Mother Knows Best?

Your Psychopathic Mother - Rick Springfield (mp3)

We took the girls to Disney’s newest flick, TANGLED, over the holiday, and it was massively entertaining. It’s the first Disney flick since the Dawn of Pixar that actually held its own.

As someone who spent his late teens and college years fawning over Disney’s animated rebirth, starting with “The Little Mermaid” in 1989 and soaring thorough “The Lion King” five years later, TANGLED is the logical continuation of that production line. But it at long last corrects a serious error from Disney’s past.

Those great Disney rebirth movies had young characters with a slightly bigger degree of nuance that reflected our less idealistic age. Aladdin is a thief. The Beast is a snotty rich boy. Simba’s disobedience leads to his father’s death. None of them have the kind of simplistic goodness and innocence of Snow White or Mowgli or Bambi, characters whose misfortunes were unfairly (and somewhat randomly) thrust upon them by cruel fate.

While I loved “The Little Mermaid” -- its soundtrack was the first CD I ever purchased -- I couldn’t help but object heavily to the message of the movie: that a 15-year-old girl knows better than her parent(s). Because we’re not talking about lip gloss choices here. The movie is about a girl getting her panties all warmed up over some dude, wanting to become an entirely different form of human to chase him, and the father being overbearing and out of touch by daring to suggest this might not be a wise decision.

I didn’t like that storyline as a teenager, and I sure as hell don’t like it now. Thankfully, the message of TANGLED corrects everything “The Little Mermaid” screwed up while keeping the parts that were most important.

The parts that are important:

1. independence and freedom are two vital aims of growing up;
2. parents often lose track of what’s important, and controlling parents are almost certain to lose their children.

The improvements:

1. the protagonist is a girl on the verge of turning 18. A big diff, those three years. She’s not necessarily a full-blown woman, but she can sure as shit legally drive, and our current culture has deemed this to be an age deserving of most independence.
2. the motives of the parent deserve scrutiny. Her “mom” is in the business of parenting for herself, not for her child. Her parenting decisions are about self-interest and have nothing to do with the daughter’s well-being. But, like millions of abused and neglected children, Rapunzel has no clue about her mom, because it’s the only parent relationship she’s ever known or seen. It’s normal for her, even while it’s maniacally disturbing to the viewer.

But the TANGLED slam goes well beyond abusive parents and into the world of “Helicopter Parents,” those lovely folks who hover over every aspect of their child’s existence, who even want to micromanage their college and professional lives after the nest they left has grown cobwebs. The movie is a reminder that good parents are obliged to gradually loosen, and eventually remove, the leash, from our children.

The more teenagers are constricted and bound, the more violently they will fight to escape. The more parents insist on making any and all decisions and dictating the teen’s life, the less capable teens will be of making them when no one else is around. That’s why they keep texting you about their boss, as if it was a lifeline on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

One of the best lines in the movie is when Gothel, Rapunzel’s kidnapper mother, says, “Great, now I’m the bad guy.” The dramatic irony, the self-awareness... and the fact that parents all over the world (including me) say that crap all the time. Being a devoted and good parent requires that, once in a while, we be the bad guy to our kids.

The essential question is: For whose good, and why, are we being the bad guy? For us? Or for them? Are we trying to hold onto our youth? Trying to recapture a missing experience or fix a regret of our younger days through the life of our child? Or are we trying to raise an independent and capable human whose dreams are her own, whose life has no preordained direction other than what she chooses for herself?

And are we willing to ask ourselves these tough questions? Because the motive is pretty damn crucial, as is the method.

That... is the story of TANGLED.*

* -- Well, according to my daughters, the story of TANGLED is that her long hair should have caused her a lot more trouble, that not all mean scary men are helpful, and that horses and chameleons make for hilarious sidekicks.

High Dives and Monkey Bars

Trapeze - Patty Griffin (mp3)
The Wrong Child - R.E.M. (mp3)
In My Tree - Matthew Sweet (mp3)

Had a melancholy moment with my daughters last night. We were driving back from Ringgold, emerging from the Fourth Circle of Hell otherwise known as "a swim meet," and they asked me if I'd ever been on a high dive. The only high dives they've ever seen were on the Olympic Trials we watched last night. They've never actually seen one in person.

"Was it fun?" my older daughter asked me.

As usual, I probably overthought my answer before just being honest, worrying that my honest "Yes, it was very fun" answer was salt in the wound, reminding them of joys they'd never have.

