To Cheer or Not to Cheer?

It’s that time of year again when signs start poking out of the grass all over my part of town. Yes, it’s time for cheerleading and football sign-ups. Girls get to cheer and boys get to play football and moms and dads watch eagerly from the sidelines as their daughters and sons set out on a path that should, God willing, secure them a better place in the social hierarchy of their school careers as one of the elite or at the very least, not one of the hopelessly uncool kids they might become otherwise.

Naturally, because all her friends have been cheering for the past few years, TQ has expressed, again, an interest in joining in the fun. And I, being the overprotective freakshow that I am, have conveniently “forgotten” about cheerleading sign ups the past two years because, quite frankly, I’m just not sure about it.

I mean, of course, there is a part of me that’s like “YES! Be a cheerleader and you’ll never be picked last for teams in middle school gym class or not be invited to the cool parties or be picked on by bullies” and believe me, I fully realize how utterly pathetic that is but you know, as a parent, you always want your kids to grow up as unscathed as possible.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple because the other part of me is saying:

“NO WAY! I refuse to let my daughter get sucked into this elitist glorification of completely outdated gender roles where a girl is valued not for her brains or talents but rather her ability to jump up and down in a coordinated fashion like a trained monkey while looking cute in a short skirt. She should be PLAYING a sport, not cheering while a bunch of dumb jocks play the sport!”

I know that’s a narrow view of cheering and I’m sure it will piss off a few of you but I offer no excuses. That’s my perception of it. And yes, I know it’s hard work. Of course it is. But this isn’t exactly competition level cheerleading. It is, literally, jumping up and down in a coordinated fashion while looking cute in a short skirt.

Equally vexing to me is the time commitment — two hours, two evenings a week for practice (6-8pm) and every Saturday morning they have a game. They’re barely second graders yet!

But then again, do I want to be responsible for what will eventually be a chasm between her and her oldest friends? Would it be better to just go with the flow and be like every other mom and let her do it? Even though it feels wrong to lead her into something so limiting to her potential, in spite of it’s obvious social advantages?

It must seem silly of me to devote so much time to thinking about this but every year it gets a little harder to justify my reluctance about cheering, especially when I see how left out she feels.

I know this is probably the time in which I need to stand firm because this is just the beginning of these types of dilemmas where my values and her happiness are diametrically opposed but I have to say, I can now see why parents sometimes make decisions that, to the rest of us, seem so utterly stupid.

We just want our kids to be happy.

Where Mothers Fear to Tread

My son fell off a swingset yesterday. He fell not from the swing itself but from the crossbar that holds the frame together. Factoring in his own height, he fell about five feet and hit his head on the concrete so hard I could hear it. Just thinking about that moment makes my eyes burn.

He had climbed up there while I was on the phone. I was right there, trying to stop him but, ironically, I was afraid that by fighting him, I’d make him fall. So I went around the frame to get behind him as I was positive he would end up falling backwards but before I could put a hand on him, and in the blink of an eye, he fell forward and hit the concrete along the outside of swingset. I will never forget that slow motion fall to the ground and the sound of his head hitting the unyielding cement. I screamed.

I inspected his head for the blood I was certain would be pouring out of it but miraculously, he wasn’t bleeding.

I carried him inside while he cried like I’ve never hear him cry before. It was relentless and mournful. I put ice on his head but by then, I couldn’t remember which side hit the ground. I kept asking him to show me where it hurt but he wouldn’t answer. He just kept asking to lay down and kept blinking his eyes like he couldn’t see.

I was terrified.

As I dialed the pediatrician, I replayed in my mind all the stories I’ve ever heard about people hitting their heads a lot less hard than he did and dying from it. I thought about my friend who hit his head when he jumped from the car we were in together. His brain swelled from the impact and he didn’t make it.

The pediatrician suggested I bring him in immediately rather than go to an emergency room as it would definitely take longer to get even a basic head injury assessment.

I hung up the phone and began to sob uncontrollably. I felt like I had failed my son by not being able to prevent his fall.

And for the first time ever, I considered my childrens’ mortality for more than a half a second.

I’ve read many blogs written by parents who have lost a child and I have cried tears for them as I tried to grasp their pain. But I’ve never, ever allowed myself to imagine the horror of losing a child of my own. Even though the ever present spectre of death has been a part of my life since I was a child, I’ve willfully never let my mind go to that dark place until yesterday.

