From the mouths of babes
I am so glad that The Kids are past that adorable
”
child-like honesty
”
phase.
Child-like honesty seems to always come at the expense of a
stammering, usually publicly embarrassed adult. In our house, that
adult is usually me. For some reason, The Kids are very comfortable
being honest with me.
From the mouths of babes
I am so glad that The Kids are past that adorable “child-like honesty” phase.
Child-like honesty seems to always come at the expense of a stammering, usually publicly embarrassed adult. In our house, that adult is usually me. For some reason, The Kids are very comfortable being honest with me.
Luckily, most of the time, the honesty had been confined to our home. No one was around to witness my uncomfortable squirming and nervous chuckles. Sometimes, The Husband has been around to have a front row seat. This pleased him to no end. No one can make me squirm like a 4 year old who declares that dinner is ready when she hears the smoke detectors go off.
You’d think that I would learn, after being subjected to such brutal honesty as, “How come when Lulu comes over, you clean the house? Are you going to get in trouble?” or “When you were a little girl, was the world in black and white?”
Apparently, I am not a very quick study, but I was cured of ever doing anything too revealing, so to speak in front of The Kids when I took The Girl shopping with me, one bright, sunny Tennessee afternoon in 1995.
It was early summer and I was feeling a little daring. More daring than I had any right to with an honest-to-a-fault child in tow.
I’d grabbed several swimsuits off a rack and corralled The Girl in a dressing room with me, after steering her through the throngs of other women, about to embark on the scary journey that is “Bathing-Suit Season.”
I was asking a lot, I know; for this child to patiently wait while I tried to avoid the full-length mirror on the back of the door and wrestled out of my clothes and into a bathing suit that in reality would probably never see the light of day. Who was I really kidding here? Ah, well. It was a good day and I was feeling good until:
“That’s really not going to fit you,” said a small voice, channeling my mother, which still somehow managed to resonate through the dressing room, bouncing off mirrors and walls and catching the ears of other women suffering the same fate in rooms next to mine. I could hear stifled giggling to my right.
Forgetting that I was talking to a 4 year old, “Yeah, well, these things can stretch a lot. Stand back,” I stage whispered as I attempted to shimmy into a swimsuit that was now begging for mercy.
The 4 year old looked skeptical.
She was right. There was no way that thing was going any higher than my knees. I thought about how great it would be to have lived in the ’20s. A swimsuit with actual sleeves and tights was really sexy. I wouldn’t have had to worry about exposing anything that shouldn’t be exposed. I was born in the wrong era.
I looked under the door to the dressing room to see if I could see feet belonging to the giggling women. There was no way I was going to come face to face with them. I managed a graceful escape (But still imagined the entire dressing area erupting in hilarity once I was out of earshot) and vowed to never try on another bathing suit as long as I lived.
While The Girl might have outgrown her child-like honesty, it has given way to the teenaged, “I’m just saying,” which is their brand of frankness. As in: “Mom, that’s not cool,” when I try to sing in the car. “I’m just saying.”
At least now, she keeps my un-coolness on the DL.
