June 12, 2009

In a moment that I can only attribute to channeling my mother yesterday, I told my daughter that if she didn’t clean up her toys, I was going to throw them away or give them to needy kids who appreciated them. Um, yeah. She’s only 2 1/2, and it wasn’t my finest moment, but it’s one of those idle threats that my mom used to shoot off when I didn’t tidy up after myself (although in my mother’s case, it may not have been so idle). When I later told the husband what had happened, he looked at me like I had just announced that I wanted to go bathe in raw sewage. I said “Oh, c’mon, you know that standard parental threat! Didn’t your mom ever say that to you?!” His response, “Um, no. Never.” Aside from being a perfect explanation of the differences between my type-a anal retention and his blase attitude about everything, it raised a debate. IS that a standard parental threat? In my household, it most definitely was, but now I’m wondering if my parents were the exception rather than the norm. I’ve got that Chinese mother thing going on that ups the intensity factor of childhood, so maybe that’s where it came from. Did your parents threaten you with getting rid of whatever you didn’t clean up? Did it make you more neat or less so? And what other kinds of parental threats do you remember? Ah, nostalgia.