God Save Us From Perfect People

OR "I'm an Old Sour Puss Who Has Too Much Time to Think"

(My apologies for my absence to the four of you who read this!)

So I'm sitting on the couch with Greg watching the Olympics. Some 17 year-old American ice dancer is making herself dizzy right now. I didn't pay attention to her name (Rachel somethingorother Flatt, maybe?).

What I did pay attention to was the set-up that NBC provided for us. This lovely young lady is blonde (of course), blue-eyed (duh), and skating since the age of ... I think it was in utero. She's an honor student, senior in high school, and attending Stamford in the fall.

Gag me. All I can do is quote Elizabeth Taylor. "The problem with people who have no vices is that you can be pretty sure they have some pretty annoying virtues."

I suppose part of this is envy, as I sit on my couch at 26, having gained weight over the winter and course of a new relationship, unemployed, and clumsier than a new-born fawn. The other part is just my brain going, "seriously? SERIOUSLY? This is bullshit. At least Lindsey Vonn seems like she'd have a beer with me." I am quick to admit when I feel a bit o' the old green monster (and not the one at Fenway); however, I just wonder so much about this girl, the pressure we put on children and teens, and what the results of all that will be.

As George Carlin said shortly before his untimely and much mourned death, we have become a nation of child-worshippers. I agree, yet not in the way that we cater to every whim our progeny seem to produce (though many do), but because as a society, we seem to set out to create perfect little machines who have ice skating and violin on Mondays, German and tennis on Tuesdays, Mandarin and art on Wednesdays... BLAH BLAH BLAH. And what isn't over-scheduled or wrung out of the poor kids' energies is left in front of television or Xbox or some such. No wonder teen pregnancies and drug abuse are on the rise. They've got to be bored and desperate to break free.

I can't remember the last time I saw children playing outside. And it's snowy! You'd expect to see some sledding, snowball fights, or at least the odd snowman.

All of this makes me think of the (former) coworker of mine I overheard one day whining about her own lack of life. I shall repost my facebook-related rant now.

This is what I heard:
"ZOMG! I over-extended my kids... and then myself! WTF? How did this happen? All of a sudden, I'm a mother of THREE! It's like babies magically appeared in my life and grew up! I never knew it would be this much work! OMG! It's like I have TWO CAREEEEEEEEEERS. It's like, maybe, I married a guy who thinks child-rearing is woman's work, but that's OKAY because he makes SO MUCH money so I can send my kids to violin, and soccer, and kickboxing, and horseback riding, and sculpting, and catechism, and underwater fucking basket weaving but it's like it's MY LIFE now. I don't know if I'm okay with that. ALL YOUR SYMPATHIES ARE BELONG TO ME. FEEL SORRY FOR ME FOR MAKING RIDICULOUS CHOICES AND LETTING MY KIDS RUN MY LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE.
It's okay, though, because after they've successfully been over-scheduled for their entire childhoods and adolescence, I'll be able to start in on obsessing over being a helicopter parent for the rest of my children's lives. I can yell at their college professors and potential employers for not appreciating the UNIQUE AND SPECIAL SNOWFLAKES THAT MY BABIES ARE. Or at least, they might be, if I had gotten to know them as people rather than just assigning them pseudo-personalities by way of the millions of activities I help perpetuate in their over-crammed daily lives."

My point? Those of us who do not yet have, or may never have, offspring are not interested. But I think it's more than that. It's the perversion of the so-called American Dream nonsense. It's the middle-class curse to keep pushing only to find that we are all, ultimately, human. And no amount of shoving your kids into little shapes is going to change that they will, someday (hopefully!), become their own persons. And if not? Well, I do hope they enjoy the same ticky tacky boxes that their parents built and created to be their own prisons. Am I above it? Am I beyond it? I have no idea. I'm not ready for any of it yet, and may never be.

Okay, so this post really doesn't have anything to do with the lovely Miss Rachel Flatt. She's very talented and pretty and obviously smart, and I do wish her well. But was most of her life spent on ice skates because she loved it, or because she was good at it, or because her parents pushed her to excel? All? None? Something else? Did she have a childhood playing in muck in the backyard at all? I use her as a primitive, rough archetype, really. She's perfect. (At least from what I know, admittedly.) Is our culture still so strange and perverse that we're still trying to raise Barbies and Kens? (I know Barbie was an ice-skater and a doctor in her lifetime!)

And what of those of us who aren't hard plastic, aren't white, aren't sexless? Why are we still told that we're wrong? And why are we told, especially we women, that unless we achieve and conform and perfect, this from such a young age?

When I was 17, I was riding around with friends, skipping stones on ponds, smoking cigarettes, eating chocolate, cursing, and trying to decide who I wanted to be for the next fifteen minutes. Sure, I participated in certain structured activities, but I was still a teenager. I got in trouble, I ran amok, I did mildly illegal things from time to time. I kissed boys, I drank beer, but I was still a kid. Did Rachel ever get that chance? Did she herself choose not to flounder and grow and discover for herself in childhood, or was the choice made for her?

Granted, I'm sure she will grow up to cure cancer or solve global warming or whatever it is that perfect people do. But her own abilities won't stop today's or tomorrow's parents from forcing a two-year-old to put on ice-skates, or a teenager to continue playing baseball because dad never made it to the majors.

Photo from this blog of Chinese Olympic fan Meing Jie (c. 2008).