~Will Smith, on keeping his kids real
[Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith
and their under-privileged children]
My mom said crazy shit like this, but she wasn't kidding. Whenever I would exhibit an inkling of self-pity, my mother would mock me by singing, "Nobody knows de trouble I've seen...", which is an old Negro spiritual (my mother is black); or she would say, "Jules, you're a Slav. Your great-grandfather worked a plow and died alone in a ditch. What do you have to be crying about? Go clean the bathroom."
She was always trying to get us to clean shit. As far as I could tell, my mom's whole purpose in life was to cook and clean, but she hated doing both of these things and as far as she was concerned, if she did the cooking, we were supposed to be cleaning all the time.
ME: I'm bored.
MOM: Go clean the toilet.
ME: Can I go to the movies with Michele?
MOM: No. Fold the towels.
If I would ever complain about anything, she would say, "You get to live in my house." And I believed her. I thought I was privileged that my parents let me sleep inside. I'd seen the barns in Croatia where my grandparents were born. I thought they could send me back there.
I recently posted an entry where I boasted that I had FIVE BARBIE DOLLS! When I wrote that post, I was 17 years old, and I thought having five Barbies was excessive. But as I re-typed that essay recently, I was humbled. How sad. Five Barbie Dolls today is probably the number of Barbie Dolls in a Barbie Doll Starter Kit that comes with the Barbie Dream Penthouse and BMW. Little girls today probably have five Barbie Dolls just to use as maids and manicurists for their REAL Barbie Doll contingent. They probably use their spare Barbie Dolls to prop up the legs of their four-poster canopy beds to make more room underneath for all of their Barbie accessories. Looking back, the fact that I had only five Barbies (one of which was an imposter anyway), is total bullshit.
But I thought it was amazing that I had five Barbie Dolls because I didn't have many toys. Think of any toy. I probably asked for that toy, and my mother would say, "If you're so bored, go clean the litter box." If I asked my dad, he would convince us that we could make the toy out of a box, so we were always playing with boxes. Boxes weren't in short supply at our house. We moved every year, and my dad always kept all the moving boxes. Also, my mother kept all the little boxes: jewelry boxes, shoe boxes, cereal boxes, oh, we all different sorts of boxes!
Any toy that was roughly the shape of a box, could be made out of a box.
I wanted a Speak and Spell. So my dad made me one. Out of a box.
[Whining] "But it doesn't do anything."
"Use your imagination!"
I wanted a Barbie Dream House. So my dad made me one. Out of a box.
[Exasperated] "But Dad, the Barbie Dream House has three floors."
"It does? OK, well, here!" He puts two more boxes on top of the first box.
[Unsatisfied] "But Dad, there's no elevator."
He takes my Barbie out of the bottom box and puts her in the top box. "See how that works!"
[Pissed off] "It's supposed to be pink."
"Color it."
Well, you and I both know that a brown cardboard box colored pink is still brown, so I complained about this too.
"Use your imagination!"
When he said this, he meant, "Whatever we can't do with a box, do it in your head."
My dad was always making us use our imagination to imagine we had better toys. But we sort of believed in him because my dad was a fun guy. My dad was "fun" if you think it's fun to be forced to play Risk on the day you learn to speak. My dad was "fun" if you think it's fun to go on a 90-mile bike ride when you're eight. My dad was "fun" if you think it's OK to let your kids stand in the car with their heads sticking out the sunroof of a Ford Fiesta while he drives 80 mph down 75th Street on the way to the pool. My dad was "fun" if you think it's cool that on the day you get your driver's permit, he takes you to the high school parking lot to do donuts and makes you drive 40 mph towards a fence and then tells you to crank the wheel really hard to avoid the crash, "So you learn that you're in control of the car." My dad was a fun guy, if you think it's fun for your dad to tell you to stand on your tippy-toes at the measuring pole so you can ride the Super Duper Looper at Hershey Park when you're five and about to poop in your pants because you don't really want to go on an upside-down roller coaster. "It's going to be FUN, Jules!" [i.e. I want to have adult fun, but I'm stuck here with a five-year-old, and I don't care if she's pooping her little pink pants -- we're getting on that roller coaster].
He made us have fun, whether we wanted to or not. We'd go to Great America the day before the first day of school every year, and we'd have so much "fun", we'd have sunburns and blisters and be lame by the time we got home at midnight. We had to RUN to every ride. We weren't allowed to eat. We had to drink water out of the flume ride. We had to RIDE THE RIDES ALL DAY. Just before the amusement park closed, when we were completely done having fun and wanting to pass out in the car, he'd make us run to get in line for Shock Wave, so we'd be standing in line for an hour to get one last ride long after the park was closed and all the other kids were eating cotton candy and walking to the parking lot. My dad was not risk-averse, not particularly concerned for our safety, and doing all of these things behind our mother's back -- a lot of the "fun" we had with my dad, we weren't allowed to tell our mother about.
I'm making it sound like I was some forlorn child sitting in a box wearing a babushka. And come to think of it, that's kind of true. I didn't have many toys, and the other half of the equation was, my mom wouldn't buy me normal clothes. I went to private school and wore a uniform, but when I got home, I had this dismal array of clothes that my mom got from Venture, which is a store that no longer exists, but was SO much more pathetic than K-Mart in the 80s. It was similar to a shoe store in East Berlin. There would be one kind of shirt, and so whatever shirt they had in stock, my mom would buy me 3 of them. When I was 12, it seemed like a lot of the clothes had teddy bears and rainbows, and all of my pants were brown or gray because my brother had to be able to wear them when he grew into them. If I begged for a pair of jeans, which I never was allowed to have, after she was done singing me some insulting Negro spiritual and making me clean the gutters, she'd say, "You get to go to private school," like the choice was to go to school OR have pants.
I don't know why we couldn't have toys or clothes. We weren't poor. We weren't even middle class. I'd venture to say that my parents had a great deal of money. But they didn't spend it. I love listening to my dad talking about his retirement accounts now, and I'm like, yeah, meanwhile, on dress-up-day, I had to go to school wearing a table cloth held around my waist with your old belt. I actually did that once. I wore this red and white checkered table cloth and put a belt around it. I cried myself to sleep the night before, but I thought I could get away with it because, although it was dress up day, we also had to spend the whole day taking apptitude tests, so maybe no one would notice me. But we had to have lunch and recess. We were playing Capture the Flag and I was the fastest girl in my class, so I was in my glory, running around in my belted red-and-white checkered table cloth saving people. I grabbed Dave's hand and brought him back. When we got to our side, he said, "You're really fast, Bob Evans!" I will never forget that, or forgive my mother, for letting me go to school dressed IN A TABLE CLOTH and then come home to play with boxes.
If I were to ask her about it now, my mother would say, "You were building character." And then she would make me do some dusting.
Well, you were before your time, Ma. Thanks for keepin' in real. I have character to spare, just like Will Smith's kids.
