I would like to talk about perfume a little bit, because I just made an exciting (for me) perfume purchase and so it is on my mind, but here is the thing I need to get out of the way right up front: perfume is one of my Startling Expenses. And it turns out THAT is what I actually want to talk about, so the subject of perfume will wait for another day.

I remember learning about Startling Expenses back in elementary school, when a friend’s Christmas haul was ten times the value of mine. I was indignant and jealous and upset, and I think what I wanted was for my parents to make condemning remarks about how out of line the other family was to spoil her so badly, and maybe also to apologize for not doing the same to me, or at LEAST take a satisfyingly superior tone about how our family was Keeping Christmas Simple.

Instead I got a Reasonable Explanation about how different families make different decisions with their money: one family might love Christmas and really have fun going all-out, so they skimp on other things all year to save for it; another family might go light or medium on Christmas and spend on a vacation; another family might go medium on Christmas, skip vacations, but go out to dinner, or buy new school clothes, or pay for private school, or save for college, or have parties, or make home improvements, or donate to charity, or get their hair cut at salons, or have a housecleaner, or get portraits done, or buy organic food, or have smart phones, or have cable, or replace cars more frequently, or have a gaming system, or live in a more expensive area of the country, or take more time off, or go back to school, or take music lessons, or buy casually throughout the year the things Family #1 saves to give at Christmas—or do any number of things the next family was not doing and so would consider a Startling Expense.

The things WE don’t prioritize almost ALWAYS seem like crazy things to spend money on. And at this point I have a flashback to my late mother-in-law, who would literally gasp when she saw me getting a can of Contadina tomato sauce (“*gasp* Oh! Swistle! Don’t you want the STORE brand??”), but would express equal astonishment that someone WOULDN’T pay the extra hundred dollars for sheets with a DECENT thread count.

It’s important to realize that although such things seem like RIDICULOUS CONTRADICTIONS, they are not: thoughtful consumers save money where they don’t care, so that they can spend it where they do care. The annoying thing about my late mother-in-law is not that she’d spend $100 more on sheets while not wanting to pay 15 cents more on tomato sauce; the annoying thing is that she would think everyone who didn’t make the same set of decisions must be an idiot.

It might seem like this would only apply to well-off families and luxury items, but in my experience it happens nearly across the board: even my verge-of-financial-crisis acquaintances will periodically startle me with what they will pay for a product or experience, and education and cars and foods and homes can qualify just as the purer luxuries (perfume, make-up, liquor) do. Even though my starting example of perfume puts us in the mindset of total unnecessaries, notice that to my late mother-in-law, my Startling Expense was a can of tomato sauce. Other people’s Startling Expenses seem like a foolish waste of money whether you’re poorer or richer than they are, whether the item in question is a pint of ice cream or a college degree; it’s the way Startling Expenses ARE. The instant temptation is to think that WE would not squander money that way if WE were in their shoes, and GOODNESS what a waste that spending seems to us when we can barely afford to buy our own Item That is a Good Value and Certainly Not an Equally Startling Expense!

If it is hard for you to think of what your own Startling Expenses are, because they just make so much SENSE you don’t notice them or think of them that way, you could ask a frank friend (a friend who doesn’t spend money the same way you do) to tell you. Or, think of times when you’ve said “You should never skimp on _____!,” or “Well, it COSTS more, but it’s WORTH it,” or “I’d rather spend money on ____ than on something that’s gone in ten seconds!,” or “Well, TIME is valuable, too,” or “Well, I think it’s important to TREAT yourself,” or “But it’s important for the kids to grow up where…,” or “But you can use/wear it forever!,” or “Well, the per-use price isn’t really…,” or “EXPERIENCES are the really valuable things!,” or “Well, it’s IMPORTANT to ____,” or “It’s an INVESTMENT,” or really any expense-justifying remark.

Such reasons are often TRUE; they also helpfully mark the areas where we know we spend more, and/or where we are hoping to persuade other people that they should do so too. And such are the things I say about my perfumes. Which we can talk about later.

I admit that being able to neatly de-pit a cherry in my closed mouth is not the same kind of talent as being able to tie a cherry stem into a knot under similar circumstances. But aren’t we getting tired of the cherry stem trick anyway? What is that trick intended to communicate? “If there is any sense in which you can compare your proportions to a cherry stem, have I got an experience for you”?

