Writer & Columnist | Santa Barbara, CA
Charting the puzzles and peeves of kid-herding — from Huggies to homework, Pilates to pinatas.
Published bi-weekly, twice a month
There are certain things a woman likes to hear after she kisses a man on the mouth: “Wow … please … more” and “Sweet cheeses, I’m in love” and “You taste like Wildlicious Pop-Tarts.”
But even “What do you think you’re doing, you trollop?” and “That is a LOT of saliva” would be preferable to what I hear after I kiss my husband: “Ewwww.”
The aspersion comes not from my spouse but from our 7-year-old son, an undersized-and-outspoken Puritan who finds even the chastest of our amorous embraces repugnant. Mind you, this child is not easily made queasy. He mixes fruit punch with Dr. Pepper and spoons applesauce onto his chicken nuggets, and I’ve seen the kid blithely pluck a strangled, desiccated lizard from a soccer net with a monkey wrench. Yet he finds nothing so disgusting as my lips touching his dad’s.
“Yuck.” “Nasty.” “Not again. Seriously? Come on!” It’s tough not to take that personally. I mean, why the horror? “Because the sound is gross,” he says.
Unfair! Sometimes we’re completely, no-slurping silent, I swear. He still cringes. “It just makes me … (sigh) … It’s just gross!”
The moment had come. She stood there pretty as a picture, and he was nervous as could be. Could he pull it off? Would she say yes? “I pulled out a rose, got down on one knee, and popped the question,” the young man said. “She was just staring in disbelief, like, ‘What is going on right now?’ But she said yes — thank gosh.”
What makes this story strange is that the happy couple aren’t adults, they’re high-schoolers. And this wasn’t a marriage proposal, it was just an invitation to the homecoming dance.
But in fact, there’s no such thing as “just an invitation” to a dance anymore. Teens all over America have taken to grand, showy gestures to land a date to homecoming or prom.
“You have to,” explained Jack Haley, the question-popping San Marcos High School junior mentioned above. “It’s expected. You can’t go up to a girl and just go, ‘Hey, you wanna go to homecoming with me?’ because the girl will say, ‘Ask me in a better way,’ and you won’t get any respect from your peers.”
Inspired by watching The Last of the Mohicans in history class, he wooed his date by blasting the movie’s theme song from his car in the school parking lot as he fended off faux attackers (his “bros”) with a plastic sword, shouting, “No, she’s mine!” When the last bro was mock-slain, Haley knelt and asked the amused, confused girl to the dance.
Never mind the baby books. Forget the motherhood magazines. Everything I needed to know about parenting I learned from other parents. Wiser parents. Parents who went before me, hacking through the murky jungles of momhood with the Machete of Courageous Experimentation and calling back to me each time they lurched into the Quicksand of Poor Parenting: “Okay. So you’re gonna need a rope …”
When I was pregnant, a friend advised me to get a pedicure because I’d be spending countless hours of labor staring at my feet in stirrups and would be disheartened if — on top of soul-splitting, sanity-rattling, life-begetting contractions — I had icky toes. I got the pedicure, and the merciful, thank-ya-Jesus foot massage that went with it. It was the best advice I ever got.
The best advice my husband ever got also came while I was pregnant. An experienced dad told him, “Listen, there will be a moment when you have a strong urge to hurl your crying baby at the wall. Sounds crazy, I know. Just trust me, it’ll come. And here’s all you need to remember: Don’t do that.” We figured the guy for a nut-job until … it came. And my husband heeded the advice — relieved to know he wasn’t the only frustrated father to have ever needed it.
Even now, with my oldest entering high school, I’ve benefited from the been-there-learned-that counsel of my friends with older kids: Take Spanish in the summer, bring blankets to the football games, and choose water polo for PE; it’s the only sport where your kids come home nearly clean.
Frequently, I am confounded by the stickers that I see on the back of cars: The grenade silhouette. The TRUTH fish eating the DARWIN fish. The Calvin-esque little boy who pees on things.
Never, though, have I been so baffled by a bumper-sticker trend as I am by the stick-figure family decals that have become de rigueur on the back of minivans and leviathan SUVs. You’ve seen them: a string of cutesy cartoon characters straggling across a rear window, diminishing in size from yoga mom and lawnmower dad down through shopper teen, baseball boy and ballet girl to dog, cat, bird, and a fourth, unidentifiable beast that will only be fully realized just before you rear-end the offending vehicle because you’re tailgating, compelled to know what the hell pet they feel is worth commemorating on their Buick Enclave.
