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Kids, Laughs

Sisters say what? (Vol. 10)

March 7, 2024


It’s been a minute since I cleared the Notes app on my phone and shared the memorable nuggets from the mouths of my babes. Here are some recents from the sissies.

“We’re working on compound words and contraptions.” – Sloppy Joan

“If I was death-spert I would just hide longer. But only if I was super, really death-spert.” – Sloppy Joan

“That is in-say-ying!” – Sloppy Joan


“That was the doctor’s appointment when they asked me about pubeder.” – Spike

“Any changes to your medical history?” – Doctor 
“My mom’s peeling from Turks and Caicos.” – Sloppy Joan 


“Their parents are probably so proud of them!” – Sloppy Joan after the AJR concert

“Ants weigh less than an inch.” – Sloppy Joan


“I think he got tiggers.” – Sloppy Joan, meaning chiggers

“My butt has been on so many toilets.” – Sloppy Joan


“Find a clean one. That’s my motto in public bathrooms.” – Sloppy Joan  

Husband comes home to Sloppy Joan playing her electric bass hooked up to the amp in the garage.
“Whatcha doin’?” – husband
“Makin’ some money!” – Sloppy Joan


“I can’t tell if he’s an old man or a dad.” – Sloppy Joan

“I might have gotten a 2-second butt rash, I think!” – Sloppy Joan


“I hope I get a good husband with good babies.” – Sloppy Joan

“We’ll meet you at Crackle Barrel” – Sloppy Joan

“What if he just ignored you because he thought you were a boomer?” – Sloppy Joan


“Yeah, the tortoises at the zoo are always doing it.” – Me
“Wait … I thought they were giving each other a ride.” – Spike

“I’m not very religious but his freckles and cross necklace just do something for me.” – Spike, crushin’

“These boots are too small.” – Spike
“It’s OK. You’ll get through it. Like the time I wore a bra to school.” – Sloppy Joan

“I haven’t had a Pepsi in a hot second. Like literally just a few seconds.” – Sloppy Joan

“Your breath stinks.” – Spike to JoJo before basketball practice
“It’s OK. It’s basketball, it’ll smell like sweat soon.” – Sloppy Joan

“She was born on Valentine’s Day.” – Me, sharing that friends welcomed a grandbaby on Feb. 14.
“Ohhhhhh … She’s gonna love sooo many people!” – Sloppy Joan

“Op, tomorrow’s spring 1st.” – Sloppy Joan

“I thought that bunny was laying babies.” – Spike


“The Office is like an adult show and a kid show combined, because it’s really funny, but also, they’re working.” – Sloppy Joan

“I’m so glad we aren’t super rich or anything cuz then I’d have to dress all fancy and look all nice. Plus, I couldn’t fart.” – Sloppy Joan

“I’m not getting a second load.” – Sloppy Joan
“You mean a refill?” – JoJo

“Aw, shoot! It’s the real Slim Shady.” – Me
“Mom, it’s Eminem.” – JoJo (annoyed)

“He’s the best drumist.” – Sloppy Joan

“I opened my belly button, the water ran into it, I folded the skin and when I lifted it, the water was gone!” – Sloppy Joan
“Where did it go?” – Me
“Into my belly. I drank through my belly button.” – Sloppy Joan
“Wow.” – Me
“Does your belly button ever get hungry?” – Sloppy Joan

“I left you a scent packet.” – Sloppy Joan, after tooting in my car

“We played zombie.apicklelips.” – Sloppy Joan

“If I wanna keep one good one I gotta stop farting.” – Sloppy Joan, referring to dating/marriage

“Maya Angelou was born in Ar-Kansas.” – Sloppy Joan
“Where?” – Me
“Ar-Kansas.” – Sloppy Joan
“Oh, Arkansas?” – Me 
“I guess!” – Sloppy Joan

“We’re going to The Empathy.” – Sloppy Joan, the day of her field trip to the Embassy

Kids, Thoughts

The Christmas gift that made me cry

January 2, 2024

By the grace of Amazon, we’ve come out on the other side of Christmas once again. I don’t know about you, but I’m in the phase where I’m freebasing sucrose, on a strict diet of stale sugar cookies and Emergen-C®.

The day of giving is still close enough that, when you run into people, the first thing they ask is, “Did you have a nice Christmas?” And my answer is, of course we did! This is because, much like the agonizing process that brought our children into the world, against all odds, mothers everywhere have already magically shed the angst from the relentless grind of merry-making we disproportionally shoulder. We can look our friends and co-workers in the eyes and actually mean it when we wax poetic about the joy and looks on their sweet faces as they ripped into package after package, all of us concussed by the charm of their fleeting gratitude.

Gone are the tears from back-breaking gift wrapping sessions crammed into playdate windows. Banished are the pangs of disgust over jarring grocery receipts and factoring peanut allergies into holiday party treats and rolling the dice on first-time dishes for family gatherings. Tallying who got what and elves who didn’t move and empty tape dispensers and White Elephants and Secret Santas and “Oh, Mom, I forgot …”s, all pests of the past now.

Shifting from stuff

Particularly in recent years, we’ve focused on experiences over things, in an attempt to open the girls’ eyes to the gifts you can’t wrap–the vibration of live music, the vastness of mountain summits and coastal shores. The transition has rejuvenated my commitment to Christmas.

While no one appreciates the magical anticipation unique to Santa’s light more than me, I also try to emphasize the benevolent buzz of giving over the fleeting, materialistic high of getting. One of my favorite traditions, and I’m confident the chicks would agree, is our annual Day-o-Treats.

We spend a few nights creating confections, varying combinations of nuts and melted chocolate and butterscotch. We blast my expertly curated Christmas playlist and lean into the mess and marathon of dipping, freezing and packaging. “It’s totally worth it,” JoJo will remind me at least a few times, as I scrape dried candy coating cocoa off the countertops and rotate parchment paper-lined pans in the garage.

Then, typically on the first day of Christmas Break, we load up boxes of sweets, blast the same jolly Dolly-heavy playlist and drive around surprising friends with boxes of holiday treats. I let the chicks choose our targets. This year, it took us from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. to hit all the houses. (And Santa covers the whole world in one night!)

As we pulled out of the last driveway and through the neighborhood ablaze in light displays, the timers ticked on in the early darkness of winter, I sighed, exhausted. “Totally worth it,” JoJo reminded me again. And I saw a flash–one I see quite often these days–of my oldest girl inching toward a maturity I’ve long fostered and feared. With every passing Christmas, she helps more, and gets lost in less. It’s a transition as expected and heart-breaking as any cruel side effect of aging children.

The gift that made me cry

Somewhere toward the end of our predawn Christmas unboxing, my JoJo passed me a handmade gift. “It’s from me and Spike,” she said. It was a large glass jar, draped in a soft flannel fabric, tied closed with twine and a tag that read:

“Here’s a jar of compliments to bring you light when the sun refuses to shine, to settle the sea when it continues to rage, and to remind you how amazing you are when no one else will. Love you!”


I made it to “shine” before the tears came. Maybe it was the lingering effects of seasonal stress which, let’s face it, siphons the life out of you, or exhaustion or my own baited expectations for the day. Maybe it was such how sweet it was. But the thoughtful words and generous gesture made my cocoa mug runneth over.

What the jar really means to me

Instinctually, my first reaction was guilt. I hated the thought that I’d failed to mask my anxiety or shield them from my stress. But in the lazy haze of the nameless days that fall between December 25 and the New Year, I remembered the words of the social science goddess Brene Brown, who constructed the parenting manifesto I have framed on my dresser (mentioned in JoJo and the Case of the First Grade Burdens).

Among other expertly crafted words, it says:

“We will practice courage in our family by showing up, letting ourselves be seen, and honoring vulnerability. We will share our stories of struggle and strength. There will always be room in our home for both.
We will teach you compassion by practicing compassion with ourselves first; then with each other. We will set and respect boundaries; we will honor hard work, hope, and perseverance. Rest and play will be family values, as well as family practices.”