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Elizabeth has gotten it into her head that two-piece swimsuits ALWAYS have skirts, and that if they DON’T, that they are extremely embarrassing. A one-piece doesn’t have to have a skirt: that’s fine by her. And she doesn’t like any two-piece suit that shows any skin between the two pieces, so her two-piece suits are basically just one-piece suits cut in half for bathroom-break convenience. BUT THEY MUST HAVE SKIRTS. Otherwise ICK!! She was a little startled by me not knowing this already.

I was a little annoyed, because I bought her a number of suits last year on good clearances, and none of the two-piece ones have skirts. But I am not fully annoyed, because when you pay $3.24 for a swimming suit, one of the upsides is that it’s not a big deal if it doesn’t fit or if the child hates it or IF IT TURNS OUT THERE IS AN UNWRITTEN RULE ABOUT SKIRTS.

Caitlin and I were emailing more about the decision to have children, and something came up that I want to talk about with a larger sample.

I was mentioning how people often cite their own families of origin when explaining their reproduction decisions—but that those decisions can be completely opposite. For example, one sibling from a six-sibling set can say, “Well, I came from a big family so that feels natural to me”—while someone from the same sibling set can say, “Well, I came from a big family and I don’t really want that; we’re planning one or maybe two kids.”

And it’s hard to know how much we’re affected by society. When we say, “There were two kids in my family so that seems right to me,” how much of the “seems right” is from growing up in a family with two kids, and how much of it is from growing up in a society where two kids is the norm?

And we’re probably also affected by what’s typical in our extended families. Did everyone have two kids except your family which had six? Or did everyone have five or six kids except for your family of two kids? Or was your family with the majority?

Here’s what I would be interested in knowing: How does the size of your Growing-Up Family figure into your thoughts and decisions about how many children to have (including if that number of children-to-have is zero), if at all? That is, would you say a sentence such as: “Well, I came from a family of ____, so I _____”? Or wouldn’t you do that? (In which case I would still want to know the size of the family you came from, and the size of the family you’re making or intending to make.)

Water cup at lips
Just in time, movement noticed
Ant and me, both saved.

I placed a few orders for kid clothing to fill in some gaps in our supply. Then I got caught up on the laundry of one of the 2-kid rooms and realized my folly. Whoops.

Well, the drawers don’t really NEED to close. And also, how often do I get caught up on laundry? So I don’t think it’ll be an issue. There. Rationalized it.

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If you are of a plumpish persuasion, may I suggest taking up cooking and/or baking? A career would be ideal, but even as a hobby it works. Just as the sentence “It’s a family name” seems to settle people’s agitation about a peculiar baby name, being a good cook/baker seems to settle people’s agitation about plumpness. “Ah, that makes sense, then; we LIKE that combination,” they think, and their brains send them some soothing chemicals.

Additional benefit: if you cook or bake and you’re plump, people make assumptions about your good nature. Even if you are a bit of an anxious mess, people persist in thinking of you as having a cheerful and generous personality.

********

Henry is missing another day of his Expensive But Worth Every Penny summer program, and it is driving me nuts. I just HATE “losing money” like that. I’m using the quotes to show that I understand that the money is spent either way and I’m not actually losing anything. Nothing except SIX HOURS OF RELATIVE PEACE, that is.

I don’t know what he has. He has a sore throat and low appetite, and his fever has gone over 102 but mostly stays in the normal-to-101 range (known as the “He’s kind of warm” range). He has a rash on his legs, especially at the knees, and it’s also on his arms, his ears, and his upper buttular region. I’d thought strep, but both the short and long strep tests came back negative. So maybe the rash is a reaction to something he encountered outdoors, and then he’s just got a cold? I don’t know. Kid illness is baffling.

I remember learning in one psych class or another that the human mind insists on things making sense. If we do something that doesn’t make sense to us (we act badly, we act nicely to someone who doesn’t deserve it, we act kind of crazy, we act against our own best interests), our minds will scramble to FORCE it to make sense. Maybe our mind decides that we didn’t actually do it and so we just kind of forget about it, or now we label it “no sense dwelling on the past [because it makes us look bad],” or maybe our mind decides that we did do it but under circumstances we’ve cleverly reinterpreted. Maybe our mind decides that we did do it, but that it wasn’t our fault.

