Payback

Another fun thing about having kids is the way they make you realize what you must’ve been like as a kid. My girls have developed a habit of memorizing certain lines from movies and repeating them over and over (and over) again, until I’m ready to scream at them to stop. First it was a line from Mulan: “Get out of there, you make people sick!” which they would say, scream, sing, or shout to no end. This week it’s a line from the movie The Wild: “Goodbye Ryan, we’re gonna miss ya!” They can repeat this phrase for hours and never grow bored of it.

The only remotely funny thing about this annoying new game of theirs is remembering that my sister and I used to do the exact same thing. There was a time when we could (and frequently did) recite every word of dialogue from the movie Valley Girl (among others), and we thought it was highly entertaining. Our mother didn’t see the enjoyment in repeating the same sets of lines over and over again, and used to shush us repeatedly. At the time I thought she was a spoil sport who didn’t understand the basic joys in life. I even remember her telling me that she didn’t have any interest in seeing the same movie fifty times, and wondering how she could possibly feel like that. Now, of course, I get it. I get it well enough that the other day, I actually apologized to her for driving her crazy with my movie-line memorizations all those years ago. She, of course, just nodded toward my kids, shouting “Goodbye Ryan, we’re gonna miss ya!” in unison, and laughed.