Charting the puzzles and peeves of kid-herding — from Huggies to homework, Pilates to pinatas.
Published bi-weekly, twice a month
You listen to me, I would say if my teeth weren’t clenched for the express purpose of preventing my saying it. I will be tucking you in when you stumble home from the senior prom shnockered on bad, illegally obtained liquor, and you will like it. … The tucking-in, I mean. Not the liquor. You will very much dislike the liquor.
Are you like me? Do you find yourself stranded in the middle of January without a single resolution for the New Year? Well, don’t panic. I have a plan for us both.
The reason I haven’t set any goals for 2015 is because it demands personal reflection, which is dreary, and accountability, which is yucky. So instead, I’m going to suggest terrific resolutions that you can make, dear reader. These will not only help you become a better human — they’ll make the world far more pleasant for me. Win-win!
Pick and choose your favorites, but get on it quick. I don’t want to see the old you ever again. This year, you will:
Any of these strike your fancy? No? That’s okay. I asked my friends to contribute some, too. They suggest that 2015 be the year you:
I can’t take this anymore. I can’t read one more news story about a child who committed suicide after being relentlessly bullied.
Bullying is the new smoking: The bad kids do it and always for terrible reasons. The schools are wallpapered with posters urging you not to do it. And apparently, bullying kills — far faster, in fact, than lung cancer does.
But I don’t want to talk about bullies, those cowardly cretins who think they can deflect attention from their own festering failures by kicking around someone who’s simply less inclined to be mean. It’s obvious; no one should harass or humiliate another person. But do you know what else shouldn’t happen? Children should not kill themselves. Ever. And that’s what I want to talk about.
This is a message for the bullied — a pissed-off missive for kids who’ve fallen prey to some loud-crowing schoolyard tyrant or cackling klatch of neighborhood creeps.
Dear Bullied Kid,
Yeah, you. The one wearing that mantle of shame. I’ll be honest: It doesn’t look great on you. It’s not your color, not your size. I see you in something more colorful — something lighter.
Word has it you’re being pestered by the local toughs. Do they say you’re weird? Call you a freak? Insist that you don’t fit in? Joke’s on them because you’re in great company: Nearly a third of American students say they’ve been bullied this year alone. That means one in every three kids on your block, your bus, your team feels the same way you do at any given moment.
If there were a Pocket Field Guide to Dating Musicians, it would read like this:
This species can best be viewed in its natural habitat, under the colored lights of nightclub stages — and in the drier months, anywhere there’s free beer.
At the front stands the lead singer, scientific name Egos maximus, a close relative of the peacock. Don’t look him directly in the eye; he views this as a mating call and will rip his ironic T-shirt right off and begin caressing the mike suggestively if he thinks you’re the slightest bit interested.
To his left is the guitarist, Controli freakata, recognized in the wild by his rock-and-roll power stance, practiced indifference, and telltale markings: pants several sizes too small and bits of twine, locks of hair, and other strands of refuse wound round his wrist as boho jewelry. Beware: He is prone to depression; it’s when he writes “his best stuff.”
And making all that racket at the back, on the riser, is the grinning drummer, Rhythm perspiratious, descended more recently than the rest of us from apes. This good-time boy is a competent multitasker but frequently shamed by his bandmates for not knowing scales. Feeding habits: Large meat sandwiches that he stores in the bass drum and gnaws on between songs.
Then there’s the keyboard player, who … Wait, no. This isn’t 1985. There is no keyboard player.
But hark. What is that intriguing breed on the right? The one standing in the shadows with the quiet intensity and the booming, low-slung bass? That, my boyfriend-shopping adventurers, is the extraordinary Fella perfectata from the family Delicieux. His coat is less showy than the others’, so he often goes unnoticed. Yet he’s always there when you need him, steadily, deftly weaving the band’s rhythm and melody into an impenetrable humming-thumping-humming-thumping musical fabric that—scientifically speaking—you just want to wrap yourself up in. Naked.
I have a friend I adore. She’s smart, compassionate, funny, open-minded, and operates power tools. Correctly. So when she told me last week that she’s going to have a baby, I was ecstatic. More delightful people like her in the world? Huzzah!
We squealed and hugged and spoke of Storkish matters, the way girlfriends do: Nausea. Maternity leave. Glass of wine or no glass of wine. Modified yoga poses. And the alarming way her belly is widening in multiple directions — all at once.
But I left feeling that there should have been more to our chat. I wished we’d bounded — for just a few minutes — right over gestation and delivery to talk about actual harsh-light-of-day parenthood. Because making a baby is about more than making a baby; it’s about raising a child — which is Way. Exponentially. Huger.
So here’s what I wish I’d told my friend. Let’s call it What to Expect After You’re Expecting:
Having kids is, in every way imaginable, an extreme sport. Rife with dramatic contradictions, it’s the most draining and fulfilling thing you’ll ever feel utterly unqualified for.
