December 16, 2006 10:23 pm
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By Mike Pound
Globe columnist
We do a lot of yelling at our house.
It’s not so much that we’re mad at each other as it is we’re lazy.
Say my wife is upstairs in the bathroom drying her hair and our 8-year-old daughter, Emma, is downstairs in our kitchen eating her breakfast and watching a rerun of “Saved by the Bell,” and suddenly realizes she has a school-clothes crisis.
What does she do?
Well, first, Emma turns to me and asks my opinion about how best to solve her sudden school-clothes crisis.
Ha! I kill myself.
No, what Emma does is, knowing that my wife is upstairs in the bathroom with the door shut and running a loud blow dryer through her hair, calmly walks upstairs and waits outside the bathroom for my wife to finish drying her hair and then asks her how to solve her sudden-school clothes crisis.
Ha! Seriously. I’m killing myself here.
Nope, what Emma does when she realizes that she has a sudden school-clothes crisis while she is in our kitchen, eating breakfast and watching “Saved by the Bell” is to slide her chair back from the counter and yell at the top of her lungs.
Emma: (Loud) Mom!
Wife: (Nothing).
Emma: (Louder) Mom!!
Wife: (Nothing)
Emma: (Incredibly loud) Mom!!!
Wife: (Turns off blow dryer) What?
Emma: (Turns up volume on TV) What?
This goes on for several minutes until I get involved in the conversation.
Me: What’s going on?
Emma: What?
Wife: What?
Dog: Woof?
Because Emma is 8 she has a lot of energy. She has so much energy that she has trouble sitting still during important activities. Like watching TV, for example. When Emma watches TV, she’ll stand up in front of the TV and sing or dance or do some sort of gymnastic move. If she does sit in a chair, she will allow herself to gradually slide down into the chair until she is literally watching TV upside down.
Yep, when my wife or I call “Miss Full of Energy” while she’s watching TV, Emma suddenly loses power in her legs. For some reason, she is unable to walk away from the
TV and into whatever room my wife or I are in to find out what we want. Instead Emma yells “What?” when my wife or I call.
This makes my wife and me mad, and we can’t understand why our little girl is suddenly too lazy to come to us so she can hear whatever it is we want her to hear. So we yell back at Emma. Of course, she can’t hear what we’re saying so she yells “What?” back at us, and we yell back at her.
This goes on for a couple of weeks.
I don’t want you to think that Emma always yells “What?” when we call her.
Sometimes she ignores us entirely.
One time, I was in our basement and I wanted her to come and put away a few of her 3,958 Barbie dolls. I called her for 10 minutes. Finally I stormed upstairs and found her singing along with some Disney teen actor on TV.
Me: Emma!
Emma: What?
Me: Didn’t you hear me call you?
Emma: I didn’t think you really meant it.
I was tempted to ask my daughter why she thought I would call her name for 10 minutes if I didn’t mean it. But I knew her answer would just give me a headache so, instead, I did what any parent in my position would do. I sent her to her room.
Emma hates being sent to her room. But, really, it’s not like she’s being sent to a prison in Calcutta. I mean, she has a nice room. For Emma, the punishment is not so much that she has been sent to her room as it is that we always tell her “to think about what she did.”
She hates it when we tell her “to think about she did.” For one thing, I suspect that if Emma had thought about what she did before she did it, she probably wouldn’t have done it. For another thing when we tell Emma “to think about what she did,” that means she has to sit on her bed. No TV, no music, no books.
We’re good parents. We want Emma to learn from her mistakes, but we don’t want to overdo things so we try not to make her sit in her room too long. A week, we think, is sufficient.
Ha, that’s a parent joke. No, usually what we do is send Emma to her room and we go downstairs into the kitchen. After about 10 minutes, my wife will yell up to her to let her know she can come out of her room.
Wife: Emma?
Emma: What?
Wife: What?
Me: What?
Dog: Woof?
Address correspondence to Mike Pound, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, MO 64802, or via e-mail at mpound@joplinglobe.com.
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