Kids Say the Darndest Things

When kids are young, they love to share things they’ve learned with their parents. I remember those days well. My daughters, E and S, always seemed eager to tell me about school. Maybe it was something that happened on the playground, or a lesson about their favorite animal, or maybe learning about the moon or the planets. Everything was new to them, and they were pure and innocent and curious.

Now, my two girls are teenagers, and while they probably tell me way more than their friends tell their parents, it is just not the same. Maybe it’s because, at 16 and 14, they are already a bit jaded and burned out from too much homework and being able to tell when assignments are a waste of time. Maybe it’s because they are not learning anything new that’s worth mentioning. Truth be told, there is less excitement over, say, logarithms then there would be over manatees. Even the stories of their classmates are more shocking than amusing. Let me illustrate that point for a second.

S (about two weeks ago): Hey Mama, you know that boy who is always looking at my butt? Well, he got suspended for a week for making Lean in the bathroom. I won’t have to deal with him breathing on my neck in math! Praise the Lord!

Lean, for those of you who are neither the parents of teenagers nor in the hip-hop community, is a recreational beverage involving codeine cough syrup, Sprite or Mountain Dew, and a Jolly Rancher candy. Also, this boy likes to make my daughter uncomfortable regularly. It’s not just her and not just that boy; it’s kind of how a lot of middle schoolers interact with each other. Perhaps you remember?

Here’s another one.

E: Hey Mom, guess what happened at school today. This girl got into a big argument with this asshole boy that no one likes and today someone spray painted a large blue dick on the side of her car and it was probably him cause he’s done that kind of thing before. And her car’s white! Ha! That shit isn’t coming off without a fight.

These are the teenage equivalent of what happened at school today. It’s enough to make you not want to ask anymore. The stories tend to involve girl fights, drug arrests, or naked snapchats from the 8^th grade mattress back that the whole school sees. We have moved past the conversations about showing kindness and compassion or not joining in on the gossip because what if it were them. According to both of them, all the stories are true, all the time. And sometimes they are documented, so even if they do sound fucking ridiculous, they can still be true.  They reassure me they don’t talk like this at school, but save it up for me when they get home.

I don’t really feel reassured.

For the record, my kids go to pretty good public schools. Mostly affluent area of town, lots of overachievers and competition for good colleges and honors and AP classes. Also lots of entitled brat narcissists with Jeep Wranglers and a pocketful of Mom and Dad’s prescriptions. Seriously, what is the definition of a good school today?

Every once in a while, however, they will come home with something new they learned, and it’s almost magical, that despite the fact that they, nay, all teenagers, know everything, they can still learn something new.

E, who is almost finished with her sophomore year, came home all excited a few weeks ago. Normally she comes home and scowls, eats anything she can find in the pantry, and then lumbers upstairs to sleep it off. Sometimes, she comes home and cries. Excited is not usually what the coming home looks like.

E: Hey Mom, do you know how sloths mate?

Me: Um, no. Should I?
E: Yes, you should. I’m going to tell you all about it. It’s really cool. The female sloth gets all worked up, but she is too lazy to leave her tree, right?
Me: Right.
E: So to let the male sloths know she is ripe and ready, she starts to scream, like this.

E emits this high-pitched screech. It was quite unpleasant, like a girl who sees a bug in her bathroom or when two girls run into each other at Target. Here is an actual sloth making the same sound:

Me:  I get it, you can stop now. So then what happens?

E: Well, she just hangs from the tree, screaming like that. And then a male sloth might hear her and think, oh snap, it’s time to smash…
Me: Where did you learn this, exactly?
E: Just wait, so he gets out of his tree and follows the scream sound until he finds her.
Me: And then what happens?
E: They smash.
Me: When did smash become a thing?
E: You’re old. It was always a thing.
Me: So what do they do?
E: They mate. I told you.
Me: Well, what’s so special about sloths mating? I thought that was the point of the story.
E: It was mostly the scream.
Me: Ah. Thanks for sharing that. Great story.
E: Why don’t we have anything good to eat?