I cried as I put my son’s shoes on, knowing I shouldn’t do so in front of him, but powerless to stop. He’d said almost nothing since the fall maybe 15 minutes prior and he seemed very out of it but as I cried, he climbed off my lap, gently wrapped my face with his two tiny hands and kissed me. My heart ached.

As we drove to the doctor’s office, I forced myself to not cry, opting instead to make silent bargains with God.

After an extensive examination, his doctor concluded that while there was a very small chance he *might* lose consciousness, it was okay for him to go home as long as we agreed to wake him every three hours to make sure he was not unconscious. If he was or if he started vomiting, we were to go to the ER immediately. She also said it was a miracle his head didn’t split open from the impact of hitting such a hard surface from five feet. My sentiments exactly.

P made it through the night okay but he might be feeling some minor effects from the fall as he’s been very fussy today and a wee bit clumsy, hitting his poor little head again on my desk. Cognitively, he seems okay and I’m guardedly optimistic that he’s going to be wonderfully, perfectly fine in a day or two. I hope.

There is nothing on this earth that will make you appreciate your children more than thinking you might lose them. It’s not that I needed to be reminded to appreciate my son but in the chaos that is our everyday life, it’s easy to forget that my children are really the only things in my life that truly matter to me. I don’t want to lecture or preach but please, look at your kids and take in their essence; their goodness; their ability to love you unconditionally. And then imagine if all of that was gone from your life.

I really believe P is going to be okay and aside from knocking a couple years off my life, I’m fine, too. It was a horrible event that’s now over. The one good thing that came from it is a very pointed reminder to not take life for granted — yours or anybody else’s.

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I wanted to do this in my last post but since it was a Flashback Friday, I opted to wait—

I just wanted to say thank you to all you nice people who sent their well wishes and congrats via email, comments and twitter for my little 15 seconds of fame in the Wall Street Journal. Most of you were not friends, as one might have expected (lamers!), but rather total strangers (and maybe new readers?) who found their way here from the Journal. Your kind and very unexpected words made me feel really good. I realize now it was kind of silly of me to feel so oddly self-conscious about the whole thing because I am good enough, I am smart enough and doggone it, people like me! And If I ever channel Stuart Smalley again, pinky swear that you’ll throw me in front of a bus.

My Lips Are Sealed

God knows I’ve made enough mistakes in my youth that I could expound on them ad nauseum. However, after much deliberation, I decided that reviving a post from the past might work best for the following challenge:

What memory or story from your youth would you never share with your own children and why? And if there’s nothing from your history that you wouldn’t have them know, why is that?

What I’m offering up is a true story that both embarrasses me and amuses me endlessly but I’m not sure I could, in good conscience, tell it to my children until they are adults, mainly because I wouldn’t want to make light of or trivialize my stupidity or all the bad things that could have happened to me but didn’t.

Soooo… I give you “Don’t Take the Pot” back for an encore from the 2006 archives of IzzyMom.
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Don’t take the pot.

Yup. You heard me. This message is directed to all you kids out there that are sneaking the computer and going through your mom’s blogroll

Okay, okay. I was just being funny and imitating my parents there. What I really mean to say is don’t SMOKE the pot.

Why? Why, you ask?

Well, because you might decide, at the wise old age of 14 or maybe 15, that when your friend calls you on a Saturday and tells you she got a joint from that stoner guy who rides your bus, that it would be a smashing idea to go to the gazebo by the lake and get high.

So you lie to your parents and say you need to get something from the drug store and instead you get on your yellow 3 spd bike (with the dorky baskets on the back that are better suited to towing people than carrying stuff) and you swing by your friend’s house to pick her up. You guys take turns towing each other to the gazebo only to find there are people there feeding ducks.

Puh! Hopeless dork losers that they are, you leave them to their duck-feeding while you and your friend try to think of a place where two unbelievably cool teenage girls sporting feathered hair and black eyeliner and wearing those little nylon Dolfin shorts (you know, like Richard Simmons and the Hooters girls wear) can go burn one without being too terribly conspicuous.

You end up deciding that the little tunnel of bushes behind the Publix Supermarket will afford you the privacy needed to get baked. While puffing away, some stock boys from Publix follow their noses to your hideout and you guys have to share with them. They are kind of cute and you decide this is for the best since you’re already way too stoned. Being a novice pot smoker, you always let this happen. You never quit while you’re ahead. Dumbass.

