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7.08.05
I remember when dinner was dignified.
Wait. No, I don't. Before Claire, Bob and I often ate sitting on the sofa in front of the television. Now, at least, we always eat at the table in the kitchen, always with placemats and cloth napkins. (Sidenote: The cloth napkins aren't a snooty thing. They're my token nod to paper conservation and ecology at large. My only nod, alas. I go through thousands of boxes of Kleenex and rolls of toilet paper and paper towels each year.)
And we always have conversation, of sorts. I'm working on teaching Claire not to interrupt adults when they're talking. She is an integral contributor to every conversation, but she is also sometimes the ONLY contributor, so I'm trying to reign her in a bit. She's getting old enough to get it. Kind of.
I remember my sister working on this with my nephew, Jonathan, who is now four and the picture of politeness when it comes to conversation. But for what seemed like two years, every time I talked to her, he would come roaring into the middle. "Put your hand on my arm, Jonathan, and wait patiently," she'd tell him, and I'd see him standing there waiting, and I'd remember how, at his age or maybe a bit older, I would stand quietly, but thinking "MOM! STOP TALKING BORING GROWNUP TALK TO THAT LADY AND LOOK AT ME AND TALK TO ME!" (She had the hand-on-arm rule with us when we were little, too.)
It is a lovely, civilized rule, and I don't believe adult conversation should always be forced to yield to kids who interrupt. Besides, they will grow up to be interrupting adults if no one ever sets them straight on interrupting, and people will find excuses to walk away from them at parties and suchlike. But you've got to be careful.
The story goes, when I was five, that I walked into a room full of adult women, Air Force wives having some kind of get-together. Probably bridge. And I stood, waiting to be acknowledged by an adult, for several minutes. Finally, my mom looked up and saw me, and smiled, and I slowly and calmly told her that all the other kids had climbed into our neighbor's car and put it in reverse, and had rolled down into the street.
And they had. So we see by this illustration that some kids might overdo it. So perhaps tailor your etiquette lessons to your specific kid, I think.
As it turns out, my specific kid is not likely to overdo politeness at this point. She's more like a wild pony. So I am attempting to teach politeness and slow her down a bit, but not squash her spunk. Because her spunk, I love.
We will welcome you into every dinner conversation, Claire, because if we have something private to talk about, we'll go elsewhere, at a different time. So you can always talk, but you have to wait your turn. You can't talk right on top of us, where the words get smooshed into a big lump and no one can hear anything. And you may not repeat yourself and increase your volume tenfold to bypass the no-interrupting rule.
She even prays like that. Here is what grace before dinner sounds like (this is an exact and faithful, true-to-life transcript of our before-meal prayer tonight, which Claire is now in charge of):
"Dear GOD ("God" is shouted), sank you for our fud. A-men. (The "A" in amen is shouted.) Now your turn." (Then she opens her eyes, looks at her dad, and waits for him to pray. If I try to go after her, she says "No, it's dada's turn.") She prays loudly, and quickly, and bossily.
So Bob the Atheist mumbles something along the lines of "Dear God (no shouting), thank you for this food. Amen."
And then I come along behind, at the end, to kind of tidy things up a bit: "Dear God, thank you for this food, and this lovely day, and for our family, and health. Amen."
So teaching kids how to communicate both well and politely (not, I must emphasize, politeness for the sake of politeness, never to be prissy or alienate people with high-falutin' ways, and never deceptively, at the sake of truth, but simply, I mean, good old-fashioned politeness as a small way to show people you care for them) is quite the task.
We all know people who are bulldozers when it comes to conversation. I know many -- quick, bright, and intense, who interrupt often and seem focused only on what they have to say. Words pile up on top of each other into huge towers until I long to remind them that sometimes in a conversation it is nice if there are listeners as well as speakers. And that words should be more like little beads on a string, one after the other, than bricks in a heap.
"Dear God," I pray at dinner, but this time only inside my own head, and not aloud, "I am such a flawed communicator in so many ways. Help me be patient with Claire, and teach her to speak with love, and in truth, and always with consideration for other people. Please help her to listen more than she speaks. And while she's learning these big ideas, I trust you to keep me from going insane because she talks ALL THE TIME, all the time, all the time. And I also trust you to know that we do not always have napkins on our heads when we eat, but tonight we are all pretending to be ballerina princesses because we are in a pretend castle eating ballerina princess food. So thank you for this food, and this day, and my insane family. A-men."
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