We all love a good fortune cookie. That yummy almond crunch is the perfect end to Chinese take-out. And the fortunes themselves are fun when read one by one around the room, sometimes leading to sage nodding all around and other times ending in hilarity.
Last Sunday night, after a nine hour drive back from Nashville and trying to get home before Lost came on TV, the boy and I dashed into the Chinese place for take out. The resultant meal was delicious, the entertainment on TV even better, but the cookies got short shrift that night as I ate an extra rangoon instead and left my cookie lying on the counter.
The boy, however, ate his cookie. I know because when I came downstairs Monday morning, his fortune was stuck front and center to the fridge door. In my groggy trying-t0-make-the-coffee kind of way, I paid it no mind, only realizing once my mug was in hand that he’d never before hung his fortune on the fridge like that. So I went to check it out.
Seems people like to give advise, but not listening to their own.
Okay, a few points here. One, the Chinese are hilarious. These cookies no longer even sound like Confucius. Which is a rip-off. The language here sounds like Jim Bob Lee, multi-generational American of perhaps some long-ago Asian descent who is writing fortune cookie wisdom rather than paying attention during his senior English class in high school.
Two, and more important: obviously my boy thinks I’m a hypocrite.
What constitutes a hypocrite in this day and age? If you need a brush-up, here’s the Webster’s:
hyp·o·crite
/?h?p
?kr?t/[hip-uh-krit] –noun 1. a person who pretends to have virtues that he or she does not actually possess, esp. a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.
Oh, yeah, this sounds just like me. Well, maybe not really. In fact, perhaps not much at all, since I’m not one to hide who I am from anyone.
But I believe what he’s getting at is all the times his dad and I have to tell him NO to things we’ve both done ourselves in the past. Or when we have to punish him for doing things either of us may have gotten away with in our earlier years. In his mind, WE got to do it and WE turned out just fine, so how come HE must be held to a higher standard? Unfair, unfair!
Sigh.
Is it true his dad and I did some things we shouldn’t have and got away with them? If you don’t count hangovers as punishment, yep, it’s true. Is it true we don’t let our boy do things we ourselves were allowed to do at his age? Yep, that’s also true. Here in the days of cell phones and email, it’s ever so much easier to check with the boy’s friends’ mothers to be sure the boys are actually going where they tell us they’re going. Had our folks availed themselves of all available technology back in the day, we still would have had mighty big windows of opportunity in which to perpetuate our schemes of misdirection.
So as far as I’m concerned, that’s not hypocritical, that’s us being able to cotton on to his wily schemes faster than our own folks were able to. That’s just bad luck on his part, and I am only too happy to take advantage of it.
Third, and finally, parenting comes with a level of hypocrisy built right in. At one point, which of us grown-up, civil, responsible human beings were not ourselves teenagers? We all go through that unrelenting stage of stupid behavior. We all make stupid choices (to one degree or another) during that phase. I would have a hard time believing anyone, anywhere who would claim otherwise. But once we goofballs who lived through our teen years actually begin parenting teenagers ourselves, we’d be lax in the extreme to try to parent without the hypocrisy.
par·ent
nt, par-]–noun 1. a father or a mother. 2. a protector or guardian.