Kid of the Week or A Farm Treatise on Post-Moderism

I didn't think it would be an issue quite yet, but I am having to make decisions about what to let my kid look at on the internet.

Cliffy likes to read the blog.

Hmmm. There is the language, which I would like to pretend he doesn't hear from me out loud. (We talk about how his mama is a potty mouth and how that's sort of okay because she's a grown up and doesn't really have to impress anyone in her line of work, but that he's a kid and his future is still open and he'll have more high-quality wife options and better jobs if he learns to express himself within the pages of Webster's Unabridged.)

It's not the language. It's the idea that there is a narrator to this life of ours.

My absolute favorite college professor at Oregon, Michael J. Clark, had this example he used to illustrate the Post-Modern Condition: a post-coital couple is lying in bed, maybe smoking, and the woman says, "This must be ecstasy we are experiencing." This line, from a book he never had us read, made him physically jumpy. I could never tell, and still can't, even though I'm older now than he was then, whether he was impressed by the savvy of the author, showing a bit of his craft (it's not ecstasy unless I, the writer, say it is) or he thought the world was going to hell in a bucket because people in this post-modern era can't experience anything directly, without first putting a word on it so we know how we're supposed to feel and act. Probably it was both. Funny that Post-Modernism was so intensely interesting to Michael that I think he forgot himself a little, pacing around the front of the classroom, all elbows and half-laced Doc-Martined feet, flipping his long hair out of his eyes, trying so hard to communicate to his public university students the idea that words can be mittens that keep us from really feeling the world at the same time that they frame its meaning.

Professor Clark's 20th Century Lit class lurks in a troubled corner of my brain. On the one hand, there's just my life and the kids and farm and all the stuff that comes with it that, as we are fond of saying around here, we can't go over, can't go under, so we just have to go through it. On the other hand, there's the blog. There's me trying to e-mail pictures off the cell phone to post here (they came out upside-down and blurry--be good in this life or you might have to come back as a cell phone that Earl carries around in his farm-junk-laden pockets) while the heifers are stuck in the manure pit and the plan to return them to their pasture is only half hatched. Even the kids are caught up in this, looking over their shoulders at me saying, "You should put this in the blog."

The other thing they think I should put in the blog, and what I originally set out to write about, is the Kid of the Week program around here. I've lost track of how it started, but a few weeks ago, Cliffy put on his super-suit and seemed to decide he was going to be a good sport about everything and make the summer great--for him and everyone else. He read books to his brothers, he let Jackson use his special plate, he reached things that were too high for Harley, he asked Oliver if he would like to knock over towers and then offered them up for destruction, again and again. He kept the compost empty and the chickens watered and the dog fed and appeared at my elbow when I was cooking supper, reading my mind and handing me the vegetable peeler just as I was wanting it. He picked strawberries for dessert, got milk and cream from the creamery when we needed it, and motivated his brothers to zoom around the house, putting toys away, so I would say, "Wow," when I saw it. You get the idea.

Sometimes Earl and I worry that Cliffy wants so desperately to please us that he loses track of what he wants out of the world. Mostly Earl worries about that. I am counting on the genetic impossibility that a child who hails from such a long line of ornery people could be a yes man. I also see that Cliffy gets what he wants, appreciation, prestige and money (I pay by the bug for potato bugs and their eggs and Cliffy, his math skills and the potato plants are doing very well with this arrangement.) He also gets to choose some of our activities and where he sits in the car, because Kid of the Week has some privileges.

My mom, who worked her childhood ass off taking care of her seven younger siblings, says that her parents would sit outside her door every night and say, "I don't know how we'd manage without Helen. She really is a blessing." And because we are all just repeating our childhoods (unless we get a lot of therapy to overcome them), Helen is still saving the day for the people blessed enough to have her in their lives (like me and my sibbies). And that's the good thing words can do--they can transform, "Here I am, sweeping the dirty floor again," to, "Here I am, with my broom and dustpan, holding the world together."

I guess whether he reads about himself in the blog or not, Cliffy will find his own level of self-narration. He may, like me, find his early adulthood punctuated by deliberate efforts to shut off the voice-over in his head by putting his journal in the basement and dating someone incapable of abstract thought. Or he might dedicate himself to his Facebook or MySpace pages or post YouTube instructional videos. He might even keep a blog.