My favourite character

My favourite character in the Bible is Jonah. Not very seasonal. You thought I was going to say Mary or Joseph, or possibly a shepherd, didn't you? Well, ha ha. Wrong! My favourite character, by a long chalk, is Jonah.

Jonah is best remembered for that stint in the whale, but the rest of his story is the best bit. He gets to Ninevah, where God sent him in the first place, and he preaches to them, and they all go "Hey, yes, Jonah has a point". They repent, and live happily ever after, and Jonah says "See, God? I told you there was no point me coming here. You make me so angry. And now you're probably expecting me to be all glad and joyous that the Ninevites have repented, but I'm not. I'm angry and I'm grumpy. Aaaaargh, I'm so angry I can't even speak. I'm going to sit under this tree in the shade and be really really angry". And the story ends with God trying to get Jonah's attention, and Jonah sitting in a great big wallowing grump, probably the emotional equivalent of the belly of the whale, and not talking to him. It's marvellous.

When I get to Heaven, the first thing I'm going to do is find Jonah. I'm going to sit right down next to him, under that tree, and I'm going to join in his great big long eternal grump. And I'm going to enjoy every eternal minute of it. I think he and I will get on really well.

We'll start with schools. I don't know if he had much experience of schools, or even had children, but I expect he did. I mean, that whole whale episode was so designed to be a Favourite Kids' Bible Story down the ages, it smacks of someone who knows about children. So we'll get started on schools, and how teachers can ruin your week by expecting you to help your child produce a project, on a huge piece of poster board, about Christmas traditions in some selected nation of the world, by Friday. Don't they KNOW how much some children hate doing projects on poster boards? Don't they REALISE that Friday is very soon after Monday? (and ok, ok, I could have read the homework page on the website, or maybe my child could have communicated to me, but GET REAL, this is life). Does anyone CARE about Christmas traditions in France? I will ask Jonah if they had the tradition of teachers' seasonal gifts back in his time. You know the one. Where you feel obliged to contribute to a pot of money for someone who is doing their job, just like all the rest of us are doing our jobs. But most of us don't have jobs that involve innocent adults having to help with projects on poster board. Am I the only one who has noticed this?

You see, Heaven will be Heaven, because it will be full of people who have noticed the poster board thing. I am sure of it. I'm guessing quite a few thousand of them will have drifted towards Jonah and his tree, and it will be FABULOUS, because we can complain about poster board projects endlessly (literally endlessly). And if we get bored with that, we can move on to children and their incapacity not to strew chaos everywhere (Heaven is going to be self-tidying, did you know that?), the Post Office, churches and all their members, the media, adolescents who answer every question with "I dunno" but manage to leave out all the consonants so that it sounds like a nasalised "I uuuhhh", tax forms, sleepovers, McDonalds, customers who want to tell you about their trip to England which happened so long ago they can't remember the names of any of the places they went to, the quirks of Blogger, apostrophes in the wrong place's, library fines, and families who have the nerve to get together at Christmas - together, I tell you! - without those of their number who live on a different side of an ocean.

So Jonah, hang on in there, up there, or wherever the Nth dimension is. I am coming. I'm going to join your club. I bet it's the coolest one in town (does Heaven have towns?), with all the anarchists, the Occupy Cities people, the trailing spouses, the disgruntled mums, and all those people who just can't face the shiny smiley ones over the other side of the cloud. We will eat far too much chocolate and drink far too much wine, and be really really grumpy all the time, without it mattering one single jot. We will whitter and whinge to our hearts' content, and dance to the very loud music of rejuvenated punk rockers dressed in bin liners with safety pins through their noses and lips, who will be tediously smug about how they started the whole body-piercing craze.

And ha! I've just had a brilliant idea! We will do poster board projects... about teachers. We'll do them badly, without reading the instructions, and hand them in late (we'll need a philosopher or two to help us out with the concept of "late" in an eternal setting). Ooooh. I'm looking forward to it already.



