Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

I need to stop watching American Horror Story. It’s fucking with my mind.

I didn’t even know this show existed until late last summer, when my then fourteen year old daughter, E, started talking about the upcoming season. She had spent the summer Netflix binging on past seasons in her bedroom, unbeknownst to her father and me, and fools that we are, we figured it was on television and therefore couldn’t be that bad. Chalk that up to a big parenting fail.

She was very excited about the season that started this fall, Freak Show, and decided that it could become our new show to watch together. Normally, we stick to such classy reality television shows as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Gypsy Sisters, so for me to get hooked on a drama is really out of character. I am not one to watch regular television programming. It seems like too much of an investment of my time that could be better spent reading books from the library or looking for cat videos online. E loved the show, though, and I love E, and therefore I was willing to give it a go.

Do you know anything about the show? If you watch it, you see my point about the mind fuck. If you don’t, then here is a brief explanation. I’m not very worried about spoiling the show for you because if you aren’t familiar with it yet, chances are pretty good you won’t ever watch it, and good for you.

Every season has a different  disturbing theme and different characters but mostly the same actors. I started with the current season, which is the fourth. It’s called Freak Show, and that’s what it is, an old fashioned side show based in Jupiter, Florida, in the 1950’s. Pin heads, dwarves, giants, deformities, tattoos, hermaphrodites. If you can think of a sideshow freak, chances are, it’s in this season. This show has a little something for everyone. There’s romance, smoking, drinking, and sex, lots of sex, normal sex, deviant sex, violent sex, sexy violence, violent violence, and murder with some torture and dismemberment just for a little something extra.  The language is foul, and there is a naked butt at least once an episode. In short, it’s the perfect show to watch with your teenager.

Also, there is an evil clown. His name is Twisty. He is the reason people are scared of clowns.

E and I watch the show in the dark because it makes it scarier and also we can pretend we aren’t watching the sex scenes together. The sex and violence are gratuitous and help distract you from the holes in the plot and weak character development. Every time an episode is over, I feel a little wrong for having watched it, even more so for having watched it with my child, my sweet, innocent child. None of it can be healthy.

Some time in the last month or so, she thought it would also be a good idea to watch an old season to see how amazing the show used to be, as the current season doesn't seem to be up to the standards of past seasons. Honestly, keeping up that level of quality sex and extreme violence year after year isn’t as easy as it sounds. We started with the second season, Asylum, which is set in a Catholic run mental institution in the 1960’s. That season involved some alien abduction, demonic possession, rape, polygamy, and necrophilia. Oh, and evil nuns and a Nazi doctor who continued the medical experiments he started in the concentration camps. This was all in addition to the sex and freaky sex and violence and murder and naked butts.

We would sometimes watch two or three episodes at a time, in the dark. This show cannot be healthy, and Netflix binging on it is just not a good idea.

After we finished that season, we went back to the first one, Murder House. That season is the one that actually scared me. The other two that I’ve seen are warped and twisted and horrible and creepy, but that first season is downright frightening because it has ghosts too. Murder, sex, rape, latex masks, Columbine style school violence, a girl with Down’s syndrome, hit and run car accidents, a deformed boy hiding in the attic, accidental suicide, and death by a fireplace poker shoved up an ass. I couldn’t stop watching it, not because I liked it, but because I had to. I was almost scared not to. I would watch the show and have nightmares for a few days.

At this point, season three, Coven, is now on Netflix, and we are all caught up on season four, which has a brief hiatus until mid-January. I don’t want to get started on the third season because it’s the holidays, and it just doesn’t seem right to watch so much deviance during such a joyful time of year. Plus, I have way too much to do, and generally after an episode, I have to sit sort of catatonically for a little while until the weird feeling subsides. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

If you watch American Horror Story, you either have a high tolerance for the macabre or no soul. I don’t know which applies to my daughter and me, but everything about that damn show is wrong, just wrong. And the more you watch, the more you get desensitized to its twistedness, like cutting off an animal head and sewing it on a baby body is, you know, kind of okay. I still am not sure if it is worse than Honey Boo Boo or Gypsy Sisters, because those are almost real people.

