UnchartedParent.com

Sometimes life really does imitate art.

Future dances have been cancelled at a local public high school over disapproval of a form of dance called “grinding.”  Grinding occurs when a girl leans forward and sticks her butt out and a boy then stands behind her and makes thrusting motions with his pelvis.

Disgusting?  Sure.

Would I want my kid doing this?  No.

Is this offensive to some other kids?  Undoubtedly.

Should all dances then be cancelled as a remedy?  Don’t be ridiculous.

Kids have been horrifying parents with their behavior for generations—probably throughout recorded history.  I’m sure, long ago, in some cave in what would thousands of years later become France, some adolescent cavekid painted a picture on a cave wall that his parents and tribe insisted was lewd.  (We can only imagine the penalty.)  Specifically, parents and other segments of society have always objected to the way kids have expressed themselves with their bodies through dance.  Even ballet was once thought to be obscene, not to mention Elvis’s hips and the lambada.  (Some thought that the public should have been protected from Al Gore’s Macarena, but that’s another debate for another time.)  As time went on, however, most of these “obscenities” were eventually accepted by the mainstream and recognized as legitimate forms of expression.  The proponents of these forms eventually became society’s rulemakers, and their standards then became accepted as appropriate for society as a whole.

All of that being said, however, does not mean that the adults in our society shouldn’t set standards and expectations for today’s kids.  It’s perfectly appropriate for administrators in this situation to establish rules of conduct; after all, it’s their job to prepare today’s kids to take their places in the adult world, and learning that there are limits to acceptable behavior ought to be part of what they teach.  If the administration believes that “grinding” is unacceptable behavior at a school function—and I can certainly understand that position—then by all means, they should prohibit that activity.

But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Make sure that kids understand the rules, then punish the violators by insisting that they leave the dance.  If the offending kids refuse to obey, there are plenty of other sanctions in educators’ toolboxes that they can use.  But let the rest of the kids enjoy their dances.  Indeed, the dance might provide an educational experience in itself as kids who disapprove of their peers’ behavior work out how to deal with a tricky situation in the presence of responsible adults who can back them up.

Canceling school dances is an overreaction, though not a surprising one.  This is, after all, an era where rational discretion seems to have left many of our schools.  Zero-tolerance drug and weapons policies result in young children being suspended for carrying plastic butter knives in their lunches, and adolescent girls can be kicked out of school for carrying Tylenol or Motrin to relieve menstrual cramps.  School curricula are being revised not to ensure the best overall education for our kids, but to boost uniform standard test scores that actually do leave some kids behind and aim to guarantee that the rest of the kids achieve a lowest-common denominator of education—and not much more.  So it’s no shock that when faced with an offensive dance craze, a school addresses the problem by simply eliminating any potential public setting where it might occur, regardless of the positive social aspects provided to kids via their participation in school dances.

Besides, we all know how this turns out.  One teen told me that a group of high-school kids is contemplating renting a hall and holding their own dance.  I’ve seen that movie before; it was big in the ‘80’s.  In the battle between the town and Kevin Bacon, there was never really any question who would end up the victor.

Kevin Bacon, where are you now?

I’m not a patient person.  Never have been, never will be.  I’ve worked on this flaw a lot, and I have gotten better.  But compared to almost anyone, I’m just impatient.

Compared to almost anyone, that is, except my daughter.

Yes, she is only eighteen months old, and everyone knows that “patience” is hardly a toddler’s strong suit.  But “Emmie” sets new record lows, I think; she is impatient even for such a little kid. 

Most toddlers, even babies, will get excited when they see their food being prepared.  My Emmie?  She begins to cry the moment I take the milk out of the refrigerator because she’s not drinking it yet.  I cannot tell her that I have to “cook dinner” because that phrase prompts her to run to her high chair and try to climb into it, whining all the while.  When I pull the car into the garage, she instantly begins tugging at her car seat strap and whining while looking straight at me to indicate her frustration at not yet being out of her seat—and all of this occurs before I’ve even managed to shut off the engine.  She even gets impatient with the books she brings me to read; after two or three pages, she slams the requested book shut to make it clear that she is finished, even if the book isn’t.

