It’s a not-uncommon convention in sitcoms to have an oft-mentioned but never seen character hovering in the background. These characters carry a presence that is sometimes magnified by the fact that you never see them. In the case of Maris Crane, for instance, you hear so much about the character that it becomes impossible for the producers to find anyone to fit the profile. Often the imagination can run more wild and free when it’s a faceless entity. If you ever saw them, you’d probably be disappointed. These characters usually add humor in some form or another with their larger-than-life non-present presence.

Our new neighbor is kind of like the comedy-relief character you never actually see. I’ve never actually seen her, though her presence looms large in our common back yard. I hear her pretty much whenever I go out to the car, to take out the trash, smoke, or whatever else. A couple times I’ve heard her on the phone through the walls. Her voice carries. Most of the time it carries, though, because she’s screaming. So unlike her sitcom counterparts, it’s not actually funny.

I don’t know. Maybe she has the worst kids on God’s Green Earth. The kids seem decent enough to me. They play with the hose outside, run around, and do most of the things you would expect of kids about 11 and 8 years old (maybe as old as 13 and 10 or so). I see their sister (somewhere in the 14-16 range) less frequently, though she seeks okay, too. They don’t make me nervous the same way that a lot of the neighborhood kids do.

But they apparently forget to do their chores. That’s almost always what I hear her screaming about. The dishes haven’t been done, their room hasn’t been cleaned, or the something else along those lines. Every day it’s something that they’ve failed to do. One time they didn’t wrap up the trash they put in the trash can and it was windy and things got blown around the yard. So of course she screamed at them for that and threatened to take away the TV and their video games and whatnot if they didn’t go pick it up right that moment. She made threat after threat about what she was going to do if they didn’t clean up the yard even as they were quickly scrambling to pick up the yard as fast as they possibly could.

I feel very fortunate that I was not raised in a household where there was a lot of yelling. We never yelled about how Mom and Dad just didn’t want us to be happy and they never yelled about the chores we didn’t do. Instead they simply told us what to do and we responded. Maybe the kids don’t respond to anything but her screaming. Maybe they’ve been conditioned as such. Pretty impossible to say.

It’s easy to criticize when you don’t have any kids of your own. I get annoyed by childless couples who get overly moralistic about how other people fail to raise their children right and properly keep them in line. Not that I don’t understand their frustration, but I favor humility in moralizing others about how they deal with circumstances you’ve never confronted. Even so, I simply cannot imagine that the Unfunny Sitcom Neighbor’s kids are better off for all of the screaming that goes on and I have to think that there is a better way.