All of this actually happened, more or less.
The Jippies
A parent’s number one job? Keeping the kids safe, some might say.
Not so fast. I’d go with survival.
As Thomas Hobbes famously noted in his bedtime classic Leviathan, or the matter, forme, and power of a commonwealth, ecclesiasticall and civill, life in a state of ‘warre’ is nasty, brutish, and short.
With apologies to Tommy’s spelling, war is what we’re talking about. Get any two parents out at an extended margarita happy hour and sure enough, that carefully cultivated face they make to face the faces in their life will slide off into the nearest puddle of Jose Cuervo, revealing the vacant stares of those who have looked into the abyss.
Pile on a couple of shots and they go full overweight Coppola Brando. You’ve seen the movie; it’s not pretty.
Because the reality is that once you’ve invited a diminutive fifth column into your household, you find yourself in much the same position as any other dictator, clinging to power using only your wits. (Which is not to say that a network of secret police augmented by enthusiastic citizen-informers isn’t also helpful. Fortunately, children are naturals in this department and it requires only a modicum of encouragement to sharpen the daggers of treason in their precious little hearts and keep the pointy ends oriented firmly in the direction of their siblings. More about that later.)
Among the biggest errors new parents make is spending too much time worrying about outmoded concepts like Democracy, Fairness, and Justice. A good rule of thumb is that the net sum of time spent in discussion and/orcontemplation of these should be somewhat less than the time it takes the parents to finish a bottle of wine. (Not a box of wine. That’s way too long.)
Even worse is the notion of Truth, a concept really only intended for those without offspring. As a parent, the best way to think about Truth is to imagine it like a small amount of fissile material in what you hope is a lead pail in the closet. When you need it, it’s really the only thing that will serve. (For example, if you absolutely had to, how else would you turn your neighbor’s house into a smoking crater of poisonous ash?) But it is dangerous, highly unstable stuff, and only available in very small quantities.
Truth: The Nuclear Option.
The first imperative of any totalitarian state is the submission of the people through fear and indoctrination. We were engaged in a constant battle with adversaries who could teach AP courses to the Viet Cong. Outgunned in anyconventional sense, my two special angels never hesitated to abandon civilized rules of engagement, employing ad-hoc propaganda campaigns (crayon on coffee table, for example), weaponized LEGO, and PSYOPS against baby-sitters which included magic-markering their own tongues.My kids didn’t have Stinger missiles, but I doubt it was for lack of trying. Deep in the fog of war (Or the fog of bourbon…Whatever.), I realized I was raising a couple of little Che Guevaras hungry for regime change.
In such an environment the ends justify the means. Truth, as I’ve already mentioned, was a philosophical ship that had passed in the night, so I was free to educate my children in whichever manner suited the tactics of the moment without any tedious obligation to accuracy. Thus, the Jippies.
Let’s level-set for a moment on the topic, courtesy of my crack research department (Google).
gyp·sy
ˈjipsē/
noun
plural noun: gypsies
1.
a member of a traveling people with dark skin and hair who speak Romany and traditionally live by seasonal work, itinerant trade, and fortune-telling. Gypsies are now found mostly in Europe, parts of North Africa, and North America, but are believed to have originated in South Asia.
2.
a nomadic or free-spirited person.
Allow me to add an additional definition:
3: People who are always in the market to purchase bad children.
Spanking? How gauche. Time Outs? Seriously? Do you even HAVE kids? When my perfect little Sandanista Princesses misbehaved, I dropped the hammer on them.
Me: “Sarah! Ashley! Stop that right now!”
Them: “Umm, what, dad?”
Me: “Go ahead, girls. Try that again. I’ll sell you to the Gypsies.”
Them: “…crickets…”
In one fell swoop, as my now adult children are quick to point out, I managed to marginalize an entire ethnic group by appealing specifically to their very worst stereotypeswhile at the same time introducing my very young daughters to the idea of human trafficking.
What can I say? I’m results-oriented.
Fortunately for me, this was long before my darlings had internalized an understanding of capitalism or supply-chain management (don’t worry, there’s a whole chapter on that explanation). As a result I found myself in a negotiation with parties who had no reason to question either why two little persons with a penchant for hurling juice boxes would have any market value whatsoever to a band of itinerant fortune-tellers, or how exactly it was that their caravan would somehow be within five minutes of our house each and any time there was an incident of misbehavior.
Still, one could imagine that a couple of smart little kids (even though they were like, five and three at the time) would eventually get wise to their father’s empty threats. Especially since, for the record, I in fact had no relationship with any Jippies, as my kids referred to them, had no idea where I would locate them if I wanted to (this was way before Craig’s List), and was highly confident that if I did meet them they would in all likelihood be much nicer persons than myself and have no interest whatsoever in giving me any money for the purposes of enslaving my children, even if it would teach them a damn good lesson.
But fate played right into my hands. It all started, as it so often does, with small appliance repair.
After an evening dinner, the dishwasher wasn’t doing its thing, so we made an appointment for a guy to come out and take a look at it. Everything seemed routine in our little domicile. I was away at work; my wife was home waiting on the guy, and the kids were hanging out, reading their Little Red Book, or plotting our downfall, or whatever.
Then (and this, as it turns out, is important) the doorbell rings and its not a guy, but two guys. As in, plural.
They make housecalls for a living, so I’ll bet they were familiar with shy kids, but I’m pretty sure they’d never seen a stranger-danger reaction like this one.
“The Jippies! The Jippies!”
My oldest daughter, Sarah, was plastered to her mom’s leg, pointing and pale with terror, as my parenting chickens came home to roost. I’d never threatened to sell them to one Jippy. It was always Jippies. Plural. If only one guy had shown up things would have been fine, and maybe my kids would have received something resembling conventional parenting rather than the, um, less standard version they actually got. Instead, they were certain they’d pushed their luck too far, that the Jippies had finally arrived, and that it was time to pack their little Dora bags and hit the road for good.
Life turns on the little things, sometimes.
In the end, things got sorted out. The dishwasher got fixed, the children were not sold into servitude, and no one called Child Services. And many lessons were learned:
The kids: Holy cow, that was a close one! Dad’s not just making this stuff up.
Me: Holy shit. These kids will believe literally anything.