The ironic thing about all of this is, naturally, that I have no patience for Emmie’s impatience.  It drives me crazy.  I can’t understand why she can’t figure out that if she would just wait a minute or two, she’ll probably get what she wants.  So I get frustrated and find myself snapping at her in exasperation, and then we’re both unhappy. 

I guess we both have something to work on.

It was a big one, the biggest I’ve seen.

It was the kind I’ve been told I threw as a kid.

Last week, “Jack” had his first kicking, screaming, sobbing-so-hard-he-can’t-breathe temper-tantrum.  He’s thrown little tantrums before, of course, but the full-blown, dramatic hysteria of a world about to end just isn’t his style.  Well, it didn’t used to be.

And what triggered this melodrama?  Of what crime was I guilty?

Upon arriving home, I told him that I’d already gotten the mail.  It wasn’t the fact that I’d gotten it that upset him, mind you; it was the fact that I told him I had.  And, as he informed me over his quivering lower lip, I interrupted him in the process.

I apologized for the interruption—I believe it’s important to ‘fess up when you’ve messed up—but that was all I was willing to give him.  Apparently I wasn’t sufficiently contrite, however, because he was not at all satisfied.  He thrashed about and screamed even more.

Usually, the whining and complaining and crying gets to me.  I have far less patience for it than I wish I did.  It makes me want to have a temper-tantrum myself. 

But my reaction to Jack’s display this time was uncharacteristically serene.  We were in the garage in the car, engine safely turned off, and I calmly looked at him and said, “Jack, I’m taking ‘Emmie’ into the house.  When you are finished having your temper-tantrum, you may join us.”  And despite louder wails, I did just that.  The result?  In rather short order, Jack pulled himself together and, sniffling, joined us in the house.

I guess the absurdity of this temper-tantrum made it easy for me to maintain my own cool.  And my calmness, after a moment, enabled Jack to realize that the world had not ended and he found his own center again.  I was proud of myself, for once, for how I handled this outburst.

Still, I’m hoping that this behavior was an isolated incident and not an indication of what’s to come.

“No,” my four-and-a-half-year-old son protested.  “We can’t go out to dinner on Friday night.  We have to have challah and candles, and they don’t have those at the restaurant.”

My face broke into a smile.  My efforts were succeeding. 

I love the idea of family traditions.  I select details from our daily, weekly or yearly lives and I try to imbue them with a sense of importance.  I want my adult children to be able to remember fondly walks through New England apple orchards in fall, vibrant discussions at the family dinner table at least several times each week and the family-based exploration of the rhythms of the Jewish calendar.  Establishing and observing these traditions will also, I hope, give my children a firm sense of belonging to a unique family where we all love each other enough to celebrate together the different facets of who we are.  After all, how many other families celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Chuseok, Christmas and Army-Navy Day with equal vigor—and always, in season, with apples picked ourselves from the local orchard?

One of the traditions I set out to establish early on was to mark the beginning of Shabbat each week with a family dinner.  We say the prayers, light the candles and sip the wine, and share challah I usually make myself.  We eat in the dining room, with cloth napkins instead of paper and a special fun cup that “Jack” only uses on Friday nights.  Other than challah and wine (and milk for the kids), the menu is unimportant—we have even had fast-food pizza on particularly hectic days—but no one can begin eating until the prayers are concluded.  (We do allow a cranky-baby exception to that rule.)  Though I don’t read a word of Hebrew and speak only a few well-known vocabulary words (“shalom” comes to mind), I’ve learned the prayers in Hebrew well enough to let them roll off of my tongue and into the ears of my young children.

We are not, ironically, “religious” about observing Shabbat.  Occasionally we are at someone else’s house, and, if so, we follow their Friday-night traditions.  Sometimes I’m just too darned tired at the end of the week to cook, and we go out.  It was during one of these overtired days that Jack responded to my suggestion of dining out by objecting to missing the weekly candles and challah.  Smiling and proud, I agreed to cook so that I would not deprive Jack of this already cherished family tradition.