If you have little kids, talk to them every day. Act interested in all the stories. Comment and really participate. Because one day in the not -too-distant future, those stories will either stop altogether or morph into something you aren’t sure you want to hear.

 

All That Glitters is Gold

Sometimes, I have a story I want to share, but I don’t think I have enough details to make it blog worthy.

Actually, this happens all the time, not just sometimes. I might have a thought, or see something on television or in public, or my kids, well, they still say the darndest things. It could be any of those, but those short anecdotes tend to lack the rising action and the denouement. Not that I am complaining about only having the climax, but seriously, we all need something to work for, don’t you think?

I might sit on one of those ideas, hoping to gather more information or find a way to stretch it out or embellish it for the sheer joy of writing and retelling and hopefully, for you, reading. More often than not, I just forget it, which is a damn shame, especially when I find an hour to myself to sit at my laptop and think, hmmm, what to say? Then what to say turns into yet another email or Facebook check, and the next thing you know, I’ve wasted that hour, and have nothing to show for it but a status update that only I find clever.

Can you relate to that? Sure, you can. I bet you waste all kinds of time. This is not a skill unique to me.

This is one of those stories. It’s not fully developed. It made me laugh and want to tell it to other people so that they too could laugh. Doesn’t everyone want to laugh?

Maybe not. My husband told me recently that everything I write is offensive, which might have something to do with the fact I have been doing less of it lately. This underdeveloped story might offend you. If you are offended by this or whatever else I write, do us both a favor and stop reading it. This ain’t no chicken soup for your fucking soul.

Here we go. An unfinished story.

My older daughter, E, is a freshman in high school. She is currently taking her only required year of physical education, unlike the semester required each year in middle school. She is in the middle of the sexual education unit of her class. In high school, this unit lasts for three weeks, which means they teach more than just abstinence. They also teach anatomy, so that you know what parts shouldn’t touch until G-d sanctifies that ring on your finger and you are free to procreate, according to the curriculum the conservative legislators agreed was appropriate and not necessarily based on science.

The boys are divided from the girls, so that they don’t get any funny ideas, like having sex with each other in the back stairwell. E literally stumbled across this one day while leaving class early. She actually tripped over a couple in flagrante delicto on the dirty stairs at noon in a high school. Oh, to be young again.

I asked E all the usual questions the first week of the unit (and is anyone else keeping track of how many times I say unit). My usual questions are things like “Do you have to dress out or just undress?” and “Do they divide you into partners or do you get to choose your own?” and “are they any group projects?” and of course, “Will there be an oral exam at the end?” I have asked these questions whenever the sex ed unit rolls around since the sixth grade, and like jokes about Uranus, they never get old.

This week, E came home and said to me, “I have a good story for you.” I love a good story. I settled back in my chair and waited. My thirteen year old daughter, S, sat across from me, pretending to do her homework.

“This boy in PE today asked the best question. You know it’s sex ed, right? Well, he asked the teacher if the clitoris is the same thing as the vagina!” E was delighted with herself. And does my child know me or what?

I honestly didn’t know that my fifteen year old knew what a clitoris was. This is the same kid who thought she put her tampon in the wrong hole the first time she used one a couple of years ago. I had to ask her if she had a tampon in her butthole because that is the only other hole down there that can accommodate one. She is still mad about that.

I was not surprised, however, that the thirteen year old doesn’t know what a clitoris is. She has yet to venture into the world of tampons, having a huge wrong hole fear. I keep telling her to grab a hand mirror and take a gander, but the idea of looking at her crotch is even worse than trying to plug it up by feel alone. Since we are stuck at this hole road block, we haven’t quite gotten around to discussing the happy bits. Obviously it isn’t a conversation my husband will have with her, but hell, I don’t want to talk about it with her either. Can’t she discover it on her own in the shower or near a pool jet like the rest of us?

After E told us what the boy said, S had a follow-up question, based on what she thought she heard.

“What is a glitter? Glitter? Did you say glitter? What does glitter have to do with a vagina?” she wanted to know.

