Loco Parentis: A Clean Sweep
On some level, I believe she would. I’ve listened to a surprising number of grown-ups bitterly relate how pissed off they were when, after they left for college, their moms turned their bedrooms into sewing rooms or home offices. But how long do you maintain bedroom shrines? Till the kids graduate? Marry? Have kids of their own?
And speaking of future spouses, I met my husband, Doug (who has clutter issues of his own; don’t worry, I’ll get there), when I wasn’t much older than Marcy is. This house’s current hodgepodge of artifacts is fine for non-serious boyfriends and girlfriends to see. But sooner or later, Marcy and Jake will be bringing The One home to our proliferation of clumsily constructed birdhouses, and those gargoyles, and the chalkboard that takes up an entire wall of the dining room, still bearing a proudly scrawled -KENDRA WAS HERE from Jake’s first boy-girl birthday party, in eighth grade. (“Don’t you dare erase that!”) I worked hard to get my kids out of their hometown and off to colleges where they could meet — and fall in love with — a higher grade of human being. Why did it never occur to me that they’d be bringing those superior suitors back here to this squalor, this house that reeks of lack of discipline and order, this horrorland of art-class tribal masks and Pinewood Derby cars?
But that’s not the half of it.
I MENTIONED OUR dining room earlier. I lied. We have no dining room. We have a space that was intended to be one, but is occupied instead by an out-of-tune baby grand piano, two electronic keyboards, three trombones, a tuba, a bugle, piles and piles of sheet music, amplifiers and speakers, a hand truck, bins filled with carefully coiled electric cords and power strips, assorted music stands, hundreds of CDs, and 30 years’ worth of business and financial records. This is Doug’s office, where he used to practice piano and trombone and tuba for an hour and a half every day. He was in a band when I met him, and for most of our life together, I was with the band.
After 9/11, though, the gigs became sparse. America didn’t feel like partying anymore. Then the way we listened to music changed; it became less a communal experience and, thanks to computers, more a personal one. Young people getting married didn’t want a cover band’s take on a Shakira song; they wanted the version they saw on YouTube, downloaded onto iPods, and sang along to at karaoke night. Meanwhile, the music itself changed, morphed into a mash-up of samples and loops and Auto-Tuned vocals and drum machines. Doug drove a school bus for a while, and thought about what he’d do next. He’d been a musician since he’d picked up a trombone in third grade. Now he wasn’t anymore.