I don’t get it. Why enumerate your bulky brood with “personalized car clings”? It feels like these families are keeping score and the rest of us are losing — not only by the paucity of our progeny but because the doofs in front of us are multiplying even as they impede our path and sightlines with their colossal clan-haulers.
Sometimes my kids ask me questions that rattle my mind like a cold, brass church bell. My skull had only just stopped reverberating from their last confounding query (“Mom, what does nothing look like?”) when my teenager riddled me this: “Why don’t old people at least try to be cool?”
It was an honest question, and it struck me as kind of brilliant — in the way that one often chooses to focus on her children’s refreshing curiosity rather than dwell on their astounding lack of manners or perspective.
I considered telling him that the answer lies in simple physics: Cool is a fast-moving target. And old people are slow. Then it occurred to me that by “old people,” he might very well mean me. I needed more information.
“If they would just put on a pair of skinny jeans and a V-neck T-shirt,” my son said, “they’d be cool.”
“According to whom?” I asked, cautiously. The parenting books say that active listening encourages your kids to speak openly. They also say it’s bad to call them idiots. So I listened.
I suppose they were reasonable things to come from a father’s mouth. Still, they took me by surprise. “Only move one body part at a time,” I overheard my husband saying as he helped our young son up a ladder. “Grab it around the stripe; fingers across the laces,” he explained a few days later on the subject of throwing a spiral. That night, he gave an impromptu lesson in scooping unyielding ice cream from a carton: “Use the fancy spoons,” he said. “They don’t bend.”
The information floored me. I didn’t know these things. How did I not know these things? Was I supposed to have learned them from my dad?
I asked friends what their dads had taught them and was aghast to find that their pops had instructed them in physical feats like surfing and fishing, and practical tasks like changing tires and hammering nails. They’d insisted their kids give firm handshakes and pack only what they could carry. They spouted sensible maxims like “Finish what you start” and “There’s no excuse for being late. Ever.”
It’s the most irksome and indubitable law of the universe: Fate favors The Planner. The gal with the foresight to research preschools while she’s pregnant. Or to begin funding a 529 plan before her child can even gurgle the word “college.” Or to know what the frack she’s serving her family for dinner before she gets home from work at 6:22 p.m. and announces, yet again, “Umm … exciting news, everyone: It’s soup night! Grab your favorite can!”
In life — and in parenting, especially — she who wings it regrets it. But that’s exactly how I wound up having my kids seven years apart. When the other moms in my baby group were plotting their second and even third children, citing anecdotes about brotherly bonding and quoting stats about the effect of sibling spacing on each child’s health, intelligence, and self-esteem … I was busy trying to distinguish Boudreaux’s Butt Paste from Motherlove Nipple Cream, clawing my way out from beneath daily heaps of burp cloths and wondering if I’d accidentally stuffed my once-vigorous mojo into the Diaper Genie during a bleary-eyed late-night changing.
By the time I emerged from the disorienting fog of baby care into the dense haze of toddler care and then, well, into the light but still unpleasantly wet mist of 1st-grader care (okay, I’m easily overwhelmed), it was too late to have children who would ever want to ride the same rides at Disneyland much less be able to attend the same school.
I hate things that make me sound like I’m 90 years old. And that’s what online porn is doing. Beckoning our teenagers from their laptops, iPhones, and tablets, X-rated Web sites are causing me to curse technology and pine for the good old days when smut knew its place: on the pages of a shrink-wrapped girlie magazine on the periodicals shelf of your neighborhood 7-Eleven.
Back in my day, we pored over dog-eared Playboys, passed around Penthouse letters, and stared agog at warbly VHS tapes of Deep Throat — all lifted from our parents’ stash. Or our friends’ parents’ stash. Or our parents’ friends’ stash.
We had to work hard to see porn, and I’m not complaining; we had quite the work ethic. But today’s teens have to work hard not to see it. It’s free, it’s abundant, and it’s a single click away. Most of it is explicit, and much of it (what? I conducted a study) is so in-your-face graphic that you have to wonder if it’s intended to turn off the viewer.
Our teens — and, in some cases, ick, our preteens — are looking at this stuff. It’s not a question of if or when. They. Are. Looking. And how can you blame them? It’s a fascinating alien world. A big-box toy store. A freshly stocked cookie jar. I think it’s healthy for teens to explore their sexuality, and at least on-screen you can’t catch anything. Or create anyone.