad. I thought so even at the time.

I was a dad and I was pretty good at it. Then, just about the time I was really getting the hang of the job, everybody grew up and moved out. I was forced into parental retirement! With no severance package!

I can’t believe I’m the only empty nester to feel this way.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with a great new business idea (yes, yet another of my get rich without working plans).

I call it Rent-a-Kid. 

That’s right, for a small fee — thirty bucks, maybe — a kid between the ages of five and nine will accompanying you on hayrides at the apple orchard in the fall, or drop by your house to open presents Christmas morning, or maybe play in the lake while you sit on shore hollering at him or her not to wade out too far.

Or maybe not. Now that I actually put the idea down on paper, I gotta admit it sounds a little creepy. That’s not how it was in my head. 

I blame the media for sending me back to the drawing board.

Catch Mike Taylor’s Reality Check radio program every weekday at 5:30 p.m. on WGLM, m106.3 on your FM dial.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

Sometimes life’s best lessons come with a rake

Why, yes, of course the world has gone crazy. The monkeys are in charge of the zoo. The center cannot hold. Will the last sane person out please turn off the lights?

Pick your metaphor.

The point is, much of modern life makes no sense at all. Common sense is no longer all that common. And nowhere is this truer than in the way in which we now bring up our kids.

For thousands of years, each generation of children was raised in much the same way as the generation which preceded it. Good behavior was rewarded, bad behavior was punished.

A parent’s job was to feed and clothe the child until such time as that child got a) a job, b) married, or c) drafted. An educator’s job was to make sure the child could a) read, b) write, and c) figger numbers.

Beyond that, the kid’s fate was in his or her own hands.

Then came Dr. Spock, self-esteem, organized pee-wee football, baseball, softball, professional piano lessons, soccer, karate, ballet, gymnastics, swimming, upscale preschools, upscale pre-preschools … the list goes on.

Good behavior was still rewarded. So was bad behavior. And mediocre behavior. And no behavior at all. Why? See Dr. Spock and self-esteem, above.

Parents were too busy driving junior to all these “fun” organized activities to actually do any parenting themselves. So teachers were asked to do that job in their stead, and to fit in the teaching thing whenever they had a few spare minutes.

It’s a great system, assuming you’re trying to churn out a generation of pathological narcissists devoid of any sense of personal responsibility. In his later years, Dr. Spock himself backtracked on many of his child-rearing theories, but, oops! By then, the damage was already done.

Too many people had been brought up worrying WAY too much about parenting issues that previous generations had never even considered. There are those, even now, who still contend modern child rearing techniques are vastly superior to those of their parents’ or grandparents’ day.

To which I say, really? Do your kids treat you with the same respect you showed your own parents?  If the answer is “yes,” I’m betting you raised them pretty much as your parents raised you and you’re wondering who this Dr. Spock person is that I keep mentioning.

I love my old man, but as a child, I feared him, too. He put up with exactly zero BS from myself, my brothers and my sisters. I often thought he was unfair and sometimes he was. 

But with him, I knew where I stood. I had my part to play in the family and he had his. If I was bored, he didn’t rush to the psychologist’s office to see what he, as a parent, was doing wrong. He handed me a rake and put me to work in the back yard until I wasn’t bored anymore.

If I was angry or upset, I was encouraged to say exactly what was on my mind, just as soon as I was out of earshot.

My old man didn’t feel an urgent need to make sure my every waking moment was filled with educational activities designed to bolster my self-esteem. Hence, I learned how to make friends, join pickup softball games, climb trees and figure out for myself how to enjoy life.

Why am I on this particular soapbox today? Well, I just read an article about a school in England that has banned the game of hide and seek.

Hide and seek promotes “secretive play,” administrators say. It sends “mixed messages,” they say. It exposes children to “dangerous situations.”

I only wish I was making this up.

My own son, many years ago, was sent home from third grade for breaking the playground rules. He and a friend were playing cowboys and Indians, using their pointed index fingers as six-shooters.

Such brutality, such mindless violence, I was informed, would not be tolerated on the playground.

It seemed crazy to me then and it seems crazy to me now. But then again, I was raised by a man who handed me a rake when I got bored. So what do I know.

Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com. 

I’ve finally found my target audience: second graders

The second grade classroom wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I had imagined.

As regular readers of this column (both of you) may recall, I was invited a few weeks back to speak at Collins Elementary School. They are, apparently, hard up for speakers there.

I hemmed and hawed and tried vigorously to get out of it, even though the teacher who did the inviting promised me free chocolate and introductions to some of the school’s attractive, single teachers. She came through with the chocolate, but I’m still waiting for those introductions.

At any rate, the kids were wonderful. The teacher, principal and other staffers all made me feel very welcome; so much so, in fact, that they eventually had to ask me to leave so they could work on math.

But the best part came a few days later, when the envelope containing the kids’ thank you notes arrived in the mail. I’ve never had such uniformly positive reviews. If their parents would give ‘em up, I’d personally adopt the entire class, assuming the parents would take them back when they hit their teens. Once was enough for that.

“Dear Mike Taylor,” wrote Alise. “No newspaper writer is better than you! I really like your articles. Sometimes, I wish they would never end.” (I’m going to get Alise to accompany me to the boss’ office next time I go begging for a raise. Unlike Alise, my boss seems to think there are better writers than me and that if he threw a stone into a crowd of chimpanzees, he’d probably hit one of them. Alise, bless her, knows better. It would take at least two stones.)

“Thanks for coming to our classroom!” wrote Gabriela. “You are awesome!” Maybe I should take both Alise and Gabriela when I talk with the boss.

Then there’s Gavan. Gavan is a really cool kid, but for some reason, he can’t stop talking about spinach. He even gave me a lecture about the dangers of eating all the chocolate the teacher gave me. Someday, Gavan will own a gym, I’m sure of it. Gavan says I’m a “nice author, for a grownup.” He’s not as big a fan as is Alise. Maybe if I ate more spinach.

Willis, on the other hand, hinted in his letter that if I didn’t like chocolate, he would be happy to take some of it off my hands. Sorry Willis; that chocolate was gone twenty minutes after I got back to the car! (Yes, even the big box of fancy chocolates that I was supposed to give to a girlfriend.)

Sam’s letter I’m not so sure about: “Thank you for visiting our class,” Sam writes. “I really wanted to meet a real author … before you came.” I guess meeting me cured him of that desire.

Bill and Gracie were concerned about my kid-o-phobia. “Are you really afraid of second graders?” they wrote. Well, Bill, Gracie, I was, but not so much any more, thanks to you guys.

Some of the other kids sent pictures; Marisa, for one, is as brilliant with a crayon as she is with a pencil. I’m sure she’s going to have my job someday, but that’s cool; I’ll be done with it by then. Regan also sent me a lovely drawing. And Brody sent a portrait (of me) that looks far better than I do in real life. I’m thinking of swapping Brody’s drawing with the mug shot that usually runs with this column.

At any rate, I’d like to publicly thank the kids for helping me get over my fear of second graders. Also, I should mention their teacher, Ms. TenCate. She is one of those rare educators that seems born to the job. She deserves a raise and I’m not just saying that because she gave me chocolate.

I’m saying it because I’m still hoping she’ll introduce me to those cute, single teachers.

Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.