Our mind tells us a story in which the action now fits our view of the world and of ourselves in it—and if it the story doesn’t fit, we don’t feel comfortable until it does.

A classic example is relationships. How do we explain attraction? Definitely it isn’t our genes calling out for reproduction! No, attraction is fate, it is love, it is two people recognizing something special in each other. We aren’t attracted to someone’s appearance but rather to that person’s SELF. The mind tells us a story in which our love-loopy behavior makes sense.

But then the relationship ends, and how can we explain being so wrong? The mind scrambles to fix it. We were deceived. The other person changed. We changed. We were on the rebound. We thought we wanted something it turned out we didn’t want. We were never really in love in the first place. Our upbringing messed us up so we make bad choices in a mate. It’s not that our minds finally won the arm-wrestling contest with our genes; it’s not that our genes had had time to accomplish their goals, and so let us free.

And because humans ARE more complicated than, say, paramecia or butterflies or rabbits, it IS more complicated than just genes. Well…probably it is. We don’t really know yet, but it seems safe to assume that when it’s common for people to meet and fall in love and marry long after their genes have given up the reproductive goal, or to gladly stay partnered long after there is any chance of reproduction, that there is more than one thing going on here.

But here is the thought I had this morning, which is flooring me: if the mind scrambles to force things to make sense (even if it has to lie to us to do it), and if we feel uncomfortable and weird and keep-lookingish if it doesn’t succeed—I wonder if a lot of the struggles we have with parenting are because our minds are trying to force things to make sense. And repeatedly failing, because it’s something that doesn’t entirely make sense on a personal level, and isn’t going to.

What if the only reason to have children is to continue the species—just as it is for rabbits and butterflies and paramecia? But what if our complicated minds can’t leave it at that, especially considering how much more of an investment it is for us to reproduce than it is for rabbits/butterflies/paramecia? And what if natural selection favors the humans who are good at coming up with justifications for things that otherwise don’t make sense, so that they continue to do what is beneficial for the species even though they have the mental ability to see that it doesn’t make sense for them personally? If all those things are the case, what would our minds try to tell us about something as time-consuming and labor-intensive and resource-draining as parenting? What stories would our minds tell us about that?

We already know that baby faces and baby scents and baby cries have evolved to appeal to something ANIMAL in us. We already know about hormones and how they make us panicky and anxious so that we protect the babies who can’t protect themselves. We already know that our bodies want sex because our genes want to reproduce. What if there are MORE THINGS TO KNOW—and pretty much all of them are biological, not logical, and our minds are having trouble figuring out how to resolve that? We like to think we are calling more shots than that.

What if the reason we talk about how FULFILLING and IMPORTANT and MEANINGFUL and WORTH IT parenting is (but then feel like terrible parents for not always liking it or wanting to do it) is that our minds MUST find a way to justify something that is not in our personal best interests at all? Our genes want to reproduce, but all they can do is create a craving; the genes must convince the mind that IT wants that TOO.

But it’s a fragile construction. Our minds are pretty good at convincing us that our biological urges make sense, but they’re also pretty good at seeing flaws in the logic, at sniffing out things that don’t quite fit, at giving us an unsettled feeling until everything clicks naturally into place. When we think we’re in love with someone unsuitable, we might hear something about it: “Is it a little…weird…that he does that?” We brush it away, but we heard it. It could be the same with parenting: the voice speaks up anxiously and this time it says, “Does this…make SENSE to do this? I don’t know that this…WORKS, as a way to ‘live,’ in the modern, non-animal sense of the word.”

But here we are, doing it! It MUST make sense, or we wouldn’t have done it! It HAS to make sense: we’re already no-turning-back invested. And so our minds quickly build up better construction to repair the doubts: Of COURSE it makes sense! It’s fully worth it! We LOVE this! It’s the most important work we’ve ever done! Sure, we don’t ALWAYS love it, but that’s NORMAL! In the long run, this is important and valuable! And if it doesn’t feel that way, we will distract ourselves with new parenting concepts, new parenting methods, anything that seems like it might make everything fall into place and explain to us why we spent a good two decades of a short life doing it.

