Not Only Diamonds Are Forever

There is an unfinished bit of parenting business rattling around my head that I just can’t lay to rest. My son would tell you it’s over, yesterday’s news. And in some ways, I am proud of the parenting I did. I remained calm(ish). I didn’t escalate the situation. For my son, it is genuinely settled. But I am not settled because I feel like I’ve neglected my duty—not to my son, but as a member of the larger parenting village.

Several weeks ago, my son received this message on Xbox:

The message, from a boy my son knows through school, was the first of several, all equally profane, angry and appalling (I've blocked out the worst parts and any identifying screen names, but you can get the idea). One thing you should probably know right off the bat is that both boys (the message sender and my son) are not African American (nor any other minority ethnicity, from what I can tell). Their school is in a suburb that is tied for the whitest town in our state. The jab, therefore, is not only hateful, it’s confusingly racist and also inapplicable. It’s as if the sender searched his memory for the foulest words he could think of, shook them up, and then poured them out in random order.

When I first read the messages, I was horrified. I began mentally planning meetings with the school principal and phone calls to the boy’s parents. I was a mama-warrior, and I wasn’t going to let this happen to my son without a fight.

When I showed a screen shot of the offending messages to my septuagenarian father, venting and expecting to be cheered onward into battle, he surprised me by laughing. He said it reminded him of when he was a kid and they would say a list of every really bad word they knew all in a row as fast as they could, which effectively took the meaning out of all of the curses. His laughter took a little of the bluster out of my reaction (thankfully), and I decided to change my approach. I would attempt to end this line of messaging without escalating the situation for my son. (We all know there’s nothing like a marauding she-warrior mother to collapse the social hopes of a junior high boy.)

The result was a reserved message sent from me to the young perpetrator on Xbox: “Hi. This is xxxxx’s mom. I have all of your messages saved. Please stop sending them.” (If you’ve ever tried to type with an Xbox controller, you will understand that my missive was a huge accomplishment.) The messages stopped immediately, my son was able to play it off by saying that I was in the room when the messages popped up onscreen, and the sideways giggling glances toward me at school events commenced. I've made a point to say a friendly hello to Xbox boy at those occasional plays and basketball games (but my eyes whisper, “I’m watching you”).

So in a way, I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. The stream of messages has stopped. The situation was no big deal among the social ranks of the school, and the kids have moved on to other daily dramas.

But in another way, I’ve completely failed that young man.

He deserves a chance to learn from this experience. His parents deserve the chance to help him learn from this. And, frankly, the rest of us could learn from this, too.

It’s not just the lesson that you might expect, either. If I were his mom, of course I would want to talk to him about the anger and the bitterness and the awful, socially inappropriate words he chose to use to convey his frustration at being a middle school boy navigating the waters of shifting friendships ("[mutual friend] does not like u bit@h"). But beyond that, I would want him to learn that his words are now out there…forever. We have reached an age where many of our statements are no longer just funny memories for our 70-year-old selves to laugh at decades from now over lattes with our own daughters. Messages that you text or Facebook or tweet or otherwise put out there into the universe now are out there permanently. Even if you jot them down the old-fashioned way, cell phone cameras and YouTube and Tumblr ensure that a forever-reminder may only be a few clicks away. These images and statements become a layer in the archaeological record that you leave of yourself for the world to unearth. What kind of record are your own kids leaving? What about you?

Do you want to be the boy I knew when my sons were younger whose Facebook page (at the age of thirteen) proudly proclaimed that his favorite quote was, “It’s not rape, it’s surprise sex”? Do you want to be the acquaintance whose f-bomb-littered status updates turn up regularly in my father’s Facebook ticker since he is also my “friend” online? What about the teenage girl from our local area whose boyfriend uploaded a video of her performing sexual favors and then shared the link with his friends? You can delete photos and videos and posts and ill-conceived messages, but you have to assume that someone, somewhere downloaded a copy or created a screen shot or somehow otherwise captured your moment of infamy forever.

As we each create the layers of our own archeology, we need to think about what they are going to say to the world about the kind of people we are. I sometimes swear like a trucker, but is that the side of me I want the world to unearth when they look into who I am online? How would I feel if the person who mined that particular layer was my best friend’s grandmother… a future employer or client… my own mother?

As a mom, I have always tried to drive home to my own kids how important it is that they never put anything out there that they wouldn’t want seen by everyone. This boy apparently thought his message was funny when he sent it to my son. I think it became a little embarrassing when he realized it had been read by me. I wonder how he’d feel knowing my son’s grandpa read it. (Not to mention all of you.) 