If you haven’t started the show yet, I recommend you don’t unless you need another reason to feel badly about yourself and everyone else. You can get that same feeling from watching the news, but it has way less sex. And naked butts.

Dawn of the Twelve Blogs of Christmas: It's the Thought That Counts

Can you believe it’s December 1? I mean, sure, the calendar says so, but seriously? I can’t even with December. It’s fifteen days until Hanukah. It’s twenty four days until Christmas. And it’s forty-six days until my daughter’s bat mitzvah. You would think just those three things should be enough to make my head spin. But on top of all of that stuff, all that planning and shopping and cooking and trying to please and unrealistic expectations and inevitable disappoint and all the other emotions, I give myself another big task every December. Yes, people, it’s time for The Twelve Blogs of Christmas. None of these posts will be rehashed, edited, or photo shopped into something new. Twelve original posts, stories, anecdotes, vignettes, lists, or whatever I can muster up from my overtaxed mind. I can’t promise length, excellence, poignancy, or hilarity, but I can promise twelve.

So here we go.

On Saturday night, a friend came over with her two kids. She was going squirrely over the Thanksgiving in her own home after banning one more hour of video games and realizing that meant they would turn to her or against each other for entertainment. We decided on take out Italian and board games, which is really brilliant combination that I highly recommend after a couple of days of Thanksgiving food and football. Luckily we had a game they had never played before, and after we figured out a rhythm, everyone seemed to loosen up and relax.

My friend came to my house after dragging her kids around the mall, in an effort to get out and away from screen time. Her children are a delight, and even after a few too many days of together time, they still were pleasant and polite and engaging, which cannot be said of many eleven and thirteen year olds. Her thirteen year old son, who actually talks to adults other than his parents, made the mistake of mentioning that even after a trip to the mall, he had not gotten a gift for his girlfriend and had no ideas of what to get her.

The whole concept fascinated me, so I had to ask lots of follow up questions. It went down like this:

Me: Wait, you have a girlfriend? You are, what, thirteen now, right?

Boy: Yes.

Me: Can I ask you a personal question?

This is the part where I really shouldn’t ask a personal question. I should just keep my thoughts to myself, inside my head, instead of letting them out there to haunt and disturb others. It’s that filter thing that I lack.

Boy: Um, sure. I guess.

Me: What do you do with your girlfriend?

Boy: (silence)

Me: I don’t mean do, but, like, you don’t exactly go on dates, obviously. I mean, you’re thirteen. It’s not like you are picking her up and taking her to dinner and a movie and then back to her place. So what do you do? Do you talk on the phone? Do you walk her to class? Text? Snapchat? What constitutes a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship in middle school? I am genuinely curious.

My friend sat quietly. Either she didn’t know how to stop my interrogation of her son, or she really wanted to know as well.

Boy: I don’t know. We don’t really do much. I don’t have any classes with her, so I don’t walk with her. Sometimes I see her at the end of the day, in the car pool line.

Boy’s sister: Twice a week! He can talk to her twice a week.

Boy: The rest of the time she is really busy, and then she has to do family stuff on the weekends. So we don’t really talk all that much.

Me: Do you live in the same neighborhood?

Boy: No.

Me: Okay, this is fascinating. So you have this girlfriend, whom you only really see or talk to for a few minutes twice a week. And you don’t live near each other, and you don’t have any classes together. How exactly did you hook up with her?

I hoped that hook up meant something different in eighth grade.

Boy: Well, basically a girl who is friends with my girlfriend came up to me and asked me if I liked the girl who is my girlfriend, and I said sure I guess, and so now she is my girlfriend.

I am pretty sure that is how all relationships begin.

Me: So what’s the problem?

Boy: Well, I don’t know what to get her.

Me: What’s wrong with a piece of crappy jewelry and a stuffed animal? Isn’t that the standard? That was the standard back in the day. Every kiss begins with K.

