Barbie's Hot Bod

My first child came home and asked if I knew that Barbie would never menstruate were she a real person and that, brought to life and expanded to human height, she would tip over because of her toddler-sized feet and Parton-sized boobs.  When she brought forward this litany of anti-Barbie slurs, I nodded in assent and talked of irrational body image, the evil of capitalizing on idealized bodies and stuff good Moms do.

But secretly I cringed a tiny bit - maybe empathizing with poor Barbie who can't help how she was born.  Or maybe just considering the bins of Barbies in the next room... could these plastic ladies really have crushed body images the world over since 1952 and made us a society of people wishing for un-articulated plastic willowy limbs and genital-free crotches?  As for me, while Barbie with her unrealistic proportions never ever crossed my childhood threshold I stocked my own kids up with a dream supply of Barbies and their coordinating attire and animals and homes... and… I admit - I bought them ruthlessly even knowing as I did that they were images of destruction.  

In the same vein - why, knowing as I do, that having anything mildly resembling a weapon around the house will create a violent and deadly race of human children, did I create an actual set of drawers labeled "the arsenal" full of Nerf and non-Nerf type swords, cowboy guns and plastic daggers?  Before you say that this is all a side effect of being a crap-for-a-crunchy-parent, consider my thinking.  Because, believe it or not, there was a tiny bit of that in the shopping frenzy...

You see, Barbies are sort of fun.  And they come in all sorts of color shades and tons of different careers.  And weapons are also kind of awesome. There are a lot of things around that we are supposed to look at with disdain - barbies, swords, sugar, the color pink...  But I just refuse to be a hater of even those most detestable and pigeon-holing items.   I refuse because I truly believe that longing for and idealizing a Barbie or a Nerf gun or a head of pink hair is far worse than having those things and being able to enjoy them along with a bunch of other chubbier and less violent items.  

Barbie is a ridiculously out of proportion plastic lady who doesn't age and rocks a killer wardrobe.  Our kids' body images can't be so frail that Barbie's menstruation free hot bod and long waxen locks inspire dark fear in a parent’s heart - there are lots and lots of scarier things out there I'm afraid.  And they aren't made of foamy pellets or plastic.  I for one vote that we save our staunch prohibitions for drugs and premarital sex.  Or whatever.  

Bumming at the Mall

I think that you probably remember as I do, with crystal clarity, the feeling of going to the mall, with a pal or even alone, and bumming around.  Bumming around just meant walking longingly through Forenza and Esprit stores, fondling the odd shirt or cable knit sweater, laughing hysterically at the dirty posters at spencer gifts...  Never buying anything except maybe a thing of fries at the food court.  It was a gift of freedom.

And we were dropped off and picked up later.  There were no cell phones and no internet and the pay phones were slime coated and cost a dime but worked to call if no one came to pick you up.  I hate to say this but I am pretty sure that there were evil and gross people at the mall back then - murderers and sex offenders and all sort of stuff from the Group W Bench.  It wasn't really top of mind though -  we weren't scared and we did fine figuring out how to manage our days and nights at the mall.

Today I am taking my son to the mall with his friends for his birthday.  And before our departure I am sitting here planning how much freedom exactly they can handle.  It's a big mall.  Full of strangers who are  likely felons.  Maybe not but it's a free country and anyone can go to the mall.  And while he has a cell phone I am suddenly unsure about his stranger danger alert system and if it will really function when needed.

I know that I'm not the only person who is bewildered that in just one generation we have become so afraid of the unknown that we can't let a kid walk around an enclosed space - even one that has actual cops riding around on wheeled patrol.

Once I posed a question on Facebook to see if people thought my daughter, 10 at the time, was old enough to walk our dog in the park.  I got something like 64 comments, most questioning my sanity at even broaching the idea.  So, in turn I questioned my own sanity and decided that it was a broken relic of a rural upbringing - a sanity that could be useful in some other decade, in some less urban setting.  Could it be this same ancient fading sanity that drives me to think that my kids who can't handle a dog walk can handle a whole mean mall?

But wait... my kids, at the least the tweens and teens among them, are responsible and serious people.  They can make good choices, and they have the basic fitness to run from any stray murderers loose in the mall when needed. And I have to man up and let them try it out because I guess that in the end they have to be out in this crazy world sometime.  They have to learn how to pick good friends, talk to the right strangers,  be cautious about their surroundings.  They have to have a few risks and experiences under their belts sometime before they need date rape prevention nail polish and sex offender internet searches - days which sadly aren't far off.

So there is no time like the present to kick it off -  bumming at the mall -  with some far more cool and hip nomenclature.  I'll just keep my phone in my hand and be sitting at the emergency location, you know, just in case.

Pathologizery

In our house, four of four kids have been Extreme Tested (See Post on Extreme Testing) but for one, the debrief was a bit unlike the others.   There were still 32 pages of information about the then 9-year-old cutie pie, but the psychologist held them tightly in her grasp and gave them only with this caveat:

“There are learning differences here but I can’t complete my evaluation without you seeing a neurologist.  I am confident that there is an underlying neurological issue.”