I was reminded of why I framed the pledge in the first place; not only as a north star for me, but also as a visible promise to my girls. Something they could see in plain print. Picking up the framed words helped me shed the guilt and savor the simple beauty of their present.

The handmade gift–the fact that they took the time to fill the container with words of hope and encouragement–isn’t a symptom of their front row seats to my struggles. It’s a symbol that we are raising humans who see people. Who see me. And I love that. I need that.

As parents, more days than not, it feels like we’re just screaming corrections and commands into the wind.

Put your laundry away.

Turn off the screen.

Don’t laugh at words said at someone else’s expense.

Stand up for what’s right.

Stand tall in who you are.

Go high.

Be kind.

Pitch in.

Pick up.

Seize the sunshine.

From the moment they arrive, we start shaping and molding and instructing. And it’s hard to tell if any of it is sticking. So to get this wink of empathy from the two who will take on the world first, feels pretty incredible. And thus, the tears.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, keep going, parents. It’s working.

Happy New Year!

Kids

Tears of a clown

June 4, 2019

I always get irrationally sad this time of year. Am I alone in this? It’s something about endings and beginnings; I am equally ill-equipped to handle both circumstances. Graduations, and goodbyes and page turning … it all makes my eyes burn.

So much happened this school year. Our JoJo found her strength on the bars and footholds of a ninja warrior course. She made new friends and grew a confidence I feared she would never find. You still don’t have to dig too deep to tap into the lava of sensitivity bubbling just beneath her skin, but she has come so, so far. She’s gorgeous and happy and always inventing new ways to shine. She hit double digits, and she’s going to be in fourth grade! Fourth grade! I can’t handle that.

Spike continued her path toward the Supreme Court. She had a special connection with her teacher this year. They spoke the same language and she thrived in the supportive environment. She is a sponge, absorbing the factoids and infinite details of our world. But as thirsty as she is for information, she craves justice and civility just as voraciously. And that’s what fills my bucket.

But this year is also particularly bittersweet, as we’re getting to the end of our line in one very familiar classroom. Our household’s wild-hearted Sloppy Joan has just a few days left in her preschool class. A class led by one of our all-time favorite teachers. Our third little girl is the spirited caboose bringing this period of our lives into the station. Her final day in PreK-4 marks the official end of a chapter that had three sweet installments during a particularly busy and sugary stage of our lives.

Guys, my sorrow over this can not be contained or explained. Thus, I have no other option than to go hide my face in a sticky tent of shame nestled in the camp of avoidance. Not because I don’t have respect for the situation. Not because I don’t want to give, in this case, the woman who literally loved all three of our children as if they were her own for days on end, the hug and thank you she deserves. But because my emotional break often comes on with so much momentum and on such a high end of the spectrum in comparison to others that it ends up just being altogether mortifying.

While most human, adult mothers in this situation might get “choked up” and a little misty eyed, I experience more of a torrential downpour of snotty sobs likely to collect in a pool on the unsuspecting teacher’s shoulder. I get red-faced, my mouth contorts as it loses the battle not to turn down like a drunken clown’s lips as the tears surge aggressively down my cheeks. I can’t speak. I can’t breath out of my nose. And I sure as heck can’t express my gratitude like a composed grownup. It’s a disaster. Me + sadness = 80s telenovela.

It’s like when you have your last baby, and you find yourself grieving things like the disgusting crust that falls off their belly button. It’s all one long farewell tour. The last trip home from the hospital. The last bottle. The last first steps. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. This year has felt a lot like that. The last first day. The last “Mom” painting covered in tiny ladybug fingerprints. The last time those little voices will gather around a cafeteria table and say their prayers together over muffins and apple slices. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Ugh! It rips my heart out. It just does. Even though she’s five years old and will likely remember approximately 3 percent of the memories she’s made over the past 150 days, it’s just too sad for me to wrap my arms around. This woman has hugged and consoled and cared for three of the four most important souls in my life. And she did it so selflessly and fully. She was all in, you guys. And that makes all the difference. And that makes it so gosh dang difficult.

I’ve been here before. When we decided to move home and I took then-baby JoJo out of the home daycare she’d been going to for nearly a year, the woman thought someone in my family had been in a horrific car accident. When our saint-of-a-sitter we had after that retired, I was curled up on the ground like she’d been given a stage six cancer diagnosis. (She’s fine, by the way.) When we told our sitter after her that we were going to put SJ in preschool instead of keeping her home … sob fest. And, in an all-too-similar scenario, when JoJo – the first in the series – was finishing up her run in PreK4, I wouldn’t take her to school for a week for fear I would fall apart in front of the other, more mature parents. See … Ill-equipped.

I can’t help it. I have a big thing for the people who make my kids a big thing. I mean, let’s be honest, they don’t even have to be that good at it. If you put your arm around my kid just one time, you’ve got a spot in my heart. But, as luck would have it, the vast majority of the folks who have cared for, taught and entertained my daughters have all been really, really good at it. Hence, the frightening clown face of tears.

So what I’m asking you all here is … is it just me? Does the cheese stand alone? Is there anyone else out there who can’t handle the change that comes with the natural progression of the standard school year? I’m attached and overly sentimental, and I can admit it. But surely there’s someone else out there eating chocolate in their closet this week. Where ya at?

Kids

Different like everybody else

January 16, 2019

This morning, JoJo, my oldest daughter, walked out of the house wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, a navy and cornflower blue striped men’s tie, knotted loosely around her 9-year-old neck and a confident grin. Around 10 a.m. I got a message from my husband, who’d clearly been sitting on his concerns for the past three hours.

“I hope kids don’t pick on JoJo today. You know … because of her tie.”

I knew. I knew exactly where his heart was. I saw it on his face when I watched him tie the slick fabric at her request in our closet the night before. He brought it around behind her, under the baby hairs on the back of her neck, then came to his knees to fiddle with the knot’s intricacies, looking adoringly into her sparkling eyes every now and then. She was so excited, high on the proposition of making a personal fashion statement. Sporting something that was her dad’s no less!

But sadly, as parents, we know that allowing our little people do anything that could even be considered mildly different is like tying a bleeding cat to a concrete block in the middle of a meadow. It’s bully bait. It’s a healthy thing to do for them, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still bully bait. And some kids just have better armor than others.

Every morning, when I watch my oldest girls trot up the sidewalk and take that first, unnecessarily massive step up onto the bus,  a handful of thoughts pass through my mind, like a ritual I’ve practiced a thousand times before. The first is, Dear Lord, please keep my babies safe and bring them back to me just as I left them. The second is, please protect their little hearts, followed close behind by please let them be kind to others’ hearts.

It’s no secret we’ve wrestled with confidence and emotional issues for a few years now with our JoJo, mostly a result of her finger sucking addiction. When she feels hurt, which happens quickly and often without warning, her response is to yell and say hurtful things. It ebbs and flows, but typically it feels like we’re storing an active volcano in the bedroom at the end of the hall. She’s also gotten disturbingly skilled at rolling her eyes, so that’s officially in the repertoire. It’s hard as the parent to see her reactions for what they are – a rusty shield she keeps at her side always – rather than just spite, but it’s gotten easier over the years.

But that’s at home. School is an entirely different island.

At school, her reflexes will get her labeled a “mean girl” and barred from social circles. At school, the triggers are peers and poor performances on tests and 8 million other tiny touchpoints. At school, the largest, and historically the most prominent pain point, is being different; acting different, saying something different, looking different. In any way. And thus we come back to the neck tie.

“Are there other girls in your class who are wearing ties, babe?” I asked this morning, as she ate her breakfast.

“Nah,” she shrugged.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, it looks really cool.”