What more could a Jewish mother ask?

I recently turned 40.

This is the first birthday that has bothered me.  I was too busy getting married and graduating from law and graduate school when I turned 30 even to notice that birthday.  I was pregnant with my first child when I turned 35, and, in spite of the “advanced maternal age” label that was plastered on my medical file, I still felt young and I knew I was about to enter a whole new world.

But 40 isn’t just an age.  It’s a stage.

I am officially middle-aged.

Lest this birthday pass unnoticed, fate seems to have presented me with multiple opportunities to sear into my brain the fact that I am no longer considered young.  For example, recent visits to my gynecologist and my gastroenterologist have netted me, respectively, a mammogram (“We do a baseline test at age 40”) and a bone-density scan. (“It’s not your age; it’s something we do for Crohn’s patients.”  Right, and how come I’ve never been referred for this test before?  I’ve had Crohn’s for almost twenty years.)  I know that I am now too old to, for example, become a spy for the CIA.  And I’m old enough that not only would it be difficult for me to take up a new foreign language, but I should be grateful each day that I can actually remember all of the words I want to use in my native English.

Perhaps the greatest markers of the arrival of middle age are cultural.  The appeal of seeing one’s underwear protruding over one’s pants eludes me.  MySpace scares me to death.  And any moderately educated third-grader could probably kick my butt on the computer. 

The biggest harbinger of my middle age, however, came last week, when I was watching the Today Show as I got dressed (which probably tells you something right there).  I watched some white, hip-hop, rapper chick named Fergie (when did the Duchess of York take up rap?) perform a song with the refrain, “How come every time you come around, my London, London Bridge wanna go down.”  When she was done, I wrinkled my brow and my entire face and blurted out loud, “I don’t get it.”

Middle age, here I am.  But as so many people have consoled: it’s better than the alternative.

A story following Fergie’s rap song promised to reveal beauty tips for “women over 40.” 

I paid attention.

Often in this blog, I’ve discussed dilemmas relating to my kids.  What I haven’t done in several cases is come back and told you how things turned out or how they’re progressing.  So, to the extent it is possible to provide answers, here are some updates regarding topics about which I’ve blogged over the past few months.

• “Emmie’s” sleep.  At the very great risk of jinxing myself, I will write here that we have made some progress on Emmie’s sleep issues.  We finally and reluctantly decided that if she woke up screaming in the middle of the night, we would wait five minutes and then, if she hadn’t stopped, we would set up the pack-and-play in our room and let her spend the rest of the night there.  We followed this strategy for one night, and that seemed to be all she needed!  There have been a couple of other incidents where she woke up too early in the morning and we tried to get a little more sleep by putting her in the pack-and-play.  (It didn’t work.)  And there have been one or two minor setbacks.  But for the most part, the middle-of-the-night-screaming episodes seemed to have stopped.  Maybe she just needed to know that we would let her be with us if she really wanted to be?  Also, we revamped bedtime for both kids so that our non-napping four-and-a-half-year-old son now is in bed by 8:00 p.m., but our one-and-a-half year-old daughter doesn’t get tucked into her crib until somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m.  This change has resulted in a better-rested little boy and a little girl who, with a couple of exceptions, now generally gets up between 6:00 and 6:45 a.m.—much better than the 4:45 to 5:30 a.m. we were enduring before.  It’s also resulted in parents who are less inclined to walk face-first into walls and doorways due to sheer exhaustion.