Forever is a long time to have your mistakes out in the world.

Tightropes and Wonder

October is Bullying Prevention Awareness Month here in the US, and I’ve been trying for weeks now to think of the right way to share our family’s story from the past year. Blogging about real children is a tightrope walk—you never want to share anything too painful or too raw, or anything that your child feels is too personal. But you do want to share those universal moments that might resonate with other parents and kids who are struggling. Because sometimes those shared moments weave together to form a net that catches people when they are falling, helping them feel a little less alone in the void. So here goes the tightrope walk (my son gets the final edit).

Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A little over a year ago, our family moved to a small town just south of the suburb where we had lived for all of my 12-year-old son’s life. We had lots of good reasons for moving, and both kids were ready for the adventure of a new beginning. Our older son already knew a handful of kids at his new school through sports, and he quickly acclimated to his changed environment.

Our younger son—who is delightfully quirky and enthusiastically intellectual—found himself in a country grade school where he knew no one, surrounded by kids who were nothing like him. He delighted in reading. They delighted in kicking him in the shins under his desk when he pulled out a book. He loved to grapple with difficult math problems. They loved to sneer and mock him for loving what they hated. He had a malformed, smaller left hand, and he was surrounded by kids who refused to tolerate differences.

Day by day, they peeled away his confidence and his well-being and his sense of self. They carved him with whispered taunts, cutting away at how he saw himself, until all that was left was a shell of the boy he had been. Tears. Panic. Daily heartache. And that was before the day last spring when he was attacked on the playground. A single punch to the mouth left him bleeding and stitched and swollen, unable to eat solid food for over a week. The classroom teacher truly ached for him and tried to help, but she and I agreed that the best solution for my son was to get away from there, to start over in a school with kids more like him.

We found our silver lining in a new school this year in a district not far from here—another year of being the new kid, but with much different results. My son has found his tribe. When he brings up questions about wormholes and time travel in science class, the other students mull over and discuss his ideas, never even considering that the concepts might be unusual. He passes notes with a friend coded via the Periodic Table. He jokes with his pals about his “lucky hand" and shares the hallways with a stellar athlete who has no hand at all. He has friends. He is happy. We are happy.

But what happens to those kids who came so close to destroying him last year? How do they grow past their brutish tendencies when the people who are different from them are chased away? How do they learn to be anything more than what they are? What will they do in the larger world when they are faced with people who are disabled, or gay, or culturally different from them? The thought makes me almost unbearably sad.

Yesterday afternoon, I read a delightful book that could be part of the solution. Wonder, by R.J. Palacio is an exceptionally written middle-grade novel that captures the pain of bullying so poignantly, so beautifully, that the story and its message resonate long after the last page is turned. If I were still teaching (grades 4-6), I would buy a class set of this novel, and we would spend the month of October reading and discussing it to lay a foundation for mutual understanding and to facilitate a culture of kindness. Even if you don’t routinely read children’s books just for the joy of experiencing the quality literature being produced in that category today, you should make an exception for this book. But have tissues handy. Really.

            “… in the future you make for yourselves, anything is possible. If every single person in this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to act a little kinder than is necessary—the world really would be a better place.”

Wonder, by R.J. Palacio

Bullying is not just an October problem. It’s an everyday, everywhere problem that can only be solved when people consciously remove themselves from the neutral bystander camp and become protectors of the least of us. This month, and every day of every single other month, do what you can in your world to foster mutual understanding and compassion.

Please leave your ideas and comments below.

April Fools!

I have a confession to make: April Fools’ Day turns me into a bit of a conniving goofball. There’s just something delightful about a holiday that’s all about embracing silliness and childish pranks, especially when the rest of the year I’m locked into the role of Responsible Adult. I make the appointments and organize the bedroom cleaning and help the boys with their homework. I replace torn socks and and make sure the pantry and fridge are stocked with sensible and nourishing staples. I am The Mom.

But once a year I get a little goofy. I plan silly surprises and “gotcha!” moments for the boys in my world (well, except for the dog… I don’t think he’d understand). This year’s holiday tributes looked like this:

• Last night, I sneaked into my 14-year-old’s room and discovered, to my delight, that his alarm clock has an “alarm 2” switch. So without disturbing his usual morning settings, I was able to program a surprise pre-dawn awakening by the Spanish language station set to full volume. ("Bueno, los campistas, la subida y el brillo, y no se olvide de traer sus botas. Es cooooold hacia fuera allí hoy!")*
  

• Every year I find at least one fabulously freaky item while I’m surfing the web for Christmas gifts in the fall (check out sites like thinkgeek.com). Last year, it was a toilet monster. This year, it was this fabulous shower curtain (see photo). The shadowy figure is a permanent feature! I see it as a perfect cross between Psycho and Poltergeist.