“I know!” she lit up.

It’s just a tie, I told myself. Maybe the other kids will love it, and she’ll get compliments all day long and come home on Cloud Nine. Maybe it’ll be fine. Maybe if I build her up enough …  But, just like her father’s, my heart quickened as she pulled her coat on. Send in the concrete block.

I listened to a podcast recently where a physician said that we are all exactly who we are supposed to be, and we are so unconditionally accepted by God and the universe that it’s unimaginable. Our flaws are intentional. They are the nuances that make us uniquely beautiful. The only problem? None of us realize it. No one feels that way. Instead, we spend our energy agonizing over whether or not one little neck tie has the power to emotionally level our fragile daughters.

This physician’s point was that, if we could all get to a point of internalizing that acceptance, all of the fear and anger and the destructive, selfish actions that come from that family of feelings would dissolve. The anxiety of finding our place would dissipate entirely, leaving room for the good stuff, like joy and love.

So the question then becomes, how do I make my JoJo, and her sisters as well, feel unconditionally accepted in a world where we’re all working with overactive label makers? For that matter, how do I get myself to open a gift that powerful? How do we drop that first pebble in the pond to start the ripple of peace and approval, both with ourselves and others, so we’re all on the same page, in the same mindset? So that we’re all living on the same island.

Different like everybody else

I don’t have an answer for that; Only a feeling that the implications of imparting those beliefs onto the next generation could turn some serious things right around for the somewhat sad state of this planet. For now, I’m going to keep telling my daughter that her accessories are fierce, but her confidence is fiercer. I’m going to keep saying my prayers as she skips up the sidewalk and steps up onto the bus. I’m going to tell her that we’re all different. That we’re all beautifully, expertly tailored to be different. Then I’m going to bend down and pick up another pebble.

Kids

Six words that changed the way I’ll talk about my body

August 29, 2018

There are certain phrases that come from the mouths of our babes that stop us dead in our tracks. Phrases such as …

“Uh oh …”

“Shut up!”

“Don’t be mad …”

“I can’t hold it.”

“Whoops!”

Late last week we added a new one to the list.

I am a sad, snooze button-slapping sloth. My intent is always to workout in the mornings but, because of my aforementioned condition, I typically have to cram it into the evenings, right between stuffing dinner in my face and washing a child’s butt.

On one seemingly uneventful evening, I was in the basement, 10 minutes into 80 Day Obsession’s Booty day when the chicks came down. JoJo set up a ninja obstacle course and was pushing her sisters to “Jump higher!” “Run faster!” and “Do it like this!” They were running around in their sports bras (hand-me-downs from a work friend’s daughter and their latest obsession) and giggling and burning off energy and radiating innocence.

After about 20 minutes, Spike came running over, panting, and put her hands on her hips.

“Look how much weight I lost!” she declared.

I set my weights down and spun around, propelled by the sobering gravity of the statement spilling out of my 7-year-old’s lips.

“Whoa! I mean, I think you look really strong,” I said, grasping desperately for a solid, child psychologist-endorsed rebound. “And that’s what I like to see.”

She raised her eyebrows, looked over at her biceps, shrugged and went back to the course, pleased by the exchange. That made one of us.

With every squat, every leg lift that followed, I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into a sinkhole of shame. I finished my workout and went up to tell Hank we were big, fat failures who could not use the words “big”, “fat” or “failure” anymore.

“We have to stop talking about our weight!” I announced. He barely turned from the dishes. “I mean it. Spike just told me she’d lost weight, and I don’t like it. We gotta get it together. Only stuff about being strong, from now on. No more rubbing our bellies, or complaining about how much we ate, or any of that.” He nodded in the agreeable way he does when I make such profound proclamations out of nowhere.

Body image is a struggle handed down from the women before us, who put their eggs in the basket of Jane Fonda, Weight Watchers, Slim-Fast and Oprah. Women who inherited the same battle from the generation that came before them. A generation that sought resolution through grapefruit, diet pills and belt massagers. It is a conflict as old as humankind – the epic tussle between vanity, health and self-acceptance.

Thinking back on my childhood, I can fondly recall my own mother’s affinity for peanut M&Ms. At night, after dinner was cleared and the children had scattered, my mom would sit down on the floor next to her bed and watch L.A. Law with a bag of the multicolored candies in her lap and make me scratch her back. At the time, I thought nothing of her evening ritual. It was endearing and just something she did, like dying her hair or snapping her fingers when she danced.

But in my house now, when I reach up into the cabinet for my after-dinner treat of two pieces of 72% cocoa chocolate, I see my daughters watching. Sometimes they’ll even say, “Watch the sug, mama.” And they’re not saying that because they’re judgmental turds. They’re saying that because I’ve unintentionally conditioned them to say that. I, along with a million forms of media and mixed messages, have formed their thoughts and placed phrases in their minds by vocalizing my own food shortfalls over and over again, in conversations that I thought were benign or far enough away from little impressionable ears.

And now, despite all my best intentions, the thing I always feared is happening. It’s being held up to my face in the form of one innocent little statement: “Look how much weight I lost.”

I naively thought I was following the protocol for bringing up healthy, well-adjusted girls. To their faces, it’s always about nourishing our bodies, getting stronger, treating ourselves well. But it hasn’t been enough. The fabricated shortcomings of our mothers and our mothers’ mothers are infiltrating my adorable chicks and I so desperately want to stop it.

I was talking about Spike’s declaration with a friend at work and she mentioned that even her oldest son, who is 6, has been talking about his “belly” and comparing himself to the other little guys in his grade. He’s 6!

What the hell? Where did it all get so screwed up?

Maybe time has quickened the affliction, but I don’t remember worrying about my body until middle school, around the time the dreaded locker room came into play and sixth graders with C cups started ruining everything. I had a short pixie haircut above my ears, braces, freckles and a chest as flat as an Indiana cornfield. That was when I started comparing myself. We all remember when we started comparing ourselves.

That same friend told me about a project her class did in first grade. They were doing some experiment with pumpkins and the teacher had the students step on a scale, first holding a pumpkin, and then without it, in order to get the weight of the squash. “I still remember pretending to be sick so I wouldn’t have to weigh myself in front of my class,” she shared. “And I wasn’t even that much bigger than the other kids.”

We all carry some of the responsibility, I suppose. For my part, I’ve been known to rub my food baby after a meal or let out a regretful groan after going for the second cinnamon roll or saying stupid shit like, “Oh, I shouldn’t,” when offered an amazing homemade pastry. I think I’m counterbalancing it by screen grabbing inspirational quotes on Instagram like, “Exercise is a celebration of what your body can do. Not a punishment for what you ate.” I think my perception is off.

How do we break the cycle? How do we convince the next generation that as long as they are using their bodies and treating them well and they feel capable in their bodies and they feel at home in their bodies, that they are doing exactly what they need to be doing? How do we make them feel proud not embarrassed, motivated not defeated, informed not passive?

Caring for yourself is a massive responsibility. It’s composed of a thousand decisions in a day and, as any mind-body guru will tell you, the body keeps score. There has to be a shift away from succumbing to the suffocating complexities of the weightloss noise and toward the beauty of caring for this precious gift we were given, this phenomenal space we get to occupy on this planet.

I’m not saying I have the roadmap to get us there. But, thanks to six little words and the mirror only a child can hold up to you, I feel like I’m waking up to the urgency of the issue at our children’s’ feet. The shift has to start somewhere. Let’s lean in a positive direction.

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Kids

From trigger to tantrum: The 3 stages of parent-child confrontation

August 1, 2018

When our JoJo started popping her top back in 2015, we chalked it up to the age. It’s just a phase, we thought. All kids develop a short fuse during that challenging transition window between toddler and child. But the tantrum tide hasn’t rolled back out to sea. The triggers can be anything from a sister getting too much attention (a spark one might categorize as irrational) to a container of 25,000 rainbow loom loops flipping and raining multicolored chaos out across a patterned bedspread (warranted).

