Last week’s weather was so ferocious, the report could have been delivered by King Lear, straight out of Shakespeare:
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!” (King Lear, Act 3, Scene 2)
And, like King Lear, I discovered I had raised some thankless offspring – specifically, two boys who paid no attention to my warnings to bundle up.
Exhibit A: the boy who came home from college leaving his winter coat at school upstate – apparently under the mistaken impression that global warming had turned Long Island into a tropical paradise. When I spotted him, emerging into the waning light of the following evening, he was about to leave the house wearing two sweatshirts and a corduroy jacket.
“Sweetheart,” I said to him, “You cannot go out like that.”
“Why not?”
“The temperature outside is five below zero. And that’s BEFORE they do the wind-chill factor.”
“Mom! I’m just walking 15 feet to somebody’s car!”
“Is ‘Somebody’going to visit you in the hospital, when you end up there with frostbite? Is ‘Somebody’ going to pay all your bills?” I then pointed out that cars sometimes spin out of control, and slowly roll back down ice-covered hills into trees that are hidden in a snow-drift.
“That’s oddly specific,” my husband remarked. “Was that your roommate driving?”
“Never mind the irrelevant details,” I said. “The point is, sometimes you find yourself in a situation you didn’t plan for, hiking down a dark road to a pay phone, and you’ll wish you had gloves and a hat. Also boots. And a flashlight….”
“Well, my friends aren’t stupid,” said my child. “They have flares in the car, and flashlights. Also, have you heard of cell-phones?”
“Not then, I hadn’t,” I told him. “Besides, the point is that you simply may not leave this house like that! I’ll lend you your dad’s old winter things, if you promise to let me buy you something tomorrow.”
“Why do you even care?” he pouted.
“Certainly not because I love you, or want to spare you pain,” I wanted to say. “It’s just that I’m worried what the neighbors will think, seeing you out like that in this weather. They’ll think, ‘Doesn’t she even buy him a winter coat?’ when the truth is that a lovely, warm coat is sitting somewhere, in all its down-filled glory, without you.”
But all I actually said was, “Just humor me.”
“You know Mom gets crazy in winter,” said my 16-year-old, arriving up from the laundry room in a T-shirt and sneakers. I shivered just looking at him. “Remember how she made me wear snow pants to that ice skating party?”
I defended my honor. “Well, you always felt the cold so much, you shivered when you were little.”
“It was last year! Can you imagine, if I’d actually shown up like that? Thank God there was a locker to stuff it into.”
That explained the state those clothes came home in. Still, who can blame me for trying to protect my offspring? Back on that ill-fated ski trip, I had never heard of ski pants. I did have some thermal underwear, under my blue jeans. But it was my first time ever on a ski slope, and so all I managed to do, all day, was fall down in the snow. By mid-afternoon my roommate yanked me off the slope and back to our cabin, and made me take a warm shower. “I knew your lips were blue, but look at your legs!” she shrieked. “They’re blue, too!”
“Oh, that’s just the dye running from the blue jeans,” I answered. But in hindsight, perhaps she was right to worry. When I finally discovered proper snow pants, boots, and gloves, I never looked back. I bought everything I could find, and wore all of it, even just to brush off the car. “You can never be too warm or too puffy,” became my mantra.
But my children just look at me like I’m crazy.
Is it so wrong that, after they’ve run gaily off in their corduroy shirtsleeves, leaving their scarf on the bureau and taking way too little of my advice – is it so wrong of me to wish that, just once, they should have a little trouble? Nothing irreversible. Just enough to make them listen, the next time I tell them to bundle up?
King Lear knows what I mean. After all, it was he who wailed, “Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have an ungrateful child!”