“Is that a bunny in the back yard?” I quickly diverted her attention before I had to have that conversation that neither of us was ready for, certainly not over her Holocaust homework at the kitchen table.  E snorted and refused to answer her. Lucky for both of us, S didn’t remember she asked a question, as she was busy looking for the rabbit.

Later, I asked E if they actually taught about the clitoris, since they certainly didn’t bring that up in the sixth through eighth grades. She said the teachers didn’t say what it was for, just that it’s there, which means she is getting her sex education like everyone else, from the internet and her friends. She did say the class had to watch a rather awkward video about doing breast self-exams while the boys had to watch one about testicular self-exams. I have no doubt the majority of the class will demonstrate not on themselves but on each other over the weekend.

Except my daughter, whom I expect will remain abstinent until I no longer ask what happened in school that day, like when she is away at college or something.

Let’s pause here for an even shorter unfinished story. I know a woman whose husband is a lady parts doctor. He told me once about a patient who came into the ER with some sort of vaginal emergency. Again, this is a story lacking in details, except for one significant one. She had some sort of glittery hair gel with which she had styled her pubic locks. Glitter puss. I wonder if that was in the medical records.

Sometimes, maybe there is glitter near the vagina. And just perhaps the clitoris is such a fabulous little organ that we should start calling it a glitteris.  

Are you offended yet? I hope so, because I would hate for my husband to be wrong.

Sometimes the Apple Falls Far from the Tree

Yesterday, my twelve year old daughter, S, made me cry in the car. It wasn’t what you think. They were tears of joy, of pride, of love.

Why? Because this person, my daughter, is amazing, and certainly not because of me. She is compassionate and caring and nice.

While I try to set a good example most of the time, the truth is, I am not that nice. I laugh at things I shouldn’t, like people with bad teeth or dogs squatted and hunched, relieving themselves. I sometimes don’t let people merge on a busy highway, just because I don’t like their car or the way they drive or their stupid bumper stickers. When I am in line with a full cart at the grocery store and the person behind me has one or two items, I think fuck you. So whatever kind of nice she is, she became that way on her own.

Nice has somehow become a bad thing to be.  When someone is unattractive, he or she is described as “having a nice personality.” Women gravitate away from nice guys, favoring the bad boys that eventually break their hearts or batter their faces or whatever it is that bad boys do. Single men know that to be described as “nice” is the kiss of death to any hopes of getting laid, which isn’t a nice thing to say, but true.

My daughter, however, is nice, and she makes it a good thing to be. She's bringing nice back.
On the second day of school, S was behind another girl on her way out of the art room. S didn’t know this girl and wasn’t friends with her; she was just another kid in class. S noticed as the girl walked that she had gotten her period in class, as she had a blood stain on the back of her shorts, obvious enough to anyone to whom such things like a big bloody Rorschach blotch would be.

She scooted up to the girl and whispered to her that she had a blood stain on her pants. She told the girl it wasn’t so bad, but she might want to go to the bathroom before it gets worse. S was discreet and quiet about it so as not to arouse unwanted attention. The girl thanked her, and the two of them, along with the rest of the art class, left to go to their lockers.

S told me she saw the girl later that same day, and that she was wearing a different pair of pants. She was happy for that girl, that she didn’t have to walk around all day in blood stained shorts for the rest of the school to see.

So, yes, that single act of kindness, that compassion for another girl going through a potentially emotionally scarring middle school experience, brought me to tears. How many teenagers would think about how someone else would feel?

When I was in college, I had the opportunity to do something nice for someone else, but I took a pass. I was walking to the cafeteria one day, and in front of me was another girl walking by herself. She had a nine foot train of toilet paper trailing behind her. It wasn’t stuck to her shoe; it was tucked into her pants. Her paper train floated along like an elegant reminder of some unusual hygienic behavior on her part. To this day I still don’t understand how a piece of toilet paper longer than my car can originate from someone’s pants, but still, this girl was walking along unaware of her own shadow. I felt I was in the presence of bathroom royalty. Rather than disturb her paper trail, or alert her to its existence, I merely held the door as she walked through it, making sure a heavy swinging door did not come between her and her Charmin.