Like you, I’m a spiritual person given to pondering the great unanswerable questions of life. Like this little existential mystery:
Why in Saab’s name are 15-year-olds allowed to operate moving vehicles on public roadways?
I can think of no good reason why a person who still drops food from his mouth with stunning regularity — and alarming nonchalance — should be permitted to propel a half-ton, motorized murder machine through cityscapes occupied by innocent and unsuspecting humans.
It ain’t right.
So it’s only natural that I lurch into a sudden brace-for-impact stance when my son is driving and we are careening down a freeway off-ramp at rush hour into a snarl of ghastly gridlock.
“Mom, really? Can you not do this?” the giant child says, dramatically mimicking my dashboard death grip.
“Very well,” I say, calmly. “But what you didn’t see is that I stopped myself from screaming, ‘PLEASE, GOD, DON’T LET ME DIE IN AN UNDERPASS!’ So … that’s something.”
I fear for his safety, sure. And that of his fellow motorists. But it’s more than that. It’s bigger. From the first time he operated a wheeled vehicle — the Elmo lawn mower that helped him take his first steps, his fudgy feet flap-slap-flapping the ground as he pushed that thing from couch to kitchen and back again (boy, I hope he doesn’t read this) — I’ve been scared by what it signifies.
It’s the parental fear that no generation before ours has yet grappled with: the terror that our children will grow up to be on a reality show. My particular dread? I’m raising a prime-time “hoarder.”
Never one to pass a rock without dropping it in his pocket, my youngest child weeps and wails if I throw out a year-old, splay-bristled, paste-encrusted toothbrush. He has Valentine’s candy from 2011 crammed into keepsake boxes in his tchotchke-stocked bedroom.
And last weekend, the boy refused to relinquish a pair of skate shoes whose canvas had torn away from the rubber soles up front, exposing his toes as he walked and flapping open like a chatty cartoon mouth. Even my grandmother, raised on scraps in the Oklahoma dust bowl, would call them “hobo shoes.” Though he left the shoe store with two new pairs, he wouldn’t — couldn’t — throw the old ones in the trash. So I did.
“It’s just …” he started, “I have a lot of good memories with those shoes.” Perfect, I reasoned. Then you don’t need the actual shoes. And memories don’t take up room in the closet.
It’s a constant battle: His sentimentality versus my efficiency. He has collections and mementos; I have goals and checklists. He loves to reminisce and savor the past while I strive to produce and stay ahead of the clock.
My son Stone, 15, wrote my column again this week.
Hey again. It’s me, Stone. You may remember me from last summer, when I ranted about parental oppression. Well, I’m back, with something else I need to get off my chest.
When I passed the driver’s test and got my permit back in April, the training taught me to be a very nice, friendly, rule-abiding driver (always walk around the car and inspect it before driving, signal 100 feet before the turn, etc.). But when I backed out of my driveway and entered into the real world of driving, I was like a small, fluffy bunny in a pit of angry, rabid Rottweilers. The polite world of driver’s ed was ripped away to reveal a world of people cutting off other people and not using their turn signals — and full of, ahem, parental help: “STONE, ACCELERATE, YOU NEED TO ACCELERATE!”
Of course, I haven’t let all this affect my driving. I still drive slowly and carefully, and the incessant honking around me from those Porsche SUVs driven by soccer moms who need to get to their jewelry-making class is drowned out by the song “Let It Go,” which is on indefinite repeat (Yes, I am the only male on the planet who insanely loves Frozen). I am determined not to stoop to the level of other Santa Barbara drivers. As Queen Elsa says, “Don’t let them in, don’t let them see. Be the good girl you always have to be.”
I don’t love baseball. And I feel bad about that. Some of the finest people I know — people who are undeniably more advanced human beings than I am — are wild for the game. They love that it’s not timed, but rather over when it’s over; that it lets players of every shape and size be superstars; and that the object is more complicated than just putting a ball into a net, over a line, or through a hoop.
The closest I ever come to loving baseball was a brief tenderness I had for its distinctive snacks. It was 1981, and Fernando Valenzuela was pitching for Los Angeles, Steve Garvey was playing first base, and I was mowing Dodger Dogs, Cracker Jacks, and ice cream on the blistering Loge level.
Back then, I was a kid watching grown-ups play baseball. Recently I’ve revisited the sport as a grown-up watching kids play it, in Little League. But the new perspective hasn’t deepened my appreciation for our national pastime. In fact, it’s made me dread it.
Each time a kid gets up to bat and strikes out — my son or someone else’s, on our team or the opposing one, doesn’t matter — it positively guts me. Hollows out my stomach like an inverted baseball cap or a stadium peanut being popped from its salty shell.
Swing, miss! … Adjust stance. … Swing, miss! … Adjust grip. … Swing, miss! … Adjust self-image.