The Universal Parent

Most of us become parents someday, and we're happy about that. What we don't expect is to turn into our parents. But we do, because all parents are essentially the same. The quirks of parenthood are universal. Despite the many variations, we all had basically the same upbringing. Nothing will ever break the horrifying cycle.

All mothers are obsessed with the state of your room when you're a kid. It's all she thinks about all day. I'm sure Charles Manson's mom thought he was as good as gold as long as his bed was made. And she'll always say the same thing when she comes in. "This room is a pigsty!" Mothers are fixated on pigsties. I'm not even sure what a 'sty' is, exactly. I know it's something that isn't good in your eye. Mom sure kept her eye on my room. "How can you live like this?" she'd say. "In my room, you can eat off my floors." I'd say, "Well, you can eat off mine, too, Mom. There's a sandwich over there...some pizza over here..." Needless to say, she was not amused.

Parents are also obsessed with the roof. Every aspect of your behaviour is ultimately about the roof. "As long as you are living under my roof, you will abide by my rules," they will intone like a mantra until the nano-second you leave home. I always wondered whether, if I slept on the roof, they'd be okay with my drinking whiskey and smoking cigars and having hookers up there.

You aren't allowed to touch the thermostat. That's the big sacred taboo device in your life. Even when you grow up, you can't go near it. You might be old enough to drink and drive and vote and get drafted into the Air Force to fly stealth bombers, but your parents feel you are not qualified to operate the thermostat. I used to wait till they went out and touch it with a long stick and a trembling hand. But somehow they always knew. A parent's sixth sense is spooky, that's what it is.

And they can never agree on a setting for the thermostat. Your mother likes the comfort of the Antarctic and your father prefers the surface of the sun. With all that hot air going back and forth, it's no wonder your room "looks like a tornado went through it".

Also strictly off-limits is your mother's 'good scissors'. You never hear her calling for the crappy scissors. She always has a job that requires the good scissors, presumably cutting the ribbon for newly-built city halls or something, and you'll never, as long as you live, be allowed to use them. And your dad has his special sharp knife that's only for neurosurgery, apparently. Which you use for cutting cardboard boxes when he isn't around. In my neighbourhood, there were children who mysteriously disappeared one day for doing that. Never saw them again. Their folks claimed they ran away and joined the circus, but there were mysterious fresh mounds of earth in the flowerbed that they could never quite explain.

If you hold the fridge door open long enough for the light rays to reach your eyes so you can see what's in there, they lose it completely and shriek at you like horrified banshees. That's a capital offense to most parents. This is why Superboy was forced to develop x-ray vision.

Taking a slice of bread from the middle of the loaf is another heinous crime. To a kid, the slice that's on the end is deadly poison. You want a nice, fresh, soft piece from the forbidden middle. But try taking one and they'll feel perfectly justified lopping off your fingers with the good scissors.

What sick compulsion is it that drives your dad to come pounding on the door of the bathroom demanding to know what you're doing in there? Sky-diving, he figures, perhaps? Bull-fighting? It's weird, and it's really creepy. Mind you, I never knew what he did in there, either, other than that, whatever it was, it rendered the place uninhabitable by human beings for at least a full day afterward.

And what mental disease convinces your mother that your friends, and even worse, your dates, want to see your baby pictures? Is this just some cruel retribution for the pain of childbirth or does she feel abject mortification builds character somehow? The French Foreign Legion is full of children who signed up to flee the embarrassment.

One day we'll come to the stunned realization, all of us, that we do every one of these things. And then we'll face the sickening reality that we have somehow morphed into the one entity we vowed most vehemently we'd never be - our parents. I'd kill myself now, before that day comes, but I have more important things to do. I have to go check on my sons' rooms.

It looks like a bomb went off in there.