Blame Me

Blame Me

When my daughter was in third grade, her teacher did a graphing activity. The students were asked to chart the times they went to bed. My daughter put her mark at 8:00. That afternoon, she came home crying.

After calming her down, I found out that the other students had all reported bedtimes of nine or later and that they had teased her about her early bedtime. I understood her distress. Kids can be cruel. She begged me to change her bedtime. As a mother, I knew she needed her sleep. She got up very early to catch the bus. 

So I told her what my mother had told me in similar circumstances, “Blame me.”

It’s a simple strategy. When being coerced or teased by your friends or classmates, and you really don’t want to do what they are asking you to do, just say, “My parents will punish me if I do that.” Let your parents be the bad guys so that you can avoid arguments and stay out of trouble. 

Of course, I argued plenty with my own parents about doing the things “everybody” else was doing. My father always asked, “If everyone jumped in the lake, would you do it too?” I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to answer “YES!” but I knew better. No meant no. I am sure he had his reasons for denying my requests, just as I had mine with my children, but I sure didn’t understand them then. 

So I blamed my parents. No, I can’t play behind the old barn. My mother won’t let me stay out late. I’m not allowed to go swimming in the lake. My dad won’t let me watch that show. I have to stay home. I need permission. I have to ask.  My parents will be watching me.

I got out of a lot of sticky situations because of this rule. I didn’t have to hang out with the smokers behind the barn. I didn’t have to jump in the cold lake. I could go home before dark. I didn’t have to go where I didn’t want to go or do what I didn’t want to do. My mother and father were taking the blame and I got the benefits. 

My mother even extended this benefit to others. She told me that when I wanted to say no, there were probably others who also wanted to but were afraid to say so. “They just need a leader.” So when I said no and blamed her, my friends often jumped right in with “My mother would punish me too.”

My daughter learned to use this strategy. In fourth grade, she and a friend went to a birthday party. I dropped them off and left. When I arrived home, the phone rang. She and her friend were coming home. 

When my daughter got home, she told me that the kids had decided to watch an R-rated film. My daughter said, “My mother would ground me if I watched that.” Her friend agreed and they called for their ride. 

I was happy to accept the blame. I was glad to be the bad guy. I was watching and my daughter was safe. 

Bread Bags

Bread Bags

A story on a radio program caught my attention. The speaker was saying that, when she was young, she only had one pair of good shoes, which she wore to school. When it rained or snowed her mother tied bread bags over her shoes and ankles to protect them. When she got on the school bus with her feet in bread bags, she was never embarrassed, because all of the other kids had bread bags on their feet too. 

This story brought back memories of my own days in bread bags. My siblings and I often covered our feet with plastic bags when sledding. All the kids did. When my own children were young, I put bread bags over their socks and inside their shoes when they played in the snow. Even when we had boots, we lined them with bread bags for extra protection.

During WWII, the British government published a series of pamphlets titled: Make Do and Mend. These pamphlets gave suggestions on how to reuse or repair everything from socks to clocks during this time of rationing and shortages. At the end of the first decade of the 21^st century, the government updated these pamphlets to help people make it through the recession.

In my day, “making do” was a part of childhood. When we didn’t have it, we’d make it. We loved inventing things. We’d find old boards or tires and turn them into swings or forts. A stick, a string and a safety pin made a great fishing pole – even if you never actually caught any fish. Discarded boxes became sleds, club houses, spaceships, rowboats, go-carts or terrariums for tiny crawling creatures. We once made a whole Barbie village from boxes and played with it for weeks. We used shoe boxes as molds for snow bricks to build amazing snow forts. When the boxes fell apart, we invented uses for the scraps. 

The best part of making do was that everyone else was doing it too. We were more likely to be impressed by someone’s ingenuity than embarrassed by their lack of some material good. Our pockets were filled with bits of string, lost buttons, and broken rubber bands because we just knew that these would come in handy somehow. We taped up old sneakers and called them hiking shoes. We had patches on the knees of our jeans and the elbows of our jackets. Worn school clothes became play clothes. Strollers, bikes, ice skates and musical instruments got passed from kid to kid and from family to family, sometimes making it around the neighborhood and back just in time for the next child who needed them. 

Maybe “making do” is a practice we need to resurrect. Not only did it fire our inventive juices but it also inspired us to share. Instead of grasping for more, we opened our hands to give, because we knew that when we shared with others, the others would share with us. Making do and sharing gave us “extra protection” against the world. We didn’t need to have everything; we had each other. 

These days, when I get ready to take a walk in the snow, before I slide my feet into my old hiking shoes, I add that extra layer of  bread-bag protection. My feet stay dry and my memories stay warm.