Sometimes being a compassionate parent is hard. Kids can get amped up over some pretty insignificant things. It starts early with a lost binky or blanket, then grows into things like a friend saying something is silly or no one noticing a microcosmic change in appearance. I try to understand, because it feels so real to them, but…come on. If you have interacted with children, you know compassion can sometimes be a challenge.
However, sometimes children get amped up over things that parents are just to callous to realize are so important that a single day can impact a lifetime.
I give you that day. Picture day.
Let’s take a moment and travel back in time to a little year I like to call 1981. It is a big one. Prince Charles married Lady Diana. MTV was born. Raiders of the Lost Ark made archeology sexy, Clash of the Titans wowed us with its incredible effects and made Harry Hamlin sexy. Betty Davis Eyes, Jessie’s Girl and Kiss is on My Lips topped the charts. The world lost Bob Marley and Natalie Wood. Ronald Reagan was shot. The fifty-two Iranian hostages were released, and my mom burned my forehead with a curling iron on the morning of my 6th grade school pictures.
Care to guess which one of these events has had the longest-lasting impact on me?
Let me clarify that I am talking about personal significance.
Let me also clarify that this was no minor skin irritation.
Possibly due to the fact that Republicans were in charge politically, consumer protections were just not what they are today. This particular curling iron heated up to about 1500 degrees. We didn’t style our hair back then so much as we forged it.
Unfortunately for me, my mom’s depth perception was a bit off that morning.
I should have been called in sick. That really would have been the only compassionate thing to do.
Alas, in a decision about which my pleas for mercy fell upon deaf ears, I was not excused from school that fateful day.
Not only was I not excused from school, but my mom also “fixed my hair” by covering the giant, glowing patch of my radiating skin with a sweep. She called it a sweep. Men in their 60’s call it a combover. On my forehead.
Whatever you are picturing, multiply it by ten times worse.
There were no retakes.
Now back in the 70’s and 80’s, we got class pictures – small photo pages with all of our classmates’s pictures, our teacher’s and principal’s picture and our school and year listed.
Today we have Facebook.
1981 and 2011 have met.
Picture day matters.
I am pleased to report that I did not disfigure my daughter this morning, although I did ‘overheat’ her ear with my ceramic ion hairdryer.
She looked beautiful, although, for honest reporting, let me state that I am by no means an unbiased observer.
I am sure my mom saw beauty when she heartlessly shoved me out the door and down the driveway with my forehead-combover on that September day 30 years ago. Although, having lived through 11 year-old girls twice now, I am pretty sure the only beauty she saw was in her vision of an attitude-free house for six blissful hours and her warm cup of coffee steaming on the kitchen table.
I want to believe that because, in general, my mom has an eye for beautiful things and, even with the compassionate eyes of my 40-year-old grown-up self, it is an undeniable fact that that is one ugly-ass picture.
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