Forever, Erma Read online

  When I said “No,” they giggled; “Not now,” they bit me; “Come to Mama,” they ran into the traffic; “Let me see what is in your hand,” they ate it; “The strained lamb is good for you,” they blew it back in my face.

  Communicate with a toddler? I’d sooner take my chances with an untrained, excited puppy on a new white carpet.

  The Twelve Days of School—September 1975

  Please sing to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

  On the first day of school, my children said to me, “Aren’t you glad that our education’s free?”

  On the second day of school, my children said to me, “I need five notebooks, six fountain pens and an unabridged dictionary.”

  On the third day of school, my children said to me, “We need Crayolas, your old Victrola, one pencil box and a buck for a lock and a key.”

  On the fourth day of school, my children said to me, “I need a gym suit, tennies and shower cap, a sewing kit, some pinking shears, and five yards of string, one tailor chalk, two thimbles, one bias tape and something called emery.”

  On the fifth day of school, my children said to me, “We need insurance, don’t forget our lunches and a deposit for our lab breakage fee.”

  On the sixth day of school, my children said to me, “You forgot my workbook, name tags on my soccer socks and the loan of your car till after three.”

  On the seventh day of school, my children said to me, “I need a camera, hockey stick and pink tights, a tuba in key, one chess set, one nose plug, one leotard, for my extracurricular activities.”

  On the eighth day of school, my children said to me, “Do we have some old shoes, food we will never use, books we’re not reading, money we aren’t needing, for some hard-pressed, needy family?”

  On the ninth day of school, my children said to me, “I had my picture took. It’ll cost you ten to look, for twenty you can buy the book; no stamps, no checks, just money.”

  On the tenth day of school, my children said to me, “Wanta join the PTA, the Boosters and the Blue and Gray, the band is selling key rings, and you know how you’re always losing keys.”

  On the eleventh day of school, my children said to me, “Where is my cigar box? Did you pay my milk bill? I need fifty cents. We’re going to plant a tree.”

  On the twelfth day of school, my children said to me, “Why are you crying, you’re finished buying, aren’t you glad that our education’s free?”

  “Things My Mother Taught Me” Assignment—September 28, 1975

  One of my kids had an English assignment the other night to do a paper on “Things My Mother Taught Me.”

  I couldn’t help but be flattered as he wrote feverishly in his notebook for the better part of 45 minutes. When he was finished, I asked, “Do you mind if I read it?”

  He shrugged. “Okay, if you want to, but don’t get it dirty.”

  THINGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME

  Logic: “If you fall off that swing and break your neck, you are not going to the store with me.”

  Medicine: “If you don’t stop crossing your eyes, they are going to freeze that way!” (There is no cure, no telethon and no relief for frozen eyes.)

  Optimism: “You are going to enjoy yourself at that birthday party or I am going to break every bone in your body.”

  Philosophy: “You show me a boy with a pet snake and I’ll show you a boy who wants his mother dead!”

  ESP: “Put on the sweater! Don’t you think I know when you are cold?”

  Science: “You put your hand out the car window and it’ll blow off.” (Gravity: What goes out, must blow off.)

  Insight: “Do you realize that fifty million children in Southeast Asia consider broccoli a treat...like ice cream?” (How do you get a broccoli deficiency?)

  Finance: “I told you the tooth fairy is writing checks because computerized billing is easier for the IRS.”

  Challenge: “Where is your sister and don’t talk with food in your mouth. Answer me!”

  Ethics: “If you are too busy to take out the garbage, you are too busy to need an allowance.”

  Genealogy: “Shut that door. Or were you born in a barn?” (You’re asking me?)

  Suspense: “Can you guess what I found under your bed today?”

  Humor: “When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don’t come running to me.”

  I took off my glasses and put down the paper. Son of a gun. I would have been willing to bet during all those years he hadn’t heard a word I said.

  A Baby’s Bill of Rights—November 13, 1975

  On the eve of the two hundredth anniversary of our country, it is only fitting that groups everywhere reaffirm their rights.

  To date, we have had declarations of the status of women, senior citizens, children and even dieters. Today, I wish to speak on behalf of a group that cannot speak for itself but nonetheless occupies a very special place in our world.

  A BABY’S BILL OF RIGHTS

  Article the first: People who chew garlic shall not be allowed within three miles of a baby, under penalty of drowning by spitting.

  Article the second: Excessive bail shall be set for turkeys who tickle a baby’s feet until he faints or throw him up in the air after a full meal.

  Article the third: Where a crime of the kidneys has been committed, the accused should enjoy the right to a speedy diaper change. Public announcements, details and guided tours of the aforementioned are not necessary.

  Article the fourth: The decision to eat strained lamb or not to eat strained lamb should be with the feedee and not the feeder. Blowing the strained lamb into the feeder’s face should be accepted as an option, not as a declaration of war.

  Article the fifth: New and innovative ways should be sought to test whether or not food is too hot for a baby’s taste. If God had meant for parents to test food with their tongues, He would have made tongues disposable.

