Stepkids Report

I can’t help it, it’s funny.

The first few days lit­tle­fire­fae and real_pochacco spent in the Bay area with their moth­er were unsea­son­ably hot. In their first con­ver­sa­tion with sam­bear after arrival, real_pochacco could­n’t stop com­plain­ing about it. Of course, the apart­ment there does­n’t have air conditioning—apparently it isn’t a stan­dard thing there at all.

Well, now it’s even hot­ter. When Sam called, he was told that lit­tle­fire­fae had to be fetched from where she was just sit­ting in front of a fan. When he spoke with real_pochacco, though, the boy just went off on him about how envi­ron­men­tal­ly irre­spon­si­ble it is to use air con­di­tion­ing at all. He was claim­ing that they were *choos­ing* to live with­out A/C because they did­n’t want to cause “all that heat pollution.” 

This is the child who was very unhap­py when we even sug­gest­ed that we might con­sid­er maybe some­times pos­si­bly going camp­ing as a family—because it would be too hot and sweaty and gross.

The boy real­ly believes that he thinks for him­self. In fact, he absolute­ly refus­es to read books we rec­om­mend to him, for fear of being too heav­i­ly influ­enced by us. In the past, we’ve point­ed out that always refus­ing to do what some­one sug­gests, or what is pop­u­lar, is to allow your­self to be con­trolled every bit as much as always doing what that per­son sug­gests or is pop­u­lar. He did­n’t like that con­ver­sa­tion at all. He became an NPR addict over the last year and was very offend­ed by my sug­ges­tion that he vary his infor­ma­tion sources so as to get a more bal­anced view of what’s going on in the world.

He fre­quent­ly acts as his moth­er’s mouth­piece to us. It’s very obvi­ous when he does so because his speech pat­terns change. His moth­er seems to be paint­ing us as some sort of rad­i­cal right-wing fun­da­men­tal­ists* in con­ver­sa­tions with him—she was appalled that Sam turned down her offer of some yard sign protest­ing the war in Iraq.

So to hear the boy who absolute­ly can­not stand one sec­ond of phys­i­cal dis­com­fort get­ting all self-right­eous about the envi­ron­men­tal dam­age our A/C is doing was sim­ply too fun­ny to ignore. Even second-hand.

So how should we hon­or his new­found envi­ron­men­tal con­scious­ness when he returns? Maybe by not buy­ing any of those con­ve­nience foods (which he used to love) because they use too much pack­ag­ing? Hey, we want to respect his choic­es as much as possible!

*Yes, that would be us, the polyamorous bisex­u­al pagan Uni­tar­i­an Uni­ver­sal­ists. But we must be con­ser­v­a­tives, because we home­school and I do have a con­cealed car­ry per­mit, ya know?