Okay, it probably wasn’t Charmin. After all, it was college. That toilet paper was industrial and one-ply and probably could have survived the door, but still. I didn’t want to be the one to stop that train.

My daughter, being nice, would have told her about the toilet paper streamer. Me? I didn’t want to be the only one to witness that papery spectacle, even if it meant that poor girl discovered it later and felt deep embarrassment and humiliation and maybe even anger at those of us who saw it and said nothing.

That wasn't the only time I bypassed an opportunity to be a nice person. I also laughed at the person who tripped up the stairs and couldn’t get her hands out of her pockets in time. And the woman who walked across the hotel lobby with her skirt tucked into her pantyhose, under which she opted against panties. I snickered at the person with a static cling panty broach on the back of her shoulder at the grocery store. And at countless men, including my husband, with their flies down, or, worse yet, evidence of a dribble, a few damp spots on the crotch that couldn’t always be caused by a spraying faucet.

I have felt badly about some of those times, when I could have been nice, but chose to be amused instead.  At least most of them happened before I had a cell phone, and honestly, I am not quick enough on the draw even if they did.

In the car, on the way home, sitting next to my daughter, I felt a pride like none other, knowing that this child of mine, this amazing, nice person, she didn’t learn how to be nice from me, but developed it on her own.  She made a good choice, better than one I would make, and all I could think was, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson, she makes me want to be a better person. 

Except I will still laugh when someone falls up the stairs, because, seriously, that shit is funny.

Are We There Yet?

My baby went out of town last week for the first time without me, and you better believe I was upset and worried. It doesn’t matter that my baby is fourteen and needs to learn how to take care of herself. It also doesn’t matter that in four ridiculously short years, she will be going away to college, and I better get used it. Right now, she is fourteen, and she is my baby, and she has not spent more than a night or two away from home, and any of those few and far between nights away from home were always less than a two hour drive. This time, she went to the mecca of children the whole world over, Disney World, and she did it via chartered bus, and each way of the drive was a good eight to ten hours. There was no hopping in the car to come to her rescue, had it come to that.

My baby does have a good head on her shoulders, but no matter how good that head is, it is still fourteen and doesn’t fire from all cylinders. Logic is not a big part of the fourteen year old’s decision making process, but mood and feeling is. And if all moods and feelings are influenced by budding ovaries more so than rational brain function, well, I think you see what I am getting at here. This is a child who can’t be counted on to pack what the majority of us would call a lunch, let alone select an appropriate outfit or remember that shoes are required when going to a place of business.

Allow me to illustrate:

Last weekend before her trip, she decided she wanted to do her homework outside on a blanket and enjoy the lovely spring day. Not five minutes later, she stripped down to her bra and underwear in the back yard, because she decided she would work on her tan at the same time she studied. Never mind that a bra and undies are not the same as a bathing suit, nor that she would never let any of us see her in said bra and panties if she were inside the house, nor that it is the back yard for Christ’s sake, nor the fact that in my family, we do not “work on tans,” seeing as my father died from skin cancer when I was just a few years older than she is now.

I worry because I see how her decision making skills are sort of off-kilter during this adolescent time. My husband, who is a man and therefore doesn’t usually understand the point of worrying, actually agreed with me and got in the on the parenting act as well. Before she left, we took turns reminding her of stranger danger and discussing the value of a dollar before handing her a little less than two hundred dollars.

Whoever planned this school trip neglected to include the cost of meals, but it seems a little irresponsible to me to expect teenagers to manage money for four days. I don’t know what you people with teenaged boys would do in a similar situation, but I guess you would probably worry that you didn’t give your son enough money, seeing as how they can eat their own weight in food every day. Teenage girls, on the other hand, don’t like for anyone to know they have body functions, especially eating. My husband and I both worried that our child would not eat, and therefore not poop, for the four days she was away from our vigilant care.

