It’s Spring Concert Time. Stay In Your Seat.
Mamacita says: I’ve posted about this subject before, but with the approach of the end of school and spring concert time, it’s on my mind again, so I’ve written a new post about this same thing.
This is important. Proper behavior isn’t always fun. Nice people behave themselves anyway.
This is for you, parents. ALL of you parents. Children’s concerts are fast approaching, and your children are working hard to prepare. Don’t discount their big night because your personal feet hurt, you’re hungry, you’re missing your shows, you’ve got rights, it’s a free country, and you left your good manners at home.
We’re tired. We work all day and in the evenings, we deserve a few hours to rest, eat, and just, well, unwind. We deserve some time to ourselves, to put our feet up, watch some tv, sigh a lot, snack, and just BE. We deserve some time to do these things before we go to bed and get some sleep so we can do the same things again tomorrow. Undisturbed downtime. Yes, we deserve some of that.
If you are a parent of school-age children and this is your typical evening, shame on you.
If this is what you choose – yourself – instead of getting up off your, um, couch, and heading out to watch your child participate in something, shame on you.
Shame on you, too, if you stay in your seat just long enough to watch your own child’s part and then leave as soon as you can to get home and commence your well-deserved unwinding.
EVERY CHILD DESERVES AN AUDIENCE.
For over twenty years, I attended school concerts, spelling bees, science fairs, plays, and other things, and for over twenty years I watched families pack up and leave the very minute THEIR child’s part was finished. These people paid no attention to the fact that the show was still going on while they were loudly bustling themselves up the aisles, out the doors, and across the parking lot so they could beat the rush getting out of the place, and get HOME where they could, finally, after an extra-long day, unwind. After all, they deserved it, didn’t they?
No, they didn’t. In fact, what these people want or think they deserve doesn’t even enter into the equation here. It is the children who matter, not the adults.
The smallest children had the biggest audience, but as soon as the lower elementary’s part in the concert was over, these were also the very people who couldn’t leave fast or soon enough, paying no attention whatsoever to the older children still on stage.
The upper elementary children had a smaller audience, and even those parents often required their kids to find them as soon as their part was over so they could go home and get what was left of that well-deserved downtime-before-bedtime. TV is important, you know, and a kid’s show isn’t, especially when it isn’t even MY kid up there now. Duck Dynasty is waiting. The new episode of Hoarders is on tonight. The Pawn Stars or Pickers might find something really cool and I’d miss it.
By the time the middle school kids were onstage, only Grandma, Mom, a few antsy siblings, and those families with class remained in the audience. The older kids played mostly to empty seats, because the once filled-to-overflowing, standing-room-only auditorium had emptied like a kicked anthill.
The adults had to get home. Their shows were on. And it wasn’t like it was a sports function. . . .
Yes, sometimes a school concert means a late night. You can’t deal with that once or twice a year? Poor you. Your younger children can’t deal with it? Take turns going out in the hallway with them. Let them fall asleep. Your kid can’t deal with a disrupted schedule once a year? Are you sure you’re talking about your child? Athletic functions often mean a late night, too; do you behave like this for basketball games? I suspect not.
There’s FOOTBALL on TV that night? Two and a Half Men is on? Good parents know that’s not even a negotiable point. Your children come first, or you’re a bad parent.
If you have small children whose part in a concert is usually first, try to picture YOUR child singing his/her heart out before an empty auditorium. 
Think of how those children must feel when you’re packing up and leaving while they’re on stage singing much-practiced songs meant for you, and you obviously care more about yourselves than about children who aren’t yours . . . .
Oh, and before I forget: even though I pretty much covered the subject of proper theatre behavior in another post, let me repeat a few things here: While you’re sitting in your seat, watching a concert, shut up. Nice people do not talk or otherwise make noise in a theatre. Nice people are quiet as mice in a theater, as well. (Note the spelling difference. Look it up.) In both places, nice people are quiet.
Stay for the whole thing. I don’t CARE if you’re tired or bored out of your mind.
