Archive for the ‘Thinking’ Category:
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 I refuse to let my daughter get sucked into this elitist glorification of completely outdated gender roles where a girl is valued not for her brains or talents but rather her ability to jump up and down in a coordinated fashion like a trained monkey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.
Hooray for Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll!
At the age of nine, I became a latchkey kid. My mom went back to work and I got my first house key on a keychain featuring my birthstone (sapphire, faux, of course). The major upshot to the suckitude of having a working mom was that we had cable back then and being largely unsupervised for extended chunks of time, friends congregating at my house and watching movies on cable was a common activity because you know, RATED R MOVIES, DUDE!
Our parents had no frakking idea we were watching stuff like Death Race 2000 (”in the future, hit and run isn’t a crime, it’s the national sport!”; Crazy Mama (guns and boobs, baby!) and the totally effing creepy Phantasm (hooded killer dwarf creatures, a flying drill-ball, and a demonic mortician…FUN!!!)
How I turned out even remotely normal I’ll never know.
But there was one movie that I still love to this day (Kurt Cobain once said that it was his favorite film, too) It was called Over the Edge (now something of a cult classic) and it starred a teenage Matt Dillon (HOT!) in his first movie role as a sort of ringleader of juvenile delinquents in a suburban “master planned” community in the middle of nowhere.
Having grown up in a master-planned suburban environment in the seventies, I can attest to the accuracy of this film in terms of being trapped in suburbia with nothing to do but get in trouble — sex, drugs, rock n roll, vandalism… (okay, there was none of that for me, personally, as I was a tween but I knew plenty of kids older than me that were all about it)
My best friend and I wanted to LIVE this movie. Being bad never looked so fun. In fact, the film was so controversial at the time that it never made it to a theatrical release, debuting on HBO instead. And the soundtrack? AWWWWESOME –> Cheap Trick, Van Halen, Ramones, The Cars, Jimi Hendrix…
Check out this site to behold the awesomeness of Over the Edge (a website by someone far more obsessed with it than even me). Or better yet, rent it. They have it on Netflix.
So what about you? What movie(s) rocked your world as a kid?
_____
For more posts on this theme, visit these other fine purveyors of Friday Flashback bloggery:
Mamalogues
And if you want to play along on your own blog, link this post at the end of yours, add the participants above, and then email me or leave a note in the comments so I can link you here.
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.
………………..
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.
The Ring
I was compelled to dig through my old jewelry the other day after watching gold hit the $1000 mark. I was just curious to see just how much old gold jewelry I actually had — dollar signs dancing in my eyes, no doubt.
A lot of what I unearthed was mine from the days of charmholders that held lightning bolts and floating hearts, of serpentine chains, zodiac pendants and those nameplates that were rather unfortunately resurrected by Carrie Bradshaw.
The rest was my mother’s and grandmother’s jewelry — or rather what was left of it after my sister picked through it all and took the really, really good stuff.
Nonetheless, I don’t have much affection for yellow gold jewelry these days anyway and with very few sentimentally-based exceptions, I’d happily sell all of it for a thousand dollars an ounce.
But I got distracted when I came across my old silver peace sign ring.
Seeing as I was still in utero during the Summer of Love, it obviously came from a far less intense era — the mid to late eighties. And I’m embarrassed to admit it was, by and large, worn because we thought wearing peace signs were cool and nobody else was doing it — which really just meant you couldn’t yet score any peace sign gear at the mall.
In the interest of full-disclosure, I was a clove-smoking, black-wearing, bob-sporting, mall-hating elitist back then. I apologize to to whomever I may have directed any scornful, thou-art-soooo-inferior eyerolling.
Anyway, not ever having bothered to make myself aware of the actual ugliness of war and never having watched one on TV until a few years later with the Gulf War, I was really just a poseur. I mean sure, I didn’t like war. Most reasonable people don’t. But what did I actually know about war and peace or the fight for peace or the lack of peace? Not a damn thing.
As I sat there and fiddled with the tarnished silver ring, I thought about discussions I’d had with my husband half a decade ago, before the impending quagmire known as Iraq, in which I’d argued that war should be a last resort; that every single option should be exhausted before embarking on something that will cause so much misery and suffering.
These days I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the state of the world — the turmoil, the genocide, the civil wars, man’s inhumanity to man… And I say many silent little prayers to whomever might be listening to please save us from ourselves.
So…I’m wearing the ring again. The difference is this time it actually means something.
So I’ll Never Be a Luddite
Would you think I was a bad parent if I admitted that life without a DVD/VCR player kind of sucks? Yeah, well YOU try to go two months without one and then report back to me. I will graciously accept your apology and let you gush all over me for being so totally right.
Ours now resides in the large dead electronics pile that occupies a sizeable footprint of space just inside our privacy fence and is starting to look like some kind of Unabomber-themed art installation called “Technology Sucks Donkey Butt.” Personally, I’d have named it “Cheap Electronics from China Suck Donkey Butt” but whatever.
So I’m off to begrudgingly buy another one and this time? I’m purchasing one of them there “We Think You Are a Total Sucker and a Dumb One at That” extended warranties that they’re always trying to sell you — and which they totally should when you’re buying the el cheapo grande $69 DVD/VCR player. Not that I would know anything about that. Ahem.