So we had the “talk.” About how much food costs at Disney. About how three meals and two snacks are not unheard of. About how drinking water is essential in Florida, especially if you ever want to crap again. For her part, our teen did a fair amount of eye rolling and complaining and insisting that we gave her too much money. We explained to her that she has no idea how much food costs since she never pays for her own meals. Also, she doesn’t have a credit card to fall back on. What was in her hand had to last for the whole trip, but that didn’t mean not to eat for fear of running out of money. Seriously, these were our main points. It’s kind of hard to have a rational conversation with someone who thought fifty bucks would be plenty. I bet we both sounded like every adult in a Charlie Brown show to her. Wah wah wah wah wah.

She left on a Wednesday night, midnight to be exact, for an all-night bus ride, to arrive in the morning at Epcot, where they would brush teeth and change clothes in a rest stop. In my yoga class, around the same time she was eating a Nutrigrain bar and wondering where she put her retainer, I cried because the teacher played two of my daughter’s favorite songs in a row. The next day, while volunteering, I received a text, a picture of a chicken and waffle sandwich from the Magic Kingdom. I silently was thankful she ate. By the following day, she was solidly in a routine, and I only heard from her when she was clearly devoid of all food based energy and thus bitching wildly about anything and everything. That’s how I knew she was okay.

She got home last Sunday night. Her hair was lighter from all that Florida sunshine. She  hugged me and handed my husband a wad of cash. We gave her one hundred and sixty dollars for food for four days. She came home with ninety-five. She spent sixty five dollars. Then she showed us the shirt she bought herself at the mall when they stopped for lunch on the way home. It was thirty bucks.

 At least she ate a sandwich one day. The rest of the time she survived off frozen lemonade. She wouldn’t even eat the free breakfast at the hotel because it was too nasty. This child of mine isn’t spoiled at all.

For four days, I got used to not having her around, and she got a taste of freedom that was enough for her to hold my hand for a good hour after she got home. We both know she isn’t ready to be on her own, no matter how cool it sounds to grow up and move out. I also understand what it’s going to be like when she does come back to me. I will have to learn to be happy to see her and hold my anger and judgment at whatever choices she makes with which I don’t agree, especially if I want her to come back.

Parenthood is always a dance, and you are the last one to learn the steps. Also, one can’t survive on less than ten dollars a day at Disney. I don’t care what she says.

Mom's Morning Out

If you have a teenager, when was the last time you spent a full day alone with it? I had that misfortune last week when my daughter had three doctor’s appointments, and let me tell you, I don’t plan on doing that again anytime soon. My daughter, E, is now thirteen, only she thinks she’s sixteen. While she still occasionally wants a hug or to have a conversation with me, she has decided that she knows everything and therefore doesn’t have to listen to her parents or teachers anymore.

Since there is nothing left to learn, she finds the world a pretty boring place, especially the part of the world in which she spends most of her time. Her family is boring, her school is boring, her friends are boring, there’s nothing to do, nowhere to go, blah blah blah. I can’t even understand half her complaints because she has taken to mumbling full time. If I don’t respond to what I can’t hear, then she adds sighing and eye rolling. Three year old tantrums are starting to be a reminder of the good old days, when I could at least pick up my child and cart them off to another room for a time out.

 We started the morning at the orthodontist’s office. E has been wearing orthodontia of some form since she was eight. She’s had four rounds of expanders and has been in braces for over two years now. You would think she’d be pretty eager to get them off, but sadly, no.

It all comes down to rubber bands. Every six weeks we go to the orthodontist, and he gives her a couple of packs of rubber bands which she is supposed to hook in various versions of cat’s cradle inside her mouth. She is to wear them at all times except during meals. She chooses not to.

Instead, she hides her bags of rubber bands in my car or in my purse.  Which means that the braces she should have had removed over a year ago are still hanging out on her teeth. I didn’t realize she could have been train track free for that long because she has forbidden me from joining her for her orthodontist exams, since I talk too much and therefore embarrass her. I wanted to ask her doctor specifically what she needed to do to get those braces off. He said, as politely as he could, that if she would just wear the rubber bands, she would be finished with the braces.

