Everyone Else’s Parents Are Cowed

Why is the grass always greener in someone else’s childhood? All my life, Everyone Else’s Parents have been causing me grief.

When I was a kid, Everyone Else’s Parents gave them everything--a little red fire engine that you could peddle around in, real wooden building logs that you could build a playhouse out of, a doll with rooted blond curls who walks, talks, cries and gives you stock market tips.

Everyone Else’s Parents did things with them--tossed balls, went swimming, bought them little velvet dresses at Saks Fifth Avenue. Everyone Else’s Parents were young and beautiful and went to the PTA meetings so that the teachers liked their kids best.

When my parents died, Everyone Else’s Parents were still alive and active and belonged to tennis clubs or went skiing. Everyone Else’s Parents retired to homes in Boca Raton or Sea Ranch or Phoenix, where Everyone Else got to go on vacations and visit them.

Everyone Else’s Parents continued to send them money and expensive gifts even though the kids became adults themselves. When Everyone Else’s Parents died, they left their kids trust funds or large piles of cash or huge homes or mint-condition 1949 Buick convertibles.

And now that I am a parent, Everyone Else’s Parents are still giving me grief.

When my daughter asks for money for a limo to go to a school dance, I say: “Why should I give you money for a limo? No one even heard of limos when I was in school except to maybe drive around the Rockefellers.” But she insists, “Everyone Else’s Parents are giving them the money.”

When she was 13 and wanted to go to an all-night co-ed party, I said: “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Everyone Else’s Parents are letting them go,” she said.

When my younger daughter asks me to volunteer-- volunteer --to spend my weekend painting her school, I ask her: “Why on earth would I want to do that?”

Guess who’s doing it. Them. Everyone Else’s.

So I am forming a picture of the miserable life of Everyone Else’s Parents. They get up at 6 to put a good, balanced, hot breakfast on the table. When the kids reject it, do they start pouting and say, “Why do I bother to do these things?” No. Everyone Else’s Parents say, “That’s OK, dear. I’ll just throw the food out. And I’ll keep making these breakfasts every morning until the day when you care to try some. Now, I’m going several miles out of my way to drive you to school even though you are perfectly capable of taking the bus. I don’t mind a bit.”

After school, Everyone Else’s Parents are waiting there. They will drop off all their kids’ friends after treating everyone to ice cream. And it’s OK if all the kids throw out half their ice cream cones without eating them. Everyone Else’s Parents don’t mind.

Then Everyone Else’s Parents take them to the mall to buy them everything they want. Everyone Else’s Parents like malls. None of them experience dizziness, nausea and the overwhelming desire to bolt, as I do.

Everyone Else’s Parents take them to McDonald’s for dinner. Every night, every McDonald’s is packed with Everyone Else’s Parents. They will buy the large fries and the large Cokes. They will buy things nobody will eat, in order to get the toy.

Then Everyone Else’s Parents will do their kids’ homework. They don’t mind if the kids watch TV or videos. They don’t go telling their children that Nintendo will make you go blind.

Everyone Else’s Parents don’t make them take a bath or brush their teeth or clean their room. Everyone Else’s Parents let them stay up to watch Arsenio. Everyone Else’s Parents want to go to the New Kids on the Block concert.

Everyone Else’s Parents don’t act “like a total dork.”

So I have come up with a new name for Everyone Else’s Parents: Wimps.