Boy: Huh?

His mother chimed in: What about a box of chocolates?

Me: Ooh yeah, Whitman’s Sampler from the CVS!!

We both started to laugh. The kids just looked at us.

Me: No, wait, I got it…get her a Lifesavers book!

Boy: What’s that?

Me: It’s a fake box that looks like a book, and it’s filled with rolls of Lifesavers, but only the nasty flavors.

Boy: Can we just go back to the game now?

I don’t know what he is going to get this girlfriend of his, but chances are, she will be disappointed anyway. And then in a week, they might break up because they don’t spend enough time together. Just like every other relationship.

I was impressed by him, though. He indulged me throughout the whole conversation, and didn’t even seem embarrassed or perturbed that I was clearly making fun of the whole girlfriend situation, albeit not in a malicious way. It’s what I do. I enjoy the humor of the situation. And that thirteen year old boy handled it like a pro.

She’s a lucky girl.

On the Contrary

When my teenager, E, was a toddler, she used to like to play a game we called “dis or dis?” Basically, she would carry a random object in each hand, walk up to someone, and say, “You want dis or dis?” while holding out each hand. The player would indicate which object was preferred, and E would thrust out her other hand and shriek, “No, you want dis!” She could play it for hours, and no matter how many different choices you made, they were always the wrong ones.

Today is E’s fifteenth birthday, and she still plays a version of her favorite childhood game. This morning’s edition involved E’s desire to dress up for Cowboy/Farmer/Redneck day at school. I don’t which was the actual theme, because E changed it every time she asked for help in finding appropriate accessories.

Her high school is celebrating spirit week, and E has mixed feelings about the whole thing. She wants to participate, since there is incentive to do so, usually in the form of extra credit points. But it comes at a cost, the potential to embarrass oneself. The school has a special event every night, special lunch food at the cafeteria sponsored by a variety of local restaurants, and even cupcakes and cookies for sale, made by a bunch of Pinterest loving teachers.  Money is collected in many of the classes, all for some sort of charity donation that E has yet to tell us. Also, every day has a dress-up theme, and while a bunch of kids really get into it, E prefers a more understated approach.

So this is how the game went today:

E (over breakfast, this morning, a half hour before she has to leave for school): Mom, I need some cowboy clothes for school today.

Me (still cooking her special birthday breakfast of turkey bacon and pumpkin spice-vanilla French toast): Sure, I can dig something out for you in a minute.

After breakfast was ready, I went to the guest room closet, the black hole of all things without a permanent home. Mostly it stores things like extra blankets and pillows, old Halloween costumes, gift boxes, and even the few stuffed animals and yearbooks I saved from my childhood bedroom. It also contains a few things that belonged to my late grandfather, Pop-pop.

Pop-pop fancied himself a cowboy. He didn’t grow up on a farm, he didn’t own a ranch; he was just a Jew from Baltimore who worked in sales. At some point in his adult life, however, he decided even if he wasn’t from the Old West, he could still look like it. He began wearing only western wear, which he continued until he passed away. Cowboy boots, tooled leather belts, scarf ties, pearly snapped shirts, and always a stiff cowboy hat, felt in the winter, straw in the summer.  He kept a horse at his friend’s house in Chicago when he moved nearby, and he loved to ride, more than anything else, except maybe a tall Jack Daniels and a nice pair of knockers. When he died, he left behind that collection of hats and belts and boots, and my sisters and I each kept a couple for ourselves, either to wear, or just because they were his.

At 7:30 this morning, I was in that closet, digging through the boxes until I found some belts and two pairs of boots, both snakeskin, one cordovan, the other a flashy red and black. I brought the boots out to show E.

Me: Look what I found!

E: I can’t wear those.

Me: Why not? Pops had small feet.

E: I will just wear my new boots.

Me: But your new boots aren’t Western.

E: Well, they still look like riding boots. Close enough. Anyway, I have boots. I really just need a hat.

Me: Why didn’t you say so?

