Yes, I am Tired

I’m tired. I’m tired of thinking about rape. I’m tired of reading stories of sexual violence against women. I’m tired of men who commit these acts of violence getting the minimum of consequences for their actions. I’m tired of women being victimized, diminished, and blamed for what they must suffer at the hands of perpetrators. I’m tired of the privileged culture in which we live straddling the line between tolerance and fairness and the oppressive and inherently unfair good old days.

Is this about the Stanford rape case? The one with the young, white Olympic hopeful who can never recover from the effects of a party culture that led to twenty minutes of action? The one whose father is worried about his inability to enjoy a steak? The one who will serve three hard months in prison of a six-month sentence because the judge does not want him to suffer any more?

Yes and no.

About a month ago, something horrible happened that involved my daughter’s middle school. You may have heard about it on the national news. It was kind of a big deal. An eighth grade girl from my daughter’s school and a boy from a different middle school hung out on a Sunday afternoon. They drank alcoholic beverages. They had consensual sex. They drank some more. The girl passed out, and the boy continued to do sexual things to her. He decided to share what he was doing by Face Timing at least one person. That individual, or possibly more people, saved the FaceTime video and shared it with other people. Some of those other people saved it as well to show it to even more people.

The girl was allegedly naked from the waist down and in her own vomit. She had to have her stomach pumped at the hospital. The boy was charged with second degree sexual assault. I don’t know if these details are accurate as reported in the news or just from the pieced-together version of the rumors.

The other people who saved and sent the video are also middle school students. Some of them go to my daughter’s school, and others are enrolled at other middle schools in the county. Four of those people, all middle school girls, were charged with disrupting school and possession of child pornography. Other students had their phones confiscated by police detectives for forensic testing. 

It was all anyone talked about for the last few weeks of school. Students talked to each other about it. Parents tried to figure out details. The only ones who remained silent were the school administrators, hiding behind the fact that the assault did not take place at school and therefore they were not obligated to address the rumors or provide support for students troubled by the assault or those rumors. We were all supposed to ignore it or pretend it didn’t happen, or worse, that it didn’t affect us.

When the students talked, they seemed to focus on the wrong information from the story. They discussed this girl’s already bad reputation. They said she was asking for it. They said what did she expect. They said she should have known better, and that she is just as much to blame. She drank. She had sex. She deserved it.

My daughter came home and shared these conversations with me, about how the girl never came back to school, how badly she felt for her, and how she tried to tell other students that it wasn’t the girl’s fault. My daughter was in the minority in her beliefs.

And that makes me tired.

Clearly, the two stories have similarities. Girls were drinking. Boys were drinking.  Girls passed out. Boys did things to them that they did not have consent to do. We all act shocked when we hear about it, and a percentage of us will try to make sense of it by blaming the victim.

I have two teenaged girls. They are both tall. They have some curves. They dress like most girls their age, which means skirts and shorts are short, and arms are bared, and bra straps frequently show, sometimes intentionally, sort of like an accessory.  They are not whores. They do not dress likes whores. They don’t know any whores, and they are also unsure of what whores wear. Nothing about their clothing means they are asking for unwanted attention. They dress like many girls their ages, and they are comfortable in their garments and in their skin, and they should be comfortable.

My daughters are good people. The Stanford victim and the middle school girl might be good people too. They might not. They might just be human. They did not deserve what happened to them.

The boys who sexually assaulted them are not scrutinized in the same way. They too drank, but they weren’t assaulted. They need to be held accountable for their actions. I don’t know if they are good people. They are also human, but they committed crimes and owe society, and women, a debt for their actions in order to return to the community.

I am tired of other people not understanding this simple fact.

Some of us call it rape culture. Some people say men can’t help that they are visually stimulated. Other people say that women need to be careful and stop putting themselves in potentially dangerous situations. But rape happens everywhere. It can happen at someone’s home, or at a party, or behind a dumpster. Alcohol is available in homes and groceries stores and restaurants and bars. Dumpsters are behind most every commercial property. What situations are women supposed to be avoiding?

It is always, at every level, about consent. If you do not have consent, you have no right to initiate further action on another person.

Some people also say that women who lie about being raped are part of the problem. I’m tired of that too. One person’s lie does not discredit many people’s truth. Instead, let’s concentrate on the men, because by and large, the men are entirely the problem.  Women who rape, like women who lie about rape, are not the issue. They are an anomaly. Men rape women, and other men, and children. It is by and large a male-perpetrated crime.

Men need to know they must have permission, even in a relationship, even in a marriage. Women need to know they have the power to say no. Men need to believe women when they say no. Men need to tell other men to believe women. Women need to tell other women that they believe them. Men and women need to talk about what no means with each other. They should discuss it with their children. Their children should understand what sex is and how it can only occur if both people say yes.

When you think children are too young for that conversation, remember my daughter’s middle school.  Stop wanting our society to return to the good old days. Rape was around then too, and women were property, and consent didn’t matter. Now it still is, and they aren’t, and it should, and everyone needs to talk about until we can all agree that it does not matter what a woman wears or drinks, it only matters if she said yes, and that any man, of any race or socioeconomic class or age or athletic ability, needs to accept her answer, or in the absence of one, realize that if she did not say yes, then it is a no.