As the stock boys depart, high as kites, talking about what kind of food they plan on swiping from the store, you and your friend finally exit the bushes, too, and you get on your bike.

Realizing your condition, you wisely decide to walk the bike instead. As you guys get closer to home, it starts to rain and your friend casually announces that she has to leave now to go to her aunt’s house with her mom.

Whoa, whoa, wait a second. Your brain, in it’s compromised state, is about to catch on fire because it’s working extra hard to process this bit of confusing and bad, VERY BAD, information.

“You’re leaving me? Like this? You can’t. I’m sooo stoned and I can NOT go home like this. I need someone to hang with until I can go home.”

But in the blink of bloodshot eye she’s gone and you are alone, in the rain, high.

Hmmmm. What to do. What to do.

And then you have a brainstorm. You will go to the house of the people for whom you babysit.

Yeah. They’re pretty cool. He’s a cop and keeps weed in a Tupperware in the bathroom cabinet. And they’re swingers. Remember those Polaroids you found? Ewww. Don’t think about that part. Doesn’t matter. They’re nice people. They are. C’mon.

And before you know it, you’re ringing the bell. Mr. Erlich (Officer Erlich) opens the door and you ask if his wife is home. He smiles and kindly welcomes you in while explaining that Karen and the boys are out but will be home soon. He’s just watching a movie and you’re welcome to hang out and wait. Trying your hardest not not let him see how gross and pasty your mouth is (because then he would know for sure that his teenaged babysitter was totally high) you decide to grab a pillow, lay on the floor and watch the movie. This is an awesome plan, you think to yourself as Mr. Erlich brings you an orange soda. Yes, indeedy!

As you open your eyes, you hear a little voice saying “Mommy, Daddy, she’s getting up!” You look up and there they are. The whole Erlich family looking down, smiling widely at you like you just did something hilariously funny.

Oh wait. You did. You fell dead asleep on their floor for 2 hours.

Grinning sheepishly and silently praising the sweet baybay Jesus that you’re not high any more, you apologize profusely and get the hell out of there.

If memory serves you correctly, the Erlichs never ask you to babysit again. You don’t care, though, because you’re really embarrassed (and they never had any good food to eat anyway.)

But still. You know you did something really dumb and you’re pretty sure the Erlichs knew. How could they not? And you hope to God they don’t ever tell your parents. Your dad & stepmom wouldn’t understand. They weren’t young enough to indulge in the Summer of Love and all that cool hippie stuff. They called it taking pot, for pete’s sake.

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Ahhhhh, to have the luxury of being young & stupid…

My parents never did find out about that Saturday afternoon, thankfully. They would have been very disappointed in me. I was the kind of kid that did bad stuff but got good grades and was generally very responsible. The kind of kid that fools all adults…

I smoked pot many more times after that but I finally had to throw in the towel and admit that I was not a good pot taker. I couldn’t drive (well, I could. But only at speeds under 20 mph). I couldn’t go into a store or do anything remotely normal. I could just eat A LOT, read the same line in a book over and over and then fall asleep. I wasn’t much fun.

These days, however, I have hard time sleeping unless I’m dead tired and taking the pot seems like maybe not such a bad idea.

But the eating. The unabated crap-eating…

Arghhhhh…

Maybe not.

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To read more posts based on this Flashback Friday topic, visit these fine blogs:

Her Bad Mother

Mrs. Flinger

Mamalogues

The Bean Blog

Posts from the Playground

And hey — if you want to play along on your own blog and do this week’s Friday Flashback, let me know and I’ll link you here.

My Parenting Book Deal Should Be Coming Any Day Now

I was woken up this morning with a tampon being waved in my face, unwrapped and thankfully, unused. I guess my son took a detour to the bathroom before coming to wake me up and demand “chocktick mook.” Can you decipher that? It’s chocolate milk. Yes, I’ve become one of those moms who gives their kid chocolate milk (Shut up! It’s Ovaltine. It has vitamins) instead of white milk because that’s all their preshus darling will drink. Seriously though, I just got tired of finding half drunk milk sippies all over the house and decided that a little chocolate milk never hurt anyone and that’s how we roll now. And I NEVER find half drunk milk sippies anymore. Am brilliant.