I wonder if some of us would be happier with a different approach. Instead of driving ourselves crazy trying to force parenting to make sense or feel personally worth it, what if we…DIDN’T do that? What if we shrugged and thought, “Yeah. Well, the species sure does a good job making sure it gets continued, doesn’t it! It sure roped ME in! And I don’t mind playing my part, now that I don’t have much of a choice! Gene continuation is nice, in its way! And this child isn’t half bad, in her way!” And then we could try to take from the experience anything enjoyable we could, but without expecting for it to make sense in a cost/benefits sort of way.

The cost of reproducing and parenting is huge. The benefits to us personally are…uncertain. But it could easily be that the benefits to us personally were never the point of any of this.

My mom has started fumbling with her wallet at the register, counting out exact change and trying to unload half a dollar’s worth of pennies and so forth. We both joke that this is such an “old lady” thing to do. (I laugh more.) It’s not so much the USING of the coins as the FUMBLING with them: “Oh, wait, I think I have another penny somewhere in here…*rummage rummage rummage drop other coins*…Oh dear!…Now how much did you say that was, young man?”

Considering how smoothly and effortlessly I find myself saying and doing “mom things” (those things seem so sensible now, why would I WANT to avoid them?), I don’t see much hope for avoiding an equally smooth and effortless adoption of “old lady things” next. Surely generation after generation has rolled their eyes at “mommish” and “old ladyish” things to say/do, and yet each generation in turn has gone on to do those things. (I’m using the feminine to represent both the female and the male, but of course I mean men JUST AS MUCH. No one will mind that, I hope! Why, when I was a child, we all learned that one gender-specific pronoun can easily be used to clearly represent both sexes, and WE turned out okay!)

At this point, I think most of the people my age are still firmly “mommish” types, but the first signs of the next stage are already appearing: little things that still belong to the mom zone, but that are also the first sprouts of the grandma stage to come. (The other day, I referred to a group of people as “young people.” It begins.) (Next up, I believe, is “young people today.”)

Protocol requires us to joke “And get off my lawn!” after each pre-old-ladyish thing we catch ourselves saying or doing—which doesn’t help, since it only causes the generations below us to roll their eyes and file that expression under “old lady jokes.” And the important thing here is that we may be following each old-ladyish behavior with a self-mocking that shows we know we’re doing it—but we’re also CONTINUING TO DO IT ANYWAY. I say to the kids: “I remember when a candy bar was a QUARTER! Now they’re 79 cents!” and Paul adds “And also, get off my lawn!” And then later he says, “We didn’t even HAVE air-conditioning when I was a child!” and I say “You didn’t need it, since you were still chilled to the bone from having to trudge miles through snowdrifts to get to school!” And then we both tell the children how we didn’t have email until we were in college, and didn’t have color television until late elementary school, and how car phones were a thing, and how computer games were text-only—and the children fail to fully appreciate how comparatively fortunate they are.

Have you noticed that each generation thinks they’ll manage to avoid seeming “old,” as long as they avoid the exact thing their own parents/grandparents did? A woman my age will say she doesn’t want Mom Hair or Mom Jeans—but what she’s thinking of are the current GRANDMOTHER hair/jeans: she’s filed her OWN mom’s style under “mom,” but a generational shift has occurred since then. Angled stacked bobs and cute-messy twisted-up hair with side-swept bangs ARE the Mom Hair! Cute dark-wash boot-cut jeans ARE the Mom Jeans! BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT THE CURRENT MOMS ARE DOING. Our daughters will speak of such styles with distaste, and will specifically avoid them. “Don’t give me Mom Hair,” they’ll tell the stylist, meaning OUR CUTE HAIR.

I wanted to make a list of the things that right NOW seem “old ladyish” to me, but which may soon seem like a baffling list of perfectly sensible things no one would want to try to avoid. But the trouble is, NOTHING correlates perfectly with age. Many a 30-year-old is passionate about getting the lawn perfect, and many a 25-year-old is exasperated about portion sizes, and many a 40-year-old catches herself trying to get rid of some of these COINS *fumble fumble in huge purse*. And of course many a 70-year-old is in favor of funding education, and many a 60-year-old thinks the way teenagers dress is no sillier than the way teenagers have always dressed, and many an 80-year-old is fully aware of how inflation works. And many things DO change with each generation, as issues shift and as each generation tries to avoid seeming like their own parents/grandparents.