Put your child in those other children’s places. Remember, YOUR child is someone else’s child to everyone else in the universe except you. You don’t want other people treating your child like that, do 
you?
Stay for the whole concert. You’re bored? Too bad. You hate this stuff? I don’t care.
Don’t detract from the glory and wonder and delight of children singing together just because you’re too selfish to even try to listen properly and enjoy it. Don’t make children feel that their hard work was in vain because all YOU can think about is that if you leave now you might get in on the last quarter of your very important game.
Anyone of any age who does not show respect to those onstage is a rude, childish beast.
I can’t say this enough: Every child deserves an audience. STAY IN YOUR SEAT until the entire thing is over.
Yeah, poor you. Poor you with a child who has the ability and the desire to participate in the arts or the sciences. Millions of parents would give anything they’ve got to be in your shoes, and you would rather throw it away than take advantage of it.
How much would y’all bet that these same parents find no difficulty whatsoever in sitting for hours watching a sport?
I was often bored, watching an overlong school concert. But I stayed for the whole thing. I stayed for the whole thing because those children were far more important than anything else I might have wanted to do that night.
Why are so many parents so childish and selfish? Childhood is such a brief fleeting moment in life; what kind of parents would CHOOSE not to watch every possible microsecond of it that’s possible 
to watch? Why do so many parents choose to stay home and watch Honey Boo Boo and her repulsive family instead of their own children? June Shannon’s kids are more important than your own? The Duck Dynasty family is more important than yours?
I think we all know what kind of parents would make that choice.
Children singing their hearts out while adults are walking out so they can get home and watch tv and have a beer and put their feet up. Such people are beyond my comprehension.
Children are singing for us; why don’t we even want to listen?
Oh yeah. Football, Duck Dynasty, Hoarders, recliners, selfishness, and entitlement.
Grammar is a Language Art
Mamacita says: I will have to say that if I were on that jury, I, too, would consider that statement to be one of admission of guilt. Parse that statement and the double negative would, as in math, create a positive. Double negatives are the same as a positive.
“I didn’t do nothing” translates to “I did something.” As cranky old Mrs. Roberts back in 7th grade was fond of saying, “If I did not do nothing, it follows that I then did something.” It makes sense to me. It made sense to me back then, too. My love of language-done-properly began at an early age.
I am daily and forever amazed that people choose not to use their own language correctly. It’s almost a badge of pride for some, to corrupt and twist the language, to fit in with some group of grammarless twits and I hated to hear it even as a small child. Yes, I am a grammar snob. I think everyone should be a grammar snob.
Dialects and accents do not bother me; I like them. What I do not like is someone who never bothered to learn to use his/her own language properly. People with only one way of speaking amaze me. Would they go to Buckingham Palace and say “Yo, Queen, throw me sum o’them there sugar cubes, babe?” Would they go to the White House and say, “I done come here for a reason!” or “I’ve went here with my cuzzins?”
I tell my students that one (of many) characteristic of an educated person is having more than one way of speaking, depending on who/where/circumstance. Speaking without regard to grammar with one’s friends and family is one thing; speaking without regard to grammar in public, where we are all judged by our communication skills, is quite another.
Your English teachers are not trying to remove all traces of your environment, likes, dislikes, dialects, etc. from you. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with people whose grammar skills are lacking. We are merely trying to show you that we ARE judged by our ability to communicate with all kinds of people, and that when we use poor grammar, we are metaphorically slamming doors of opportunity and respect in our own faces and not even realizing it.
Let’s encourage ourselves and our children to use language creatively yet properly. Language is an art, remember, just like music or sculpture or painting or dance. Remember 8th grade? Language Arts? That.
Let your language flow like music from your lips. Learn to use your language properly, for once you 
know the rules, you can break them creatively. It’s easy to tell the difference between a person whose grammar is “interesting” in order to create an effect from a person whose grammar is “interesting” because he/she simply doesn’t know any better.
Don’t be that guy. Be the guy who knows how to manipulate the rules because you KNOW the rules in the first place.
You’re welcome.