I’m also using Skittles to bribe my son to use the potty. I’m sure many of you are thinking that if I were more devoted and less lazy, I wouldn’t have to resort to sugary sugar-coated sugar nuggets and perhaps there’s some truth to that but honestly, I’ve been through potty training before and bribery often works just as well as following your child around all day asking them if they have to go. But alas, my confidence in the superiority of bribery is flagging lately because that method is not working quite as I’d intended.

See, he has been taking himself to the potty for months now (he’ll be three in June) which is great, right? There’s just one small glitch. He’ll only use the potty if he already has no pants on (not an unusual occurrence) The fact is, he just won’t take his pants down to go potty, opting instead to take the path of least resistance and go in his pull-up. I assume this is primarily attributable to laziness. He is, after all, my son. And honestly, who hasn’t wished at least once to be able to just pee into a nice absorbent diaper for the sake of convenience?

What? Is that weird?

So anyone who has an opinion, which is everyone, says I should just put him in underwear and pants and not use pull-ups anymore since he clearly knows when he has to go and is capable of taking himself to the bathroom without any assistance from me. And I’m all WHAT? Are you crazy? Do you realize how many pair of pants and underwear we’ve gone through already with that approach? And his sneakers? Peed upon right along with the sofas and the carpets. Were it not for Stanley Steemer, my house would smell like a freaking nursing home and if you’ve ever been to one, you KNOW what I’m talking about.

It seems we’ve reached an impasse. I can just let him go everywhere without pants on, which is tempting, or I can keep him in pull-ups until he’s like ten which is even more tempting except that those suckers are pricey and I’d rather spend that money on myself something more practical than character-festooned disposable underwear to pee and poop in, which, when put like that, actually sound downright absurd.

I’ve got to get him out of those things. Le sigh.

The Age of Unreason

Well, I’m back after a brief trip to Camp Unspeakable. I cannot, however, tell you specifically where I was or what I was doing because the first rule of Camp Unspeakable is that we don’t talk about Camp Unspeakable.

So, you are please to be missing me, no?

I missed you, too.

Not to prattle on incessantly about that which cannot be spoken (hello ad network agreements) but I really did have a great time there. Uh uh…don’t even ask. What happens at Camp Unspeakable STAYS at Camp Unspeakable.

Suffice it to say that spending time eating, eating, oh, and eating (they fed us well) and attending a jam-packed day of weird (feed your kids Splenda!), wild (rBGH is perfectly fine!), wacky (1,4 Dioxane is harmless!) and somewhat frightening (Uterine prolapse can be fixed!) corporate edumacation with a few of mah favoritest bloggy betches was just what I needed.

Unfortunately, it’s just like when I used to go to camp every summer as a kid and then come home all deflated because what could possibly top four weeks of playing spin the bottle and slow dancing to Freebird every Friday night? Ummmmm. Nothing?

So I’m home and it seems more…noisy and chaotic. But otherwise, it’s just the same as I left it except my mostly occasionally angelic kids are now behaving like obnoxious, whiny and inexplicably loud crack monkeys. Because? It’s spring break, of course.

Did I ever mention that I loathe spring break only slightly less than having my eyeballs penetrated by an army of flying salad forks. Well, I do.

And my son, almost three, recently entered the “age of unreason”. You know, it’s the age where rational thinking and rational behavior are NONEXISTENT? The age where tantrums are thrown over Every. Little. Thing?

But since I’ve been home, he’s taken things to a whole new level. Now, when he hears something he doesn’t like, instead of just throwing himself to the floor in a kicking, screaming heap, he’s added LOTS of high-pitched whiny, squealy, screamy, brain-bleed inducing howls of protest to his repertoire. DONOTLIKE.

And the banging. What is it with little boys banging on everything?

ARRRGGGHHHH

On the upside… The devil pills? I don’t seem to need them anymore. Well, for now anyway, although I may take them anyway if this new behavior doesn’t cease and desist soon.

A peek inside the imagination of a mom on the verge:

“Here,” said Betty as she handed Joan the little brown bottle labeled Devil Pills. “I call them my Mother’s Helpers and they’re simply marvelous! Just take one whenever you feel anxious. I’ve got to run now and put a roast in the oven. Jim’s boss is coming for dinner tonight. Cocktails around three?”

“See you then. Don’t forget that gelatin salad recipe!” Joan called after her, wondering when the man would arrive to fix the Frigidaire — the thought of cocktails without ice made her shudder.

Heh. I know just how she feels.

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Congratulations for making it to the end. Your reward? Photos from Camp Unspeakable here and here. Try to curb your enthusiasm :)