• “Jack’s” bike.  He got back on!  In less than a week!  (O.K., so you knew that’s what was going to happen.  I freaked out again without cause.  I’m sure it won’t be the last time.)
• Selling our house.  It’s still on the market, and at the moment, it seems the stream of interested potential buyers has run dry.  I have, however, noticed an almost-daily trickle of news stories regarding the horrible state of the real estate market and how difficult it is for anyone to sell a house these days.  The clock is ticking; keep your fingers crossed!  In addition, our house is still clean, but some dust is starting to sneak up on us.  But I have managed to decrease my stress level and have seen a corresponding reduction in the whininess of my kids.
• September 11, 2006.  Jack asked his first questions about September 11 on this year’s anniversary when he saw the small American flag pinned to my shirt.  He wanted to know why I was wearing it, so I said simply, “Five years ago today, some very bad people did something very bad to our country, and it was very sad.”  Curious Jack naturally followed up with, “What did they do?”  “They killed a lot of people,” I replied, praying he wouldn’t ask me how they killed them.  Jack asked no more questions, so I was spared from further explanation for the moment.  I know that someday, I will have to answer that question and many more from my children, and I hope that I will have some answers to satisfy them, even though I really don’t know how to explain the inexplicable.

Our four-and-a-half year-old son attended his first soccer class last week.

I like to think of myself as distinctive, unique.  I try to do things because I truly want to, and if those things are unusual, so much the better.  My husband and I created our interracial family through technology and adoption; hardly unique, but definitely not the mainstream.  I am, for the most part, a stay-at-home mom, but my kids have nearly always gone to part-time daycare.  (More on that in a future post.)  Unlike many of my peers, I don’t keep the cleanest house in the world, and I really don’t worry about it.

But now I’m a soccer mom.

Soccer has always seemed to me to be a positive sport for kids.  There’s lots of running involved to counter the effects of watching TV and playing video games, it teaches kids about working as a team, and it’s not rooted in violence and acquiring territory (sorry all you boxing and football fans out there).  But geez, everybody seems to have at least one kid who plays soccer.  And now, so do I.

Somebody bring me a minivan!

How do you get a little boy to talk?

I have puzzled over this question almost since my now four-and-a-half year-old son acquired the power of speech.  In stereotypical male fashion, “Jack” refuses to discuss his feelings and dislikes sharing with me or his father details about his day.  While this behavior merely disappoints or annoys me now, I harbor real concerns for what it might mean when Jack is an adolescent and he is surrounded by people, places, objects and ideas that really need discussion.  If there are drug dealers doing business in his middle school, for example, I’m going to want to know about it, and I’d like to hear it from him.  If world events like terrorist attacks leave him frightened and confused, I’d like to believe he will come to me or his father and talk them over.

With that future in mind, I’ve tried mightily to set an early precedent of discussing daily events and feelings.  Until now, it’s been an uphill and mostly unsuccessful battle.  I’ve tried asking him how his day was (“Good”), asking specific questions like, “Did you play outside today?” (“Yes”), and “What was the name of the book your teacher read during circle time?” (“I don’t remember”).  I’ve tried not asking questions to let him come to me with information.  The result: I didn’t get any.  I’ve even asked about feelings: “Do you feel sad because the new baby is taking a lot of Mommy’s time?”  (“Yes.”)

Then an acquaintance of mine relayed to me a trick her mother, a former teacher, told her.  She suggested asking specific, two-choice questions.  For example, I might ask Jack, “Did your teacher read you the book about the caterpillar or the book about the ladybug?”  My acquaintance swore that this technique had caused information to spill from her son’s mouth like water from a  running tap.  I was skeptical, but I decided to give it a try.

When I picked Jack up after his first day at his new school, I asked ordinary questions about how he liked the school and if he had fun, and I received the usual one-word answers in return.  But then, I asked him if he had read a book with his new teacher or colored anything with crayons.  I couldn’t believe his response:

“She read us a book.  It was The Very Grouchy Ladybug.  The ladybug wants to eat some aphids for breakfast.  Then a nice ladybug comes and the grouchy ladybug doesn’t want to share.  So it goes and it meets animals.  First a yellow jacket, and a hyena, and a snake.  And the animals ask if the ladybug wants to fight, but she says no, you’re not big enough.  And then she meets a whale, and the whale sends her all the way back to the nice ladybug, and now the grouchy ladybug is nice and she eats aphids.”

Whoa.

“And then we made ladybugs out of construction paper, and then my teacher gave me a ladybug eraser.  Wanna see it?”

Who is this kid?