While the tantrums once rumbled in like a summer storm you could spot 50 miles away, now they’re more like an F4 tornado that seems to drop down out of nowhere and elicit mass destruction for all in its path. We go from 0 to fury in 5.2 seconds, and no one is safe from her wrath. I once looked on in horror as she reprimanded a baby – a baby! – for stupidly sucking on her pretend smartphone. It was then I questioned how those nurses ever let me take a human being home from the hospital.

We’ve tried some things to remedy the rage. But in the end, the tantrum cycle always comes back to the same three phases. Picture a bell curve with a crescendo of contempt right at the top.

Level 1: Psychospeak

I love me some Brene Brown, I do. I worship the woman like a Vegas bride worships Elvis. After I read her gospel, “The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting,” I thought I had it. I got cocky. I was going to stop leading my children and instead embark on a journey of growth and discovery beside them. We would learn together, always with love and truth at the heart of our endeavors and conversations. I was going to be a different kind of mom. I even printed her parenting manifesto and framed it. It’s on my dresser. I’m looking at it right now.

My thing with Brene isn’t exclusive. I like to toss in a little Gabriel Bernstein, John O’Leary, Glennon Doyle, Shauna Niequest, Shonda Rhimes, Dalai Lama, Oprah and Tony Robbins for extra flavor. You might say I’m a bit of a self-help junkie. I like to hit the bong of Super Soul Kool-Aid on the regular. And perhaps that’s all to say that my mind’s a little restless, but also, I have an insatiable hunger for perfection and happiness, whatever that means.

When Hurricane JoJo comes ashore, I always reach for my favorite reference guides first. I attempt to tackle the tantrum through reason and empathy. This begins with a simple question:

“What’s wrong, honey?”

Now, where this goes wrong is that it’s rooted in the assumption that a reasonable question will elicit a reasonable response. In reality, it’s met with such sentiments as:

“Spike said I’m writing my 9s backward!”

“She called me a ‘geck’.”
“What’s a geck?”
“I don’t know! But it’s bad!”

“I was the teacher and then she said it was her turn to be the teacher and then I tried to show her how to grade the papers but she said she didn’t want to draw stars and then she took my pink marker and told me I had to be the nurse, not the student, and no one is listening to me and Sloppy Joan always gets everything she wants always because she’s the baby and everybody hates me because I like green jello!”

And so, as anyone would, I pause and consider what to do with such weighty tribulations. I remind myself that, to her, this is a big deal. It is upsetting. It is a reasonable excuse to completely lose her shit and scream-cry and throw things and slam doors. I remind myself that her tantrum is valid, because her feelings are valid, because she is a little human.

Depending on the day, the weather, the circumstances, I might be able to remind myself of these things several times. I might be able to recall Jo Frost, the SuperNanny, the Godmother of meltdowns, and remember I need to invite my daughter to share her feelings, not project my own onto her. I might even share a story from my youth. Perhaps a time when someone didn’t like the same flavor of jello as me and it resulted in emotional distress. Perhaps I’ll sit with her on a pillow of patience and we’ll sort through the whole misunderstanding peacefully, Brene and all her friends smiling over my shoulder.

This is the stage in the game when I redirect. When I send JoJo to her room to collect herself – “an emotional timeout” I call it – which looks like bracelet making or reading or meditating. Hypothetically, this is when her heart rate comes down and she regains composure and we establish resolution.

Hypothetically.

Level 2: Detonation

I try. Really, I do.

But when someone is howling within a sealed enclosure for more than 10 minutes, it can be difficult to keep your cool. I’ll confess that I’m a yeller. It’s not something that I’m proud of. But in my defense, the voice that I was born with – the pitch, the volume, the tenor – doesn’t seem to resonate with my oldest unless I turn it way the hell up. At least not when she’s in full conniption mode.

These fits always reach a pitch where inevitably I need to turn up the dial to be an active participant in the conversation. It just works out that way. In the moment it feels like a necessary element for communication, though one might argue as an observer that, from their perspective, it looks a lot like an adult tantrum.

This was an honest-to-goodness exchange I had with my daughter last week.

“What is wrong? Huh? Tell me, please,” – me, yelling.
“I’m tired!” – JoJo, crying and yelling.
“Then go to bed.”
“I don’t want to go to bed.”
“Then stop crying.”
“But I’m tired.”
“Then go to bed!”
“I don’t want to go to bed!”

To read it now, it seems like a riddle. A joke, at least. And maybe that’s the humor in it. The fact that afterward you can recognize the absurdity of a 35-year-old woman and a 9-year-old girl screaming at each other to stop screaming at each other.

And where is my tribe in these moments, huh? I don’t see Oprah or Tony anywhere in this steaming pile of mess.

This is often the stage in which I resort to threats.

“Do you want to go to Sophie’s party on Saturday?”
“Do you want to go swimming tomorrow?”
“Do you want to start American Ninja Warrior classes?”
“Do you want to make it to 10?”

[Of course she does.]

“Then get it together and knock it off!”

These threats can range from a few hours in her bedroom to a canceled family vacation. Of course, as punishers, we know that the higher the threat, the less likely it will actually be executed, but sometimes you have to go big for effect.

I’m not proud of the things that happen in the Detonation period. I’m just not. Often, it concludes with me slamming her door, which, coincidentally, I likely just yelled at her for doing a few minutes before I jerked the brass knob myself (I know, that sounds dirty).

Level 3: Repentance

It usually hits me like the rancid air 2 miles outside a hog farm. Regret. Lots of it.

Once I’ve walked away, I realize that that was where I went wrong. I turned my back. The instant replay in my mind starts when I hit the steps and turns into a full blown highlight reel of my failures by the time I reach the kitchen. She needed someone and I dropped the ball.

I blew it.

I missed the mark.

I’m worse than a person who kicks puppies.

I let down Brene and Jo and all of the people who tried to coach me to avoid this exact parental calamity.

I breathe on it for a bit, collect my thoughts and go back to her room to apologize. Dr. Dave, a dear friend who specializes in mindfulness, talks about how important it is for us to ask for forgiveness, even from our children. Sometimes especially from our children. But I struggle with the “but”.

My apologies typically sound something like:

“JoJo, I’m sorry I just yelled at you, but you have to understand …” or “Honey, I shouldn’t have raised my voice, and I want to apologize for my behavior. But when you lose it like that …”

Nothing matters after the “but”, we all know that. My 9-year-old knows that. And yet, I can’t break away from the “but”.

The saving grace is that resilience is the ingredient that distinguishes young souls from the middle aged ones. I will feel the aftershocks of a good tantrum for at least 24 hours, while JoJo will be asking for chocolate ice cream after 1. For me, it has to mean something. It has to be a smoke signal that there is trouble in her heart, and we must form a five-part plan to help her channel her aggression immediately. But really, the longer these go on, the more I think she just gets pissed and wants everyone to know. She’s onto the next episode of Little Lunch before I’ve metabolized the emotional post mortem.

And perhaps the most defeating facet of the tantrum cycle, is the inescapable certainty that it will all happen again at any moment. There’s a whole world full of triggers out there, and we’re just waiting to hear the first shot.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe I’ll be better. Maybe it’s just a phase.

Kids

Jealousy and a tough awards season

February 1, 2018

Jealousy. The green-headed monster. Riding the bitter train to Envy Town. The desire to possess what someone else possesses or garner the attention someone else has garnered is a totally natural, entirely ugly impulse.

I still remember crowding around a modest 20-inch television in the corner of our kitchen, the camcorder hooked up to the inputs, to watch a video of my older sister reading her winning entry for the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest. Mom had tears in her eyes. Dad got nostalgic about his writing days in college. At school, they announced her name over the loudspeaker. She had a certificate with a gold seal on it, which made it worth a million dollars in my mind. I was in third grade, she was in fifth, and all of this was very much a big deal.