  Article the sixth: Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize, whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved.

  Article the seventh: No person may be made to wear a sweater when the parent/grandparent is cold or run around under a cold garden hose when the aforementioned is hot.

  Amendment one: No baby shall at any time be quartered in a house where there are no soft laps, no laughter or no love.

  Happiness and Motherhood—April 24, 1980

  Researchers are finally getting down to some real serious studies on the postnatal depression. Do you know what they’ve discovered?

  You’re not supposed to have a good time after the baby is born.

  It’s something a lot of us suspected, but were never really sure about.

  My postnatal depression was longer than most. I went into it seven months before the baby came, and it lasted until the kid was 17. Then it began to taper off.

  Had it not been for As the World Turns and pacifiers, I’d have slipped into humming and braiding my hair. Every day I’d put a pacifier into whatever part of his face was open, get a plate full of buttered noodles and sit in front of the TV set and watch someone who was worse off than I was.

  Every time I went to the pediatrician, I’d try to search the faces of the other mothers for some sign of exhaustion.

  I only saw one mother break, and that was when her son, a real hellion, had skated across the carpet shocking everyone with his static electricity, rearranged the furniture, licked the drinking fountain, taken a book away from another child and finally submerged his hand in the aquarium. She just sat there, numb, and finally said softly, “Think piranha.”

  Another rare moment of honesty that suggested motherhood was less than perfect came on Mother’s Day in church when a new priest looked out and said to the mothers, “I know what you’re thinking. You’re tired. You feel pulled in nine different directions. You think no one understands you, and you’re saying to yourself, “Mary and
her one kid. Big deal!”

  According to the new theory, ambivalent feelings are perfectly natural. It doesn’t mean you love your child any less; it means you’re realistic about the demands on your personal life.

  A new mother in Colorado wrote recently about her two children, one two years old, the other three months. She put the toddler on a potty seat so she could bathe the baby. She lathered up the baby when the meter man appeared. The dog suddenly went into heat. The phone rang. The toddler jumped up and overturned the potty on the new shag rug. He then stuck his head in between the washer and the wall to see what the meter reader was doing and got stuck. The baby got cold and began screaming. Strange dogs began running through the house. She moved the washer and her son emerged bleeding. “What would you do?” she asked.

  I’d do now what I should have done years ago...cry!

  Disposable Diapers—February 8, 1990

  The question being asked by baby boomers isn’t, “Is there life after throwaway diapers are abolished?” but, “Is that life worth living?”

  Disposable diapers were something my generation used to fantasize about. That and catheter implants. I used to stand at my picture window in the suburbs, watch a blizzard raging outside and pray, “Please, God, I don’t care if the milk gets through or the mail or even the school bus...but please give wings to the diaper-service truck.”

  Maybe it’s because we had gone through the dip-and-flush era on our hands and knees in front of the commode. It was not a pretty sight. If we drifted, the flush sucked the diaper and our arm right into the septic tank on the front lawn.

  When diaper service came into being, we rejoiced. True, dropping a soiled diaper into the can the day before pickup meant risking the sight of a good eye, but it was better than what we had had.

  When paper products became state-of-the-art here, disposable diapers were a natural. Today, mothers use 16 billion of them a year. That’s 3.6 million tons a year going into sanitary landfills. Environmentalists say you have to start somewhere. Why not go back to cloth diapers that you dip and flush, wash, bleach, soften and use again?

  Could we talk about this? As a mother, I’d rather do away with foam cups and have hot coffee poured into both of my hands and drink fast than do away with disposable diapers. Want to cut back on paper products? Abolish those little paper dresses that doctors use to make you forget why you came to their office in the first place. Just bring a bathrobe from home.

  It’s not as if we don’t have other options. Think how much wastepaper we could save by doing away with the 18 or 19 subscription cards that drop out of a single magazine each month. Ask yourself, Do we need all that paper wadded up in the toes of new shoes? There is absolutely no reason in this world to keep turning out gift boxes year after year. My mother has enough of them stored to supply every major city in this country for the next 10 years.

  You need priorities. What is more important, filling out eight pounds of insurance forms for a crack in your windshield or changing the diaper of a child who just ate mud? There have been few contributions to society in this century that have made such an impact on our population as the disposable diaper. I don’t think people really care if their hamburger is housed in a white foam condo or if plastic rings are really necessary to bond their six-pack. But to do away with paper diapers would once again bring mothers to their knees...literally.

  Let us hope manufacturers can come up with a diaper that is environmentally sound. To go back to cloth would send us back to the day when breathing and raising a baby at the same time were incompatible.

  Spit—March 18, 1990

  I received a birthday card from my daughter that said she loved me. When I opened it up, it continued: “But I never forgave you for cleaning my face with spit on your hanky.”

  We laughed. She, because she thought I was embarrassed. I, because I never used a hanky. I used my fingers.

  In truth, I thought the sentiment was rather ironic, coming from a kid who drank from the water jug in the refrigerator and deposited enough crumbs in it to make it look like a Christmas paperweight.

