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You've all read (or should have by now) my stories of parenting wherein Captain and I diverge on philosophies. Captain is of the "everything is a crisis" school of thought while I am of the "choose your battles" camp. Captain tended to yell about everything. I only yelled occasionally.
But when I did...you can fill in the blank here.
You know that old saying, "her bark is worse than her bite"? Yeah, my description is more like "you won't hear the bark until she has chewed your face off."
Stay with me here because I'm not trying to build myself up as a World Class Beeyatch. I'm trying to illustrate that a child's healthy respect of an adult has to have just a tiny drop of fear in it.
The reason I bring this up is because I got the sincerest validation of my parenting choices recently. Have any of you ever had one of those "Lord, I did something right as a parent" moments when your adult children are talking? Usually it's because your young adult son took time to help a stranger load something heavy into her car at Fleet Farm or whatever. You get what I mean. A warm fuzzy moment. I've had those, and it's an amazing feeling.
Recently, however, I had one of a different flavor, but it was just as satisfying.
I'm going to paraphrase and take some artistic license with the details to protect the innocent here, but the crux of it is that we were recently at a gathering that included many of Bigger's classmates. They are all in the early 30s now and parents themselves.
I'm not certain how the conversation got started; probably one classmate started talking about stupid stuff they'd done as teenagers and whether or not they (1) got caught and (2) got in trouble. One classmate asked the group which of their friends' mom they were most afraid of.
I had three fingers pointed right at me.
Huhn?
The follow-up question, obviously, was "Why" and the unanimous answer was, "Because she didn't flip out about everything, but when she did, she followed through on a consequence."
It stands out as one of the proudest moments of my life. Again, I don't want to be known as the Class A Beeyatch, but being known as fair but fierce is okay in my book.
On the same note, I saw a Facebook reel this morning which actually prompted this post. It was a male comedian talking about parenting and yelling. He said you can't just yell at your kids all the time because they will eventually tune that particular frequency out and, in his words, all they hear is a Yamaha dirt bike in the distance. For my fellow Gen Xers, that means you'd sound like Charlie Brown's teacher.
Anyway, he said that as a parent, you have to have two discipline voices. One is the generic yell akin to a Yamaha dirt bike. But then you have to have what I call the Come To Jesus voice. My kids--and apparently their friends--know this voice of mine.
I have a big voice, so my standard discipline voice generally covers a radius of a half mile. Everybody in the neighborhood knows my kids are in trouble. That's the voice to use when someone didn't finish their chores.
The Come To Jesus voice is a full two octaves lower than that, is soft, and it's deadly. And usually has fewer words. This voice is what comes out when the child pulled out the old nugget about being old enough to do what he/she wants (i.e. stay out to the wee hours drinking and then not get up in the morning to do the expected chores). This conversation will then move into Come To Jesus territory and end with me saying in that two-octave-lower voice "If you are living under our roof and we are paying the bills, you do what I want you to do." And here's the kicker. The voice drops another half octave and ends with "Are we clear?"
I didn't pull out the Come To Jesus voice often, but those times when I did are still talked about. And I'm okay with that.
I have had two outstanding Face The Consequences situations as a parent; one with each kid. I consider them to be the pinnacle of my parenting career. And neither one actually involved the Come To Jesus voice, now that I think about it. Hmmmm.
But, we must have done something right because between the two of us, Captain and I raised two children who became functioning, contributing members of society with respectable lives of their own. That's what parenting is supposed to be, in my mind.
Call me a Big Old Meanie, but if I run into any of my kids' classmates and get a bear hug and a story about how I terrorized them...that's a red letter day in my book.
Call me crazy.
