In Depends Day

The cycle of life and striving to achieve Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

We hold these truths to be self-evident," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Jefferson was not only one of our country's Founding Fathers, but also a father of six (probably more). Hard to believe that he could whip up such thoughts with a bunch of munchkins tugging at his leg, but he did, and I suppose that he capitalized Rights, Life, Liberty, Pursuit and Happiness as a way of stressing their importance or significance. They are high ideals, indeed. More than two hundred years later, I'm not sure that any of us truly have them. We strive for them, but I don't know if we ever attain them. Even when we come close, we often have to sacrifice them.

From the time we are born, we are always striving to achieve Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you're a toddler, there are things that you try to do, but you find that your body just won't let you do. As you get a little older, you begin to assert your independence, but there's almost always a parent telling you, "No." By the time you're a teen-ager, you're just itching to break free. But there are your parents telling you, "Not while you're living under our roof."

College life may be the closest thing we have to true independence. For four years, sometimes more if you take the meaning of higher education seriously, you almost begin to think that you've achieved what our Founding Fathers fought for so valiantly. Only in college, those unalienable rights really translate into something a little less noble, known in dormitories and fraternity halls as, the right to party until you puke. Those champions of the parentally and authoritatively oppressed, the Beastie Boys, best captured this sentiment with the ultimate teen-age rebellion song, "You've got to fight for your right (to party)." The same spirit that went into the Declaration of Independence and its list of grievances against the King of England can be seen in the lyrics of that Beastie Boys song –

        You wake up late for school, man, you don't wanna go
        You ask your mom, "Please?" but she still says, "No!"
        You missed two classes and no homework
        But your teacher preaches class like you're some kind of jerk.

        You've got to fight for your right to party.

The Beastie Boys might have lacked the eloquence of the Founding Fathers, but the point, basically, is the same: Independence does not come easily, you have to fight for it. Whether you’re breaking ties from the mother country, or from your mother and father.

Unfortunately, you soon discover that there's a price to be paid for that little bit of freedom that you achieved in college, and that comes when you are eventually forced to enter a place called "the real world," and I'm not referring to the MTV reality show, which bears little resemblance to the real real world. The real world is the place where you find that you have to pay back all of those loan and credit card debts that you piled up in your four or more years of college.

 

 

And you have to pay rent, and pay it on time. Not to mention utility bills, and food – even bar tabs. It's a truly scary world, one that college taught you little about.

You do what you have to do, you get a job, where for eight or more hours a day you answer to your boss and your boss's boss, and on and on. So much for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Over time, however, you earn enough wealth so that you are once again getting close to reaching that golden ring of which the Beastie Boys and the Founding Fathers dreamt. Sure, you've still got to answer to that dreadful, know-nothing boss, but you've got a sweet little apartment decorated in bachelor black, a big-screen TV, and enough money in your bank account to go out every night and do the things you want to do.

But then one day you meet that certain someone, and she has different thoughts on interior decorating and how much TV you watch and what you do at night. The black futon in her eyes is not furniture. The movie posters that decorate the walls are not to her art. You cringe and almost cry watching them being unceremoniously taken away, the last vestiges of your former life. You find after a while that you're sitting for dinner at an actual table and eating foods that are not made by Swanson. Then the transformation is complete when one day you do the unthinkable and unforgivable. After dinner, instead of going out drinking with the boys, you plop down on that cursed designer couch and sit through two hours of "Bridget Jones' Diary." You think, at this point, that you've given up everything.

Until that one fateful day comes, and your whole world turns, literally, upside down. It begins when that little critter pops his head out of that certain someone and makes his first scream at the world surrounding him. Forever, from that day on, you come to realize that you will sacrifice every one of those unalienable rights to that one creature.

Life doesn't exist, at least not as you'd come to know it. The structure of it is an entirely different form. Urgent potty calls, unpredictable sickness, tantrums that seemingly come out of nowhere, they all alter life as you'd come to know it.

Liberty is thrown out the door. Instead of the baseball game on TV, you're watching The Wiggles sing "Fruit Salad." Rather than dining at that quiet, romantic restaurant you used to love, you're eating cardboard pizza at Chuck E Cheese amidst flashing lights, pinball buzzers and screaming kids. And when you're so exhausted that your eyes barely stay open, you don't nap or go to sleep; you play knights or pirates with that little creature. 

The pursuit of happiness takes on a whole new meaning. Instead of vacations to exotic locales and faraway places, you’re spending that precious time away from work with relatives or a stranger in a mouse costume. Employment opportunities that you once might have sought, well, forget about them. Because your happiness comes second to that little one. Oh, and that convertible you’ve always dreamt of, well, there’s no room for it in the budget – or in the garage, not with the SUV or the minivan.

One day, well down the road, when your hair's turned grey and your bones are creaky, you will set that child free and retire from that job, and you will have nearly attained those unalienable rights. You can do whatever you want. But by then it will be your body once again stepping in, just like it did many, many moons ago when you were just a toddler, and it will be telling you, "Nope. You just can’t do it."

If you live a long enough life, there may come a time when the cycle is complete and you are not unlike that baby that you once were, completely dependent on another. It may be that son or that daughter who now feeds and bathes you. This will be your In Depends Day, the day you find yourself once again wearing diapers.

 

 

Reviews

[Rie Sheridan Rose]

Excellent piece. I love your "cycle of life". I never really thought about it quite this way before, but everything you say rings terrifyingly true. :)