I keep thinking of folkways that I've already violated. They are too numerous to mention, however, they all hold a different meaning of their own, and each is funny in it's own particular way. So I will work on my favorites.

My children and I were at a church function waiting in line for refreshments. As I've mentioned before, I have several children. They were all instructed to take only two cookies. One of my daughters took five my son came to me tattling. I told him to tell her to put them back. He said, "She already ate them." I was stumped, I didn't want to punish the one child for eating too many cookies, and I didn't want to hear the other child saying, "That's not fair!" So, I told him, "Fine, go eat five cookies." One of my friends who was standing in line behind me was flabbergasted. I was a little bit embarrassed by my own reaction, but I felt justified in breaking the little rule because kids will be kids, and we were there to have fun. My friend is very health conscious and her children only eat sugar occasionally, so I thought that explaining it to her would be very hard, as it turned out, she thought I just had to be joking! She said, "So I guess you call this the shock treatment?" My child didn't know what to think of it either, and he didn't go ahead and take five cookies. He went along with the social norm himself! What I learned from this is, when children are left with a choice to make on their own, they will generally not break social norms if they are older than three. I also learned that if people know you and you act out of character, they figure that you are joking. Or, they make some kind of forgiving excuse when they are your friend. When people see something abnormal, they are quick to explain things into a normal state of being. It's good to step out of this state of being sometimes in order to see the humor of a situation. I think people take life too seriously. I try to get out of that monotonous same-old same-old sometimes. Like this one time after shopping for hours and hours, with 5 small children, I was at the checkout. I heard someone say to me, (for the ten zillionth time) "You have your hands full!" I replied, "You are the first person who has ever said that to me!" I acted like it was such an honor to hear that phrase again. Of course the person who said it seemed a little embarrassed, she didn't know how to act until I started chuckling. Then everyone had a good laugh.

My greatest folkway breaking happened while I was waiting in a long line at a check-out counter. I had four children with me and they were all clamoring for this and that, "Mommy can I have..." (endlessly) A man waiting behind us asked me, "Are all of these children yours?" I answered in the affirmative. Now, get this, three children are obviously white and the fourth one is of mixed race, so already the guy is giving me the sideways "LOOK." To make matters even more interesting, he asked their ages. I said each of their ages as I touched each child. At this time my little mixed son and my little blond daughter were both two years old. I used to call them my twins, "ebony an ivory." The gentleman's lower jaw just about dropped to the floor! His face lost most of it's color. In a quiet, awestruck tone he asked, "H-how can th-that be?" I could almost see the electrodes in his brain going every which way bouncing off of every unbelievable explanation he could think of. Then he looked straight at me in horror, disgust, and wonder. I could read this conclusion written all over his face, he was thinking I must have had sex with more than one man the night they were conceived. So I decided to give his old ticker a break (we didn't need an aneurysm in the shopping mall) and I explained that I had adopted my children.

The feeling I got from all of this was mostly a big kick. I enjoyed it immensely. I was somewhat embarrassed when I saw his logical conclusion. I come across many episodes of breaking the folkways because of the size and structure of our family. It makes for a lot of good laughs and it breaks up the monotony. I found myself dissapointed that I even explained my twins to that one man because life is too predictable sometimes and it's fun to through in an unexplainable to get people thinking and wondering.

I guess the insight I have gained into norms, are that they serve the function of keeping life less complicated, but I believe that we all have a need to question folkways. What makes them so important? Back when I was growing up it would have been OUT OF THE QUESTION to raise a racially mixed child in a Caucasian family. My mother would have NEVER told me to commit the same wrong as that of one of my siblings, (as in the cookie episode). I guess I'm innovative in that way. I disliked the way I was ignored as I grew up. This made me determined to never be like my mom. It took me about 15 years of being a mother to finally decide that some of the things my mother did were very good. I was so set against being like my mom that I didn't even use any of her cultural lingo. I questioned every action I made before I made it, to see if it had any merit. I believe this was important. It made me more sensitive to my children's needs instead of putting too much stock in, "what will the neighbors say." It's gotten me in trouble a few times with relatives, like at Thanksgiving time when my sister-in-law piled my son's plate full of food and expected him to eat it all. I'm sorry, I don't believe in that. I was raised that you clean your plate or you don't get desert, but I will not torture my children with such paltry rubbish.


Pamela
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