Picture credit: phillipmartin.info

New Year Rant

Okay, so here is a rant. It's been triggered by this post at Notes from Lapland. She's writing about how cosmetic surgery and beauty treatments which we used to think were the sole privilege of narcissistic and slightly weird celebrities, have now become mainstream. Her example of choice is teeth-whitening. She says:

I remember not many years back laughing at the blindingly white, perfectly straight, false looking teeth that every American actor had. Now it’s perfectly normal to have your teeth whitened and many shopping centres in the UK have Whiten While You Wait booths for those lunch time teeth whitening emergencies.

What’s wrong with normal looking teeth, when did they become an abomination? Are we really all expected to look like anime characters?...

...We all know how it works. You see it enough to become desensitized to it, making it normal. You feel abnormal for not having it done.

She puts it so well. Somewhere along the line, having perfectly white teeth, and perfectly straight teeth, has become a norm so strong that it has become harder to opt out of it than opt into it. Did we all collectively want that to happen? Did we tick some box that said "I want to spend time and money on making my teeth look good. That is an important issue for my life."?

Let's play guess the celebrity.
Whose perfectly straight teeth are these? Recognise them?

Ha! Trick question. Those are the teeth of my 13 year old son, and you know what? I'm very grateful for them, because if they weren't so beautiful, they would probably be requiring us to fork out thousands of dollars in orthodontist bills. (And while I'm venting my rage, I want to ask why they are called orthodontists, not orthodentists? Why?) The jury is out on 9-yo, but 6-yo definitely has a crowded mouth, so unless the Tooth Fairy can do a little more magic than just leaving a couple of dollars in an egg cup by the bed, we are going to be presented with some choices over the next few years.

There's the financial choice. Would we rather spend our money on ensuring that 6-yo will look just like all her peers, than on her education, holidays, leisure activities, living environment, or anything else that we could choose. Of course the orthodontistry option is appealing to the parental instinct, because it is visible proof to everyone that we care for her, and are wealthy enough to hold our heads up in polite society.

Then there's the medical choice. Apparently these days what you do for an overcrowded mouth is apply some metallic contraption or other that encourages the jaw to grow, to make a bit more space for the teeth. The dental hygienist who was telling me about this assured me that they have done research, which demonstrates that this is a better strategy than taking out a couple of teeth, and prevents problems in later life. Yup. I bet they have. (She couldn't remember what problems it prevents, but she thought they must be serious...) But my nice Scottish osteopath, when he heard we were moving to America, told me not to let them put braces on my kids. According to him, they can cause so many problems in later life: neck problems, head aches... quite apart from all the issues to do with making your child go through her most formative years with a mouthful of painful metal, which will affect her eating, her speaking, her image of herself.

Don't you think they'll look back, in centuries to come, and judge teeth braces as instruments of torture? Don't you think they'll be up there with corsets, and foot-binding? (Well, not as bad as foot-binding, but absolutely as bad as corsets.)

Here's why I am so ranty and angry about this. I feel so powerless. I know that the pressure to enable 6-yo to have nice teeth will be greater than my better judgement. It's not that I want her to have horridly crooked teeth. I don't. But I believe that there is a sensible middle ground, where a little bit of dentistry will result in good enough teeth (and as Notes from Lapland fears, this kind of talk does make one sound like Aunt Mabel saying "what was good enough for my generation, is good enough for yours"). I believe that getting her jaw to grow beyond what nature intended, in order for her to have a row of white tombstones that will give her the look that used to be pure Hollywood, but is now average suburban housewife, is not right. I want to have a sensible conversation about this with an intelligent dentist. But it doesn't work that way. Dentists are bought into helping people have perfect teeth - it's their business. The media, the fasion industry, the cosmetics industry, the plastic surgery industry, the airbrushing industry, Mrs Jones down the road, I don't even know WHO... they are all bought into presenting us with the image of what is no longer the perfect face, but the acceptable face. And as much as I want to bring 6-yo up to believe all that good stuff about it's not what you look like but what you are, and how dangerous and damaging it is to tie up your self-esteem in your looks, I can see that I've lost the battle before I even start. I don't know who the enemy is. I don't know how to arm myself. I don't even know if I want to win. Do I really want her to have less-than-perfect teeth in a world where everyone else's are perfect?