When I won the same contest two years later, it just wasn’t the same. The shine of victory had been dulled by repetition. There were no tears. Hell, i think we even skipped the banquet where the winners read their essays. It wasn’t the first time my sister did something ahead of me, better than me. But it was one of the first occasions I can recall vividly. That sting of a sibling outshining her housemates. The taste of ice cream in someone else’s honor.

Everybody has those memories! We’re born with comparison and competition coursing through our veins. I remember thinking the attention I received for my own accomplishments just wasn’t as significant as the embarrassing amount of praise my brother – the football player and only boy – or my sister – the equestrian with the shy disposition – got. Of course, their memories are likely skewed the other way. And, in hindsight, the truth is, we were all loved an appropriate amount for three children who experienced predominantly mild, occasionally notable success, and acted like jerks much of the time.

But see, the trick to that clarity rests in the hindsight. When you’re in it, you can’t see it through the green. These days, my view is from the other side of the fence. The parents’ side. And it ain’t pretty, folks.

Last week, Hank and I received an email from the principal at the girls’ school:

[Paraphrased]
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Spike’s Parents,
It is my pleasure to inform you that your kindergartener, Spike, will receive our Perfect Panda award for displaying this month’s life skill, integrity. Please join us at our school assembly to surprise your child and present her with her certificate on Tuesday, January 30.

Sincerely,
Spike’s Principal

I closed the email and immediately jumped on chat. He was already there …

Hank: Go Spikey!
Me: Right?!
Hank: JoJo’s gonna be pissed.
Me: Right.

See, what you don’t know is that the school gives out these awards every month throughout the school year. And every month for the past 2.5 school years, our JoJo has come home with a sad, shattered spirit after learning she, once again, was not named a Perfect Panda. Spike, as the universe would have it, came in and cleared one just five months into her academic career. That burns a bit on the way down.

This was tricky. As the parent, you certainly don’t want to detract from one child’s accomplishment. But when you have an emotionally fragile child, you don’t want them spiraling, either. What to do … What to do …

I took every opportunity to initiate damage control early. For instance, when JoJo scored in her game Saturday, but Spike did not, I was quick to point out that Spike cheered for her big sis even though she didn’t get a bucket earlier in the day. JoJo nodded and smiled at her sister across the backseat. Then returned to her pack of Oreos. (Quick side note: What the hell is going on with the snacks at youth sporting events guys?)

Then I turned things up a notch. It was Sunday morning and all three of the chicks were tearing each other apart. I hit that boiling point that all parents hit after so many consecutive minutes of tattling and whining and sister-on-sister hate hitting.

“Go get your sisters and get in here!” I spewed to Spike.
[The three girls filed in, noses to the floor, and sat down in a row.]
“Mom, she–”
“I don’t care.”
“But she–”
“I don’t care.”
[sighs]
“Here’s the thing, ladies” I began. “We are a tribe. The five of us. We don’t hurt each other. We don’t put each other down and we don’t touch each other out of hate. Over everyone else, we have each other’s backs. Do you understand?”
[hesitant nods]
“Who knows what integrity is?” I asked. (Remember, Spike didn’t know she was getting the Perfect Panda award yet. Pop quiz, suckers.) JoJo raised her hand.
“OK, what is it?” I prompted.
“It’s how you follow the rules.”
“In a way. It’s also what people think of when they think of you as a person. So, let me ask you … What kind of person do you want people to think of when they think of you? You want them to think you are a _____ girl.”
“Brave and kind,” JoJo said.
“OK, brave and kind. Good. Do you think a brave girl calls her sister stupid?”
“No.”
“Do you think a kind girl calls her sister stupid?”
“No.”
“How about you?” I asked, pointing to Spike.
“Kind and does the right thing.”
“Great. Does a kind girl say she hates someone?”
“No.”
“Is telling someone you hate them doing the right thing?”
“No.”
“And you, Sloppy Joan. What kind of girl do you want to be?”
“A princess girl.”
“K. Do you think a princess gets to be mean to people?”
“Yes.”
“No. She doesn’t! So, here’s the bottom line. Stop before you say and do things and ask yourself if a brave girl would do that, or a kind girl would say that. Got it?”
They gave a collective, half-hearted yes, but I wouldn’t be satisfied until they gave each other the obligatory forced group hug. I made ‘em hold it, too.

(Happy byproduct of this fairly typical Come-to-Jesus exchange, it had never occurred to me before that moment to ask them what kind of person they wanted to be. I’d always just told them what kind of person they should be. It was interesting and worth revisiting.)

The momentum from the atta-boy lasted into the evening. They even had a party to celebrate each other, including Hershey kisses on toothpicks and glow rings strung together to form a disco light. I felt like Carol F-ing Brady. I was riding a high, though history told me it was temporary. I even convinced myself that JoJo might just surprise us, I truly believed it. I wanted to believe it.

One Manic Monday later, the day of the ceremony arrived. At 1:50 p.m., we sat waiting in a room adjacent to the gymnasium while all the students got settled into the bleachers. We lined up outside the doors. Two children from each grade would be recognized, and, of course, kindergarteners would go first. I was fidgeting. “Calm down, mama,” Hank warned.

Then he turned to the roars of cheering and applause coming from the gym. “Man, the principal is like a rock god. I wonder if he goes home and tells his wife he totally killed it.” It was true. The dude was absolutely slaying the 5-11-year-old demographic. Every punchline landed.

“And February 12 is Mooooovie Night!” [roaring applause]
“Don’t forget we’re collecting Box Tooooops!” [cheers and high fives]
“And on March 1, the middle school orchestra is cominggggg!” [losing their minds completely]

Then it was time. “Alright, it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. We’re going to honor our Perfect Pandas now. These students demonstrated integrity in their classrooms during the months of December and January. Let’s start with kindergarten … Spike! Come down and receive your award from a surprise guest!” Out we walked, to a sea of tiny smiling faces and frantically clapping hands.

Our girl was waiting at the bottom of the steps, wearing the biggest smile I’ve ever seen and nutella remnants on her cheeks. We leaned down, hugged her and took our place on the red line, facing the crowd.

“I don’t see her,” I said, through my teeth, scanning for JoJo. “Do you?”
“I’m looking.”
“Oh, there’s her teacher.”
“Op, there she is.”
“She’s crying.”
“She’s definitely crying.”
“Oh, she’s losin’ it.”

We kept smiling. Everything’s good here. Nothing to see. It’s all happy joyful love in our house.

Once they’d made their way through the fifth graders with integrity, we took a seat to watch the rest of the program. Jon Bon Jovi came back to the mic. “Now, to introduce our new life skill, respect, here is the entire second grade class.” Ohhhhhhh shoot … I had completely forgotten about the song! JoJo had to come down and sing in front of everyone! She’d mentioned it this morning. The only question now was, could she rally?

She couldn’t.

With her fingers firmly in her mouth and cherry juice-colored tear tracks down her cheeks, my eldest daughter stood in front of the entire student body and barely mumbled through “It’s about respect, check it out, check it out.” . Her eyes were locked on us, her trader parents and her award-winning little sister. I gave her the best thumb’s up I could muster. Hell, I even shoulder shimmied a little to try and hypeman our way through this nightmare. Nope.

When the program finally came to a close, we walked to the group of second graders. As I approached JoJo, her teacher stopped me.

“She was already having a bad day,” he warned. “Then she took this pretty hard. I think it sent her over the edge.”
“We anticipated that. Thank you.”

He’d barely walked away when I felt her bury her hot crying face in my thigh.

“Hey, JoJo! You sang so well!” I lied.
“It’s no fair that Spikey got a Perfect Panda,” she said, putting all her cards right down on the table.
“We’ll talk about it when we get home,” Hank said.