"What was it like? Was it scary?"

It was scary. It was exhilarating. Most of the fun was trying to decide what kind of flying leap you had the nerve to take while you were climbing up that steep ladder, then standing on the edge of that board for a gut-check. To dive, or do a flip, or just take the coward's way out and do a "pencil" or run flailing off the edge, hoping the silliness would disguise your hesitance to do something more skillful.

The high dive was an awesome rite of passage. That water seemed a looooong way down as a kid. It seemed even higher up when you'd see some adult -- usually a mother -- get up there and have trouble working up the gumption to jump.

What I didn't tell my girls -- not yet -- was that I fell off the back of a high dive when I was eight years old. After a year of swim lessons and regular visits to the neighborhood pool, I had finally worked up the nerve to dive off the high dive. It took a few minutes, but I finally managed, and even received a 3.4 from the East German judge.

Having successfully done it, I was in such a rush to repeat the miracle that I raced up the ladder a little too quickly, and as I reached for the rail at the top, my hand slipped, and I fell backward.

It's amazing how quickly your brain can shut down. That one split second in time, of my hand slipping away from that rail, feels like several minutes in my memory. I couldn't have been in the air for more than a second or two, but I don't remember any of the actual fall. I never even felt myself crunch against the concrete.

The only things I remember before starting to wake up is the nervous reaction of my mother, who was so frightened she couldn't even scream. She whimpered. And I could hear it as she leaped from her lawn chair. My biological father died when I was a couple of days old, and Mom never hid the fact that her single greatest fear in the world was losing me. The sound I recall coming from her is a lot more chilling now than it was back then.

Turns out blacking out saved me a few broken bones at the very least. I landed so completely flat against the concrete that I got up with only a few minor scratches and nothing else. We didn't sue. We didn't even cancel our membership. We were back at the pool the next week. No measures were put in place to make the high dive safer. No warnings were posted that one should grab the hand rail carefully, that no one should go too quickly up the ladder. The judgment was made, fairly quickly, that user error was the root of my accident.

By the time I was 10, I was joining my friend Andy and other pals at his pool, doing really stupid things. He had a curved slide that went eight or so feet down into the water, but mostly what they did was climb to the top and jump in. The really daring moments required you to stand on top of the handrail before jumping.

Someone really could've hurt themselves. Especially a massive klutz like myself. But we never did, other than a few bruises or scrapes from hitting the pool bottom too hard on occasion.

When I start thinking back to my childhood, there wasn't much of any of it that hasn't been deemed, by one group or another, as Too Dangerous. Riding dirt bikes 10 miles, across several four-lane high-speed roads, to the local movie theater. Fighting in bottle rocket wars. Playing "joust" on our bikes with baseball bats. Watching HBO when my parents weren't around. Hell, even playing Dungeons & Dragons.

And those adventures that weren't deemed dangerous were flat-out demolished. Like high dives. Monkey bars. Sitting in the floorboard of the back seat of your parents' car on the trip to the grandparents or the beach, playing with your Star Wars figures.

Where do kids today find healthy ways to explore that gray area of Acceptable Risk? The very nature of growing up, of maturing, requires that kids and teenagers test boundaries, take flying leaps, push red buttons. Part of growing up is learning that sometimes parents and other adults were right on about warnings, and sometimes maybe they weren't.

Lately it seems like adults, with heavy assistance from hungry attorneys, are working to sanitize the entire fucking planet. Gone is the notion of acceptable risk, replaced by "if it hurts even one child, it's too dangerous." I'm honestly surprised swimming pools are still permitted at all, with the crippling power of the anecdote and its value in the news media over actual statistics.

My daughters are oddly fortunate, however. The school campus on which I live includes something affectionately known as "The Tower," a huge concrete platform that soars some 20+ feet above the surface of the water. If it was a rare treasure 20 years ago, now it's a rat that has somehow survived in a cage full of velociraptors. I'd like to say The Tower will survive another 20 years, but the cynical side of me doesn't even give it another five. A boy had to be taken to the hospital a couple of weeks ago after slipping and falling off the concrete structure.

The lifeguards responded quickly. All of the precautionary measures in place worked. But he was hospitalized. The first injury we've had on The Tower in at least four or five summers and four or five school years, with thousands of boys, thousands of kids running and leaping from it every day from late April until September.

But one injury might be all it takes in today's world. The notion that kids will be kids and that sometimes being a kid can hurt... well, that's not acceptable.