• I switched the hand soap in the kitchen and the boys’ bathroom with canola oil, thinking the smeary experience would at least elicit some grudging boyish respect because of the grossness factor. The joke was on me, though, because nobody noticed. The boys just smeared oil on their hands and went about their business nicely moisturized. [Note: backfiring tricks are not unprecedented. When Caden was five or six, I tucked a second-hand Barbie into bed with each of my sleeping sons on the night of March 31st. When Caden came downstairs the next morning, he was stroking her hair and calling her Stephanie.]

• Not wanting to leave Eric out of the fun, I sneaked out in the night and tucked bubble wrap under his rear tires, hoping that the resulting noise would give him a jolt as he wondered what he-of-the-perfect-driving-record had hit. It would probably have been more startling if the bubble wrap hadn’t been bright pink and the morning paper hadn’t landed right next to the rear of the car. Ah, well, at least he felt included.

• While the boys slept, I covered the top part of their bedroom doors with newspaper and filled the resulting pocket with packing peanuts. When they opened their doors in the morning, each boy was greeted with a snowy avalanche. That was a short-lived triumph, however, since “Responsible Mom” is the one who had to clean up all of that drifting Styrofoam (that, and my older son returned the favor by covering my bed in the flighty stuff). Note to self: no messy pranks next year.

• Caden’s lunch contained a “candy” surprise. I carefully opened the end of a bag of M-n-Ms and poured out (and enjoyed) the candy, refilling the package with dried kidney beans and gluing the end closed. The prank was perfectly undetectable! I think his friends at lunch were more amused than my M-n-M-less ten-year-old, though. I had to pony up an actual treat after school to make peace with the jilted candy-craver.

• While the boys were at school, I changed the home page on their web browser to bieberfever.com. I mean, what 14-year-old boy doesn’t want to gaze at Justin Beiber as soon as he logs on?

• The final twist to the day was the dinner, which I always try to make as “April Foolish” as possible. This year’s menu was a sort of course reversal. The “fish sticks” and “peas and carrots” on their dinner plates were actually cereal-coated wafer cookies and hand-shaped Jolly Rancher chews and Starburst candies. The “cupcakes”, on the other hand, were made of meat loaf topped with pink-tinted mashed potatoes. Yummy! 

How does the rest of the family respond to this annual frivolity from Mom? My ten-year-old looks forward to April Fools’ Day almost like it’s Christmas. He giggles his way through the day, glancing suspiciously around door frames and asking frequently if there are more tricks on the way. My older son—at least this year—suddenly finds the whole thing embarrassing and mildly contemptible. (“Oh great, Mom, ‘April Fools’. That’s hilarious.”) But I persist. I’m hoping that when my kids are older, they’ll remember that once a year (at least) Mom was more than just that person who made them brush their teeth.

So... what should I do next year?

 

* Apologies to actual Spanish speakers if Google Translate mangled the DJ's line from Groundhog’s Day. My son, a first-year Spanish student, couldn't help me on this one.

The Post-Holiday Exhale

Even this tree is slumping from the stress of the season.

It’s over.

I mean, I still haven’t taken down the tree, and ours are the only house lights left up on our street (hey, it’s cold out there!), but Christmas has definitely come and gone for another year. On the one hand, I’m a little sad that my very favorite annual event—the one that involves so much planning and preparation and anticipation—has passed by already. On the other hand [ahhhhh], the time has come to just breathe, arms splayed wide, body collapsed on the couch with a steaming peppermint hot cocoa by my side.

The holiday season, for me, feels a little like running in a weighted snowsuit up a mountain, alone. The end of the journey promises a Norman Rockwell experience filled with family love, twinkling lights, and the smell of fresh pine needles. When I finally get there, though, what I mainly feel is exhausted from the climb. The hubby and kids? They’re already at the top, waiting in a snug cabin with their feet held to the fire.

My husband and I have very different views on the “right” way to celebrate Christmas. While I happily embrace all the sparkle and hustle and traditions of the holiday, his perfect Christmas would involve a long nap, a rousing pick-up hoop game, and plenty of time to read the paper. (Dream on, couch-king!) Our reality, though, is filled to the brim with family gatherings (his, mine, and—modern families being what they are—mine again with the other parent), lots of gifts given and received, hugs, chaos, and mounds of shredded paper.