I walked back to the guest room and continued to dig through the closet until I found a slightly crushed square Stetson box. Inside was a lightly stained grey felt hat and a pale straw hat with a dent in it. Pop-pop would have been really pissed at the condition of his hats.

I took the hats into the kitchen where E was sopping up the rest of the maple syrup with the last bite of French toast.

Me: Winter or summer?

E: Um, those are big.

Me: Of course they’re big. They’re real cowboy hats, not those fake things they sell at Target.

E: I can’t wear hats to school.

Me: Then why did you send me in the other room to look for a hat if you can’t even wear it?

E: I hoped you had one with a string around it that I could just hang on my back.

Me: Cowboy hats don’t have strings on them.  I found some belts too. I can go get those for you.

I rushed back to the closet, grabbed the handful of scarf ties and belts I found, and brought them back to the kitchen.

Me: What about these?

E: I don’t wear belts. Don’t worry about it.

Me: I am not worried about it, but I literally just produced an entire Western outfit for you, at your request, and you don’t want any of it.

E: I guess I’m just not comfortable wearing a dead man’s clothes.

Me:  It’s not like he died in these actual clothes!

E: It creeps me out. But thanks for trying.

I put everything back in the guest room, on the floor, since I am pretty sure it will take hours for me to Jenga that closet back together. Then I went upstairs to my other daughter’s bedroom. In her closet, from an old camp costume, was a small straw cowboy hat with a neck string. I took it into E’s bedroom and handed it to her.

E: Thanks, Mom. It’s perfect.

Me: Next time you want something exact, like a cowboy hat with a neck string, do me a favor and tell me. It would save me a lot of time and frustration.

She has managed to take her favorite childhood game and turn it into a more complex and narcissistic teenaged version.  And she is the master.

Happy birthday to my first born, my sweet baby girl. I know she isn’t reading this yet, but one day she will, and hopefully she will see the humor and joy and love she brings me every day, in her own special way. She is worth all of it.

Adding Insult to Injury

Yesterday, my twelve year old daughter S became a woman. It is important that you know she gave me permission to write her story. If you see her, don’t congratulate her, commiserate with her, or tell her she is blossoming before your very eyes. Whatever words of wisdom you feel the need to impart, stuff them back inside your gaping maw. Make like you don’t know, or she will never grant me such permission again. Here we go.

Is there ever a good time to get your period? I mean, other than when it’s late, obviously. What about when you are just a kid, minding your own business? You know eventually it is going to happen to you, since everyone has assured you that yes, you too will bleed once a month for approximately half your life.  Until it finally happens, though, you probably don’t think about it too much. You might carry a little bag with pads in your backpack or your purse, hoping that you never need them. Chances are pretty good that when it does start, you will be without your little bag, or your mom. Just like a real grown up.

All year, S was looking forward to the sixth grade field trip to the U.S. Whitewater Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Due to budget cuts and everyone’s general contempt for middle school aged children, the middle school has no other field trips for sixth grade students, not that this actually counts as a field trip, but more of a parent funded day away from school, one that the entire sixth grade dreamed of for the entire school year.

I dropped her off at school at 6:45 in the morning. She wore old clothes and carried a change of clothes along with a towel in a backpack. She left everything else at home, her hair brush, her spending money, her little bag of pads, because she really didn’t have any room in her bag for any extras. She didn’t even have her phone since the kids had nowhere to leave their belongings except on the seats or in the storage under the bus. I recall offering to chaperone back in the fall, but S thought it would be better if I didn’t, since even she realizes we need to have some time apart.

About three hours later, my phone rang. It wasn’t a number I recognized, so I let it go to voice mail. The phone rang again right away, the same number, which is never a good sign.

“Hello?” I said.

“Waaaaahhhhhh,” my daughter cried loudly.

Oh lord. No mom wants to hear her child cry like that, especially not when said child is on a school trip in another state.

“Calm down, baby. What’s the matter? What happened?”

“I got my period, and it’s all over the place. It’s like someone died down there!” She cried and sobbed and choked a little on her hyperbole.

