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By Andrea Isaac Adams
"Brat!" I love the word itself.
It’s so descriptive, so satisfying to say.
"Would you listen to that whiny,
bratty girl?"
"Wow. Did you see Sarah’s little
boy throwing a fit? B-R-A-T."
And the veritable queen bee of all
such sentiments, succinct yet alluringly powerful:
"That kid is such a brat!"
Before I had my own children, I
heartily believed the word (which, let’s be honest,
is basically the combination of two words that
describe the signified: "Rat" and "Baby") was
reserved for the worst kind of person; a small one
with childishly bad manners and very few redeeming
qualities, if any.
Naturally, what grown people
without little munchkin duplicates of themselves say
to one another is, "We will never have one of those.
Sarah’s boy and that obnoxious girl at the
restaurant? Forget it. My parents sure never let me
act that way, and no kid of mine will act that way."
Oh, sure. Wanna bet? I’ve got five
dollars riding on this for each and every one of
you: ask your mom, next time you are jointly in the
presence of a kid throwing a fit over a piece of
candy at a store or whining about "Is it time to
leave yet? Huh, mom? Is it time to? Huh? Huhhhhh?"
whether or not you ever acted like that. Go ahead,
because I dare you to find out the truth.
She can say two possible things,
"Yes, kiddo, you acted just like that and you
embarrassed the fool out of me on a regular basis,"
or, "Yes, you did and I wore you out for it." In the
first case, you were definitely a brat. In the
second case, you were such a big brat that you
reduced your mom to also being a brat.
The truth is, we were all brats. I
did not know this, and I did not want to believe
this, but it is true. I am very, very chagrined to
admit it, but I flagrantly passed judgment on other
people’s children on numerous occasions prior to my
own munchkin production. There were brats in church,
brats on every grocery aisle, brats everywhere my
little eye could spy. And it’s not as if I disliked
all these children — I thought it was a fundamental
flaw in their parentally inept mom and dad models.
Just so any non-parenting types
reading this may know: passing judgment on children
and their parents works in the form of a personal
curse. Do not imbibe.
I thought our first daughter was
an angelic little being, morally incapable of
embarrassing me by acting ... bratty. Until we were
leaving my in-laws home one Sunday afternoon and she
didn’t want to go. She then proceeded to throw a
monumental shrieking fit. I was mortified beyond
mere mortification, shocked to the point of
near-death electrocution. After several months of
increasing displays of bad behavior in various
locales caused by diverse, unknowable
fit-precipitating events, I had to admit, at least
to myself, that it was technically possible that
some less-considerate folks might potentially think
our daughter was ... a brat.
Our second daughter was, perhaps,
a tad bit brattier than the first. We could admit
it. If she acted particularly bad, we might
laughingly say, "Please excuse our kiddo. She can be
a bit of a brat sometimes!"
We introduce our third daughter to
people like this: "This is Daughter Three, the
Brat," as if "Brat" is a war title like "Catherine
the Great" (which, of course, it sort of is).
If we have any more children,
their name has already been decided. No sweet,
misleading name like Angelica or Charity — we’ll
just cut straight to the punch and name the kid,
"Brat."
But somewhere in the four-year
interim, "brat" became less offensive and more
affectionate, more of a mix of "impudent" meets and
mingles with "cherished." Who’d have thought it:
Brats aren’t so bad!
About the Author: Andrea Isaac
Adams writes from Grapevine, Ark. |