But there are a few things that symbolize Being Elderly to me, and I would like to at least try to avoid (or downplay, or maybe HIDE) these things myself:

1. Fumbling with payment at the register, especially counting out coins. Coins go into an overflowing jar on the bureau, and I don’t want to hear any more about it.

2. Complaining about portion sizes.

3. Complaining about how prices have gone up, in a manner that implies I don’t understand how inflation/money works. (Aware-of-it comparison stories are still fine: I liked hearing my dad talk about 15-cent ice cream cones and my grandpa tell about buying a house for $7,000.)

4. Voting against school/education taxes. (It’s not like I have to vote yes on all of them, but I want to avoid the “_I_ don’t have kids in school, why should _I_ pay school taxes??” attitude I have learned to associate with the elderly in my particular district.)

5. Asking people to guess my age, and then gloating when the guesser tactfully subtracts ten years.

6. Complaining that current popular music isn’t even music, or that songs/books/movies USED to be good/quality/art, but NOW are NOT. (This area may require vigilance. I have already caught myself claiming that all the current songs are about nothing but SEX and CLUBBING.) (Well!?! Have you LISTENED to the radio recently??) (Now, now, Swistle, settle back into that rocking chair. Shall I hum you a few bars of the simpler/better songs from your own youth? Perhaps “Pour Some Sugar on Me”? How about “I Love Rock and Roll”? Or “Push It” or “I Want Your Sex”? Or I could go on: remember Samantha Fox? 2 Live Crew? Prince? Madonna? Yes. That’s what I thought. Simmer down there, grandma.)

7. Explaining to frazzled, exhausted, verge-of-emotional-breakdown women with small children that this is the best time of their lives. (I will find another way to more accurately convey what I mean. Maybe something like, “Oh, what adorable children!,” combined with a general policy of not making things harder for the mothers by acting affronted when children exist in public.)

8. Suggesting that things are getting worse and worse with every generation—starting with the one immediately following mine.

9. Complaining about how “weird” baby names are now; why don’t people use NORMAL names like the names WE used for OUR babies?

Do you have things you’re avoiding, either for the mom stage or for the grandma stage? Have you already found any of those ideas….slipping here and there? (Hey! Sometimes “Because I said so” IS a good reason.)

I saw two movies this week. I liked both of them. But in both cases I was, um, doing laundry, so take these reviews with a grain of wine salt.

(photo from Amazon.com)

The Adjustment Bureau (Netflix link)- You know who I love to watch run, and especially in a business suit? Matt Damon. You know who’s basically Zooey Deschanel but not quite so EVERYWHERE, and, bonus, has a name spelled a way I don’t have to look up every time? Emily Blunt.

Perhaps those two tests are not enough to persuade you. Never mind, I have more! Do you love the kind of sci fi where everyone’s suddenly frozen in time except Our Guy, who is turning around alarmed and mystified, giving you a nice long interesting look at the frozen people? And where there’s some other guy who seems to be OUTSIDE REALITY and is consulting a notebook that tells him everything that’s happening and going to happen next, because there are people BEHIND THE SCENES of the universe? And where the stakes might be DEATH but there still isn’t a whole lot of blood or yuck?

But do you ALSO love a cute family-man-type in a suit being all EARNEST and FUNNY to a woman? So, like, you kind of loved The Matrix, but did it have to be so DARK and DEPRESSING and SOOTY and GROSS, and could Neo and Trinity have acted a little more like they were in love rather than having ulcers, and would you have preferred them to smile at the end? Then I think you will like this movie.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Shutter Island (Netflix link)- I’m more hesitant to come right out and recommend this one, because if I had known what it was like BEFORE I watched it, I would never have watched it. And yet I liked it enough that I’m going to read the book. And yet I still wish I hadn’t seen certain images, which are the sort that involve children and/or death camps. So I think what I wish is that I’d read the book instead. But now that I HAVE seen the movie, I’m GLAD I saw it before reading the book, because I’d rather take in the more detailed version of the story when I DO know what’s going on. So. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe skip the whole thing, maybe get the movie and then read the book like I am.

