Parents

 

It’s often said that teenagers think their parents know nothing, and suddenly, when those teens reach their 20s, their parents become intelligent again.

That was not my experience.

I wasn’t the kind of kid who got into trouble. Most of my school friends didn’t live near me, so I didn’t get to hang out with them. Those who did live near me had jobs. I couldn’t get a job, even after I got my driver’s license because people didn’t believe I was old enough. In those days there was no photo on the driver’s license. When I was 16, most people thought I was about 13, if that.

The people I spent the most time with were the other people who were in the church guitar group with me. We had an adult who ran the group. We met at the church on Tuesday evenings to rehearse. Occasionally, we went somewhere afterwards, or had a Saturday afternoon outing. In those cases, the leader told the parents and gave them a time to expect us home. On school nights, other than Tuesdays, I was home, doing homework or watching TV.

I wasn’t terribly burdened by peer pressure. I didn’t do things simply because someone else did it. Smoking was one of those things.

My father smoked. There were ashtrays in nearly every room of the house. The stench of smoke was usually somewhere, except in the daytime, when my father was at work.

Whenever we went to Philadelphia for the day by train, we would meet up with my dad, who worked in the city, and after dinner, take the train home. Traveling with him meant spending the entire ride in the smoking car, with its persistence of concentrated smoke that not only clung to clothes, but also burned the eyes and made breathing difficult.

I’d had summers filled with getting cigarette ash blown into my eyes and onto my clothes when my father flicked cigarette ashes out the window during drives in a car without air conditioning.

In addition, every morning I awoke to the sound of my father coughing long enough and hard enough to make me expect to hear a thud on the floor from his fall, bereft of breath. That it never came was a daily wonder to me.

My eldest brother was exposed to the same thing for longer than I had been. That he had started smoking himself at 14 or 15 was beyond belief.

His friends smoked. They all thought it was cool or sophisticated or simply grown-up. While my friends and I pretended to smoke when we were given those disgusting chalky mint flavored candy cigarettes at the corner store, I never would have considered ever taking up smoking. And I made that decision when was only seven or eight.

While this was the early ’60s, before the Surgeon General’s warnings on cigarette packets, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that weeds wrapped in paper, lit on fire and the smoke inhaled into your lungs wasn’t going to be good for you. That was an eight-year-old’s conclusion. What was wrong with the adults?

My parents had forbidden my brother to smoke. He was apparently not able to figure out that he would eventually have the same cough as my father. Or that my mother, who didn’t smoke, could smell the smoke on his clothes and his breath. It apparently never occurred to him that if he was going to sneak smoking, he should at least use mint gum or mouthwash to hide the fact. He thought he was getting away with something, even though on at least one occasion he was careless enough to leave a lit cigarette on the windowsill in the bathroom. I found it.

My mother tried bribing him, promising that if he didn’t smoke and waited until he was 16, she would buy him a pipe.

I never understood what was so magical about waiting until age 16, or how a pipe was any better than a cigarette. A more treatable cancer, perhaps?

My father eventually overruled my mother, perhaps recognizing that my brother was simply sneaking cigarettes and lying about it. Why else would he suddenly be interested in walking the dog every night?

When my brother was a few months shy of 16, my father told him he could smoke. It took him until his mid-60s to finally succeed in quitting.

When my peers tried to pressure me into smoking, I said, “No thanks,” and made no secret of how stupid I thought anyone who smoked was.

At the cusp of my teen years, I had two friends I chose to let go. Each, at different times demonstrated that they thought shoplifting was cool. I was not about to be a party to that. Even though I wasn’t participating in the theft, I didn’t want to be caught with either of them and be tarred with the same brush. In each case, the girl wouldn’t listen to me, so I walked away, and that was the last time I had anything to do with them.

I wasn’t some goody-two-shoes. My non-smoking brother and a friend had decided several years earlier to try stealing something out of the local grocery store, just to see if they could get away with it. They, of course, were caught.

In those days, the store manager called your parents rather than the police. I well remembered what my father had done to my brother once they got home, and assumed it would go worse for me if I ever tried it, having not learned from my brother’s mistakes. Besides, both girls’ behavior was so far from my moral compass that I didn’t think they were worth remaining friends with.

Where my parents and I were at odds during my teen years was my not being allowed to do things they let my brothers do, for no better reason than that my father had failed to give me a Y chromosome. The double standard rankled.

What I didn’t know when I was a teen was that women in the U.S. at the time didn't have a lot of rights. They weren’t even allowed to own their own credit cards. Married women had to have their husbands co-sign for credit cards, and banks could refuse to issue a credit card to an unmarried woman up until 1974, the year after I graduated from high school.

While I was still in college, I was sent an application for my first credit card, which was, I believe, from Macy’s. I applied simply because I could. Once I received that, I had my entre into the world of the credit cards I actually wanted.

I was always good with finances. I didn’t spend simply because I had plastic. I only bought what I needed and could pay for.

My parents tried to instill fiscal responsibility in the three of us kids. They succeeded with two of us. The other, not so much.

My parents didn’t buy us just anything we wanted. If one of my friends got something I dreamed of having, I might ask for one. We generally only got gifts for birthdays and Christmas. It was rare, indeed, if I got some inexpensive toy if there was money left after the grocery shopping was done. First of all, such toys were often cheaply made, and wouldn’t last. Secondly, we had no reason to expect a gift if it wasn’t a birthday or Christmas. There were poor children whose parents could only afford such toys, and they should really be left for them.