Since then, I’ve tried to ask these two-choice questions when I could, and most of the time I’ve gotten similarly positive results.  I don’t know why this approach works, but I don’t really care.  All I know is that my acquaintance’s mother is a genius.

Someone ought to give this woman an award!

It’s a little after 10 p.m., Sunday night, September 10.  We’ve finished dinner, the kids are fast asleep, and my husband and I were just procrastinating in the kitchen, laughing and marveling at the huge mounds of dirty dishes I always seem to create when I try out a new recipe.

In other words, it’s an ordinary Sunday night.

But there is nothing ordinary about tomorrow.

Five years ago tomorrow, time stopped.  Evil uncovered its face, burst from the shadows and roared its presence to the world.  Nearly 3,000 lights were extinguished in flame, smoke, oil, concrete and metal.  The light of the world flickered briefly as we all tried in vain to comprehend all that had changed in one sunny, east-coast morning.

Five years ago tomorrow, we learned that heroes don’t wear capes and fly faster than speeding trains; rather, they wear first-responder uniforms and climb tens of flights of stairs into burning skyscrapers.  Heroes also sacrifice themselves by bringing down a hijacked airliner in a field so that scores of people in a city on the ground might live.  Heroes dig through rubble, answer calls for help in the smoldering darkness and carry charred, suffering, innocent people to a place where their wounds can be tended and they might have a chance to survive.

Good versus evil: it’s the oldest story in the world.  Whatever anyone thinks of the United States’ response to September 11, no one can rationally claim that those nearly 3,000 people deserved to die that day.  They were undeniably innocent. 

As parents, we know a lot about innocence.

Sleeping in my house right now are a blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy and a dark-haired, brown-eyed little girl.  These children—my children, and all others like them, are innocent.  They learn evil as we, the grown-ups, teach it to them.  They learn from the world around them.  And we parents must look into their eager, innocent eyes and figure out how to explain to them what is good and what is evil.  And after September 11, 2001, we have to find a way to tell them that even after all of our denials, in fact, monsters and heroes really do exist.

On September 11, 2002, I wrote a letter to my then nine-month-old son.  Though it will make this blog entry a bit longer than most, I excerpt some of that letter here.  I dread the inevitable day I will have to explain September 11 to my son; after all, how can I explain such a horrific, inexplicable event?  The letter I wrote on the one-year anniversary of September 11 was my initial attempt to undertake this weighty task.

My Dearest _____,

            I am so lucky.

            I am writing this letter on the one year anniversary of September 11, 2001.  Someday, you will learn in school about what happened on that day.  But I want you to know that history is real, and that this bit of history happened right here, very shortly before you were born.

            Why am I—are we—lucky?  Because our September 11 story is not very tragic.  Daddy and I did not lose anyone we knew on that day.  In fact, we have so much more now than we did a year ago: we have you.  Because of you, last year was a very good year.  But it was also because of you that I learned how to be scared in a way that I never could have imagined.  On September 11, 2001, and in the days that followed, what I thought about more than anything else was you.

            Let me tell you how that day unfolded for us.  I was six months pregnant with you, and though my job often took me into Washington for meetings on Capitol Hill and in other parts of the city, I was working from home that day.  Daddy had gone to work in the city.  I had just woken up from a nap—pregnant women take lots of naps when they can—and I turned on the news, which was just reporting that a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York.
           
           I called Daddy to tell him.  He hadn’t arrived at work yet, so I left a message for him.  I did the same when the second plane hit, although now I was horrified, because that second plane made it clear that this was no accident.  Then I heard and felt a distant boom, and I thought, “Is something happening here now?”  Five minutes later, the news reported that the plane had hit the Pentagon.  Suddenly, whatever was happening was happening here.

            I called Daddy again to tell him to get out of Washington and come home.  Our conversation was jumbled, as he was trying to talk to others at work about what was happening and more news reports were coming in every minute.  The television kept reporting more explosions: a fire on the mall, a car bomb at the State Department, an explosion on Capitol Hill.  Daddy said he would come home, we both promised to keep our cell phones on, and Daddy said he would call me every half-hour to let me know he was okay.