Netflix recommended this to me after I lost my mind over Inception. Netflix was all, “Oh, WE getcha! You like Leonardo DiCaprio, tons of water symbolism, and crazy dead wife dreams/hallucinations!”—so Shutter Island was the obvious choice. But Inception was about, like, dream travel (and I’m more keen to see Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whereas Shutter Island was the old “who’s REALLY crazy here?” plotline with the usual batch of creepy twists, combined with what I THINK was supposed to be a New England accent. (Why DO an accent, when it’s not even needed? DISTRACTING.)

Last time it was school-related; this time it was doctor’s office-related. But both times, I’ll note, it involved EDWARD.

Today he had a check-up. The doctor is a funny guy with a lot of jokes and games to make the exam more fun/comfortable for the kids, and he asked Edward if Edward knew what a “grinder” was. Edward was supposed to say it was a sandwich, and then the doctor would say no, it was THIS!—and “grind” a fist ticklishly on Edward’s torso.

But Edward did not say it was a sandwich. Instead, Edward cupped his entire, er, PRIVATE AREA, with BOTH hands, and said earnestly that THAT was a grinder.

The doctor did an admirable job persevering through this to the conclusion of the joke. I was suffused with embarrassment, awkwardness, and also the fear that somehow this exchange would mean that Bad Things happened in our family. Because a child should not be using words like “grind” with That Area, right? I mean, RIGHT? And I don’t THINK Edward has any reason to associate those things, but if he DID, where did he pick up on that? And where would the DOCTOR think Edward would have picked up on that? Was he adding a note to the file RIGHT NOW??

The rest of the visit went by in a fog of undefined mortification and agitated, fretful brainial-file-cabinet searching.

On the way home I broached the topic. “Er, Edward,” I began. “When the doctor asked you about a grinder, why did you, er? Why did you answer…the way you did?” Edward said because that’s what that area is CALLED. I expressed doubt, and Edward persisted. As evidence, he said that his karate teachers kept referring to that area as “the grind.”

I was baffled, and also now the fretting had expanded to include his karate class/teachers. And then the brain’s office manager found the right file folder at last: “WAIT. Do they call it a GROIN??” Edward: “YES, that’s what I SAID.”

I suppose there’s no way to write a little “Oh by the way, funny story ha ha ha” note to the pediatrician.

A lot of the party invitations we got this year included email addresses, which is GREAT. Let’s have a little appreciative round of applause for this getting more and more widespread.

Some had only phone numbers, but I had the email address from a class list, and used that.

Some had only phone numbers, but I could call while on my way to school pick-up/drop-off, or RIGHT before leaving, knowing the other parent would likely be out of their house at that time. (Note: this plan is dicier now that people put down their cell phone numbers.)

Some only had phone numbers, but I knew the parents from school pick-up/drop-off and could just mention it to them when I saw them.

Some had only phone numbers, but I got lucky and got an answering machine. Or in any case I was RSVP’ing “yes,” which is a positive sort of thing to be calling about and has a good exit line (“Okay, so we’ll see you on the 5th! Okay, bye!”).

This week I had one where there was only a phone number, I didn’t have a class list, I didn’t have the parents’ names—AND, I was RSVP’ing a no. It’s a much more awkward call. There is the potential for accidentally falling into the nervous pitfall of over-explaining the reason for not attending, even though no one cares and the explanation usually makes it worse. And I haven’t yet thought of a good exit line. “Okay, so then…I guess I…won’t be seeing you at any point soon, ha ha nervous laugh. I hope she has a good party…even though we won’t be there…I mean, not that I’m trying to say our presence was essential ha ha nervous laugh.”

Here is the idea I finally thought of and used: the party was a home party, so the home address was on the invitation, so I had the child draw a birthday card and we mailed it. The child included words like “I’m sorry I can’t come to your party, and I hope you have a great birthday” along with all the drawings and glitter glue and stickers.

ALSO, I could totally file this under Life Skills Training: the child wrote the address and the return address, put on the stamp, etc., as well as listening to a mini-lecture about always RSVP’ing. AND, the child was the one to handle the RSVP, which is good training for future independence!

I don’t have a PHONE ISSUE, psh no! I’m just EAGER TO TRAIN MY CHILDREN!