Writer & Columnist • Santa Barbara, CA
Charting the puzzles and peeves of kid-herding — from Huggies to homework, Pilates to pinatas.
I’m spending the week with three charming gentlemen who regale me with tales of their epic world travels. They describe the sheep on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, the vegetarian sharks in Belize, the sugar in Costa Rica, and the beaches in Cannes.
From grown men, it might be braggy, but because these are my nephews — a 14-year-old and twin 10-year-olds — it’s sort of astonishing.
In a nation locked like longhorns in contentious battles over abortion, immigration, and assault weapons … can anyone really still be bickering over spaghetti straps?
Mais, oui, my friends. The struggle is real.
From Guilford, Connecticut, to Lynchburg, Virginia, to Helena, Montana, junior high and high school dress codes are being criticized — and even reevaluated this summer — as students and parents decry outdated policies as unrealistic, ambiguously enforced, and deeply sexist.
Trying to regulate teen wardrobes is a fool’s errand. Most everyone agrees that students should be clothed; beyond that, it gets tricky. Boys’ dress codes tend toward “Don’t promote drinking, drug use, gangs, violence, or racism,” while girls’ codes imply “Don’t … be sexy”: no short shorts, low-cut tops, bare midriffs, thin-strapped tanks, or exposed bra straps.
Most disturbing is the reason given for the girls’ rules: Their “provocative” clothing is “distracting” to other students in the learning environment.
I have an ugly secret: For 18 years, I’ve felt like a fraud both at home and at work.
From the moment I became pregnant with my first child, who graduates high school next week, I’ve had the unshakable sensation that I’m faking big chunks of my life, playing the part of a competent and confident mother and professional — but in fact always shortchanging someone their due: arriving late to work after delivering a forgotten lunchbox to school, darting out of a too-long meeting to arrive at the school awards ceremony 30 seconds after they call my kid’s name, emailing with the college counselor when I’m supposed to be watching that IT training, or grinning robotically through my son’s trumpet-lesson story at the dinner table when my mind is on that proposal I need to finish by morning.
At a party recently, two of my good friends informed me that their teenagers, formerly a boy and a girl, were newly identifying as a trans girl and a gender-fluid person; once him and her, they were now her and them, respectively. The next day, I met a girl whose best friend had left for spring break as a girl and returned to junior high as a trans boy.
I couldn’t help wondering: Why the sudden surge of transgender teens?
When my firstborn son was a toddler, I used to wonder if he would become a bouncer someday because he was big for his age — and fixated on doors. Opening them, closing them. Letting some in (the dog), keeping others out (the dad). He’d station himself in a doorway and take charge, wielding his power like Excalibur: You? Yes, by all means, enter. But not your friend. She waits out here with the others … until I say.
It was cute unless you were carrying groceries.
Now the tables have turned. He’s standing at the doorway of more than a dozen universities, waiting to see if he’ll be admitted. We’re staggering around in the three to four aimless months (110+ days!) between applying to colleges and hearing back from said colleges. The kid is handling it just fine — but for me, this limbo is anguish.
Tradition deems that a bride should give a few gifts on her wedding day. She might give jewelry to her bridesmaids and chocolates to her guests. She might bestow a monogrammed hankie on her mother, and will likely present her groom with a little sumpn special back at the hotel ifyouknowwhatimsayin.
But here’s a nuptial-day trinket you don’t often see a bride offer up in 2015: a note from her gynecologist to her father avowing that her hymen is thoroughly, virtuously intact. A Maryland bride did just that recently, posing with her dad, a big ole virginal grin, and a physician-signed “certificate of purity.”
Let’s review: Her wedding. Her gyno. Her father. Her hymen. The situation is wrong on so many levels. Here are just four of them.
Dang it, there goes my Mother of the Year Award. Again.
Last week I sent my 16-year-old son to Las Vegas overnight to get a giant black tattoo in a place where he’ll see it every day for maybe 70 years. And I didn’t just let him go; I arranged rides, booked flights, got a hotel, and even pleaded with a reputed Sin City ink slinger to defy his own no-minors policy and scar this child’s otherwise flawless forearm forever.
But I had good reasons. I think.
You know that moment when you’re heading out your front door for a big trip and you keep going over that mental list to make sure you’ve taken care of everything?
Dog sitter, mail hold, toothbrush, tickets, directions, deadbolt …
That’s where I am right now as a parent. My oldest is driving, earning paychecks from two jobs, and getting ready to apply to colleges. As he heads toward the front door for the trip of his life, that list keeps ticking through my head. Have I taught him everything he needs to know?
It’s becoming quite clear to me, as these things do.
You told me it would — that one day I’d understand why you did the things you did when I was a kid.
Remember our clashes over curfews, battles about boyfriends, and disputes over driving? Back then your motivation was opaque to me — not mysterious, just whack. We seemed so wildly different: Me a gangly, new-wave, camo-clad poet. You a petite ex-hippie breadwinner with a Motown jones.
We wanted such different things. For example, I wanted to be with my boyfriend at every moment, and you wanted me to occasionally eat, bathe, sleep …
But the enlightenment you predicted has finally arrived. Having kids now myself, I often find myself walking a mile in your strappy stilettos. And I’ll be honest: My feet hurt.
He still lets me tuck him in at bedtime. Nine years old, in a big hurry to grow up — but he hasn’t yet booted me from plopping beside him, pulling the covers up to his chin, and humming some hit ’80s song while I drag my fingers through his silky, shaggy mop.
Oh, it’s coming. “I don’t think my friends’ parents tuck them in at night,” he offers casually. “I might be getting too old for this.”
You listen to me, I would say if my teeth weren’t clenched for the express purpose of preventing my saying it. I will be tucking you in when you stumble home from the senior prom shnockered on bad, illegally obtained liquor, and you will like it. … The tucking-in, I mean. Not the liquor. You will very much dislike the liquor.