If I pointed out that one of my friends had something I wanted, my mother would flippantly suggest I go live with that child’s family. My other option was to save up for what I wanted.

In our family, once we started school, we were given an allowance. At that age (6) I received 25 cents a week. My brothers were older, so they received more.

Allowance was originally meant to be a payment for doing specific chores. My mother never ended up liking the way I did any assigned chore. I made too much of a mess washing dishes, didn’t dry the silverware sufficiently, and did a dreadful job making the bed. She didn’t trust me to dust her breakable knick-knacks, and I always ended up setting the table backwards (cutlery on the wrong sides)because I was left-handed.

My incompetence in chores I wasn’t interested in doing wore her down. Eventually, none of us did chores, but we still received our allowance. My parents wanted to teach us how to handle money.

I remember the excitement every four weeks when I could exchange my four quarters for a dollar bill.

We each had a Band-Aid tin to keep allowance in, in the top drawer of the buffet in the dining room. Each was slightly different, so everyone knew their own. My parents had zero tolerance for thieves, so no one had to worry about anyone touching an allowance box that wasn’t theirs. 

For those who think I'm giving too much away, my parents are both dead, the house sold, the furniture elsewhere. I don't even have a buffet in my dining room, so you won't find money there if you come to rob me.

We each had piggy banks in our rooms, and I don’t know why our allowance wasn’t kept in those. Mine was a silver plated pig given to me for my Christening. I kept money that other people gave me in that, but never my allowance.

If we wanted something our parents weren’t going to buy us, we could save up for it.

I’ll never forget my first allowance purchase. I was six. There was a doll in Woolworth’s that I wanted. I asked my mother if I could buy it with my own money, and she said yes. It was $1.97. By my reckoning, I needed $2, and I’d get 3 cents change.

I had to save for two months.

Each time I was in Woolworth’s, I’d check to see if the doll was still there. Fortunately, it wasn’t a popular doll, a no-name in the age of Barbie.

Finally, I received my eighth quarter, and begged my dad to take me to get the doll. (My mother didn’t drive at the time). It was Friday night. I’m sure he was tired from working all day, but he drove me to Woolworth’s.

When I got there and claimed the doll, I took it to the cashier. I was excited. I had the self-control to save for something I wanted, and this was my first big purchase.

I put my money on the counter while the cashier rang up the sale. I was all set for my three cents – maybe some penny candy? – when my world fell apart.

“Two dollars and six cents,” the cashier said.

What? The sticker said $1.97! Why was she charging me more? Was it because I was a kid? My dad was right there.

I turned to him, tears starting in my eyes,

“I don’t have enough money. She charged me extra,” I said.

He chuckled. No one had mentioned sales tax.

He could have made me leave without the doll, but he’d made the trip. I’m sure he didn’t want to make it again the following week for six cents. After all, no one had explained sales tax to me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some spare change. He handed the extra six cents to the cashier and I went home happy, even if feeling as if an injustice had been done.

“They charged me extra,” I said once we were in the car.

On the way home he explained about taxes. I still didn’t think it was fair, but I had my doll.

My next project was saving up $10 to open a savings account. I had to save for nearly a year to do that, but I was determined, and when I opened my first bank account, every cent was mine.

When I wanted to do a semester abroad in college, my parents couldn’t afford to send me. They told me I’d have to pay for it myself if I wanted to go, so I got a job in the dining hall, and squirrelled away the money I made for two years.

My mother surprised me by giving me the money she normally would have paid the university for my dorm fees, since I wouldn’t be in the dorms that term. She still had to pay the tuition because of the way the program was set up. But the dorm money helped tremendously, and they’d taught me to work and save for what was important to me.

Even though most of the students I went abroad with had parents who could afford to send them and give them a summer in Paris as well, I knew mine couldn’t. I never thought it was unfair that I had to save my own money. My brothers had never been given trips to Europe, and I had no reason to expect it. All I ever asked for was permission.

I had friends whose parents bought them brand new cars when they graduated from high school. My own parents never owned a brand new car themselves, and wouldn’t have been able to give me a used one – nor did I need a car in college. When I graduated, my gift was a set of suitcases so I could get my clothes back and forth to college. Those friends had gone to public school, so perhaps what they saved on Catholic high school tuition allowed them to be able to afford cars.

Still, those friends didn’t get to experience the accomplishment of doing things on their own.

My mother and I had the usual mother/daughter skirmishes of teen life, but I also tried to improve her life.

As a young teen, I tried to convince my mother to wear miniskirts and more makeup so she’d be trendy. I was unaware until years later how ridiculous she would have looked had she taken my advice. But I was trying to modernize her and make her look pretty so people wouldn’t think she was old. She explained why she wouldn’t do that, but I thought she was just being stubborn.

I suppose I’m lucky that I was able to mainly get on with my parents and not lose respect for them. I didn’t say the things about my parents that I heard some of my peers say.

Of course, having always expected my parents to be the wiser heads, at least in most things, it was a shock when, at the end of her life, my mother was unable to make choices that, a few years earlier, would have been obvious to her. The ravages of some diseases are far more disrespectful to parents than some teens can be.