Dear Sweetly Misguided Teenager Ann,
I understand that your burgeoning kinship with Susan Polis Shutz greeting card sentiments has left you full-to-bursting with misplaced teenaged hormones, but please reconsider what you are about to present to your Grandmother as a belated birthday gift.
For starters, Granny was not an overly emotional woman. Remember the time you tried to kiss up to her on Hanukkah asking:
“Granny, How did you celebrate Hanukkah when you were a kid? [bats eyelashes]”
and she replied
“We put eight candles on a brick and my father gave us a dime and that was it.”
Not exactly the greeting card moment you expected, right?
Oh, I know how you, Seventeen-Year-Old-Ann, enjoy a catharsis every time that little boy grows up and drives over and scoops up his MOTHER and cradles her in his arms and rocks her. But, Ann?
A) it is unrealistic. She would say “Put Me DOWN” or “Who the hell do you think you are, you pervert? Didn’t I teach you to knock first?” Or at the very least “OY, my LUMBAGO”
B) It is creepy and depressing. And You thought The Giving Tree was sad? I mean sure, the tree was all amputated into a stump, but at least it didn’t show The Boy digging it up and rocking it and singing to it, and then casting it aside to go plant a cute little seedling.
c) I don’t care how old you are, you just don’t want someone giving you this book when you are the one the family-generation-train is leaving behind. Like We’ll Love You Foveverrrr….BYE!…See you later…your getting smaller…we can barely even see you now…off the rest of us go…to be fruitful and multiply…sorry to leave you behiiiiiiiind
But you won’t listen to me Miss. “My Camp BFF gave me this book and I thought of you immediately and now you will be so overwhelmed with my capacity for love and this generous display of my love that you will love me even more than you ever ever could’ve imagined”
And then you’ll sign it “Love You Forever –Ann Dec. 1991”
Just to make SURE that Granny knows the book is about HER. In your tremendous outpouring of “I will break and enter into your house and invade your privacy just so I can rock you and love you properly as a dutiful granddaughter but thankfully this is all metaphorical because if it was real life there is no way I would do any of it, I’m really sweet but I’m seventeen and I’m a little afraid of you and everything else, but if I smother the world in a huge expression of love the world will vote me the most loving and therefore most lovable existing human” sentiment.
Thankfully Granny was not such a cynic as I am, sitting here writing you this letter from my sciatica bed. She kept the book, after all. Which surprises me even more now that I’m looking at a book cover boasting a half naked toddler playing in a huge toilet. Nice gift for a woman of her generation.
In hindsight,
35-Year-Old Ann
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p.s.
Are you a Scary Mommy? Write a post about it and link up to Scary Mommy this week–she’s holding a therapy session giveaway to validate her Scary Scary parenting 😉
A huge thank you to Amy, that gloriously Bitchin’ Wife. She posted and tweeted the heck out of my What To Expect: Your First Blogiversary post–generously sharing the traffic she’s earned from her stunning and often irreverant photojournalistic blog documenting her families’ move to the UK. Thank you so much dear friend. I miss you very much.
I can’t read this book aloud…
ever
I remember when I did, my daughter who was 5 at the time, said
“Is that supposed to be a happy ending, why are you sad, then…let’s read Clifford Goes To School, next time?”
As a cruel joke, my sister gave this book to me for my first Mother’s Day. My boys grew up laughing at me when I would read it. Finally (I’m a slow learner), I hid the damn book in the hope(less) chest where it remains to this day.
Someday, I’m gonna have grandkids, and I imagine they are going to see me as very much like your granny.
I’m working on the crotchety angle. It’s not that much of a stretch.
I read this 9 years ago to my baby boy. I thought it was so dear I even SANG the part of “I’ll love you forever, I’ll something for always..” Now that makes me want to puke a little…
I have absolutely no idea what book you’re talking about. Sometimes I think I’ve lost the plot….
Ann, I just don’t know what to say about this. That often happens to me when I visit your blog! You leave me speechless and I mean that as a compliment 🙂 My brain is just spinning so fast I can’t coordinate a comment
I got 6 copies of that darn book when I was preggers. Brought me to tears…..