I feel we are all tricked into reciting mantras which have no meaning. Every time we read something that says a person had cosmetic work done "for their self-esteem", we help create that myth, and bolster it, and now the myth has become reality. It really will be hard for 6-yo to have good self-esteem if she doesn't have good teeth. It's not her fault, and it's not my fault. How did it happen? I feel so powerless. It makes me angry. I haven't been this furious since I wrote about the learn-to-dress kitty toy (I only vent my spleen in tackling life's larger issues...).

Powerless, but not voiceless. That's the great thing about blogging.

And a ranty new year to you!

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Learn to Dress Kitty

This is it. This is my least favourite toy in the shop.

It's the Learn to Dress Kitty. The idea behind it is that you use this friendly fun cat to teach your child all about clothes fastenings. See, there's a zip (zipper), a button, and shoes with laces on the front, and various hooks and eyes and other things on the back. It retails at $34.99. We also sell a wooden shoe with laces, for $14.99. Same idea, but just a large wooden shoe. No cute cat. It's my second least favourite toy in the shop.

The reason I hate these items so much is this. You just don't need them. Trust me. I've had three children. You truly don't. Here's why (and it's not rocket science). You can use your child's own clothes to teach them how to do fastenings!

"Wait a minute!" I hear you interject. "It's easier for the child to learn on an object in front of them, than on clothes on their own body." I've thought of that, and I have a selection of answers.

First, it actually probably isn't.

Second, what is the point of teaching your child a skill that's easier than the one they need in daily life? What good is it if your child can operate that taut, easy-to-pull 2-inch zip, if at preschool they need to be able to do up their own wrinkly, tricky-to-pull 10-inch zip? Eh? Tell me that. How impressed will the beleaguered preschool teacher be if they say "I can do the Kitty one at home"? Not very.

Third, even if it were helpful to have a teaching aid that the child isn't wearing, even if it were helpful to have easier fastenings to start learning on, even then, this is still a total waste of $34.99, because guess what? You can use an ordinary shoe to practise laces. You can use your handbag or a pair of jeans to practise zips. You can use a cardigan to practise buttons.

There are so very many things that are worth spending $34.99 on. Plus tax. If you still aren't persuaded, if you're still tempted to purchase this toy, or teaching aid, or whatever it is, then STOP right now. Buy a puzzle, or a doll, or a teddy, or Monopoly, or write a cheque to Oxfam. You're still liking the kitty? I hate this toy so much that I am almost at the point of offering to pay my own travel expenses to your house, where I will take you by the hand, and lead you to your own wardrobe, and help you find items which you have right there which will do the same job. It could be a life-changing releasing moment for you.

Quite apart from not buying into the whole idea behind this toy (had you noticed?), I have some issues with the details of the design. The staring eyes... The fact that the zip is so short (what's the point of a 2-inch zip?)... But most of all (and this REALLY annoys me), that orange button under the cute cat chin? See it? It's not even a real functioning button. It's a decorative button. What IS the point of having a button on a learn-to-dress toy, that doesn't have a button hole to go through? Aaaargh...

Before I self-combust in the heat generated by my own ire, I just have to show you this.

Yes, it's the equivalent toy for boys. The Learn to Dress Monkey. I hate it with the same passion, though at least the two buttons on the front are functioning (one with a button hole, the other with an odd loop arrangement that you never ever see on clothes). And there are poppers (snaps, in the US) too. But I have to tell you this about the monkey. In this picture, he's holding the banana in one hand, and his tail in the other. But in the toy shop, he hangs on a rack with both hands fully extended down in front holding the banana - they both attach to it, and (visualise it, go on) it just looks very rude.

Here's my final thought. (If you're not persuaded by now, I'm thinking you're probably beyond my reach on this item.) If your child struggles to do up laces, don't buy the kitty, the monkey or the wooden shoe. Join the rest of Planet Motherhood, and buy shoes with velcro! That $34.99 could buy a very nice pair.