Of course she was sweet and kind and brought tissues as always, because she is a good planner and even she has been staggered and a touch tearful by the volume of “issues” that she has uncovered in our family.  She gave us a one page letter of referral with her observations to provide to the neurologist.  The letter was brief, it listed the 8 basic symptomps of Cerebral Palsy (CP) and described how she saw, in mild form, all of those symptoms in our little guy.  We had been to neurologists before but the classic constellation of symptoms hadn't impressed doctors accustomed to far greater severity.  So we are good people and not negligent but we did get a really late and really hard-to-hear diagnosis.

Lots of people don't get their kids extreme tested because they don't want the "pathology".  Lots of people get tests and follow every single recommendation and are very happy to have a diagnostic pathology for whatever situation arises.   With a stack of referrals and recommendations that could keep us in waiting rooms seven days a week, what kind of pathologizers should we be?  

You can probably guess that a year later I write this post and still haven’t exactly told the young child in question about the words CP.  And haven’t exactly brought him to bunches of OT, PT, ST or other T’s.  Because I am terrified that he will feel suddenly massively different.  That he will lose his classic confidence and humor and his incurably cheerful disposition.  That he will feel like a diagnosis or a medical test and not like a plain ol kid.  He is who he is and to his mind, he's just a regular guy with an unusual walk.   Medical literature doesn't indicate that there would be a vast improvement with the imposition of eternal waiting room time and so I have opted, and perhaps you may argue, wimped out, in favor of Plan B.

I have wimped for Plan B because any plan - basking in pathology or ignoring it altogether - brings risks and damages. And Plan B is sort of a middle ground.  Plan B includes piano and violin lessons instead of Occupational Therapy.  Plan B includes karate twice a week instead of Physical Therapy.  And Plan B includes singing lessons instead of Speech Therapy.  All things that he already was doing to some degree and that he enjoyed but with a new twist on them.  Plan B is probably completely wrong in a million ways, but it is the treatment plan right now, the plan that balances pathology with just being a kid.  Fine, it errs on the just being a kid side.  And he is happy and thriving - which must count for something.  

There is a place for pathology.  There are horrible, life alternating diagnoses and treatments and urgencies that can't be ignored.  There are easily addressable issues and difficult self-esteem prohibiting problems and a million important reasons that for other kids we haven't and wouldn't have made this same choice.  But what we have for this particular child is not any of that.  And so before rushing to a life that measures time in appointments and in waiting rooms, I am taking a deep breath and a swing at Plan B.  And planning for Plan C all the while.

Minecraft Millionaires

Over 100 million people play Minecraft.  It's something like 49% of kids under 16 - don't quote me.  But it's a lot and they are all over the world.

Minecraft is a game type thing that my son calls a "sandbox game".  To me its a pixelated game on the internet that appears to be basically all about making stuff out of 3x3 cubes and then storing that stuff you made in secret places that you have also built.  For storing.  It is for the long termer, the person who doesn't mind figuring out how to build an underground palace out of squares just by watching six hours of you tube videos.  It is for the person who can remember a 47 character code to cheat and make blocks of gold magically appear in a forest of block trees.

I'll admit that I don't know that these are the exact things that happen in Minecraft but I do know that there are more visually appealing platforms out there in the world.  And more violent ones and more evil ones.  And I am sure that there must be more fun games that require way less brainpower to execute.  So, insane as it may seem I have recently become appreciative of the good people of Minecraft.  The things that they do in this blockheaded game have created a whole crew of miniature humans who can develop worlds by programming cubes to do their bidding.  That is actually cool and brainy... in disguise.

Three of my kids are among the zillion players across the galaxy and while it took them a while to pick up the bug, they adore it and discuss its complexities constantly.  Minecraft has awakened in them an interest in learning about computers and programming languages.  It has helped them to master the skills of searching for information and of teaching themselves things that they want to know.  It has forced them to work out how to be clam and perseverent in the face of obstacles.  It has kept them off the streets.

While I am staunchly against letting the small people of the earth loose on Minecraft for 12 hours a day in lieu of school,  I have reached the conclusion that it is not pure evil.  And, even better,  it may potentially be awesome - because on the off chance that Minecraft turns my kids into computer genius millionaires I'll really enjoy my fancy old folks home.

Your Kids Get Along So Well

My kids all get along so well.  Usually.   OK, sometimes.  Often in public.   Well, enough that people longingly tell me about this feat of harmony, and enough that I feel like I pull it off - sometimes.  But in truth I don’t know anyone who can live with anyone else, especially anyone else that they didn’t even choose to live with, 24/7 for 18 years and always be unfailingly polite, kindhearted, generous and enjoyably refined company.   But I do know that we expect that of our kids.  

And that’s not even close to the end of where the expectations that we hold for ourselves massively diverge from those that we hold for our kids.  Here is one... trying lots of foods.  Believe me, when I go to a restaurant if there is a gross sauce on my plate or, god forbid, a mushroom, I am so not thrilled about it.  I may appear happy and cheerful when I return the plate to sender but I am not ever eating a mushroom.  Sorry - they taste like dirt to me.  My kids, though, they need to try things.  Lots of things!  Even things that I personally detest the very idea of and wouldn't try.  And in spite of that ol’ “you don’t know if you don’t try it” thing, there are things that I promise I know without trying.  And I bet they do too - but I don't really trust them to know that yet.

