MARY ANN FITZMORRIS / L’Observateur / August 26, 2000

Some people are just slow to catch on. Take me, for example. For the last few years when my husband and son go off to camp together, I’ve enrolled my daughter in a camp of her own. This year it hit me. No, no, stupid, the trick is to stagger camps throughout the summer to have the children in the house separately! This eliminates the need for a dungeon. But I have recently found a way of separating my kids which is not as delicious as a dungeon, or as expensive as a camp.

I pray them apart. Really. Not long ago they got into a very ugly squabble. Left with no ideas, I grabbed both of them and held one on each side on my bed while I prayed the Hail Mary.

This method, I’ll admit, is definitely a last resort, concocted when all else failed. I’ve never been a fan of Time Out; it’s not constructive enough. I preferred using something like, “Give me 10 words out of this dictionary that I don’t know.” The offender would wind up learning the meaning of quite a few words. This would usually take some time, so both kids would forget what the argument was about. For a while I entertained the fantasy that my son, who instigates all squabbles, would have the largest vocabulary of any kid his age.

But soon he tired of the game, and physical force was required to keep this method going. We moved on to something he really needed: math pages. When it was time to break up an altercation, I’d set up a page of multiplication or division. We didn’t get past the first two…uh, problems, not pages.It was then that I discovered that I was approaching this from the wrong angle. Punishments such as reading (sorry, teachers, but the truth is out), vocabulary words…or the educational equivalent of the medieval rack, MATH…all these required the kid to actually do something. Which is out of the question.

No, summer is for doing nothing. But doing nothing can get you into trouble, and quickly. Soon I came to the frightening realization that both kids would be in the house at the same time every day.It was not long before the really ugly squabble that precipitated the Hail Marys happened. But it was enlightening. Call it divine intervention, or whatever you will, but it worked. Peace was restored with the first two prayers. Visionaries who have seen Mary all report the same thing: she wants us to pray the rosary. She wants us to pray for world peace. No one has brought up the idea of sibling peace, but this prayer works for that, too.

It just doesn’t work in the conventional way. It did, though, the first time. Both children calmed down and harmony was restored. But I didn’t stop there. I thought, “This is great! This works! The solution is Passive Punishment.”The next time the squabbling started I didn’t grab them and bring them together to kiss and make up, I just started praying the Hail Mary right there. They reacted like I was scratching my fingernails on the blackboard. This just wasn’t right! Praying at night before bed is fine, and we sometimes use Hail Marys to return to sleep after a nightmare. But there was something totally unacceptable about this breaking into the Hail Mary aloud in the middle of the day. They quit fighting and spent the next few minutes pleading for me to stop. Then they scattered like mice.It went like that a few more times, but soon the dynamics changed again when I brought out Mary to settle a score. Both children stopped fighting with each other and went after me. That also works, since my only objective is to get them away from their own spat.

And now a spontaneous rendition of the Hail Mary just makes them stop what they’re doing and laugh. Again, success!What would the visionaries think of this? Would they call it blasphemy or divine intervention? It’s probably a little of both.

And more. It’s effective. So much better than a dungeon, and almost as much fun.

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