What to teach my children please.

What To Teach My Children Please
If I have succeeded as a mother it was to teach my children to do the following things:
1.) Swing wide of nature, go gently on the earth and its creatures.
2.) Trust their natural feminine human instincts and not to be deluded by the nonsense of “stranger danger” and/or the modern notion of different is wrong or bad. Doesn’t discriminate based on appearance. Ugly, blind, crippled, or crazy- everyone has something to offer. Unless they feel wrong. Then you stay the hell away from them. Or knock them out. And swing hard. Fight like life depends on it; it does.
3.) There is no fair fight. Ever.
4.) Being a bully can haunt you, so don’t throw a punch you don’t want to keep in your back pocket.
5.) Marketing is a con and tv lies. Watch the art, like the art show but don’t drink the kool aid on the way out.
6.) Suck it up! Be a culture, wisdom, interest VAMPIRE. If it remotely interests you, learn something about it, anything. For this reason only USE your friends and their friends and their friends.
7.) Don’t censor. Every bit of knowledge can be passed to a child, just toned down. Human body parts, sexuality, drug abuse, religions, belief or non belief in their scary ideas about aliens, werewolves, witches, God.
8.) Tell the truth. The shoes are ugly. The needle will hurt. But it will only hurt for few moments. If you lie about the small stuff there is no trust. Trust takes years longer to earn than lose. So start telling the truth immediately.
9.) Be willing to bet. Taking risk instills personal accountability and the willingness to pull your hair back and lay your neck bare to execution.
10.) It is O.K. to be silly. Especially in public. It confuses people and gives them something to talk about.
11.) Get up early.
12.) Never duck, make faces or run amok because it is raining. You will likely get just as wet and look stupid to boot.
13.) The girls have learned the importance of being on time – because I am always late. I suspect they will be early to everything as soon as they can drive.
14.) Art is never wrong. Not your taste, not your taste – but when you are making it, art is not wrong. No one can tell you, your artwork is bad. Period.
15.) That we know everything we have ever known. Once we learn something we KNOW it. Memory is just a retrieval system with some useful tricks for faster service. Get to know those tricks but always trust that you just KNOW something. On standardized tests, and in life – KNOW what you are doing.
16.) A Southern Woman’s favorite color is Shiny followed by Tight then Fuzzy. (It goods to know how to laugh at where you’re from).
17.) If it calls for margarine use butter. If it calls for shortening use lard. The better the fat the better.
18.) How to rack, break & play billiards.
19.) How to drive a manual transmission car.
20.) How to load and unload, properly handle and adequately fire a handgun and rifle.
21.) How to swim.
22.) How to call 911 and use the phonebook.
23.) How to properly identify authority figures and genuine EMS, rescue and other safety workers from impostors and rent-a-wreck folks.
24.) How to respect their teachers and schools and still remain true to their values. Understanding that we would always support them as parents so long as they used good manners and followed a chain of command. Even kids in the second grade need to know they have the right to really get up and go pee if they have to. I hope my girls know that.
25.) Gimme three steps: The right to ask 3 Times. Mom can I? No.
a. But I really want to and it is a good plan see. I decline again.
b. She has once last chance to go gather her evidence, rally dad or convince me –
c. Three Nos and you are out. Done. Not an all day struggle of ideas or new ways to ask the same question over and over.
26.) To be discrete.
27.) To be modest. Ok a bit modest.
28.) Virginity is a gift you only get to give yourself – ONCE.
29.) Independence is freedom and a union is a bond but they are not mutually exclusive.
30.) When you think of getting married take out a cheap plastic twelve inch ruler and look at it, hard. Now think of how many years you intend on being married to your spouse. Me and John agreed to 70 years way back in 1991 when he gave me the ring. Now put however many marks, say seventy on a piece of paper and look at it and imagine your married life. Happy. Now imagine a bad year. One whole bad year in seventy, imagine the reason? Look at it on paper. How tiny it looks it that long year. Seem hard to imagine? If ever you find yourself with marriage trouble put it to the seventy year test. Really seem hard – stretch those tick marks – all the way out, one for every month of your marriage and keep asking? A piece of paper with 12 month sections for seventy years is longer than you would think. Is this a deal breaker? I married my best friend and we made a deal, a promise. 70 years. A few bad months or even a bad year is easy to put into perspective with the proper ruler.
What I have yet to teach my daughters and would love help with:
1) How not to worry about opinions.
2) How to perpetuate motion or put toilet paper back on the role.
3) How to see what I want them to find/retrieve the first time they look.
4) How to not get personally involved with other peoples hurts.
5) How to tell me when I have made them angry.
6) How to spell or care about spelling/grammar.
7) How to see/hear/understand those slippery symbols that are math.