The Bun and I have been spending a lot of time lolling on our deck, enjoying spectacular views of the bay, and catching up on long-neglected reading. It has been joyous.
Our sunning has been interrupted quite frequently, however, from the bursts of noise coming from our many neighbors. For the most part, it has been easy to ignore. Slamming screen doors, spoons scraping ceramic cereal bowls, and the like are part of the soundscape that comes with being at the beach. At times it has even been entertaining. A family with two young children is staying in a condo directly above ours. The father is American and the mother is Swiss. Yesterday, one of the little girls had a bilingual meltdown directly outside of our front door. The Bun was able to discern that the older of the two girls didn’t want to ride with her younger sister in the cart towed by her father’s bike “because it was for babies.” I just struck by the sheer amount of stamina she had in being able to carry on so loudly (and in two languages!) for so long.
But the neighbors to our left have just been plain annoying. Yesterday, they seemed to spend the entire day having loud phone conversations on their deck (which is literally 10 feet from ours), hosing off what seemed like 23 large inflatable contraptions, or inflating said contraptions (which had the effect of sounding like they were vacuuming their front lawn).
What struck me, though, were the conversations they were having with their daughter. From what I could discern, the daughter was behaving like a normal kid. She had the cheery disposition that pretty much every kid at the beach on summer vacation has. She wanted to play in the water and just have a good time. Nothing wrong with that. But her parents– one in particular, who sounds like one of those people who is in a perpetually grouchy mood– just constantly seemed to be finding something wrong with her. She wasn’t helping them with their endless hosing or the inflating/vacuuming. Her toys were in the way. She needed to pick something up that she left on the beach, and damn it, she was about to cause her mother to break her neck because those toys were *still* in the way.
There were no pleases. There were no thank-yous. There was just a lot of condescension and what-a-martyr-I-am-to-have-to-put-up-with-you-and-on-my-vacation-no-less tones. Had this little girl been a monster, I would have understood. But she wasn’t. And the thing is, it’s not like her parents were monsters, either. They were just normal parents dealing with all of the stresses that come with raising a child.
But it made me realize that being a kid just kind of sucks sometimes. Kids are forced to interact without respite with adults who are simply being–well, normal. That is to say, human. Kids, unlike adults, don’t get to spend 8+ hours a day being treated with the (albeit forced and artificial) civility and respect with which adults treat each other outside the home in our society. There are no, “how are yous?” and “would you like fries with thats?” and “have you found everything that you were looking fors?” Children are shuttled from home to school to daycare, all the while monitored by adults who do not have the energy to bestow upon their young charges the graces that they provide to the bagger at the supermarket. Children’s lives may be pleasant, but the are absent of pleasantries.
I am not trying to say that this is a crisis or that children deserve to be coddled any more than they are. It’s just an observation, I guess, that children do not get to experience the everyday small dignities that adults enjoy every time they step out their front door. And when life is stressful (as it pretty much always is) and you find yourself turning into a lunatic– that is to say human– the second you get home, full of “why haven’t yous?!” and “what’s for dinners?!,” it is comforting to know that you can once again act like a sane person the next day while exchanging pleasantries with a co-worker. Those forced civilities are often the one thing that keep us feeling– well, human.
