Modern Family Values
I don’t like sad shit. And I’m just going to assume my kids don’t like sad shit either.
When their dad and I were getting divorced, all the books I read (okay, skimmed self-righteously and with annoyance) said to sit the kids down and tell them we knew this was sad, and we were sad too, but that we just couldn’t be happy being married to each other anymore, and that it would be hard but we’d work together and blah blah blah.
This seemed like the opening to a difficult conversation sure to involve tears—and questions that I couldn’t answer without telling them about the insane accusations and forged emails and relentless sexual expectations. I’ll save those stories for when they’re older.
So, for now, I went with, “Different families work best in different ways. Ours is going to work best with two houses. It’ll be great! Two houses!” I mean: why use an ugly word like divorce when a nice word like two will do?
(Until this point, they also thought dead bugs were sleeping, that squirt guns were called squirters, and that the firemen took Curious George to a relaxing spa resort without telephones—instead of to prison, for one fucking accidental phone call to the fire station!)
“Different families work in different ways” is how I also explain when a friend has two dads or two moms, when a kid has one parent, or when a kid lives with his grandma because both his parents are at a relaxing spa resort.
All of this has given my kids a very open idea of what a family can be, which seems like a smart idea for a single mom with no solid plans for what family life might look like in a couple of years. But aside from judging me, it also keeps the kids from judging other people. My kids are open to any family situation you might describe.
When we play Barbies, my daughter’s family is regularly adopting new kids, who need homes and have no one to love them; and bringing in additional spouses, who have cool clothes and like to clean and cook. The families never get unreasonably big, though, because she quickly gets rid of the boring people by having them grow up suddenly and move to Yakima, or having them die of gum disease. (In addition to an open view of family values, I’m doing an excellent job of teaching the importance of dental hygiene!)
As of now, my kids have big, elaborate plans that when they grow up they’ll marry each other, and all their best friends, and the kid with the motorized Jeep you can actually ride in (he was a shoe-in the day he pulled up to the playground in that thing).
A friend’s mom once responded to her daughter’s inclusion in this plan with a forced chuckle, “Oh, haha. But you can only marry one person and since you’re a girl you can only marry one boy. And that boy can’t be your brother.” My kids turned to me for the wisdom and guidance they’re used to me providing. I suppose I could have told them the truth. But I don’t want them to know how fucked up the world is (mostly with respect to gay marriage) so I tell them that people can marry whoever they love (mostly without respect to incest).
I actually had a perfect opportunity to stop all this talk of a brother-sister union a couple of weeks ago, when my daughter decided that she loved the 3-year-old in the apartment across from us enough to marry ONLY him. But my heart sank at the thought of my sweet boy being excluded: “Don’t forget your brother! You’re going to marry both of them, remember? It’ll be great! And he promised to pay for the TV!”
It’s possible I’m raising incestuous polygamists, but who cares? They’ll be accepting, open-minded incestuous polygamists.
Really, the plan isn’t so bad: Incest-based genetic defects aren’t an issue, because my daughter is going to adopt her kids so she doesn’t get too fat to wear all her cute clothes. And if they don’t outgrow peeing on each other in the bath, their choices for a respectable spouse besides each other might be slim. And honestly, if they end up working at McDonald’s as planned, they’re going to need to combine multiple incomes to be able to buy any new Wii games.