And we should not stop talking about it until rape stops, until punishments are fair and enforced, until victims are no longer blamed, until we can all agree that consent is key.  Until we are all tired of the ways things used to be, and the way they are now.  If you want to make the world a better place, start with this issue, and don’t stop until everyone understands. Only then, after being tired for so long, can we rest.

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.

 

Coexist Much?

Well, the kids have been back in school for less than a week, and already, religious intolerance is rearing its ugly head. Normally it takes a few weeks of getting to know each other before the teenagers let their true colors show, but when your true colors are patterned like a confederate flag, well, I guess you feel entitled to show them to everyone.

My family lives in the South, and like many southern communities, the majority of the residents in my town are church affiliated. Christianity here is bigger than college football, which is almost a religion of its own. And when I say Christianity, I really mean evangelicals, those lovely fundamentalists who feel the need to convert or condemn anyone who does not share their beliefs. They do an excellent job of indoctrinating their children with the righteousness and entitlement they feel that comes from their personal relationship with their lord and savior.

I’m not judging them. Everyone is free to believe and practice what feels right, as long as it doesn’t infringe on the next person’s set of beliefs. That’s where it gets a little hazy for some folks.

My younger daughter is in 8^th grade. She has been no stranger to the horrible comments lots of Jewish kids hear. Nothing makes the momma bear in me come out faster than having another kid tell mine that she is going to burn in hell because she is Jewish, but no matter how big the stink I make, another kid will step up to take a turn.  Since 8^th grade is her last year of middle school, most of the kids who know her already know she is a Jew and have shared their prophesy with her, leaving them free to aim it at someone else who isn’t white or Christian.

One of her good friends happens to be Muslim, and she began wearing a hijab this year. It was a very personal decision for her friend, who up til now had not covered her head even when her twin sister chose to a few years ago. These girls, who were born in the US and are therefore as American as the rednecks who harass them, have had to deal with terrorist jokes for their entire middle school experience. They have always risen above the comments and display a level of maturity and confidence that shows more about their religious beliefs then the so-called Christian students. One kid asked S’s friend why she started covering her head. She didn’t answer hi since it was none of his business, so he followed it up with asking if she was a Muslim. When she told him yes, he wanted to know if that meant she was from Islam. She looked at him with what I hope was as much judgment as he showed her and said, I was born right here in this city.

If it were me, I would have said yes. Yes, I am from Islam, you oblivious piece of crap. I happen to know for a fact that the seventh grade social studies classes were required to learn all the countries and maps of the world. I wonder where this future McDonald’s employee thinks Islam is located.

Meanwhile, over at the high school, my older daughter, E, was having her own religious experience. She has a much different approach to her Jewish identity than her sister. She doesn’t really give a shit what anyone thinks, and she is much less likely to be polite about it. Because she is less sensitive, she gets a lot more ribbing than her sister does, which she thinks is funny. Some of it comes from her friends but she gives it back as good as she gets it, so it’s all okay for the whole lot of them.

This week it wasn’t her one of her friends that was teasing her. Some dumb freshman, according to my sophomore child, was following her and another of her friends down the hall. They were having a conversation about the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays next month, and the freshman behind her asked her if she ate Ramadan because she was Jewish. Let that sink in for a minute.

E gave him a look that should have made him throw himself off a rooftop, but instead, he continued to follow her down the hall shrieking “Ramadan” at her. Finally, she turned around and yelled, “Jesus Christ, would you cut it out?” The boy immediately stopped and was truly outraged. “You know,” he said, “that’s taking it too far. I was just messing with you, but you really shouldn’t say that. It’s offensive.”

She stared at him and then screamed,” Just shut the fuck up!” The hall erupted in great boisterous laughter because someone yelled the F word. He stopped following her, and that was the end of that.

Both my daughters still tell me stuff, and they each shared these stories with me. While they aren’t really the same at all, at the core they share the same level of ignorance. These aren’t little kids. These are kids who have had at least a small amount of book learning on world geography and different religions and what happens when we don’t accept and respect one another.  Do they pay absolutely no attention to what is presented to them in class? Do they watch no news at all, either on television or the internet? Is there no discussion of different cultures in their homes?

The answer to all of those is most likely no. Intolerance is easy when you surround yourself with your own kind. You go to school and church with white Christians. You wear your bracelet or your Forever 21 shirt with crosses all over it. You might have one black friend or know one smart Asian kid, but you don’t have them over to your house. If all you see is white and Christian, you expect the whole world to be just like you.  Well guess what, even in nineteen of the United States you are becoming a minority, never mind the rest of the world, so it might be time to rethink your position.

When I hear about people feeling their religious freedoms are being suppressed, it just infuriates me. There is no war on Christmas, but there is district testing on the high holy days. Nobody asks you if you are from Bethlehem because you are Christian, but my kids get asked all the time if they can say something in Jewish and if they come from Israel. There is no official religion in our country, yet our biggest holidays celebrate the birth and death of a guy who wasn’t even Christian!

Do me a favor and stop telling my daughters they are going to burn in hell, because guess what, we don’t believe in hell, so there.

Dramatic Paws

When I was a kid, I watched the movie “Fame” about a gazillion times. I too wanted to have massive amounts of talent, to dance and sing and act and spontaneously break it down in the cafeteria. The idea that you could go to school surrounded by your people, and learn cool stuff in addition to math and science and boring old history, that every day was a musical, well, it seemed too good to be true.  Alas, I don’t have that kind of talent. In fact, I am still trying to figure out my talents. 