I am married to an economist who sees the world as a series of cost-benefit analyses. Exchanging presents just doesn’t make sense to a guy like him. Oh, he’ll participate in the family gift exchanges (and will smile and say thank-you like he should), but he’s never going to be the recipient who lights up the room with his delight at your thoughtfulness. The way my husband sees it, if he needs or wants something, he should just buy it himself (and vice versa). That way, everyone will get exactly the right thing without the hassle of a return. The appeal of trying to guess what someone else needs or wants simply escapes him.

My economist husband is married to—I guess you could call me an emotionalist. I don’t think gift giving can be placed on the same scale as other types of purchases. That sort of thinking leaves out very real non-tangible benefits for both the giver and the receiver. I get so excited when I find just the right gift for someone on my list (like these goofy "Road Rage" signs that went in Hubby’s Christmas stocking). Often, I find myself awake in the wee hours of Christmas morning, more excited than even the kids to see how each person likes what I chose.

This Christmas, my mother bought me a beautiful new buttery-soft brand-name leather purse. It’s the type of splurge I would never dream of buying for myself, but now it's one of my most cherished possessions. A simple economic view of the transaction leaves out all of the joy she felt when I gasped after tearing away the paper, and the extra warmth I feel when I use it knowing it was a gift from my mom. To put all of that emotional goodness in economic terms, we both derive more utility from the purchase this way than we would have if I had simply bought it myself.

So (surprise!), the gift buying is not really a shared experience around here. His primary contribution to the holiday—and this is not to belittle the very real effort he makes in this regard—is to try to ignore all of the time and money I spend to find just the right gifts for everybody on our list. Even though I know his economist inner self is cringing, he never says a word, no matter how ridiculously overstuffed the kids’ stockings get each year. My job, then, is to decorate the tree (and the rest of the house), buy and wrap the gifts for our boys and extended family, stuff the stockings, cook Christmas dinner (and the deviled eggs for Christmas morning at Grandma's), create & send the Christmas cards, and rally the troops for all of the many holiday gatherings with our two extended families.

Like I said, when I finally get to the Norman Rockwell moment, I’m often too exhausted (and, let’s face it, a little grumpy) to enjoy it quite as much as I feel I should.

I have about eleven months to figure out how to make the holidays easier and better and more fun for both of us next year, but the solutions—as always—elude me. (Which branch of the family should we cut out to make time for the hoop game?) I do have a few tiny seeds of ideas that I may float out there, though (additional suggestions are definitely welcome).

• My Christmas gift from Mr. Hates-to-shop could be one day of professional housecleaning and one spa massage, to take place at the same time a couple of days before the holiday. I’m thinking that would go a long way toward bringing more peace on earth to our little celebration.
• I should really loosen up my “package prettiness” standards and let the wrapping job fall to the boys and their all-thumbs dad. [Gulp] The wrapped gifts were only under the tree for about ten minutes this year anyway because of our chews-everything fluffy mutt (last year’s best gift ever).
• Maybe—and this would be a big change for others, too, so it’ll take some discussion—family could come to our (new!) house this year, reducing the number of trips we make over the river and through the woods. Hey, and since the house would already be clean, Hubby might even get that nap!

 How do you handle the balance between multiple extended families and different celebrating styles at your house?

I Got a Rock

Remember the holiday special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown? I always felt so sorry for Charlie Brown in that show. Every Peanuts special was filled with his failures and social belittlement, but the Halloween special was the worst of all. Remember how he went trick-or-treating—the most delightfully anticipated kid event of the fall season—and got a mean trick instead of a treat at every single house? Each of the other kids got candy and apples and money, but after every door Charlie Brown would say, “I got a rock.”

I know it seems a little out of season, but I think of that TV show every year around this time for my own private reasons. You see, “I got a rock” is the refrain that haunts me as I remember my biggest holiday gift-giving failure ever.

Let me explain.

My older son was born just five days before Christmas, a surprise tax deduction and holiday-plan-changer, since he was not supposed to make an entrance until the end of January. He was fine (if a little pumpkin-colored), but his early entrance meant that he would forever have to share his birthday with the biggest gift-giving holiday of the year.

I’ve always made a big deal about his birthday, with a party and friends and a firm commitment to never have him hear the dreaded words, “happy-birthday-merry-Christmas” as we hand him a two-fer Christmas/birthday gift in one.

When he was younger, I considered celebrating his half birthday instead, but for a number of reasons—including having a cousin born on his first birthday—that never really appealed to him. So that means he gets every gift he’ll receive all year within a five-day period in late December. That can present challenges when you’re trying to think of ideas for a child who already has way too much.