But the torture wouldn’t stop there. JoJo stood and looked on as Spike posed for group photos, then parent pictures, and then one with the rockstar himself. It was almost too much for one girl to take. How do those Oscar losers do it?

On our way back to the car, I hung back with my big girl. I put my finger under her chin and tilted her face up toward mine. I could see straight through her eyes down into her heavy heart.

“Hey you. I know this is hard, but it would mean so much to your sister if you told her you were proud of her.”
“OK, Mama,” she said.
“You don’t have to. But I know she wants to hear that from you.”

And that brave little girl, she did just that. She got the words out, whether she meant them or not, and I was proud of her. Really proud of her.

Of course by the time I got home that night, JoJo’s true fury over her sister’s recognition had boiled over and we were facing a full-blown hatefest. She didn’t want to see Spike’s certificate again. She didn’t care about the stuffed animal they gave her. She thought it was crap we were having dippy eggs and bacon for dinner just because Spike picked them. Why does she get everything? My third-grade self totally got it.

But I made the decision not to let jealousy hijack this moment for Spike. She’d earned that award. She was killin’ it in kindergarten and that was something to celebrate. So, as we all sat down to our sunny-side up entree, I raised my glass and asked everyone to join me in congratulating our Spikey on a job well done. No one took a knee. The tribe showed up.

Afterward, JoJo came into the basement with me so we could work out; beachbody and American Ninja Warrior training, respectively. As I got all my gear lined up, I decided to try to parent my way through this thing just one more time.

“JoJo, can I tell you something?”
“Sure Mom.”
“You love our family, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well a family celebrates each other’s victories. They’re there for each other when someone is down, and they’re there for each other when someone is up. Today, it was your turn to celebrate your sister. And maybe tomorrow she’ll be celebrating you. It’s just the way it goes, honey. Try to remember that, OK?”
“Yeah, OK,” she said, before ninja kicking a tower of blocks across the room.

Sometimes I think parenting is like American Ninja Warrior. Maybe even harder. Obstacle after obstacle, with water hazards all over the damn place. You can strategize all you want, but odds are, that shit’s still gonna get ya.

When dealing with a sensitive soul, the big questions become: When do I shield? When do I step back? And when do I support as needed? My JoJo, with her tender skin, has some pretty rough days, but her sister winning an award for integrity just shouldn’t be one of them. A win for someone in our home should be a win for all of us.

One day, she’ll see that. When hindsight’s on her side.

Kids

Little JoJo in the jungle: a tale of survival

December 8, 2017

My oldest daughter – my JoJo – is the second coming of both my face and my fits. And she is struggling to find her place among the elementary elite.

It started when … well it started getting really bad with the arrival of a solution to an 8-year-old dilemma, the Nipit. The Nipit is a genius product my mom discovered through the power of Amazon that’s worn on the elbow and prevents a child from bending their arm enough to get their respective digits to their mouth to suck. While it lacks in discretion – it’s bright, primary colors with loud velcro straps – holy heck it works. I’ve seen my girl with her fingers in her mouth once in the last three months. For a girl who was getting her suck on in the womb, that is nothing short of miraculous.

But, as is the case with most red and blue arm braces, it didn’t take long for the kids at school to take note. It’s different, which means she’s different, which means she’s “weird”, which means she has a giant red target right in the center of her tiny little back. Thus, the bullying began.

I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few weeks, and I’ve come to some clarity. I think the issue is, when we look into our child’s eyes, we see someone different. We see an unborn baby that got hiccups every night during our 9 o’clock show. We see the little human who turned everything upside down in the best, scariest way possible, and made us a mother or a father. We see a toddler whose hair grew in from the back forward and stuck straight up while she watched cartoons on lazy weekend mornings. We see her first birthday and her tricycle. We hear the crinkle of her diaper between thick, wobbly legs coming down the hall and her first words … “dada” of course.

When I look at my daughter, I feel her letting go of my hand on the first day of preschool and her pleading eyes when big change came. I feel cuddles from the best spooner on the planet and hear her telling me, at 4, that she was heading off to college just like Steve from Blue’s Clues. I hear her laugh. I see her crooked, gappy smile and pure, well-intentioned heart. I see a thousand tiny little pieces of myself, with her daddy’s build, walking out the door every single morning.

But that’s what I see. And I am her mother.

What kids see is another little second grader in a sea of 7, 8, 9 year olds, crowding the playground and trying not to do anything odd enough to get noticed. They don’t find her to be special in any of the ways that really count. They aren’t looking for that. They’re looking for different. They’re looking for a crack, an opening. They’re waiting for her to get comfortable enough that she shows something they view as a weakness or an eccentricity. If it lends itself to a nickname or a chant, all the better.

When the tiny opening presents itself, they put their toe in first, maybe a snide comment or whisper to a friend. Then they put in their leg, then torso, and eventually their whole body busts down that door, lashing out with hateful, belittling words that feel so good to them, so empowering. Because kids know no consequence. They know instant gratification and survival of the shittiest. It’s jungle rules out there and everyone is potential prey.

In his book, “Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Ever Seen”, Christopher McDougall wrote: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

I send my little girl out the door every morning as this special ball of memories and potential, and the second she steps off the porch she’s reduced to bait. And do I blame the kids being unkind? Hell no! They’re just relieved they aren’t the girl with the brace on her elbow. And I totally get it.

Because no one wants to be that girl. Growing up, I had spacey, jagged teeth and a swoopy, horrible set of bangs for a good few years. I had girls pass notes to my BFFs saying they shouldn’t play with me anymore. I had days where I curled up in my mom’s arms, as she rubbed my back in her mustard yellow fabric covered rocking chair with the melodic squeak. Ask any adult and they can name their bully. If they can’t, they were the bully. It’s a rite of passage in some ways. Unfortunately. Stupidly.

It all came to a head recently, as one particular girl turned up the torment on my babe. We’ll call her Delores for the sake of anonymity and movie trivia. Delores has a girl gang. They think JoJo’s a big baby for sucking her fingers (predictable, easy), and they make sure she knows it on a daily basis. We’d been doing the usual coaching behind the scenes … Don’t fight hate with hate … The meaner they are, the kinder you should be … If you feel sad, tell a teacher … Just ignore her … Maybe she was having a bad day or she’s sad about something. Nevertheless, it persisted.

It persisted until earlier this week when JoJo decided to express herself about it. In a drawing. On the back of her homework. Where she’s throwing a bat at Delores’ head. And it’s labeled “JoJo’ and “Delores”. Needless to say, her teacher wasn’t thrilled.

Spike was waiting by the door for me that evening. “Mom, I’m not going to tell you what’s going on, but I will tell you that JoJo got in trouble and she has to go see the counselor tomorrow and if the counselor wants to, she can send JoJo to the principal’s office.” I walked into the living room to find my little criminal, sitting on the couch, red streaks from old tears subtle on her pale cheeks.

“You’ve taken a situation where someone was bullying you,” I explained, “and turned it around so that you are now the one doing the bullying. Do you see why this is wrong?” She nodded, her bottom lip curving down like a fat, grumpy fist in an animated feature. JoJo is certainly my creative chick, and this devilish doodle was, I’m certain, just a way for her to express her frustration, but regardless, it’s not how we roll.

Her teacher referred her to the school counselor, which, to be honest, I was a little relieved about. Finally! A professional can step in here! Somebody equipped with a degree and Inside Out dolls.

The day she was scheduled to meet with the counselor, JoJo was pacing the kitchen, whining. “I don’t want to go to the counselor’s office, Mama. I’m scared. What if I get in trouble?” I challenged her to be brave, and to be honest. I challenged her to step up to all the feelings of anger and sadness and loneliness she’s been feeling and share them with a grownup who could help. (And who she’d listen to more than her own mother.)

