Montana Momoirs

My five year-old son, Mike, recently went to a party at a friend’s house. When he returned, I asked him, “Did you have a fun time?”

“I did,” Mike said. “But I’m not having fun anymore!” With that, I whisked Mike further back to reality by making him share his toys with his brother (a ZERO on the “Fun Scale”) and by giving him vegetables and fruit at dinnertime, as opposed to the cake and ice cream Mike was certain his friend was eating for dinner.

“My friend’s house is more fun than our house!” he told me. “At his house, you can watch a movie and decorate cookies and eat candy and cake and ice cream!”

“Maybe you should go to your friend’s house when he isn’t having a party,” I said to Mike. “I bet their house is a lot like our house then – NO FUN AT ALL!”

But when I paused to think about Mike’s life, I realized that it is actually one fun thing after another. Mike’s life is punctuated by fort-building, art projects, volcanic eruptions with baking soda and vinegar, or hikes in the mountains, swims at the pool, soaks in hot springs, visits to the museum, and trips to the library, toy store, pet store, or the park.

This is the way a child’s life should be, at least in my mind. But as I thought more about Mike’s life, I realized that, in fact, there is little in his life that isn’t fun. Even the most mundane chores and tasks are made more fun by happy sing-along songs (the “clean-up song” for cleaning up his toys), pint-sized cartoon versions of adult objects (a Bob the Builder potty seat, dental floss held in place by plastic dinosaurs, a toothbrush shaped like an astronaut) or brightly-colored, sugary, kid-friendly varieties of everything from dental floss and toothpaste to milk and medicine.

But the fun doesn’t end there. In fact, as I thought more and more about it, I realized that everywhere Mike goes and everything he does is specifically designed to appeal to him and his pint-sized tastes.

Even a trip to my son’s dentist makes going to Disneyland seem a fairly dismal prospect. In the waiting room, there are video games, a train set, stuffed animals, boxes of toys, and a flat-screen TV playing children’s movies. The exam room is painted to resemble the bottom of the ocean, and stuffed fish hang from the ceiling while a huge aquarium bubbles away nearby.

At the risk of sounding like my parents and grandparents, who all apparently wore burlap sacks and hiked 27 miles to school barefoot in mile-high snowdrifts, I learned a hard life lesson early: life isn’t always fun. And you still have to do what is expected of you – fun or not.

At my childhood dentist’s office, I sat in the waiting room, which I remember as being very grey, without a toy in sight. At home, I brushed with a plain ol’ toothbrush using Crest, in its super minty pasty form. At my childhood doctor’s office, I was lucky if I could find a seven year-old tattered issue of “Highlights for Children.” My mom and I passed the time in the exam room by thumbing through the “Physician’s Desk Reference,” a tome that exceeded any respectable dictionary in size. At home, glasses of milk were completely unadulterated and were thus white and tasted suspiciously of milk. My medicine tasted like medicine. And when someone told me to clean up at school, I was just expected to put things away – without a happy song accompanying the task.

I understand the reasoning behind making the most mundane and sometimes awful tasks seem fun; this isn’t lost on me. But when do kids learn that life isn’t always fun and games? When do they learn that not just sometimes, but often, they must complete tasks that aren’t fun at all?

I don’t want to be the mean mom who takes her kids to the crusty old dentist with the windowless exam room. But I have to pause and wonder about the message I am sending when everything about my kids’ lives is fun, fun, fun and the only thing that’s missing is a giant bowl of candy with a sign that says, “FREE! TAKE ALL YOU WANT!”

I think all children should lead joyful lives where they have few worries and concerns and the bulk of their experiences are positive and happy. But I want my kids to understand that not everything will bring them joy and happiness and still, they will have to do these things because that is what is expected of them.

I wish life was all fun and games. I wish that every day brought nothing but candy and trick-or-treating and videogames and kids’ movies and books and toys and happy sing-alongs. And maybe for a chosen few, this is the way life is. But for most of us, life is about getting up in the morning and getting dressed so we can go to work or to a meeting or to the doctor or to the dentist. And still, we get up and we go do it – fun or not.