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The Goddess Speaks By Genevieve A. Suzuki |
Give me quirky cute
over cutesy cute any timeWhen Derek and I have kids, whenever that is, I've got a few wishes: We will not be offered any more fertility doctor recommendations, Derek will stash his ugly blue-flowered boxer shorts in the spare closet forever and our children will be healthy, intelligent, entertaining, humorous and quirky cute.
We don't want cutesy cute, as my friend Judith refers to them. We want quirky cute.
Quirky cute gets the lead in teenage comedy movies. Look at Molly Ringwald, Winona Ryder sans the criminal record, or Rachel Leigh Cook. It's the kind of cute that has former classmates wondering years later why they never noticed that quirky cute person.
Most important, quirky cute is the kind of cute that allows room for a personality.
The other day, I met an acquaintance's 9-year-old daughter. She was very polite and cutesy cute. And she was scary.
She didn't scare me in a psychotic, Chuckie-doll way, and she didn't scare me in that "Omen," spawn-of-the-devil way. Nah, she reminded me more of the twins from "The Shining."
She obediently stood there, quiet and sweet, answering my questions without asking any of her own. She was well groomed and had impeccable posture.
"Yes, Mom," she said dutifully. "May I blah, blah, blah?" She nodded acquiescence and exited the room in the proper manner. The girl from "Small Wonder" would have been proud.
WHERE WAS this kid from? I wondered. Was she an android? Was it Ritalin?
Wait a minute -- was I crazy? This was a perfect kid. Who wouldn't want a perfect kid?
Uh, guilty as charged. I want a kid with a kid's personality. A kid with manners, of course, but precocious enough so that I'll be able to tell the difference between my child and a boring, jaded adult.
Children should be curious. If I have a daughter, she'll ask a lot of questions. I may not always want to answer those questions, but at least I'd know she is trying to expand her mind's library.
I want my child to be a little disheveled, as though she had played with her stuffed animals, not simply put them away on a shelf. And when you ask my kids about their favorite TV shows, I hope they list cartoons, "Sesame Street" and anything on Animal Planet.
There were a bunch of kids I knew back in kindergarten who were lucky enough to wear the popular crowns. They were cutesy cute and well behaved.
In contrast, I was a social pariah thanks to my inability to nap. "Go to sleep!" my warden scolded. I was threatened with parent-teacher conferences and the loss of library privileges.
I showed her. I was a 5-year-old activist. My ideals would not be held hostage. I stayed after school every day for an entire school year. My ideals were free but I wasn't.
Back then, I thought I was a rotten kid I. I wished every day that I could be more like my classmates. But every day, I would open my mouth and disrupt nap time.
More than two decades later, I ran into one of the girls everyone loved. She had been the queen of kindergarten. As an adult she was still attractive -- not as cute as she was in kindergarten, but attractive just the same.
I stood there with my eyes glazing over as we struggled through the semblance of a conversation.
"So, what do you do now?" I asked.
"I teach," she said.
"Hey, my husband's a teacher," I said with a smile of recognition.
"Oh," she said.
"What do you teach?" I asked.
"Elementary school."
Of course, she taught elementary school. It was a good time for her.
"My husband teaches music at Moanalua Middle School," I volunteered.
"Oh," she said.
She never asked what I did or what I was up to. In fact, she didn't have any questions.
And then there was that weird silence. A silence similar to the one I experienced with my friend's 9-year-old.
We looked at each other and realized there was nothing left to say except the usual pleasantries and retreat to the corners of our own worlds.
It seemed as though the cute kids were just as hard to talk to as adults. In elementary school it was because they were members of the untouchables. As adults it's because as children they were untouched.
They never developed much of a personality because they didn't need to endeavor to make friends. They were Judith's cutesy cute and not expected to speak.
As I got ready for bed that night, I asked Derek for his opinion of cute kids and their lack of communication skills. Why can't they hold their own in a conversation?
He stopped reading his magazine and glanced over at my confused expression.
"I dunno, I never tried talking to them and I never really cared," he said. "Why do you care anyway? You're cute now."
I guess he can keep those ugly blue-flowered boxer shorts.
Genevieve A. Suzuki is a Honolulu-based freelance writer.
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