No matter how angelic your children were when they were small, they all did things that irritated you or downright made you angry at one time or another.
And if you are living in a fairy land and think your young children were perfect, then move on to your thoughts concerning their teenage years. That will bring up some unsavory thing they did, if not numerous ones.
My wife and I have been empty nesters for a very long time now. Two of my kids are married with one having a house full of kids and the other a couple. Our youngest is still single, but things are headed in a definite direction with him that it looks like that won’t last for long. So we have decided it is about time in life that we started getting back at them for all the things they did to us when they lived with us. After all, maybe another 25 or 30 years of torture from us will just about make up for the worry, confusion, irritation and plain old ticked off feelings we had before they settled their lives down.
Examples of things they did? Well, I could fill a book. But some stick out. Our oldest was quite a character, and there were times that we wondered, based on his actions, if he would become a preacher or a prisoner when he grew up. He was a master of deception.
Thinking outside the cube
One time we bought him a Rubik’s cube, showed him how it came with the colors all matching and then mixed it up and gave it to him. We thought that would keep him busy for some time. Instead about five minutes later he showed up with it solved. We were amazed thinking we had some kind of child prodigy on our hands. However, and I don’t remember how, we found out our genius was just that, a deceptive one. He had peeled all the stickers off the sides and matched them up.
My daughter used to get the previously mentioned “genius” in trouble all the time by saying that he hit her, tore up her dolls and committed various other sundry mean misadventures against her person. Being a father it is hard to believe your sweet little blonde headed daughter could be lying so we always took it out on the “genius” who objected strenuously to the punishment, saying he had done nothing wrong time and time again. Sure…what about the Rubik’s cube lie, we would think, and then exact a toll on him. Not many years ago she admitted that much of the time when they were kids she lied just to get him in trouble because she knew we would believe her. I couldn’t spank her for it, she was over 30 when she told me. She even laughs to this day about it.
Little does she know what is in store for her.
Then there was our youngest. He hated school from about seventh grade on. Both of us being fairly educated, we just couldn’t understand his attitude. We had a hard time keeping him in school and once even had a meeting with district officials and a judge who told him if he didn’t go to school he would put us in jail. He stopped sluffing, but was at times still a handful.
So now it is about time we exact a toll for those years of uncertainty and concern.
And shh…. we don’t want them to know about our plans that include three steps. In fact we have already begun enacting the process.
Sugar slam
First, is to attack them with the grand kids. I was a hyperactive kid, but in those days they just described it as having a lot of energy. My mother probably never realized what her “sugar sandwiches” did to me. But I knew. And so when the grand kids come to visit they are fed at least one sugar sandwich just before they go home. Hyperactive or not, a loaf of the cheapest pure white bread spread with gobs of thick butter and then sprinkled with sugar so white it looks like the snow at the North Pole at Christmas time, topped off by a Coke really does the trick to make parents miserable.
Next we are going to wage a campaign of telling kids they will get whatever they ask for for Christmas, birthdays, Thanksgiving, Easter, Bastille Day, or any kind of celebration that we can think of or make up so that they will whine and gripe when they don’t get it. Parents will become the enemy because they will be viewed as ungiving, while the poor grandparents will be cast as liars (which of course we would never do) and then we will come out to be the heroes when we supply the wanted item in lieu of their parents’ objections. And there is a bonus too. For the last four years we also been lucky enough to get great-grand kids added to the family. Think of the trickery we can interject there.
Finally, I have told all my kids that in a few years they need to be sure to buy big houses with a large cement pad next to the structures so I can back my fifth wheel onto it. The pad location will also need to have full hookups, free cable, and parking for three cars. I told them when my wife retires we are going to come visit, not for a week or two, but forever. We told them we are going to sell our house, and come live in their driveway for four months at a stretch. Each of them will get us for a third of the year, every year. And since Social Security isn’t much, when we need to borrow five bucks (and of course I use the term “borrow” loosely as they did when they were kids) I won’t hesitate to ask them for it at dinner or breakfast, when we eat at their house every day. Of all the schemes this appears to me to be the best payback of all. Watching them go to work every day, while we are playing and doing what we want, while they support us.
Makes me want to be five again. In fact, in a way, I will be.