Back To School -- Redux

The children went back to school today, thank God! I adore them both, more so separately than together these days. My children are 13 and 8, so we’re talking eighth and third grade, respectively. I think I may have blocked out the amount of fighting my sisters and I did as children, or else my own two bundles of joy are simply destined to NEVER be in the same room for more than thirty seconds at a time. Maybe it’s a boy thing, growing up with three sisters and no brothers I think I may have missed some stuff. I have come to realize that the male of our particular species is a group I will never truly understand. For a long time, I thought I knew a whole lot about a whole lot. Now that I have children, one now a teenager, I realize I don't know sh** about sh**. I do now understand why the eye roll that I perfected as a teen drove my mother completely mad, my eldest son is well on his way to the perfect derisive eye roll and uses it with the exactness of an exceptionally skilled surgeon. My younger son still believes that manufactured tears and outrage expressed at the highest decibel level ever achieved by humankind is the way to best get his point across...that needs to end soon.

I have also discovered, over the course of this vacation, that there is some kind of weird psychic connection between my children and the pixilated creatures in their videogames. I know this because every time their defender of the universe or football player sustains an injury in the game, my children seem to feel the pain the little computer generated person experiences. The days since Christmas (when they got the game console…damn you Santa!), have been punctuated shouts of “Ouch!” and the periodic “Aaaargh!” emanating from the office. Before you think it, I did try to find games that required them to work together as a team...they're simply not interested. The base appeal of annihilating your brother in any form seems to have outweighed the idea of teamwork and peaceful co-existence. It was a worth a shot anyway. Most of the games they play together have deteriorated into someone being completely outraged by the gruesome death of their on screen character at the hands of their brother.

Sisters fight about real things like illegally borrowed clothing, wrecked lipstick and the identity of the villain who keeps cutting the hair off all the Barbie dolls. Brothers seem to fight over things like looking at each other weird, farting at one another on purpose (as a girl, I didn’t even know that deliberate and timely flatulence was possible) and being first…at anything. Maybe we’ll add perfectly behaved children to the list of goals for the year. Don't laugh, I can do this!