Here’s another thing.  Being a grumpy, hangry pain in the ass in the morning.  For adults it’s just fine because we need our coffee and stuff to be right in the brain.  But a grumpy kid at most any time of day or night is completely unacceptable.  “We do not behave that way”.  “You can sit in your room until you can cheer up”.  “You will not start the day like this”.    Just  a few choice phrases that reflect our impatience for things that we forgive in ourselves possibly more than a dozen times a day.

I can’t stand it when my kids make a mess of stuff.  Like they spill something or they get flour all over the kitchen when making cookies.  It irritates me to death that they keep their clothes piled up and not neatly stacked away.  For those who do their own laundry, the fact that they run out of clean shirts makes my skin crawl with annoyance.  One of my own offspring incessantly singing a song over and over is enough to make me get the moustache duct tape from the drawer and apply it liberally to their mouths.  But the thing is that I do every single one of those things.  Every.  One.

You know and I know that my annoyance at someone forgetting to lock a dog cage or not closing a cereal bag completely has no bearing on mine or my kids ability to make those things happen in the future.  We are fallible and imperfect beings who may at times be unfocused on the minutia of a cereal bag.  The patience to accept in another person that which you can’t accept in yourself, well, that may just be the pinnacle of enlightenment – the pinnacle that we can for sure envision but not really ever reach. 

Sorry, y'all.  Siblings are gonna bicker.  Drinks are gonna spill.  Clothes are gonna pile up to the sky until you really need them and then they are gonna all be dirty.  The morning will be a grumpy time.  These things are promises, not threats or worries, not even things that you can carefully architect away, they are indelible truths.  For us and for our kids.  So how can we be as tolerant of these human flaws in our children as we are in ourselves? 

I’m still too annoyed by my daughter’s breakfast cereal spill to think about it right now but I suspect that sometime today I will figure it out - hopefully before anyone gets frustrated with homework because I can't stand that.  

Quitters Rock

I enter this topic of quitters and their quittingness with trepidation.  Because I totally know that there are those parents who will never ever in a million years let their kid drop a thing they started.  And those parents are also totally the ones with kids who have soccer scholarships and musician kids currently at Juliard and soon to be part of an awesome philharmonic or something.  And I am really jealous of those parents and their rockstar tenacity.  But I, personally, am a quitter.  And I personally am raising a big heap of quitters who I fully intend will rule the universe.  

To clarify.  I don't actually quit everything, I just generally quit things that suck.  I can absolutely stick with things that are great, good, half-decent or perhaps that will have a good long-term outcome like college or whatever.  But things that really suck and are optional, I have no qualms about ending when the time is right.  And I have no problem teaching my kids to do the same.  In fact, I like teaching kids how to distinguish life-enhancing activities from life-detracting ones.

Once upon a time there was a child who started playing the violin, after years of begging, as soon as she turned four.  It was hard to play and hard to practice and I had no idea how to help.  There were fits, ignoring the violin, a possibly intentional string breakage... and meanwhile I was schlepping one small butt in a car seat to unaffordable lessons.  But I really wanted her to love musical instruments, so violin turned into cello, then flute, then piano, then voice, oh and trumpet and clarinet along the way somewhere.  It was six years of tortuous musical-instrument musical-chairs.  And one day the music stopped and she said, “Mom, I suck at musical instruments" and I cried because thank goodness I didn't have to be the one to say it.  We broke up with musical instruments.  Quitters.

In contrast, a different child is very musically gifted.  He started with the piano and did wonderfully.  Until he cut his fingertip off in preschool one day using safety scissors - which is a topic altogether for another day.  He liked piano, but now it hurt to play.  He kept it up a while then tried guitar which, if you have ever touched a guitar string or had a part of an appendage cut off, you will know that it would hurt even more.  He kept at it a few years but it never got better.  Now he is a drummer and may be a drummer forever.  But he has quit plenty of things too, never fear.

Like karate.  He tested twice in the karate dojo both times in a heap of tears because, what with his musical ears it was massively loud and painful to be in that cacophonous and chaotic space.  So he quit.  Could he have advanced to national ranking level with amazing board chopping prowess?  Maybe - but the price just wasn't worth the suffering.  Incidentally his younger brother has stuck with the exact same karate practice for almost half of his life.  Go figure.

This is what we do every day, isn't it?  We weigh the costs and the benefits of things and then decide whether the equation makes sense.  I have noticed that for parents, perhaps too often part of the equation against stopping any activity seems to be "I don't want to raise a quitter".  But I think that you should raise a quitter, it's OK.  Or said a little bit differently, it's great to raise someone who knows when to quit.  And, of course, when not to quit.  Because there is wisdom in quitting just as there is wisdom in tenacity and neither is quite the right answer all of the time.