And then, I watched her step off the porch and go back out into that dark, vast jungle. Exposed and vulnerable and wearing her Nipit like a juicy, raw steak around her neck on the grasslands. A giant piece of my heart went right onto the bus with her and drove away.

I thought about her all day. I waited for the phone to ring. Maybe the principal would call and say she was suspended for the drawing. A black blemish on her spotless record. Maybe the counselor would call and tell me what a bad mother I was for waiting so long to alert them to the situation. Maybe her emotions would swallow her whole and I’d have to come get her.

But the phone never rang, and soon it was 5 o’clock.

I can always read the general temperature of our household within seconds. When something is wrong with one of the kiddos, it’s like walking into a room carrying balloons and a birthday cake after everyone else was just told someone died. So on this day, I was very tentative coming in from the garage.

“Hi, Mama!” JoJo greeted me. My whole body unclenched.
“Hi, JoJo!”
“Mom, I met with the counselor today and it was great. I didn’t get in trouble for the drawing and she told me I should tell Delores that what she’s doing is hurting my feelings.”
“Right. That’s great, JoJo!”
“Yeah, I feel so much better! Can I call Dad and tell him?”
“Of course.”

And just like that, progress. A touch of healing for a wounded little soul. She would live to roam the prairie another day.

I, of course, immediately sat down to type a teary note of appreciation to the school counselor, positive she had no clue how thankful I was for her 5-minute pep talk with my daughter. Positive I was being a little over emotional and positive I didn’t care a lick.

And the rest of this week has been better, though I know it’s not the last we’ll hear of Delores and her girl gang. The oldest child is such an experiment. They bring this stuff home to you, and you never know whether they’re being transparent or dramatic. You don’t know what’s normal and what’s a five-alarm fire. All you have to go on is your instinct and your own experiences as a child. (I mean, aren’t we all just projecting our childhood onto our own kids anyway?)

You just want to scream from the top of the school gymnasium, [in the voice of an Indian chief] “This is my daughter, JoJo! She is strong and funny and would be a really great friend! I am proud of her! And if you screw with her, I will squash your milk carton in your tiny horrible face.” But that’s not considered acceptable grownup behavior.

It will always be hard to hear. I’m the one who carries her stories, and because of that, I know what a treasure she is. I have the backstory. I’m invested, mostly because I grew her.

I’m the one who knows she called penguins “herbies” for years, even though everyone thought she was saying “herpes”. I’m the one who put her hair in long, flowing pigtails and cut the feet out of her penguin jammies so she could wear them a few months longer. I am in this thing for the long haul.

And I could sell her good points like popsicles on the Fourth of July. She likes to climb really tricky trees and eat Nutella straight from the jar and she can sing every word to every song from Descendents 2. She dabs like a boss. She’s a talented artist and can turn any strawberry into a rose too beautiful to eat. She always wears two layers of clothing, even in the summer, and changes into her pajamas within an hour of getting home from school. She did hygge before hygge was a thing. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be friends with that girl?

There aren’t a lot of choices here. She has to keep going to school and I have to keep watching her step off our porch, bait though she may be. I can’t change the dichotomy of children, the hunters and the hunted. I can’t make my daughter’s skin thicker, no matter what I feed her at home. The only thing I can do is rock her when she wants me to and keep track of her stories, so she always has someone to remind her just how special she is. Someone who’s invested. Someone who isn’t going anywhere. Someone who, after all the deep lessons have been offered and her worries put to rest, will turn away from tiny ears and say the thing that everyone really wants to say.

“Ah, screw Delores!”

Kids

Giving parenting the finger

October 4, 2017

“We’re going to give it 6 more months, and if she can’t stop, we’ll talk about putting in a rake,” my dentist/friend said, at our last family appointment.

He was referring to JoJo, my pathological finger sucker. This child … ahhhh, this child. God bless her sweet soul, I have a picture of her sucking her fingers in my womb. And then a thousand pictures after that of her doing the same. The habit is rooted in her DNA. It’s just always been part of her, like her laugh or insanely thick hair.

My girls each have their quirks. Spike does this strange thing where she rubs her head back and forth when she’s tired or falling asleep. She told me once it makes her “feel silly and dizzy,” and she’s into that sort of thing. I remember the first time I saw her do it with her chunky little baby head. It totally freaked me out. I have another friend whose twin girls used to bang their heads against the side of their pack n’ play when they went to sleep. I imagine it’s a similar sensation? Kids are so weird.

Sloppy Joan’s thing is rubbing the yarn on her special blanket between her fingers. It’s not as ingrained in her, and obviously conditional upon her having the actual blanket with her, but it’s her habit just the same. Well, that and pooping like 20 times a day.

So, now we come to my dilemma. How to intervene.

In the case of the spit-soaked fingers, it’s a matter of dental despair. I had braces for like 20 years, so the odds weren’t in her favor to begin with, but given her tendencies to put those things in her mouth, those teeth really don’t stand a chance.

The hygienist was kind enough to pull up an image of the rake for JoJo to see. It’s your typical orthodontia gem; a mouth apparatus that looks like a torture device crafted in a dungeon at the turn of the century. We got in the car and she immediately started sobbing.

“What’s wrong, doll?” I asked, over the sound of the sniffles.
“I don’t want a rake!” she wailed.
“Honey, you have six months. You can do it.”
“No, I can’t! It’s too hard!”
“Honey …”
“And I like sucking my fingers!”
“Babe, you have to stop.”
“But why?”
“JoJo, we’ve talked about this … It’s moving your teeth. Plus, you’re putting yucky germs in your mouth every day.”
“But it’s too hard and it’s going to hurt if they put it in,”
“Nah!” I comforted.

[more sobs.]

And every day since then, we’ve engaged in tense exchanges in which she repeatedly puts her fingers – the pointer and middle to be specific – in her mouth and I, running out of patience, remind her to remove them. This might come as a gentle, “Hey, JoJo, fingers,” or, if it’s been a long day, “Honey! Get your fingers out of your mouth! For the love!”

It’s frustrating. Parenting. And you can only do so much. Take this morning, for example. The girls were screwing around wrestling at the bus stop, which is at a busy corner in our neighborhood. I yelled and yelled, “Girls! Don’t do that so close to the road! Girls! Back up!” Nothing. Like I wasn’t even there. Then, Bus #53 pulled up, honking their horn like an ambulance in a traffic jam. It slowed and the door flew open, revealing a red-faced older gentleman behind the wheel. “Hey! You girls shouldn’t do that so close to the road. You could fall into the street and get run over by a car!” Then he drove off. I smiled and yelled from the porch, “Told ya!” I can only do so much.

Hank is, as usual, much more patient about the whole finger thing. He’s always the more patient one. But what is my role here as a mother? If I don’t stay on her, she’s left to her own willpower which is comparable to my own stoned at a donut factory. If I hound her, she gets frustrated with herself, and me, and ends up melting down. I just can’t do it! This is so hard! I hate this!

I have another friend whose son is obsessed with sugar and baked goods. He finds comfort in treats, and it drives her nuts. But this boy, as I explained to her, is everyone’s spirit animal. He fears that the good treats won’t be available if he waits. Something inside him is screaming for that treat, that instant. Like the ocean called to Moana, sugar calls to him, and I get that. That speaks to me. But, as his mother, my friend questions when and how to intervene. I get that, too.

JoJo is hard on herself as it is. And my nudges to quit doing what she’s doing on a 10-minute rotation are not helping. She has a special glove that my mom found online, and when she wears that, she can keep the habit at bay. So, our discussions often turn to her neglect of the glove. Why aren’t you wearing it all the time? Do you want the rake? You have to make up your mind to really try.