Whimper, kleenex please……
The title is sweet, though! It’s the nekkid kid learning to potty that makes it so funny.
Robert Munsch does much better with funny than sappy. Everyone in my kindergarten class learned to say “super-indelible-never-come-off-until-you’re-dead-and-maybe-even-later-colouring-markers” when referring to Sharpies, thanks to him.
Hmm…I have never clapped eyes on that book before…and perhaps I should be counting my blessings?
Shade and Sweetwater,
K
“sweetly misguided teenagers” that’s most of them!
Secretia
I always think of Joey on Friends with this book- anyone seen that episode? And we don’t have it. Which, I think is a good thing.
And, thank you my dear, for the shout-out. You’re the best! 🙂
I didn’t see that book till I was a mom. And it made me cry.
So funny you did this to your Granny.
I’m not familiar with this one…but the idea of presenting something like that to my grandmother cracks me up. I can just hear her booming voice saying, “well it was very sweet dear, but I really have no idea what it’s supposed to mean.”
I love you forever. . .I’ll like you for always. . .as long as I’m living. . .
What did you do about the “as long as I’m living” part??????
I didn’t pimp out your post like Amy did. I made the mailman read it. What he was doing in my apartment is none of your beezwax. BTW Beezwax is my favorite word.
I’ve never seen this book. What have I been missing?
Oh, jeebus, Ann! You are getting emotional over there, aren’t you?
1st— that book is HORRIBLE. The first time I read it, even with the spin of post-partum hormones making me cry over everything — I read that book and said, “WTF kind of creepy book is this!? Yuck!!” And that Giving Tree Book?…. it makes me cry because I’m afraid my kids are going to turn out to be selfish assholes like that boy/man who takes everything the tree has to give.
Teenagers really are amazing creatures. My mother told me that you just have to forget all the memories from parenting during those years, it is the only way you can still like your children as adults. 🙂
And, random aside: “Cringe” is one of my all-time favorite episodes of This American Life. Amazing cringe-worthy stories of past mis-deeds.
I miss you, too! Why haven’t you been on Yahoo???
Creepiest book, ever. And someone needs to explain to me why so many kids books talk about death and dying and illness — particularly when it comes to parents dying. That’s a fun conversation to have.
I, too, am terrified of that book.
We have the book in our house too. Someone gave it to us as a (possibly ironic)baby gift. It’s never been opened.
I do like the Giving Tree though. That writer had issues. His kids poetry is much more unsettling.
I had never read that book until my sister gave it to me after the Bean was born. I got about halfway through it before I was all “What the hell is THIS shit?” and tossed it.
We’re more of a Dr. Seuss kind of family.
Dude. That book is haunted.
Oh, I loved Susan Polis Shutz cards, too, and only in the last decade or so have weaned myself from them. Loved this post! Keep ’em coming, please.
I love this post. Your grandma sounds like mine. Years ago, when I asked her if she’d heard that good news—that I was engaged—she said,
“I guess you could call that good news.” HARDLY a greeting card.
That book makes me cry. I was at a conference once and the author of the book read it to us. And we cried; all 700 of us.
And I totally know how the song in the book goes.
The Giving Tree just makes me hate the boy/man though.
I must be on the wrong book-track or something because I’ve never read this book, nor the Giving Tree. I guess I’m more the Junie B. Jones type. By the way, do you know what grandchildren are? Our reward for surviving our teenagers. Teenagers… gotta’ love ’em. Great post. ~ Yaya
http://yayashome.blogspot.com
I really thought I was the only one who was creeped out by that book.
This one time, my sister and my mom and I were sitting IN CHURCH and up on the big screen came this book. Someone was narrating it all dramatic like and the pictures from the book were flashing across the screen. We got the giggles. We couldn’t stop. I mean, THIS BOOK AND THE CHURCH GIGGLES???? It was never-ending.
My mom had never read it, so she just kept turning to me with this confused look, like “WHY is that woman sneaking into her grown child’s house to ROCK HIM???
Then I’d laugh some more.
End of long story.