But for kids who do, there is a school like that in most cities, a performing or fine arts center, so the students of today can explore their creative side, and maybe, just maybe, one member of their graduating class will be an extra on CSI.

I never took drama in high school, so I don’t really know if it’s like Fame or High School Musical or Glee. My younger daughter, S, is currently taking drama in seventh grade, but so far, it’s not really shaping up to be a fictitious art school experience.

At S’s school, it’s very difficult to get drama as an elective because it is extremely popular. The teacher that used to teach it was adored by all her students, and the entire middle school would have gladiator style fights to try to get placed in her class. Unfortunately, she doesn’t teach at the school anymore. There’s a new drama teacher, one who walked off the set of the Hobbit, complete with short stature, smart little vest, and odd hair growth in uncommon places.  A lot of students were exceedingly disappointed their beloved drama teacher, the one they thought they would bond with over a semester, come back to visit while in college, and eventually friend on Facebook, was gone, leaving this troll in her place.

The funny part is that S didn’t even register for drama. She wanted keyboarding or Spanish, but thanks to an injury that required us to rearrange her electives, she was placed in drama against her will. I couldn’t really do any switching around since the school already accommodated her broken foot and knee scooter, so she just had to deal with it. Deal with it, I said to her.

This may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t want to be that mom. The pain in the ass one, always making demands and seeking special treatment for her children. I prefer to approach school much as I would a prison sentence. Do what they ask of you, don’t get involved in yard fights or romances, keep your nose down, and do your time. If you’re lucky, you make it out alive with a little time off for good behavior.

S was pretty unhappy about the drama class, but I pointed out to her that it wasn’t going to be much work. Just participate when you have to and you should be fine, I told her. For the most part, that’s kind of how it’s going. She has to write the occasional monologue or small skit, but for the most part, they play a lot of games.

What kind of games? Well, this is the part that I am not really clear about. Most days, S gets in the car and gives me a debriefing. What quizzes she had, what she did in PE, who talked to whom, the deliciousness of her lunch, and then, the daily drama game. As far as I can tell, at least three days a week are devoted to drama games, and they all appear to be some version of Seven Minutes in Heaven.

Maybe you played it as Two Minutes in the Closet, but whatever version you experimented with, it involved the same thing, right? Intimacy was initiated at a party by pairing up two victims. The unlucky couple would go off privately and explore their budding sexuality while waiting for the timer set to two or seven minutes to go off, at which point they would step out of the closet, away from the forced groping and straight to the public humiliation awaiting them from their so-called friends.

The games in drama class don’t involve a timer or a closet. Instead, they all involve a blindfold and some probing. Basically, one person in the class is blindfolded and then must connect with a classmate in some physical way, thus ending the turn until the groped individual dons the blindfold and takes a turn grabbing at his or her classmate’s body parts. Hilarity ensues, perhaps, but so does some level of sexual assault. Basically, the blindfolded person, who in S’s report is always male, puts out his hands to feel up the other students. She has had her hair grabbed, her hip and waist caressed, her knees fondled. One time she had to endure the breathing of her male classmate on the nape of her neck. She spends drama game time with one arm across her chest and the other one protecting her virginity, down there.

The games have different names, like Statue or Zombie, but they always involve the blindfold and some heavy petting, not unlike Fifty Shades of Gray. Maybe they are more along the same lines of Marco Polo without the pool, but the potential to get past second base makes them more like rumpus room party games than lessons in acting. Unless the goal is to act like you aren’t uncomfortable or traumatized, in which case, they are quite effective.  

I suppose the point is to be more comfortable moving their bodies or to trust your fellow classmates to not do something horrible to you or just to kill time while the teacher continues his search for the Ring. At least there isn’t a class play we have to attend at the end of the semester, although I could see them pulling off Kinky Boots or Chicago or a Bob Fosse Classic like All That Jazz.

I keep telling S just to let someone have a little feel if that gets her an A. Better to do that in drama than Algebra, right?

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.

Out of Line

 Do you believe that dance is an art or a sport?

This is a burning issue in my house. My younger daughter, S, has been dancing for ten years. There is no doubt she trains rigorously for her dance classes, certainly as much as her older sister, who runs cross country, does. She argues with me frequently that the physical demands and athleticism that dance requires make it like a sport. She also points out that dance competitions are a frequent obligation of many dance schools, although she does not participate in competitive dance. Her dance school, which trains in classic ballet, jazz, and tap, has recently added a competition team program to remain, well, competitive in the field of dance. The components of a sport are definitely present at her level of dance education.

I still maintain that dance is not a sport; it is an art. While sports require skill, and some athletes have a natural ability or talent that others do not possess, sports are still only what they are, a physical recreational past time. Sports require training and sometimes team work. They require commitment and practice. They do not, however, require an artistic element.

Football, like soccer or baseball or kickball or basketball, is just a sport. You have a series of plays. You root for your team. You get angry with bad calls, frustrated with fumbles or turnovers or missed shots, and elated with victories. You feel a range of emotions. Yet, nothing is expressed.

Dance, on the other hand, requires the same level of discipline and practice and arduous training, but with great technical skill, control, and grace, plus you have to look good while doing it. You aren’t just going through the motions to get from point A to point B, or to score points. Your goal is to evoke, both in yourself and in the audience, a level of emotion, of thought, of an idea or a story, all without words. It takes a physical activity to a higher place.

Sports are on the ground, and dance floats high above the canopy of treetops.

Which is why I am still surprised that our school system devotes an entire learning unit of physical education, PE class, to dance.

When my daughters were in elementary school, they did a unit on square dancing. Hell, I remember doing the same when I was in school many moons ago, and I hated it then just as much as they did a few years ago. That awkward pairing of boys and girls, the sweaty hands, the trampled feet, the horrible country music. All of it combined to make two weeks of PE torture, although looking back, it was still better than the running that induced asthma or the gymnastics that caused me to hit my head on the ground doing a backward summersault. To this day, I have never been able to do a cartwheel or tolerate country music, nor have my children. I blame PE classes.

But enough about hating PE, because who didn’t, really? I want to get back to the dance in PE thing. S, this dancing daughter of mine, just finished her dance unit in her PE class. Unlike the square dancing of elementary school, middle school requires line dancing and choreography, which I think is in part so the boys and girls don’t actually touch each other. The kids were divided into groups and had to work out a dance routine with different components, like turns and switching places and stuff. They had to be coordinated enough to remember their routine and do it in sync. It took a solid week to work out the dance choreography and practice it before they were to perform in front of entire class, thus leveling the playing field, so to speak, with an equal dose of public humiliation.

I asked my daughter how her dance went, and she felt her group did pretty good. She said they danced to a song by Foster the People called “Pumped up Kicks.” Some of you might know this song, but for those of you who don’t, it’s about a troubled kid who wants to hurt other people, perhaps his classmates. Some of the lyrics include “you better, run, baby, run, faster than my bullet”, "He's coming for you", and “outrun my gun”, making it an odd choice for a middle school class.

I was a little surprised and asked who picked the song and she told me the teachers did. I also wanted to know if it was a clean version. Sometimes a song is released with the original words and then in a clean version with the objectionable parts either played in reverse or replaced by a sound effect  or just left blank, leaving the listener to imagine what word they just missed. S told me it wasn’t the clean version, but the real one, the one all about an unhappy youth shooting other people in cold blood, the kind of thing that a middle school would normally frown upon.

Some of the other song choices included popular hits by Pharell Williams, Taylor Swift, and Ariana Grande. They even had a relatively old hit by ‘NSync. All of those songs were about being happy or self-reliant after a bad relationship, but they still maintained a degree of hope and positivity. Or the kids could opt to dance to a song about teenage revenge killings.

S’s group originally picked “Pumped up Kicks” because it has a good beat and is edgy, but they decided at the last minute they wanted to switch to a different, newer song. The PE teacher told them it was too late to change songs, so they had to dance to the gun violence song. Makes sense to me.

I doubt that anyone was inspired to commit violence because of that song, but what if S’s group decided to make little finger guns in their line dance? Would they be faced with a zero tolerance policy and possible expulsion? Did the teachers even listen to the song lyrics?

It’s not really ironic, but it is Alanis Morissette ironic. It is a bit like a black fly in your chardonnay, don’t you think?

Worth a Thousand Words

What is it about school portraits that make them so horrible? It’s uncanny, really. The photographers take these photos for a living. It is what they do every day. Why are they so bad at it? I have no doubt the lighting in the cafeteria sucks, but surely Photoshop is available to these alleged professionals. And it’s not like they don’t get any practice. They do this photo stuff twice a year at every school in the country, and there’s got to be at least 100,000 of those, right?  

I hold, in my hand, the proofs of both my daughters’ school portraits. I would post them along with this blog, but I have been forbidden not only from purchasing them but also from snapping a picture of them with my iPhone. My children prefer to pretend that these photos never existed, dreading the possibility that these unflattering images might resurface in a few years, as most embarrassing things on the internet tend to do. And I even considered buying this year’s portraits because they aren’t half bad. My daughters almost look human. Well, one of them does. The other one looks like an unfortunate hunchbacked troll with its teeth clenched in a grimace, but still pretty.

Part of why  the photos suck has to be the mass produced quality of the portraiture. If you had half a day to snap almost two thousand portraits, you better believe you would have some eyelids barely open and a snarled lip here or there. No one can make an entire school body look good, especially when virtually none of them want to have their picture taken. It’s not like a piece of their soul will be taken from them, but still, students, normally obsessed with selfies and Instagram and all things photogenically narcissistic, treat every school portrait like they are standing for a mug shot.

This year’s batch of pictures features a lovely natural backdrop, complete with an artificial tree trunk. If you look closely, you can see that the tree trunk is actually part of the back drop and not a free standing photo prop against which to lean. The photographer had to direct two thousand surly teens to pretend like they were standing against a tree, pantomime style. No wonder there is an undercurrent of “are you fucking kidding me?” evident in both my daughter’s eyes. What would have made it even better is if all the kids posed in plaid flannel shirts holding axes. Hell, if they did that, I guarantee parents would be lining to buy those photos. I know I would.

When my daughters were little and students at the local Montessori, they had fabulous portraits taken at school. The photographer would set up a bench near some blooming azalea bushes in front of the school, arrange a few potted plants around the bench, and then seat the children in a modest fashion. Combs were handed out for smoothing unruly hair, and angelic faces would beam beatifically at the camera. All the parents bought those portraits, not because they were guilted into it, but because those portraits were fabulous.

Can you imagine if you gave combs to all the students in middle school? They would be used for weapons, or possibly some sort of MacGyvered drug paraphernalia. Not to mention at least half the kids couldn’t use a comb if they tried, thank you Axe hair paste. Even if the hair was smoothed, it wouldn’t distract from the nasty facial expressions and tight lipped fake smiles hiding braces. And don’t forget the soulless eyes. Seriously, post-mortem photography is livelier than a school portrait.

Parents look forward to school photo day when their kids were younger. I know I put great thought  into the dresses the girls would wear, deciding on flattering hairstyles, how if they pulled their skirts down just so, the bruises on their knees might not show. For middle school, photo day isn’t even an afterthought. My daughters didn’t mention it, hoping to avoid it entirely. One child even wore a hand me down of her sister’s from the fifth grade, a shirt that has at least three years of wear and tear on it. Can you imagine if you showed up at Target on a Wednesday morning and someone announced to you it was photo day?

I thought about my own school photos from many moons ago, which also began as an every year purchase before petering out.  I bet my mother stopped buying them around seventh grade, and I know I fought for that one because I thought I looked good, rocking that Lacoste shirt and some wicked center parted bangs. Once you hit the early teens, you don’t really look that much different from year to year, except perhaps for the braces covering yellowing teeth and more than one acne breakout and the rebellious makeup and hairstyles.

I bet most people buy pictures of their kids from kindergarten to fifth grade and then senior year. Face it; from about ten to maybe sixteen, awkward is the dominating trend. Most of us would be better off forgetting some of those choices we made. As far as I know, no photographic evidence exists of my purple hair, circa 1985, much to my children's disappointment.

On second thought, excuse me while I go write a couple of checks to School Portraits, Incorporated. My kids might not want me to buy these shitty photos, but I know my future grandchildren will thank me.

 

Peekaboo, I See You

People: listen up. You might be alone in your car, but we can still see you through your windows. Sure, we’ve all had some moments behind the wheel that we hope and pray no one witnessed. Perhaps you’ve seen me digging crumbs out of my bra, the under boob part where the crumbs tend to settle. Trust me; it’s not for the weak of heart. I'm sorry, I didn't mean for you to see that, but crumbs get itchy.

Nowhere is this false sense of privacy more apparent than in the car pool line at a school. Short of the occasional nose picking or nail clipping, I tend to spend my time doing publicly condoned car line activities like reading, talking or playing with my phone, and even writing, long hand of course, because trying to balance a laptop on a steering wheel borders on the weird. I’ve never felt that I was totally alone, however, because I am in lines with dozens of other people killing time in similar ways. Except for some people who seem oblivious that they are not really alone.

I am pretty sure I have seen everything short of sexual acts while waiting for my children to be dismissed from their school days. As much as I don’t want to think about it, I have to admit, I have spent the better part of over thirty minutes every school day for over eleven years sitting in a line of other cars, waiting on children. So it stands to reason that during that block of time, people are going to find creative ways to fill it. I have to tell you, sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on my own time wasting because I am so curious or distracted by the time wasting that surrounds me.

Elementary school car lines are pretty normal compared to the middle school line. In elementary school, the moms and occasional dads usually sleep or talk loudly on the phone. They might have younger children napping in their car seats, waiting for big brother or sister to play with them after a busy day of learning.  I don’t think I saw anything weirder than someone walking their dog on the school grounds while waiting in the car line, and just as a reminder, if you decide to do the same, it’s kind of courteous to pick up after your dog. Especially at a school. What if your kid is the one who steps in the offending pile of crap? I bet you wouldn’t like it much, would you, if your Dodge Durango was defiled by some dog doo. Plus on a hot afternoon, that crap gets a little ripe.

Middle school takes the car pool line to a whole other level. First of all, the care and concern for the children’s safety is just totally out the window after fifth grade. In elementary school, you have to have a numbered tag to identify you as the authorized person to whom your child should be released. In middle school, you could pretty much have your pick of victims. No one gives a shit who gets in what car. If you were in the kidnapping business, the middle school car line might be the place for you.

All that not paying attention to children’s safety lends a certain air of not giving a shit to the whole line, which is apparent when you spend some time observing the cars around you. There are the parents who expect their kids to walk to their car and therefore refuse to follow the car line protocol. They don’t pull forward to the car in front of them; they just stop where they want to, and fuck the rest of you. These are the same parents who like to make a seven point turn to get back out of the line after collecting their kids. Again, fuck you while you wait for them to execute what is a pretty tricky maneuver in a Lincoln Navigator. Never mind the flow of cars and the one way road loop designed for smooth dismissal. It's every jackass for himself.

Once on a sunny day, I got a contact high from the high school student smoking weed in the car in front of me. Clearly he knew how he wanted to kill time waiting on his younger brother, and his weed fog wafted out of his sun roof on a cloud of Van Halen before drifting through my open windows. I didn't mind the wait so much that afternoon.