But then I really back the train up, and ask myself if an 8 year old is even capable of making a conscious decision to commit to that kind of change. I mean if I can’t toss out a dozen cookies at 34, what would lead me to believe my little girl could halt such a compulsive tendency? And if she is capable of making that choice, how do I encourage her in a healthy way? When I decided to have kids, I was prepared for nose picking and hitting. Biting, sure. Tantrums, absolutely. But no one tells you they’re going to come out sucking fingers and rubbing their heads until a giant bird’s nest forms on the back of their scalp.

Sometimes I can discreetly reach over and touch her leg when I see her going for it, but other times, I find myself completely losing my shit … like when she does it right after walking out of a public bathroom or playing in the campground sandbox. It’s nasty.

I don’t want kids to make fun of her, either. I mean, let’s face it, there are totally normal kids out there getting hammered at the lunch table every day. A second grader who sucks her fingers is as easy a target as the kid who toots during ciphering.

So, there’s my stuff. That’s my battle. What kind of weird shit do your kids do? Do they lick rocks? Hide in chimneys? Pull the wings off of flies? Let’s hear it. And how do you help them? I’ve brought bribery, nasty nail polish and the glove to the table, but I’m at a loss beyond that. The whole thing just really … sucks.

Kids

My village people

May 25, 2017

Spike was mumbling the words to “You’re Welcome,” which we were listening to for the second time that morning, staring at the car’s shadow on the road below and running her tiny pointer finger over her thin top lip. She always stops trying when Maui raps. I turned down the radio for my usual morning hype sesh.

“Oh man, babe … How ya feelin’ about the field trip today? The zoo is the best. You’re going to have so much fun!”

She whipped her head in my direction and said, “Yeah, did you know that of all the kids in the class there are only two moms who aren’t going?” (I knew one of them was me.)

She wasn’t being deliberately hostile. She wasn’t. She was just using her little innocent mouth to lay out the facts for me on a shitty mom platter. This would be breakfast today.

“Gosh, hon. I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, you and Jack’s mom.” (Who is a friend of mine.)

“Oh.”

“Yeah, Ms. Kylene’s going to let us be her partner since you won’t be there.”

“Well, that’s special!”

“Yeah, it is.”

Her eyes went back to the shadow. There would be no more talk of this topic for now.

It was that she said it, don’t get me wrong. But more than that, it was the way it lingered … like a pregnancy fart in a sauna. The way the “only” just hung out there so harshly, so ruthlessly, and then it latched on mercilessly to the “mom” and the two words gripped and clawed at each other in the front of my brain.

A played out Chainsmokers song picked up where the Moana soundtrack left off. My heart was drowning in my brutal interpretation of the situation …

You are the only mom not going. The only one who sucks … In a class of 12 kids, there are 10 good moms, one other mom, and you … If good moms and bad moms played Red Rover, you’d be the only one they could send over … Other moms make animal faces on their kids’ sandwiches using grapes and basil leaves. And then there’s you … You let me down.

I couldn’t adjust my schedule and make it happen. It was one of many, many times my cape was at the cleaners and I just couldn’t pull it off. And I hate that. Don’t you hate that? I would be missing – a noticeable gaping hole – in the standard group shot in front of the ZOO sign. I wouldn’t be on the log ride or there to help little people poke the straw through their juice boxes.

And the more I thought about the juice boxes and the group shot and the stupid log ride, the more I really started to go there. You know where … That dark place where jealousy infects your character with toxic judgements and ridicule. I thought of all the mothers in their perfect boyfriend jeans and trendy sweaters pointing out the orangutan baby to my child. I thought about all the embarrassing stories she would tell, and how I wouldn’t be there to laugh awkwardly and explain them. And I thought about how there would be this depressing white space in her preschool scrapbook where her own mother’s face should be. And down and down and down I went.

We pulled in and I held her hand to cross the parking lot. I love holding her hand. Her sweet, phenomenal teacher took the torch from my weakened grip and started hyping Spikey up for the big day. I needed to tap out anyway, obviously.

“Are you excited?” she asked. Spike nodded, shyly. “I can’t wait to be your partner,” her teacher added.

I smiled, squeezed my little bug, wished her the very best of special days, and walked out, feeling heavy as hell.

Every mother who has ever written on or for any platform or publication has covered this topic to an exhausting degree. In fact, you probably aren’t even reading this because you didn’t make it this far in. Same shit, different laxative, right? But people talk about it so much because it’s such a chronic pain. We work so that we can afford to pay a babysitter so that we can go to work. It’s a gross, sad ferris wheel, where all the riders are screaming and crying their heads off on the inside, but they can’t get off. Because if you get off, they might not let you back on when it’s more convenient for you to ride.

That said, I love my job. I’m not even lying. I do. I love it. I’m one of the fortunate people who only cries and screams on the inside on occasion, and usually Mondays. I get to write about topics that typically interest me and often help people and interview amazing people and I’m hyper cognizant of the fact that I’m lucky to get paid to do that. But with that comes the restrictive straight jacket known as the 8-to-5. (Remember the good ole’ days when it was 9-to-5?) It breeds anxiety for mothers and sets the stage for disappointment at almost every turn. Most days I’ve failed before my feet hit the floor.

Now, I know it might look like it, but this is not an argument about whether SAHMs or MOPS or working moms (who have no acronym) have it worse. I’m not dumb enough to take on that debate because there is no winner. In fact, when we argue about such extraneous crap, we all lose. It doesn’t need to be said here, but I’ll put it down just so we’re all 1000% on the same page: Being a mom from any location, in any conditions or in conjunction with any occupational obligations is a bitch. A beautiful, messy bitch that we’re all thankful for every day. Not like every minute of every day, but every day.

So, it wasn’t a shiny moment for me that morning in the car (in my head). And I said to myself, “No, Courtney. No. You will stop drinking the Hate-orade and quit being a chump right this second.” And I did. But it wasn’t until later, after Spikey shared how special her day was and how special everyone made her feel, that the real deep stuff set in. That I was able to sift through the litter box and find the golden turds of wisdom in the situation.

My family is my tribe. But the mass of other people – this vibrant collage of compassionate souls and patient beings – is my village. And I couldn’t mother without the village. Sometimes it’s hard for me to ask for help. And sometimes I resent needing that help, but I do. And sometimes help just shows up, in my friends and my family, and sometimes in people I don’t know that well. And that’s kind of really beautiful actually.

The people in my village pick up where I hit my limitations, where I run out of time, and where I fall short. They hide in the houses and schools and stores I pass through like a wild tornado every day, jumping in when I have to step out. I couldn’t possibly name them all or acknowledge them all, but when I really stop and think about it, they are everywhere in force. My village is big, and it’s kind.

My village has Kay, who potty trained and taught the girls to go down stairs when they were 1 and instilled faith. It has Aimee, who teaches them to read and be modest, and Ms. Kylene who calls them “love bugs” and makes them feel special on the days they otherwise wouldn’t, and Mrs Hurley who shares her own stories of finger sucking so my daughter doesn’t feel like a freak, and Coach Kasey who made Spikey take that unforgettable shot. My neighbors in my village are these gentle souls who let my kids talk their ears off while they wash their cars and who bring over cookies and don’t say a word about the fact our smoke alarm is going off. My village is centered around courageous, selfless women – my mom, my mother-in-law, my sisters, my girlfriends – with a few fellas peppered in.

But it’s even bigger than that. There are strangers in my village who stop by but don’t stay. They pass out smiles and warm gestures that restore my hope when I fear for the state of humanity. They bend down and say sweet things to my girls in the store. They listen to my first grader read and they put the straw in my daughter’s juice box when her mommy has to work.

Listen, sometimes it gets hairy, this mothering thing. There are meetings that can’t be moved and rain dates that crap on good intentions and, to be honest, sometimes there are just days when the best thing you can do for your kids is be away from them. But don’t let all this bologna send you to that dark place. Don’t do it. Look to your village, instead. Leverage your village. Love your village. Express gratitude for your village.

Your tribe will be the better for it.