Buying a new family car

I have come to the conclusion that the three most stressful
times in a parent’s life are:
1) Sending your first child off to kindergarten 2) finding out
that your child was the one at the birthday party who put the cat
in the laundry shoot and 3) buying a new family car.
I have come to the conclusion that the three most stressful times in a parent’s life are:

1) Sending your first child off to kindergarten 2) finding out that your child was the one at the birthday party who put the cat in the laundry shoot and 3) buying a new family car.

Since we’ve already passed numbers one and two, these days we’re concentrating on number three.

The first thing we needed to do was to figure out what kind of car we wanted. So in a strange fit of guilt and fairness, I gathered the family together to make a list. It went, in no particular order: a race car, a car with fancy stripes, a “pink one,” something with big tires and four equal cup holders, a car that drives in the snow, one with a VCR, and finally, a car with heavily tinted windows, preferably something in a limousine.

Even after crossing off the obvious no’s, there was still no car on the entire planet that would make everyone in our family happy.

Which was fine, really, since I had assumed, in the true Farmer spirit of things that I’d let everyone have their say and just do what I wanted to anyway.

That is until my husband, normally a cautious, soft-spoken man, uttered two of the most dangerous words in the English language. Words that have, mind you, toppled powerful dictatorships throughout time: Let’s compromise.

Sure, in theory, it sounds like a good idea. Democratic, even. In fact, there are probably a lot of instances where family compromises work out well. Like, for instance, on made-for-television Hallmark movies or in the Kennedy household.

But, really, it depends on what, exactly, your family’s compromising process is.

I call the first kind the Glass Half-Full version. This is where all family members give input and then the group makes a final decision by consensus. Afterward, everyone is happy, and all of the kids skip off to make matching ponchos and start a family band.

The second kind is, you guessed it, the Glass Half-Empty version. This starts out much like the first one, except in the end everyone is crying and throwing things.

Then there’s the Farmer version. This is where the phrase, “Let’s compromise,” is less of a request and more of a hopeful euphemism for, “Let’s do lot of arguing until someone finally stands up and dramatically decries that unfairness is running rampant in the world and that no one ever listens to their needs and that they might as well go to off to live the rest of their meaningless life alone rather than –”

Well, you get the idea.

In my defense, it’s not just my family who has this kind of trouble.

Every Friday, my friend Linda, normally a wise and practical woman, tries to get her four children to agree on what kind of pizza to order. But every week, after a 15 minute heated debate on tomatoes versus mushrooms, followed by a particularly nasty accusation of rampant vote fixing and several demands for a recount, Linda leaves the pizza parlor a tired and broken woman with one extra large pizza divided up into five separate sections.

Which brings me back to the car.

After weeks of scientific research, and some serious soul searching, we finally found a car that everyone liked: a blue SUV with a high safety rating, tinted windows, a sunroof, and four full-sized cup holders.

The funny thing is, it looks a lot like our old car, except cleaner and with lower mileage.

I didn’t say a word.