The other day, I had to drop off some medicine at the school, so I parked my car in line and got out to walk into the school. I passed by one car with its windows down, and inside was a barefoot woman rubbing the space between her big toe and pointer toe along her steering wheel. What the actual fuck? Was that some sort of trigger point massage technique I’ve not heard about? She was pretty into it, although I didn’t hear any moaning, thank you Jesus. She's going to rub her hands all over that after she's done, and then she will be in front of you at the grocery store, paying in cash before you get money back from your debit card. You might as well have rubbed her feet for her.

Last week, I was treated to a real show in the white Fiat in front of me. The driver was an elderly woman with that unnatural shade of red hair preferred by women who think it makes them look younger than white or gray even though it really looks like they’ve soaked their shorn locks in a cheap box of Franzia. Anyway, red headed grandma had a full back seat, three kids across, in her Fiat. Honestly, the car is the same size AS a box of Franzia.

She had her windows open and was making the loudest phone call ever, which was enhanced by the fact that she was on speaker phone. Not only did I get to hear her confusion, but I was also party to the frustration of the woman at the doctor’s office with whom she spoke. The topic was none other than her prolapsed bladder, and she had a lot of information to share with a front office clerk who would have preferred to just schedule an appointment or connect her to the nurse’s voice mail. Honestly, I was convinced the call was taking place inside my car, nay, inside my head. I hope to never experience what she is. I am sorry about her bladder, truly I am.

Loud doesn’t cover the volume at which this call was conducted. What is louder than loud?  

After she completed the call, she hung up, opened her car door, and stepped out to adjust her pants and possibly her bladder. She stood next to the car, tugging her velour track pants back up to her armpits, making sure to get them wedged in both the front and the back before clambering back into her Fiat, at which point she began yelling at what I presume were her grandchildren in the back seat, all three of them. Whatever they had done to provoke her wasn’t audible over her phone call, but clearly she was upset with them, and we all needed to know about it. Maybe she was just cranky because she needs a bladder tuck. I felt sorry for the lot of them, trapped with a crabby wine head in that clown car. Too bad she didn't have a big glass of what she used to dye her hair.

My request for my fellow car line patrons? Just stick to nose picking or slack jawed naps when waiting behind the wheel. It’s almost more socially appropriate. I don't want to know that much about you people.

Disturbing the Peace

Every afternoon, I sit in the car line outside of the middle school and wait for my daughters to be dismissed. Lots of people do the same, and the line of cars goes all the way from the school parking lot down the ridiculously long driveway to the road. I like to play games on my phone or read a book while I wait because I have to get there a good thirty minutes before dismissal if I want to pick them up in time for after school activities. I usually settle in for the wait, engine off, windows down, hoping for a breeze in the late summer heat. I also hope for some peace during my downtime before the craziness of dance and guitar and piano and homework begins, but unfortunately, most of the time my wait is hardly peaceful.

You see, while I quietly and patiently wait for my kids, other parents with younger children in their cars also have to wait, but much less patiently. And we all know how little brothers and sisters can be; in a word, annoying. Some parents park their cars and release these younger kids to the sidewalk where they congregate and devise some sort of game to occupy themselves until the middle schoolers come streaming out of the building.  Usually it involves a lot of screaming and running around, with no parental supervision, since their moms and dads are busy with their cell phones. Yesterday, though, I thought I was watching a scene from “The Lord of the Flies.”

On one side of the school driveway are the parking lots and the sports fields, but along the other side is a small patch of forest, with pine trees lining the edge of the grass near the sidewalk. This little bit of grass is where the scene unfolded. It began with one kid, a grade school age boy with a faux-hawk, who flew from his car the moment it stopped. He picked up a stick from the ground and whipped it along the trees, making a violent grunting sound with every lash. He ran back and forth along the trees, making sure to whip each one. As he was flogging the trees, a tomboyish girl ran from her car and joined him. She too grabbed a stick and proceeded to beat the innocent trees. Her cries mixed with his grunts to create a disturbing melody, which was a siren’s call to yet more children who emerged from the safety of their minivans to join in. Three, four, five more kids, all beating the trees with their own limbs.

The girl impulsively threw down her stick and ran into the woods, the first kid brave enough to kick it up a notch. She came out with a rather large rock, bigger than a brick, heavy enough to require two hands to hold it. She lifted the rock above her head and with a mighty roar, threw it hard onto the ground. That act was all it took; the rest of the kids ran into the woods as she did and returned with their own giant stones. As one rock hit the ground, the other kids would try to pelt that rock with their own. Seriously, these were big two-handed rocks, and their noodly arms shook as they lifted them high overhead before throwing them down with enough force to chip away little pieces. I might have even seen a spark or two.

The faux-hawk boy, not to be outdone, ran back into the woods and came back with a thick branch this time. It was no twig; this branch was thick enough to mount a human head. The rest of the kids were up to the challenge and deserted their rocks in search of the ultimate branch. In a flash, they all returned and began beating the rocks and the trees with their fat sticks. I locked my doors.

As the frenzy of violence against nature escalated, one of the kids crossed the line. He took his rod and hit another boy’s branch. It was a declaration of war. Full out quarterstaff sparring and parrying commenced, a violent minuet on the school grounds. I looked around to see if any of these kids’ parents were going to put down their phones long enough to intervene, but alas, that wasn’t to be. 