Quotation Saturday: Mothers’ Day
Mamacita says: This Sunday will be, appropriately enough, a day filled with mothers. Mine, my sisters, my niece, grandmothers, aunts, daughters, cousins, me. . . . all mothers, and several of them more than one KIND of mother. (no, not THAT kind of mother. Perhaps you were thinking of YOUR family?) Many mothers.
Once upon a time, we were just sisters and wives and daughters when we got together, sharing a mom and having first names. Now, we’re all Mom, Mommy, Grandma, Mamaw, Aunt, Great-aunt, mother-in-law . . . . I can remember days when I couldn’t remember the last time someone called me by my actual name.
I also remember, clear as a bell, the first time my child said my new name. Mama. That moment is etched on my heart, in beautiful calligraphy, and decorated with fresh flowers. I still love to hear my children say “Mom.” These women whose children refer to them by their first names, instead of some variation of mother? I pity both woman and child. It’s not right. “Mother” and all its incarnations are names of honor.
Naturally, this doesn’t keep me from snickering at women who choose a synonym for “grandmother” that sounds like poo or a body part or something from an old 70’s porn flick.
Item: I am not a grandmother.
Contrary to popular belief, mothers are not omniscient; we don’t have eyes in the backs of our 
heads, and we can’t read your mind. The only exception to that would be MY mother.
And speaking of my mother. . . Mom, I have tried to emulate you in many ways, all of my life. You read to us. You sat down on the floor and played with us. You used the power of Parenthood and created Special Days, all throughout the year. Christmas is a holiday, sure, but it was YOU who created OUR Christmas. I still fix Easter baskets for my kids exactly the way you fixed them for us. I have tried to “do” holidays just as you did, all my married life.
I’m looking forward to Sunday, dear sisters and nieces and daughters and all of the other wonderful descriptions that come with all of you. I might be the weirdo of the bunch – oh, it’s not like I don’t KNOW that!!!! -but I might also be the most sentimental of the bunch.
1.The phrase “working mother” is redundant. ~Jane Sellman
2. The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. ~Rajneesh
3. I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life. ~Abraham Lincoln
4. A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie. ~Tenneva Jordan
5. The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness. ~Honoré de Balzac
6. He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men’s mothers. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick
7. An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. ~Spanish Proverb
8. My mom is a neverending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being. I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune. ~Graycie Harmon
9. Any mother could perform the jobs of several air traffic controllers with ease. ~Lisa Alther
10. Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing. ~Toni Morrison, Beloved
11. The only mothers it is safe to forget on Mother’s Day are the good ones. ~Mignon McLaughlin
12. A mom forgives us all our faults, not to mention one or two we don’t even have. ~Robert Brault
13. One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters. ~George Herbert
14. Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children. ~William Makepeace Thackeray
15. Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother. ~Moorish Proverb
16. All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother. ~Abraham Lincoln
17. No one in the world can take the place of your mother. Right or wrong, from her viewpoint you are always right. She may scold you for little things, but never for the big ones. ~Harry Truman
18. God could not be everywhere, so He created mothers. ~Jewish Proverb
19. Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother. ~Oprah Winfrey
20. I regard no man as poor who has a godly mother. ~ Abraham Lincoln
21. The mother loves her child most divinely not when she surrounds him with comforts and anticipates his wants, but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best. ~ Hamilton Wright Mabie
22. The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. ~ William Ross Wallace
23. There never was a woman like her. She was gentle as a dove and brave as a lioness… The memory of my mother and her teachings were, after all, the only capital I had to start life with, and on that capital I have made my way. ~ Andrew Jackson
24. Who is getting more pleasure from this rocking, the baby or me? ~ Nancy Thayer
25. No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. ~ Florida Scott-Maxwell
26. Sometimes when I look at all my children, I say to myself, ‘Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.'” ~ Lillian Carter
27. And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see — or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. ~ Alice Walker
28. Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women’s opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursuits can also be found in mothering. ~ Elaine Heffner
29. If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much. ~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
30. I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it. ~ Rose Kennedy
31. A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary. ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher
32. She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions — and in the end doing them irreparable harm. ~ Marcia Muller
33. Spend at least one Mother’s Day with your respective mothers before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him. ~ Erma Bombeck
34. No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed 
after their children do it because there’s a wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick. ~ Erma Bombeck
35. Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate. ~ Charlotte Gray
36. Giving kids clothes and food is one of thing, but it’s much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people. ~ Dolores Huerta
37. Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still. ~ Nancy Friday
38. I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up. ~ Pearl S. Buck
39. The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. ~ Father Theodore Hesburgh
40. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ~ Virginia Woolf
41. A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path. ~ Agatha Christie
42. You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. ~ Albert Einstein
43. If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylum would be filled with mothers. ~ Edgar Watson Howe
44. What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin. ~ Henry Ward Beecher
45. My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it. ~ Mark Twain
46. Over the years I have learned that motherhood is much like an austere religious order, the joining of which obligates one to relinquish all claims to personal possessions. ~ Nancy Stahl
47. There never was a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
48. At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent. ~ Golda Meir
49. A mother is she who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take. ~ Cardinal Mermilod
50. A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man. ~ George Eliot
51. There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you’re faced with somebody whose needs won’t be put off. ~ Angela Carter
52. Isidor Isaac Rabi’s mother used to ask him, upon his return from school each day, “Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?” ~ Steve Chandler
53. Sometimes the poorest woman leaves her children the richest inheritance. ~ Ruth E. Renkel
54. Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible. ~ Marion C. Garretty
55. A mother is never cocky or proud, because she knows the school principal may call at any minute to report that her child has just driven a motorcycle through the gymnasium. ~ Mary Kay Blakeley
56. It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge. ~ Phyllis Diller
57. Parents often talk about the younger generation as if they didn’t have anything to do with it. ~ Haim Ginott
58. If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money. ~ Abigail Van Buren
59. Making a decision to have a child–it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~ Elizabeth Stone
60. If you want your child to be brilliant, tell them fairy tales. If you want your child to be very brilliant, tell them even more fairy tales. ~ Albert Einstein
61. If you want a baby, have a new one. Don’t baby the old one. ~ Jessamyn West
62. My mother was the making of me. ~Thomas Alva Edison
63. You’re not famous until my mother has heard of you. ~ Jay Leno
64. I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it’s such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.
~ Ellen DeGeneres
65. I am an example of what is possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by people around them. I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life who taught me about quiet strength and dignity. ~ Michelle Obama
66. I’d like to be the ideal mother, but I’m too busy raising my kids. ~ Unknown
67. Sing out loud in the car even, or especially, if it embarrasses your children. ~ Marilyn Penland.
68. It’s such a grand thing to be a mother of a mother – that’s why the world calls her “grandmother.” ~ Author Unknown
69. Becoming a grandmother is wonderful. One moment you’re just a mother. The next you are all-wise and prehistoric. ~ Pam Brown
70. If your mom’s asleep, don’t wake her up. ~ Unknown
71. My mother is a poem, I’ll never be able to write. Though everything I write, is a poem to my mother. ~ Sharon Doubiago
72. Any beast can cry over the misfortunes of its own child. It takes a mensch to weep for others’ children. ~ Sam Levenson
73. Woman knows what man has long forgotten, that the ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family. ~ Clare Boothe Luce
74. Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate. ~ Charlotte Grey
75. Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand women’s opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new pursuits can also be found in mothering. ~ Elaine Heffner
==
P.S. What’s that she’s saying? She needs to FIND HERSELF? “Find herself” my Aunt Fanny. I call bullshit on that one. Act your age, even if it’s just an “act.” You had a child. Grow a pair (above or below; both kinds can be great parents), and be a parent to your child. He doesn’t need a friend your age. He’ll have pals his own age. YOU can “find yourself” after your job is done.
P.P.S. Does anybody else love it when, out in public, a child says “Mama?” and forty women instinctively turn their heads?
P.P.P.S. Grammar Queen that I am – terrifyingly so, in fact, so watch your step – I absolutely love this cartoon:
