It's not Easy Being Green

Four out of five sons agree: green is their favorite color.

This just proves my theory that all of their genes did not come from me.

As a color, green is okay. Obviously, much of the world is green, and that's nice. Some shades of green are really lovely. But many shades are, well, just so green.

Maybe my aversion had something to do with the color rhyming with my name. Maybe I was afraid I'd grow up to be Janean Greene.

My oldest son loved and adhered to green as if it were his religion. A colicky summer baby, all he needed to stop crying was to be taken outside--where it was green--for the constant, constant crying to simply cease.

He let me know verbally early on that green did it for him. I remember watching him trying to catch green lights on his arms at the circus, wanting to choose "green meat" for his third birthday dinner, loving pea soup ("green voot") and grapes.

I accepted this very calmly and even encouraged it. Green was only one color. Even if I had six or eight children, there were plenty of favorite colors left for my other children to choose. Little did I know that most of them would choose green.

I had only two children for over a decade. Whenever I bought anything for them, one was always green. Brother would get the red one or the blue one--he didn't have a color religion. In fact, I think his first liked color was pink. I also accepted this very calmly. Pink is a pretty color. I let him like it without hassle. After he got to day care or maybe school, his preference seemed to somehow change.

My third son actually liked orange best first. Then black, or blue. I forget because he decided to very methodically change his "favorite" color according to the rainbow at the time of his birthday each year. (Yes, he's a future organizer of some type.) A few years ago, though, he settled on green, and it seemed to stick. And his little brothers are copying him. (My daughter wisely announced, "I like gold!" But that's a different story.)

The first house I bought was hideous. Decorated by some tasteless, deranged green freak from the mid-fifties, almost every room of it featured some awful shade of green. The dining room wallpaper was comprised entirely of green leaves with small pink flowers on them here and there. The linoleum in the kitchen was a passive yellow and a monstrous green--to match the "Dirty Diaper" paint on the walls, I suppose. The master bedroom sported dull moss green carpet. Even the nursery had enormous, heavy, olive green funeral-parlor drapes across two whole walls and gray-green stripey wallpaper--for a few minutes, until I could burn the drapes and paint the walls blue.

It was actually more than a few minutes, because I moved into the house a day-and-a-half after my first son was born. He had enough time to wet a stream onto the wallpaper before I could get it painted. At the time, I actually attributed that to good taste in him.

By the time we sold that house, I had changed the "Dirty Diaper" paint in the kitchen to "Wedding Cake." I had ripped out the Mike Wazowski linoleum and relaid six floors. I had also ripped out the horrible bedroom carpet to find a wonderful hard-wood floor beneath it--that I had never enjoyed the whole fifteen years I had lived there. I had painted over the foot-long butterflies in the family room downstairs. The house was so lovely that I wanted to move right back in. But we'd outgrown it.

By then, only one room in the house was green--the former bedroom of my oldest son. We had painted it the palest possible green with deep forest green trim. It looked fine.

I regularly wear shades of green. I just don't want to have to look at green exclusively--as in every room of my house--or dye every birthday cake I bake green.

I wonder if I can convince the other boys that green as a favorite was already taken by their oldest brother? All grown up, he still likes green. Now, we're just waiting for his kids--Kelly, Jade, Hunter, Teal, Emerald, Sage, Forest, and Spring, to appear on the scene.