Finally, the school bell rang and a mom called out to her son to get back in the car, right when the boy with the faux-hawk lifted his tree branch high overhead, ready to split the skull of another wild but weaker child.  One by one, the kids hurled their sticks back into the woods. Some even grabbed their abandoned rocks and heaved these too into the copse of trees before returning to their minivans and SUVs. I felt fairly certain that if they had more sophisticated weaponry, mace and clubs and burning torches, they could have successfully stormed the school and ransacked the building. They would not have taken any prisoners.

When I was a kid, I too liked to play with the plants and rocks in the yard outside my childhood home. But I used flowers and leaves to make a fake stew, or, after a good rain, a mud pie or something. I didn’t use our plants as weapons to engage in hand to hand combat with the neighbors. I mean, I’ve heard of a pick-up game of football, but not one of Mortal Kombat II.

As shocked as I was to see that level of violence, I was just as shocked to see all the kids were pretty cool with it. I could just imagine one of my kids joining in, trying to reason with the mob, telling them that playing with sticks could be dangerous, that someone could lose an eye, that they might damage the trees, or just standing there saying they should all calmly and quietly return to their cars and start their homework.

As the middle schoolers were dismissed and the car line began to move, I saw the faux-hawk kid hanging out of the  side door of his minivan as his mom drove, no seat, no seatbelt, high fiving all the older boys as they walked by. No wonder she didn’t have a problem with his violent display. Maybe she was scared of him too, and secretly hoped he would roll under the tires.

School Daze

I picked up my daughter, S, from elementary school the other day, and after she settled into her seat and took control of the radio, I asked her how the day went.

It is a ritual we have, one from which I should break free but always forget somehow when I see her face as she approaches the car. I know how the day went from the look upon her face, so asking her is superfluous. I should try a more focused but open ended approach, like what’s the weirdest thing that happened in the cafeteria, or who cried today in class. If I see a frown when she opens the door, though, I ask anyway, how was your day? She provides only two answers to this question: good or okay. Okay means that before we pull into the driveway, she will be crying, pushed to her breaking point by the struggles and tribulations of fifth grade.

Lucky, the other day she approached the car with a big smile on her face. “Good day, I see,” I said to her.

“Someone got married to a chocolate chip today at recess,” she said, and giggled.

“Did you say chocolate chip?” I asked.

“Yes, a fourth grade girl. It was a really big deal. She had been planning it all week.”

So many questions. Where to begin?

“Why was there a chocolate chip on the playground?” I asked. It seemed like a good place to start.

“She brought it from home. Some of the girls in her class were even bridesmaids. She wore a really fancy dress even.”

Did this child’s mother wonder why she was so dressed up for school? Oh wait, it was picture day. Duh. Clever move, bride of chocolate chip.

“Well, um, was it a beautiful ceremony?”

“It was lovely,” she said, smiling. “But the fourth grade boys made fun of her and made her cry.”

“I could see how a group of boys would tease her about that,” I commented.

“Wait, it gets worse. One of the boys ate her chocolate chip.”

“He ate her husband? That’s horrible, I guess. Was he tasty?”

S giggled. “But the girl was all upset.”

I liked how she didn’t use the girl’s name, as if to protect her anonymity.

“I’m sure she was. That was a very short marriage. Plus, she’s awfully young to be a widow.”

“Yeah, she cried and all the other girls yelled at the boy and then their teacher came over.”

“Well, what did she say?”

“The girl told her about the wedding and the boy eating a chocolate chip, but she said she didn’t even know how to punish him for that. So they all kind of walked away.”

“That’s a pretty weird story,” I told her. “Anything else interesting happen? Did you start a new unit in social studies?”

“Yes,” she said. “We are learning about the Dirty Thirties.”

I choked on my own spit. “Excuse me?”

“The Dirty Thirties. You know, the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl and stuff. That must be why they call it that,” she said.

I had to Google the Dirty Thirties when we got home. I didn’t believe that was a common expression that should be taught to elementary school children. But it turns out I was wrong. It might be Ken Burns’ fault; his documentary on the Dust Bowl referred to that time period as such, even though I and most people would think it was more about finding a way to make getting older sound sexier. But still, when S said it, I saw it more as “Drrrrty” and less about dust clouds. At least she didn’t say she was learning about cougars or twinks or trannies or anything.

Wait a minute, she did learn about “tran,” when she had a unit on stems in her reading class. When she studied all the stems, she wanted me to give examples of the stems in words. I kept forgetting she was more familiar with “transcontinental” than she was with “transsexual.” I did my best to contain myself.  I don’t do much better when they cover the solar system. Is there an adult alive who doesn’t at least smile inside when they talk about Uranus?

I’m going to miss the elementary school years. Next year, S will be in middle school, and her innocence will be figuratively stripped from her. She will know all the bad words and see some shit go down. Hell, she will see a police officer every day, one with a real gun who isn’t afraid to use it. She will see kids fight and cuss and make out and all the things I still can’t believe go on in a school in a nice area of town. So if the whole damn fourth grade wants to marry chocolate chips, I will be more than happy to drop off a bag of Nestle Chocolate Morsels. I’ll even throw in a case of Sugar Babies so they can all start families.

Dirty Thirties. Sheesh. Make this growing up thing slow down.

Grace Period?