  She is not yet a parent, so how is she expected to know that mothers are endowed with a spit supply that develops during pregnancy, much like milk glands? After birth, there is an increased amount to fulfill the demands of child raising.

  Mothers need all the spit they can get. At first it seems gross, but you soon adapt to it. How else do you remove a milk stain from a bib? Lipstick kisses from a cheek? Chocolate from lips? Bird doo and mud from shoes? Ice cream from noses? Spilled food from shirts?

  Mothers need saliva to tame flyaway hair and cowlicks, remove mustard from car seats and get fingerprints off walls and doorknobs. They need it to condition swim goggles. (You don’t think kids are going to use their own spit, do you?) With each child, I had a fear that my spit would dry up before I had her trained to soap and water.

  Parents do a lot of gross things in the name of motherhood and fatherhood. It doesn’t matter on what economic level you live, when a child hands you a shoe with a knot in the shoestring that he has wet on all day long, the first thing you do instinctively is put it in your mouth and try to loosen up the knot with your teeth. If we had an ounce of pride, we’d say, “You put that shoe in my face one more time and I’ll cut its tongue out!”

  And what is the first thing you do when a child wants to get rid of his gum? You stick out your hand and say, “Spit it out in here.” You have absolutely nothing in mind as to what you’re going to do with it. It just seems the thing to do.

  There isn’t a mother alive who has watched her child play in his food until it looks like road kill and, when he doesn’t want it, hasn’t eaten it herself rather than waste it.

  We are born to sacrifice, but my daughter is too young and too inexperienced to know these things. I live for the day when she has spit on three children, a Naugahyde sofa, a steering wheel, a light switch and the handles of a shopping cart, and doesn’t have enough saliva left to put on mascara.

  Then she’ll know.

  All My Children

  Children Cornering the Coin Market—January 5, 1965 (Erma’s first syndicated column)

  IT’S TIME WE QUIT kidding ourselves. The only group that can alleviate the national coin shortage is children.

  I don’t know what the appeal will be to get them to lighten their loafers, empty their socks and unfatten their little ceramic pigs, but it had best be soon.

  It has been an insidiously slow process, but our national economy now rests with a group of plotting little bandits who have amassed a fortune in coins for emptying garbage, cutting grass, minding babies, scraping plates, bringing in milk, clearing snow-laden driveways, redeeming baby teeth and racking up A’s on their report cards.

  A large boost to their independent solvency has been the Friday night allowance. How much can this amount to, you ask? I thought you’d never ask.

  We doled out 15 cents a week until we received the “Chintzy Employer of the Month” award on our block. A grievance committee informed us our children could make more in a Chinese rice paddy. They pointed out that we subscribed to three newspapers, had two cars in the driveway and an outside TV antenna, yet underpaid our children. Before we started receiving CARE packages from some European family, we thought it best to grant an increase. The kids now rake in a quarter a week.

  But the flow of currency does not stop there. Ages four to nine are retirement years for most youngsters. They live solely off their loose teeth. They spit these out like popcorn as the financial urgency hits them, and before you can whisper in the darkness, “Mother, have you got change for the tooth fairy for a half-dollar?” a little hand in the darkness reaches out, snatches the coin, whisks it under the pillow and snores a little to keep you from feeling like a complete fool.

  The mound of coins continues to grow as the little Kool-Aid tycoons and garbage financiers continue to amaze and to amass. Any adult can only marvel at their grasp of finances.

  �
�Mother, you are not cognizant of the fact you are four weeks in arrears in your allowance to me. Computed in simple compound interest over a four-week period, you have forced me to miss the current fiscal dividend from my bank, costing me an additional...”

  (Oh shut up!) This yet, from a son who has not mastered his threes timetables.

  For those parents foolish enough to float a loan from a child, a word of warning. They are less than discreet in their business dealings. In the middle of a dinner party, they are likely to emerge in their pajamas, complete with ledger, and query, “Daddy, when are you going to pay me the $40 you borrowed out of my bureau drawer to make the car payment last month?”

  The coins continue to roll in from the most unexpected sources. One pitch that has been pretty successful has been the appearance of our youngest at bedtime. He appears pink and scrubbed in his “jammys” and clutches a little coffee can (keep it simple) and goes to guests and grandparents, chanting through adorable gums, “Christmath ith coming...the geese are getting fat...please put a penny in the old man’s hat.”

  He then jingles his little can, and the guests laugh (but not much) and drop a coin in it. He started it last August, had a peak month in December and is still pulling it off.

  I could go on forever on how children hoard coins. The problem is who is going to pry them away from them. This is how a child reasons. Paper money is nice. You can make planes out of it, paste it on walls and windows, color it or use it for bookmarks. But a drawer full of coins! Why, that’s better than owning your own bottle of catsup!

  My Son, the President—October 30, 1965

  There’s been a decline in the past decade of little boys who aspire to the presidency of the United States.

  I can remember when every other male infant was hopefully named Franklin Delano Roosevelt Schmaltz or William Howard Taft Feeney and was primed from the cradle to occupy the White House when he grew up.