Category: Columns

In this economy, our family is taking a less-is-more approach to money: We’re spending less — and talking about it more.

Scarce jobs and bountiful bills have caused a cash crunch and I’m addressing it the way I address most problems: by surrounding it with the sound of my voice. My plan is to squawk and blubber about it until it asphyxiates on the carbon dioxide spewing from my motormouth. So far it hasn’t helped.

But while I’ve been prattling about money — pointing out the high cost of cable TV (was it always this pricey?) and proposing fun new dining-out policies like “I know! Let’s all order water!” — I think I freaked out my kid.

“Mom,” my 11-year-old asked this week, “are we having money trouble?”

I was rattled by the question. Embarrassed even. Sure, we’ve “tightened our belts,” as Obama likes to say, but no more than any other family. No one’s coming for our house or anything. I don’t think. Yet.

“You talk about money all the time,” he said.

It’s the same absurd episode every year. About a week into their winter break, my children take on the properties of common pond leeches.

Lazing around in their pajamas day after day, they suck down eggnog and cookies ’til the gifts come, then invariably whine about what they don’t have: the proper batteries, the money to buy what they really want, the opportunity to see that dreadful chipmunk movie …

That’s when I lose it. That’s when I go into self-righteous harpy mode, decrying their ingratitude and asking if they know what “entitlement” means and how profoundly unattractive it is. The lecture ends when I get to: “Why are you so spoiled?” Because the answer is a neon billboard-sized arrow pointing directly to their spoiling, entitled mother.

I admit it. I’m not the very model of magnanimousness, not the emblem of altruism. Sure, I leave pantry booty at the mailbox for canned food drives. I lower my window at off-ramps to toss a Washington to the fella with the pleading eyes. But I ain’t what you’d call a giver.

I’m well apprised of society’s ills; I’m just not accustomed to asking, “What can I do to help?” And much as I want the world to be a better place, I’ve never felt capable of making it so.

I’m what they call a word person, preferring “viridian” to dreary green and never uttering “confused” when “flummoxed” is within reach.

An English major whose motif-musing and allusion-hunting skills have proved all but useless in the real world, I take admittedly odd delight in the careful craft of sentence-smithing.

One of my prized possessions is a tome titled “The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate,” and I fling myself from bed each morning to savor my Word of the Day e-mail from dictionary.com — a wellspring of toothsome terms like numinous, doff and foofaraw.

I challenge myself to use each new word in conversation before the week is over, and just never you mind whether I’m successful or not. The point is I want to.

That is why I find parenting to be a bit of a bore. As a mother, I estimate 87 percent of the sentences that spring from my mouth are vapid. Artless. In fact, they border on asinine. And most of them should go without saying:

“Stop hitting yourself.” “Get your jacket out of the peanut butter.” “No spitting in Mommy’s bed.” There’s the perennial, “You must use a tissue for that” and the all-too-frequent, “Well, would you like it if I called YOU an oogie bananahead?” I recently heard myself say, “We never ever lick the bottoms of our shoes.” And I wondered what the devil had become of my dexterity for discourse — let alone my children’s common sense.

There are things good parents don’t say to their children. We don’t, for example, say, “Somewhere in the high desert, there are gnomes building you a Wii” or “Did you know that antelope have invisibility powers?” We never tell them that a kindly old woman is likely to emerge from our tub drains in a blue suit at some point this month. And that we should leave her a dish of tiramisu.

Why, then, will we swear up and down that if our kids behave and eat their vegetables, a fat man in a red get-up will flit through the sky pulled by wingless horned mammals and squeeze down our filthy chimneys to bring us coveted baubles shrouded in Costco wrapping paper?

What the elf are we doing to our kids??

I make a big stink at home about honesty and how it’s our family’s highest value blah blah blah. Yet I’ve dragged my old Doc Martens through the fireplace and stomped them across the living room to leave convincing ash footprints on the carpet. I’ve nibbled from countless cookie platters intended for Santa, leaving big, obvious bite marks and telltale crumbs. I’ve affixed postage to “Dear Santa” letters that were ultimately mailed to no one, nowhere.

Was I wrong to do it?