You Can't Always Get What You Want

Today’s parents don’t read their kids nursery rhymes. It’s shocking, I know, but many high school students do not know the line that follows “Jack and Jill went…” or “Old Mother Hubbard, went” – you know, come to think of it, there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in nursery rhymes, and maybe that doesn’t sit well with today’s society either. I’m not sure. But perhaps parents today want to load the kids into some kind of conveyance and to and fro themselves, not sit around reading about it.

In any case, as a 10^th grade English teacher and parent of five kids ages 26 to 4 (gulp), I can tell you that my rhyme-savvy little one is in the minority.

I freely admit that someone who had a crush on David Cassidy, remembers when the Six-Million Dollar Man took to fighting crime, and can say “I love it when a plan comes together,” should not, by rights, be the mother of a pre-schooler, so I guess I shouldn’t quibble with the literary shortcomings of Generation…what are we on now, Z? But as a curmudgeonly old English teacher, I hate seeing yet another sign that we’ve lost that common language derived from a canon of literature. Sigh.

I was talking to my oldest son yesterday, and whenever he refers to his (advanced) age, I wax poetic about how when I was his age, he was a darling little blond-headed tot who turned heads everywhere we went (not unlike his youngest brother is now, but I digress). The discussion turned to the age when one feels ready to have a child, and he claimed that in LA, where he lives, many women – most in his estimation – wait until their early to mid-thirties to have children. Perhaps that explains why – even on the other coast – I have not yet been mistaken for the grandmother of my youngest two. People just imagine I’m a California girl and start humming Katie Perry tunes when I traipse by. Or maybe not.

Anyway, I wanted to name this blog “Old Mother Hubbard” in reference to nursery rhymes, my “mature” years, and my parental status, but that title belongs to someone from Japan who writes about eating seaweed. I guess it’s better than a bare cupboard. So I had to come up with another name. We’ll see how it goes.