When he was in about fifth grade (I think), he really wanted Guitar Hero for Christmas. That was his entire list. I bought it early and had it waiting to put under the tree. Unfortunately, there was still that other gift-giving occasion to shop for, so I got…well…creative. And while creativity is great if you’re selling napkin rings on Etsy.com, it’s met with just a dash more scorn when you’re cobbling together a “surprise” for an eleven-year-old.

His class had done a unit on rocks and minerals that year, and he had expressed a real interest in collecting his own specimens. He was particularly taken with crystals, and showed me several in books that were especially pretty. So I decided to get him an extra-nice rock collection—including various crystals, geodes, some petrified dinosaur poop, and a professional-grade rock tumbler—as his birthday present. (I know. You can see the problem already, but I was delusional.)

So there we all were on his birthday, gathered around Austin, whose eyes sparkled with anticipation for the Guitar Hero he thought would be in that big box on the table. The paper was torn away, and there it was, stamped clearly across his face as he tried to give me a grateful smile: “I got a rock.”

It’s a beautiful set. Honest! It still sits in its place of shame next to the never-used rock tumbler on a high shelf in the back of his closet, taunting me when I have to reach into those dark recesses to put away something old or unwanted or outgrown. 

An excellent fake smile, whipped out later for the photo op.

These are the lessons I learned from my ill-fated foray into the world of rock hounds:

1.   If two gifts will eventually be given, always start with the video game.

2.   Educational gifts are best left to the grandparents.

3.   Creativity is best for gifts intended for the really old or the really young.

The search is on for two non-geological gifts for this year. Suggestions will be gratefully considered. Good grief!

The Recess Doodies

To be fair, I’m pretty sure the actual term for the women who police the fields and playground at my son’s school is “duties” (referring to instructional assistants on “recess duty”), but the homophone epithet is just too perfect to ignore. Long before kids are able to dole out truly nasty put-downs, they toss around words like “doodie-head” to lash out at the bad guys in their world. And if you listened to either of my kids describe their interactions with these playground patrollers at our local elementary school, you’d understand that the lazy pronunciation is really not an accident.

I’m sure these women are perfectly lovely human beings (really), but they seem to have forgotten something fundamental about elementary school: recess is the kids’ domain.  Or at least it should be. It’s their one chance to run and play and be imaginative and silly in a school day that has become more and more about preparing kids for standardized tests and less about allowing kids to be… well… kids.

Recess is where we all learned to navigate the challenges and politics of daily life. Bobby won’t play nice on the kickball field? Good luck getting picked for a team tomorrow. Molly won’t share the tetherball? Have fun playing solo, kid. This is our children’s best opportunity to develop negotiating skills and the ability to problem-solve their own small life crises. As parents, we know that we aren’t helping our children when we jump in and solve all of their problems. How did the school miss the memo on that?

The playground rules seem infinite and arbitrary (at least to my independent, raised-in-the-70s inner child). Want to take a turn on the swing? Any other kid waiting can count to twenty and you’ll have to get off. (Can you even get a good knee-pump going in twenty seconds?) Flag football, which was my son’s favorite game at the start of the year, has now been divided up into official teams. You can only play on certain days, and then only on your designated team. The “doodies” have split up pairs of friends (because they might pass to each other more than they do to the rest of the team); best buds are scheduled to play on opposite days. My son doesn’t play flag football anymore.

Basketball and tag are both forbidden (people could get hurt). Foursquare has an adult moderator who will send you walking if you stay in the server square too long. “Bump” (a basketball-ish game) has been renamed “shoot” because the grownups don’t like the ball-bumping required for the original game. Transgressions of any degree will earn you a recess “standing on the wall” (which kind of reminds me of this).

The wall’s purpose is twofold: to force kids to stand still during a time when they should be moving, and to hold them up to the ridicule of their peers, who know only too well what it means to stand “on the wall.” ("Ooooooh! You're in Trou-ble!") Do either of those sound like logical consequences for playing unfairly in a soccer game or serving up an illegal hit in wall-ball?

Is it any wonder the kids are a little antsy when they get back to class? The adults have stolen their free time and turned it into a regimented outdoor disappointment. Grownups have usurped their opportunity to learn how to interact without strict guidance.  The kids can’t play tag, for crying out loud.

Believe it or not, I used to be a teacher. I do understand the need for some order and control on the playground. But I also believe that we can do a better job of using misbehaviors as teachable moments and retain some of the fleeting time that kids get during the day to actually move.

I’d like to hear your ideas. What has worked at your kids’ schools? What do you think? Please join in the conversation!