This school year has barely begun and already I'm worrying about where my ten year old daughter, S,  will be attending middle school. She is my baby, and in my mind, she just isn’t ready for the typical middle school experience, complete with mean girls and acne and periods and bullying, not to mention six different teachers and changing classes and lockers. My older daughter is in seventh grade at the closest middle school, and she comes home almost daily with a story of fist fights or make out sessions in the janitor’s closet or the weird girl getting doused with pig’s blood at the school dance. She has adjusted surprisingly well; she found her niche and is maintaining excellent grades. My younger daughter, however, doesn’t seem to handle change as easily. She still hasn’t made that many friends since she left her private school two years ago, and the one close friend she has made isn’t allowed to come over and play, either because we're white or because we aren’t Christian.

The alternatives to regular public middle school are limited in my town. There’s an excellent Catholic school, but she refuses to learn catechism at the same time she learns Hebrew, so that’s out. There’re also a few magnet schools, but honestly, we bought the house in which we live because the middle and high schools are allegedly so good. And then there’s the charter school.

The charter school is small, focused heavily on leadership, community, and academics, with small single gender classes. They insist on uniforms and eschew lockers. They don’t have arts or music or sports teams or electives or a fucking cafeteria, but they do have excellent test scores and creative teachers. Do I think it’s the perfect school for my daughter? No, but perfect doesn’t exist. It is, however, nice to have options.

I attempted to get my older daughter enrolled in the same charter school two years in a row, but no luck. It’s all based on a “lottery” because the state law provides for equal opportunity for admission to charter schools. That being said, the school still has other requirements for entry, including an application, attendance at a mandatory informational meeting, and after the lottery, a screening with the student, parents, and educators, all designed to make sure the school is a good fit for your child. I appreciate that, really. Why go through all the trouble to get your kid in some special school only to change your mind because you didn’t know about the uniforms and the 1:30 dismissal on Friday?

For E, my older daughter, I attended the meeting twice, sitting through the chairperson’s historical information about the school, the stern explanation of curriculum by the teachers, and the registrar’s specific instructions, an hour wasted on what could be easily read on their website from the comfort of my couch. I jumped through all the hoops, completed the application process, and waited for the lottery. The first year, she was 152 on a waiting list for sixty openings. The second year, she rose to 15 on the waiting list. I don’t even know if they had openings. Needless to say, she adjusted well to our zoned middle school and is doing swimmingly.

A friend of mine who has a daughter the same age as S reminded me it was time to attend the meeting for the charter school. I honestly didn’t give it any thought, since the idea of having to take my kids to two different public middle schools seems a bit on the indulgent side. But I would hate to be accused of not treating my daughters fairly, so I agreed to go with her to my third informational meeting in as many years. Why? Because parents are required to attend  the meeting any time they apply for a child, even if another child already attends that school or if they've attended in the past. Again, it has something to do with thinking about what is best for your child and not taking the cookie cutter approach to education, or some such bullshit.

My friend and I met at the W Road Christian Church, where the meeting was held. Nothing screams public school like meeting about it in a church, let alone one that refuses to specify a denomination. We walked into the sanctuary, clutching our completed applications, and found two seats together. The room was just five degrees shy of Hell, an attempt to make church goers reflect on what direction their lives of sin will take them. For us school meeting parents, well, we just drifted into that red-faced, near comatose place, the one where you move beyond “this room is hot” and head straight for bobbing and swaying in your chair.

The meeting was the same meeting I sat through two other times. I learned nothing new, not that I expected to. After daydreaming about the choir section, which was really cool in a clam shell kind of way, I studied the other parents and their children, judging them and also my chances of getting my daughter in the school. Mostly, I was just waiting for my little slip of paper to prove that I had attended.

After the meeting adjourned, my friend and I had one of those brief conversations about whether or not to ask them to accept our applications. At no point in the past hour did they mention taking applications at the meeting, which I pointed out to my friend. She was convinced if she explained to them she had the application all ready to go, they would make an exception for her and happily take it.

We walked up to a couple of teachers who were standing behind a display of textbooks. I stood slightly behind my friend as she mustered up the nerve to ask them if they would accept her paperwork. The younger of the two teachers launched into a polite, indirect spiel about why they don’t take applications at the mandatory meeting, going on and on about how every child is different and to process the information you heard to make the best possible decision for your child’s education. And then he said, “It’s kind of like a waiting period.”

That’s when I opened my mouth.

“Oh, a waiting period? You mean, like if we wanted to have an abortion?”

That’s what came out.

The two teachers stared at me, slack jawed. My friend knit her eyebrows together and grabbed my forearm, leading me out of the building.

“Well, now you’ve done it,” she said. “You can kiss your daughter’s chance of getting in that school goodbye.”

“Nah-uh,” I replied, “because they don’t know who I am. They don’t have this, remember?” I waved my application in her face.

“Well, if there’s a way to kick you out before you even get in, I’m sure they’ll find it. Jesus, and in a church, no less. We’re lucky the whole building didn’t burst in flames.”

“At least I didn’t say anything about a waiting period for buying a gun,” I said.

“You think that’s worse?” she said, rolling her eyes at me.

Next time, if there is next time, my husband is going to that damn meeting. Better yet, my daughter can go to the same school as her sister. Those teachers hear stuff like that every day. Hell, they probably have kids giving each other abortions in the locker room.  

Maybe that’s why they aren’t allowed to take coat hangers to school.