            I spent the rest of the morning with the house phone in one hand and my cell phone in the other, and my eyes glued to the television.  I just kept praying that Daddy could find a way home, and I wondered what kind of world you would be born into.  I knew that to come home, Daddy would have to cross a bridge into Virginia, and none of those routes seemed good.  The 14^th Street Bridge would certainly be closed because bridge traffic went right past the Pentagon.  The Roosevelt or Key bridges to the west seemed to be the next best option, but those would require Daddy to walk past the State Department, where the military was now deployed and brandishing machine guns.

            Daddy and I couldn’t talk for several hours because all of the circuits were busy.  I kept trying to reach him, and I felt a new kind of fear and helplessness.  It was clear something awful and unprecedented was happening, but that was all I or anyone knew.  Reports came in of another hijacked plane headed towards Washington from the west, and then reporters said that the military had been authorized to shoot it down if it approached.  I looked up at the sky, terrified: west of Washington was our house!!  I kept placing my hand on my stomach, feeling you move, thinking how unspeakably awful it would be if this or an attack in the days that followed would deprive you of your father or the chance even to start your life.

          When I finally reached Daddy, he told me that downtown Washington was chaos.  Traffic was at a standstill, the thick black smoke pouring out of the Pentagon could be seen for miles, hordes of people were on foot trying to find a way out of the city and everyone was afraid of where the next attack might be.  He told me that he was going to cross the Roosevelt Bridge and walk down Route 50, so I begged him to be careful and we agreed on a meeting place.  I drove to pick him up, but I didn’t get very far before a police blockade prevented me from going any further east: all roads to Washington were closed.  I called Daddy in despair, and told him he would have to walk the rest of the way.

            As you have undoubtedly figured out by now, Daddy and I did meet up and we went home.  Daddy walked ten miles that day and his foot, already recovering from surgery, was in such bad shape that he could barely walk at all the next day.  But we didn’t care about that.  We spent the rest of September 11 icing his foot and watching the horrors unfold on television—and fearing September 12.         

           Three months later, you were born and the way in which I look at the world was transformed again.  I look into your face and I see complete innocence and endless possibilities.  At nine months, you are the epitome of why the world is good.  When you laugh and show your three teeth and smiling blue eyes and messy head of blond hair that’s already had three haircuts, I know there isn’t a better sight or sound anywhere in the world.  And I wonder how anyone who has a child could ever want anything except for a completely peaceful world where his or her child can have the best possible chance to grow up happy.  I know that I would give my life or a limb or everything I own in a second if it meant saving you, and I know that in another terrorist attack, that probably wouldn’t make a difference.  I don’t understand how anyone could be willing to snuff out your life that has barely begun.

Like most parents, I hope you have a long, long, very happy life.  I will do everything I can to see that you do.  I hope you grow up feeling safe and secure, and that your childhood isn’t robbed by fear and terror.  I hope this world is everything that you and every other child deserve.  This time, we were lucky.  I hope and pray that we—especially you—will be in the future.

                                                                                    Love, Your Mommy

Sometimes these blog posts just write themselves.

I was packing lunches for tomorrow, and as I worked through the puzzle of how two kids could require four lunchboxes in one day, I realized that I had forgotten something.  So I sat down at the computer and typed an e-mail to a friend that read something like this:

“So, I am trying to prepare for tomorrow, which includes, in the following order: one cat-at-the-vet appointment, one bikini-wax appointment, two kids being driven to and picked up from two different schools in opposite directions, one “You’re-Gonna-Be-a-Big-Sister-Party for B——,” a picnic at one of kid’s schools and a cookout at the other’s—the last two events taking place at the same time.  Tomorrow is also bill-paying day and I have a list of a half-dozen additional errands that must be completed tomorrow.  I am also hoping to shower at some point in the day. 

“Needless to say, I’ve forgotten a few things.  I know I’m supposed to be co-hosting this big-sister party, but what did I promise to bring?”

And this is just the first week of school!  What happens when things get really busy?

Good thing I wrote that e-mail; I never would have gotten around to writing a blog post today!