Parenting teenagers = relaxing certain standards. Yeow.
Okay, here's what happened. I took my daughter to see School of Rock. I know somewhere Roger Ebert said "family fun," although I had my doubts but it seemed like the least-harmless-interesting-to-teenagers-type movie. It was Friday night and ten million other people went to see the same movie. So we inquired as to which movie out of ten was not sold out. (Okay, it was like showtime by this time because we spent ten minutes hunting a parking space. I hadn't planned on any of this because I am so small town that I forgot about Friday nights in the city.) The only one not sold out was The Matrix Revolutions, which she was dying to see although she hadn't seen the second movie in the series and, yes, I had just given in to letting her see the first, but I wasn't quite of the mind to let her see the other two.
Now I have to point out that we are a family that watches virtually zero hours of t.v. per week. We'll rent a movie or two on the weekends and that's it. When the kids were little they could watch 60 minutes of t.v. per day (public television, of course), but now they prefer to spend their sixty minutes on the computer. Which they complain is never enough. Sigh.
So I give in to The Matrix because I really want to have this mother-daughter time with her as planned at the movie theatre, and then I say, "But you have to cover your eyes when I tell you to." Ha!! Yeah, right. Then I think for just a second about the fact that Greg and I have seen the other two movies in the series together and really had an unspoken plan to see this one together, roll my eyes, and plunk down my $15. We enter.
And I really do ask her once to cover her eyes, which she does. But I watch her through the violent scenes and find she is inclined to kind of sink down in the seat and wince. I'm satisfied because I realize that she's not insensitive to it. I guess I've done my job all these years.
On the way home, she says, "Mom, I'm proud of you. You let go. You let me do this." I say, "Yeah, but I'm gonna have to let go a thousand more times in the next five years." And I didn't have a tear in my eye then, but I do now.
Okay, here's what happened. I took my daughter to see School of Rock. I know somewhere Roger Ebert said "family fun," although I had my doubts but it seemed like the least-harmless-interesting-to-teenagers-type movie. It was Friday night and ten million other people went to see the same movie. So we inquired as to which movie out of ten was not sold out. (Okay, it was like showtime by this time because we spent ten minutes hunting a parking space. I hadn't planned on any of this because I am so small town that I forgot about Friday nights in the city.) The only one not sold out was The Matrix Revolutions, which she was dying to see although she hadn't seen the second movie in the series and, yes, I had just given in to letting her see the first, but I wasn't quite of the mind to let her see the other two.
Now I have to point out that we are a family that watches virtually zero hours of t.v. per week. We'll rent a movie or two on the weekends and that's it. When the kids were little they could watch 60 minutes of t.v. per day (public television, of course), but now they prefer to spend their sixty minutes on the computer. Which they complain is never enough. Sigh.
So I give in to The Matrix because I really want to have this mother-daughter time with her as planned at the movie theatre, and then I say, "But you have to cover your eyes when I tell you to." Ha!! Yeah, right. Then I think for just a second about the fact that Greg and I have seen the other two movies in the series together and really had an unspoken plan to see this one together, roll my eyes, and plunk down my $15. We enter.
And I really do ask her once to cover her eyes, which she does. But I watch her through the violent scenes and find she is inclined to kind of sink down in the seat and wince. I'm satisfied because I realize that she's not insensitive to it. I guess I've done my job all these years.
On the way home, she says, "Mom, I'm proud of you. You let go. You let me do this." I say, "Yeah, but I'm gonna have to let go a thousand more times in the next five years." And I didn't have a tear in my eye then, but I do now.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home