Previous work by Anneli Rufus can be found here.
Joss Rufus is an award-winning journalist and the author of numerous books, including Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto and Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself. Rufus’ drawings have appeared in Oakland Magazine and in such books as Europe Off the Wall, The Goddess in the Office, and The World Holiday Book.
My mother actually spied on me when I went to my junior prom. Apparently, she dropped by the restaurant where my group was eating to “make sure I was having a good time”. I guess I must have looked happy enough, but she clearly didn’t come during the part where my date and I were threatening to stab each other with our forks.
Love this cartoon and love that you know yourself enough to make your choices in life. My mom is wonderful, but she worries about me constantly and tells me so, which can be incredibly overwhelming and exhausting at times.
I regret that my offspring weren’t born in the days when you could webcam-spy on your daycare all day.
All I get to do is, like, ‘track my phone’ for my college kid, to see if he is / is not in his dorm at night, and sometimes steal my other kids’ phone to scroll through his texts (um, for totally, um, valid? parental supervisory-type reasons? look, there was a sexting scandal at his school, it’s my duty to snoop!) to suss out what the deal is with that girl who broke up with him during the dance but who he keeps going to meet at the park by her house anyway. (And if I happen to drive by that park while out running totally necessary errands, that is just a coincidence.)
Me: the spy
Mr Daki: the overprotective hypochondriac
We are not terrible parents.
Yikes. That’s messed up.
Undoubtedly!
(To be clear, I’m not arguing that our living out of all of the Queen’s scenarios refutes her childless choice.) (Also, y’all already figured out that our parenting style is a trial for our children.) (Who are wonderful despite us.)
I don’t think it’s okay for you to describe stalking and unprovoked privacy violations as “a trial”.
Showing up unannounced at public places to monitor your children’s relationships with other people is not like having a second glass of wine and regaling your kid’s date with embarrassing stories about them crying after getting slimed by a giraffe at a zoo or getting a peanut stuck up their nose on a dare at their 15th birthday party.
driving from my house to the grocery store and spotting my kid (who hadn’t yet had a 15th birthday party to stick a peanut up his nose at) walking in the park with his friend as I pass isn’t actually stalking. The kid’s the one who asked me to go buy him more orange juice. And the girl’s sister was at the park with them, monitoring them. Because they were 14, and not yet going on one-on-one dates.
Wow.
It’s like all my mom’s boundary-violating justifications in one place.
These are all super creepy things that you should stop doing, IMO. Really. It’s not charming or quirky.
Right? My mom was a great parent when I was like eight and really dumb. She is less great now that her need to not be worried is still more important than my need for privacy as an adult.
…none of those things are ok.
It’s hyperbole. I used the joint apple id my sons have to find the 15 year old one’s misplaced phone, and told the 18 year old one (in his first month of college; I haven’t used it since) that I could see his phone pinging from his dorm address. I think he disabled the tracker; I know he hasn’t changed his id because his brother keeps messing up the settings & I have to fix it so they don’t get each other’s texts and photos. In the process of fixing his brother’s phone, or confiscating it for the night when he’s doing homework past 11 pm, I sometimes see texts pop up. I don’t have the kid’s lock code (or fingerprint), and most of his communication with pals isn’t via the texting app anyway.
Sons while in high school must have phone tracking on – my rule – if out driving or with teenage drivers. If they miss curfew, or don’t answer messages within a few minutes, I might use it. They know this. They tend to follow rules, so it’s not something we’ve dealt with more than 3 or 4 times in all. Once they start driving, they have geographic boundaries on where they can go – these loosen as they age / show driving experience. When they are in 9th grade, they didn’t/don’t have unsupervised one-on-one dates (the park girl’s parent or sister also goes to the park, which is across from their house – and on the way to my grocery store.) (Which I know because I ask him. And I don’t think his texts with park girl would tell me their motivations anyway. He saves his emotion-diving for his poetry or his comedy troupe. When I pass them as they walk through the park, they wave & I drive on.)
Thanks to a police investigation/news story out of our high school, there’s a lot of ‘talk to your kids about safe technology’ stuff around here this week. (19 year old jock bullied a 14 year old girl into sending him revealing pics. Well, more than one student, it seems, but one set of parents is speaking out.) Yes, the message really is ‘it’s your duty to snoop.’ No, I don’t think it really is my duty to snoop. I did read my sister’s diary a few times when we were teenagers. I’m pretty sure she read mine, too. I never did find the spare key to one of them.
Clearly my posts did not come across as intended. This one likely won’t, either. If you deem me monstrous, okay, and if you find this reply defensive, I agree, it likely is.
But my sons are smart, adventurous, independent, funny, creative, affectionate, sensitive young men, and I’m incredibly proud to have had a hand in that. I’ve spent nearly two decades of my life determined to parent them in a way that allows them to leave home as mature, enthusiastic, responsible adults, secure in our love and support but in charge of their own destinies. And I know damn good and well that wouldn’t be what’s happening with them if I attached spy cams to their windshields, so I don’t, and I’ll shut up about it now & stop letting these replies make me feel like I’ve failed at the best part of my life.
I got the humor in your original post! I don’t think you’ve failed at all.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
Me too. I can imagine that people who have had issues in the past with parents crossing boundaries might react very strongly to dakimel’s original post, but I saw it as a funny self-pisstake.
I read the first line as “I never had children because DUCK”, and I thought that was a pretty good reason.
I believe I would be your maternal opposite.
“AHHH! Mooooooom, I burned my hand on the stove.”
“First or second degree?”
“…First?”
“You’ll be fine.” /lights cigarette
There was this old guy who lived in our complex when I had the first baby, and every time I’d be out walking the infant around, he’d stop & give me terrible advice. My favorite was that I should light the stove & hold baby’s hand over the open flame while repeating, “NO! HOT!” so he would learn to keep away from danger.
Was that, perhaps, your grandpa?
It’s good to know your limits, but man oh man none of these things seem to have stopped so many other people from having kids! My own mom tends to worry and endlessly remind me about really inane things such as if I cleaned the litter box. She worries about e v e r y thing and as above commenter said it is exhausting. It’s also really frustrating and sometimes insulting, because it feels like she thinks I can’t handle it on my own. She’s a helicopter parent who got herself a daughter who needs to do everything for herself. Not a good mix.
All of this, pretty much, but especially the first one. I can’t but see all the dangers of the world swooping in on my hypothetical child while I’m enthralled by my phone, working on perfecting my Freecell game. About the only way I could really see myself raising a child is if I could do so on the holodeck, having them learn to deal with the dangers of the world without being anywhere near them.
Ha, my kid is reading a book where that is basically the plot! The Search for WondLa. The holodeck breaks and the girl escapes and then has to figure a lot of stuff out on her own real quick.
To be fair, most of the kids survive. Way more than 99% of them. And you’re probably at least as competent as all the other first-time parents. I’m not saying you should, just that I bet you could if you wanted to…
The holodeck was probably the most dangerous place on the Enterprise!
I got the humor in your original post! I don't think you've failed at all.
My mom had to talk my dad out of coming to spy on me at summer camp when I was a kid.