“It’s ok, sweetie, it is. Aww, I’m sorry this happened on your field trip, but congratulations?” It came out like a question. Emily Post doesn’t have much to offer either under these circumstances. I just went with the first words that came out of my mouth.

“But Mom, I went to the gift shop, and all they have are tamponnnnnnssssssss!” she wailed.

“It’s going to be okay, I promise. Just calm down.” It was kind of hard to concentrate with all that crying. “Here’s what you need to do. Be brave, and go ask a teacher. A female teacher. Tell one of them you just got your period for the first time and does anyone have a pad? I promise you one of them is going to have one. There is no way they can take that many twelve year olds somewhere and not have at least one pad. Do you think you can do that?”

I assumed she could, because she hung up on me.

I waited about five minutes and then called back that mystery number. It was her chaperone. Her male chaperone.  

My poor baby. She just became a woman with someone else’s father.

“Hello?” he said.

“Um, hi, this is S’s mom. She just called me from this number. I wanted to call back and see if everything is under control.”

“Oh, hi, this is so and so’s dad. I’m so glad you called back. Yes, S is fine. The other girls have her in the bathroom and are taking care of her right now. You have nothing to worry about.”

“Well, I really appreciate that, and, um, I’m sorry you had to be the one to be there, for, um, you know, her first time and all.”

“Really, it’s fine. I have daughters.”

I thanked him and said good bye, and spent the rest of my day oscillating between feeling sorry for my little girl, wishing I had been there, crying, and laughing.

After dinner, I drove back to the school to pick her up. I had been dreading it all day, assuming she would burst into tears the minute she saw me. When she got off the bus, she waved and walked over to me, but no tears. I thought, cool, she is saving her melt down for when we get in the car, but again, nothing. She just chattered away about how much fun it was with the rafting and the zip lines and the ropes course and so on and so forth.

“Were you able to find a pad?” I asked hesitantly.

“Let me tell you what happened. I got off the phone with you and walked over to a group of teachers who were sitting doing nothing by the buses. I told them what happened, that I started my period and needed some female products. One of the teachers got out the first aid kit from the bottom of the bus and started digging through it to see if they had anything for me to use.”

I imagined them creating a pad for her out of a wad of gauze and some cloth tape. “Did they have anything?”

“Yes, she found two pads, and she gave them both to me.”

“Well, that was lucky,” I said. “What if some other girl got hers too? Someone wasn’t going to be happy. I’m glad you got them first.”

“I know,” she said. “But listen to this. While she was looking through the first aid kit, a cute little field mouse came out from the bus compartment where they keep the bags. He was so cute, Mom. He was small and brown and so sweet almost like a gerbil but with a small little tail. He kept darting about between the bags. But then one of the teachers said he was hurt. I looked, and it was so sad, he looked like he had been injured, there was blood all over his side.”

“Maybe he got his period?” I asked her. Sometimes I am the only one who thinks I am funny.

She rolled her eyes at me and continued. “The teachers looked at that poor little thing and decided he needed to be put out of his misery, you know, cause he was hurt. And then the science teacher, that one man? He just walked up to the mouse and stomped it to death. He stomped and stomped and stomped until the mouse stopped moving, and he did it all right in front of me, while I got my period. Can you believe that?”

“No, I cannot,” I said.

“It was so sad, Mom. That poor little thing. And you want to know the worst part?”

“There is something worse than crushing a mouse in front of you? Maybe I don’t.”

“On the way home, you want to know what movie they showed us on the bus?”

“No, what was it?”

“Ratatouille.”

“The one about the French rats that cook?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she said. “I had to watch a cartoon movie about mice. Mom, every time I close my eyes, I can still see him stepping on that poor little mouse, crushing it.”

I fed her a lovely dinner of boxed macaroni and cheese, and she watched television afterwards while holding her pet hamster. And that’s when she cried, fat tears raining down on her pet rodent, Sponge Bob blasting in the background.

She might be a woman now, but she is still my baby.