When we got in the car, I said to her, “You want your lecture now or later?”

She said, “I’ll take it now,” and proceeded to lecture me about why she still has her braces on, about how it’s not her fault and she forgets and they hurt and they shouldn’t make that much difference anyway and who cares if her teeth are straight.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “it doesn’t work like this. I am going to lecture you, not the other way around. You are the one who has to sit there and listen.”

I went off on what a waste of everyone’s time it was to continue to go to these appointments if she wasn’t going to do what she was supposed to do. I made her find every package of rubber bands and hold them in her hands to illustrate how many days she has been noncompliant with her treatment. I pointed out that she must really like braces since the only reason she still wears them is because of her. And I raised my voice some, because the more I talked, the better it felt to say everything louder.

 

 

That is a pile of rubber bands, not rubbers.

 

We went home. She stormed upstairs to her room, and I stayed downstairs and took out my frustration on Facebook.

Next it was time to go to the pediatrician. She refuses to see any doctor except the one she has gone to since she was a baby. He now practices on the other side of town, so I indulged her by driving twenty five minutes to get to his new office. She was measured and weighed and had her hearing checked, which, shockingly, was completely normal.  Then the doctor came in the exam room and attempted interaction. He has a thirteen year old daughter as well, so he knows a little about the breed.

He did the usual stuff and then reviewed her growth over the past year. She declared herself fatter than her friends, which is infuriating. She wears a size three jeans, and she is 5’7”. Plus, every afternoon when she gets home from school, she raids the pantry of all its chocolate. Seriously, even the chocolate chips I buy for cookies are half gone, the bag wide open, I might add, just like the pantry doors, which is how I can tell she had been looting. Anyway, she isn’t fat, which the doctor told her in a professional and tactful manner. She interrupted him several times to argue about why she thinks she’s a porker, including bringing up her 80 pound friend who is severely underweight as an example of normal. He ended every sentence with, “What do I know; I’m just a doctor.”

The same thing happened during their argument over the effectiveness of ibuprofen on menstrual cramps. The teen mumbled. The doctor patiently explained how ibuprofen works. Then the teen argued about it some more, with mumbles, until the pediatrician said a variation of his other line, “Well, if I were a doctor, I might know what I am talking about.” Clearly she feels comfortable with him, at least enough to treat him like an idiot, much like she does with her father and me.

Then we drove home again. On the way, she had to tell me when to switch lanes on the interstate, as if she knew what she was talking about. I ignored her and told her what options we had for lunch. Bagels, soup, macaroni and cheese, peanut butter, veggie burgers. She rejected everything and went for a giant bowl of Fruity Pebbles when we got home. Those don't make you fat at all.

After lunch, it was time to go to the dermatologist. I told her I would stay in the waiting room, but this time she insisted I go back with her. She seemed to have lost her will to fight, perhaps because she was sleepy, so she just mumbled at him but kept the arguing to a minimum. He asked her if she had any concerns, and she said no, so I reminded her she was worried about some new moles that had appeared on her youthful milky white skin. He examined them and told her they were looked normal. She glared at me for speaking.

After that appointment, I didn’t drive home. I drove to school.

“Where are we going now?” she mumbled at me.

“School,” I said. “The day’s not over yet.”

“Why can’t I just stay home? I’ve missed most of the day anyway,” she said to me.

“It’s not yet sixth period,” I answered. “If I drive faster, I can get you there in time.”

She mumbled at me and turned to face the passenger window to let me know she was mad at me, again.

The day was all about her, but she didn’t see it that way. She didn’t want to be at school, but she didn’t want to be home. She didn’t want to go to the doctors’ offices. She didn’t want to go back alone, but she didn’t want me there either. She didn’t want to hear what any of her doctors had to say, and she didn’t want to do what she was told to. She doesn’t know what she wants. She wants to be treated like an adult but wants to act like a kid.

No wonder she is tired all the time. That shit is exhausting.