I Thought I Would Be Different
I thought I would be different!
YOU NEED TO BUY THE MALIBU BARBIE SHOWER AND CLUB HOUSE or your little girl will never get in touch with her inner babe, never date, become a dried up scaley old lady with a mustache. (And haven’t we all been there?)
I’m in California visiting grandkids—my 18 month old granddaughter in LA and my ten-year-old grandson in Solvang, and I’m finding that nothing has changed for me as a grandparent—I’m the same awful loser I was as a mom.
Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you’re in Toys ‘R Us or Walmart, whatever, with the kids, and suddenly you’re overwhelmed by the marketing! You freeze up! You can’t make decisions anymore! What will your kids be like without this stuff!! If the boy doesn’t have the NEWEST PLAY STATION he won’t be aggressive enough, the other boys will stomp him, man, he’ll never get an NBA contract or be a sports lawyer. It gets to look more important than college that they learn how to say “Yo, wha’s up?”
I’m a nerd again. I flash back to that first awful day in the sixth grade, standing along in the corner of the playground, feeling fat and thinking that everyone else was cooler than me. Even back in those golden olden days before Barbie, I thought that the flatness of my tummy would determine my entire position in the social order.
Carson Daley, where are you? There is no one nowhere drippier than a parent in a toy department and Mattel knows that. And there is nothing more important to an American than being cool.
Hence, as my grandson and I are wandering around the Toys ‘R Us in Santa Maria, a former farming village in mid-California, I feel intimidated. I wanted to look at swing sets and those little plastic castles with slides as the first installments in the minor Disneyland I want to build in the back yard so we can have a neat house and they’ll think of us as Grandma and Grandpa fun. If it’s one thing I’m sure of, my personality won’t be enough. Maybe with the other grandparents, but not me.
To get here we’ve ridden through rolling hills with orchards of grapevines and strawberry fields, red-roofed adobe houses set back from the road in groves of ancient trees. My grandson calls me “dude.” I hope it’s because he’s got the gender equality thing going but I doubt it.
To my great chagrin I find that as a grandparent, I’m the same shallow, uncertain person I was as a parent. Needy. And I get caught up in the whirl of sound and lights and the sheer volume of goods the store offers. It’s too much plastic. Does he need a new game? Model car? He zooms around the store on a neat new scooter. There are messages coming to me from the store implying that I’ll be a bad person if I don’t buy something. Maybe that’s what really happens when you play rock songs backwards.
I start to finger my checkbook. I really would like to buy him a treat but everything in me rebels against most of what’s for sale. I see nothing that sings to me of imagination and good values No toy that he’ll love and remember fondly when he goes off to college. Everything seems garish and designed for adolescence. I should have thought of this before I said I’d come. We could be at Castlemania playing miniature golf right now and at least we’d be communicating.
Part of this dilemma comes from being in California where the “haves” with their steady stream of goods pass before the longing eyes of the “have-nots”—which include me. Where do those people get the money to buy all the cars and clothes and accessories, I wonder? Is this where the statistics about how little Americans save annually come from?
I go to the front of the store and take a deep breath. My grandson comes up and I ask him what he’s like. He’s picked out the only thing in the store that appealed to me, some tiny actions figures from a movie we just say. They actually have some potential as a story telling toy. I wait until he wanders off and get them as a surprise. He opens them in the backseat of the car and we start to imagine what happens next in their lives.
We got to Castlemania and I beat him by three strokes in a hotly contested game of miniature golf. I’ve learned never to give him a head start of he trounces me.
YOU NEED TO BUY THE MALIBU BARBIE SHOWER AND CLUB HOUSE or your little girl will never get in touch with her inner babe, never date, become a dried up scaley old lady with a mustache. (And haven’t we all been there?)
I’m in California visiting grandkids—my 18 month old granddaughter in LA and my ten-year-old grandson in Solvang, and I’m finding that nothing has changed for me as a grandparent—I’m the same awful loser I was as a mom.
Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you’re in Toys ‘R Us or Walmart, whatever, with the kids, and suddenly you’re overwhelmed by the marketing! You freeze up! You can’t make decisions anymore! What will your kids be like without this stuff!! If the boy doesn’t have the NEWEST PLAY STATION he won’t be aggressive enough, the other boys will stomp him, man, he’ll never get an NBA contract or be a sports lawyer. It gets to look more important than college that they learn how to say “Yo, wha’s up?”
I’m a nerd again. I flash back to that first awful day in the sixth grade, standing along in the corner of the playground, feeling fat and thinking that everyone else was cooler than me. Even back in those golden olden days before Barbie, I thought that the flatness of my tummy would determine my entire position in the social order.
Carson Daley, where are you? There is no one nowhere drippier than a parent in a toy department and Mattel knows that. And there is nothing more important to an American than being cool.
Hence, as my grandson and I are wandering around the Toys ‘R Us in Santa Maria, a former farming village in mid-California, I feel intimidated. I wanted to look at swing sets and those little plastic castles with slides as the first installments in the minor Disneyland I want to build in the back yard so we can have a neat house and they’ll think of us as Grandma and Grandpa fun. If it’s one thing I’m sure of, my personality won’t be enough. Maybe with the other grandparents, but not me.
To get here we’ve ridden through rolling hills with orchards of grapevines and strawberry fields, red-roofed adobe houses set back from the road in groves of ancient trees. My grandson calls me “dude.” I hope it’s because he’s got the gender equality thing going but I doubt it.
To my great chagrin I find that as a grandparent, I’m the same shallow, uncertain person I was as a parent. Needy. And I get caught up in the whirl of sound and lights and the sheer volume of goods the store offers. It’s too much plastic. Does he need a new game? Model car? He zooms around the store on a neat new scooter. There are messages coming to me from the store implying that I’ll be a bad person if I don’t buy something. Maybe that’s what really happens when you play rock songs backwards.
I start to finger my checkbook. I really would like to buy him a treat but everything in me rebels against most of what’s for sale. I see nothing that sings to me of imagination and good values No toy that he’ll love and remember fondly when he goes off to college. Everything seems garish and designed for adolescence. I should have thought of this before I said I’d come. We could be at Castlemania playing miniature golf right now and at least we’d be communicating.
Part of this dilemma comes from being in California where the “haves” with their steady stream of goods pass before the longing eyes of the “have-nots”—which include me. Where do those people get the money to buy all the cars and clothes and accessories, I wonder? Is this where the statistics about how little Americans save annually come from?
I go to the front of the store and take a deep breath. My grandson comes up and I ask him what he’s like. He’s picked out the only thing in the store that appealed to me, some tiny actions figures from a movie we just say. They actually have some potential as a story telling toy. I wait until he wanders off and get them as a surprise. He opens them in the backseat of the car and we start to imagine what happens next in their lives.
We got to Castlemania and I beat him by three strokes in a hotly contested game of miniature golf. I’ve learned never to give him a head start of he trounces me.
Comments