Not Feelin’ It

Halloween is like black licorice. You either love it or hate it.

Me? I loooooooove Halloween. It’s the attention-seeker’s favorite holiday. The one time of year when you can unapologetically dress to elicit attention. You get to be creative. Plus there’s candy. And jack-o-lanterns. And cinnamony, nutmeggy, pumpkiny foods.

And did I mention the attention part?

Junior year in college I lived with a family in France. The mother was in her forties. Super young-looking, fashionable, and pretty. And she was a maniac extrovert. When my friends would come over she’d run around opening wine (as if we needed encouragement), cranking music, and dragging the furniture to the side of the room to get us dancing.

Her teen-aged daughter would be cowering in the corner. She was painfully, hideously shy.

Our parenting days were light years away, but my friends said, “That is SO going to be you and your kid some day, Kristen.” (They called this up to me while I was dancing on the couch.)

Weirdly, neither of my girls has retreated like a threatened snail in the wake of their mother’s extroversion. In fact, Miss Kate, my oldest, holds her own quite well. She’s one of the youngest in her class, but as other parents have commented, “You’d never know it.” I think that’s code for, “She’s all  in your grill with the sass and spunk you’d expect from a much older kid.”

Or maybe they’re just referring to her mad reading skillz.

Anyway, it turns that I’m worried about Little Miss Self Esteem. On the one hand she’s so socially bulletproof. She went from camp to camp one summer without knowing a soul, and without batting an eyelash. She was the only girl in an animation class with 19 boys. And she was totally un-phased.

She’ll happily let anyone babysit for her. (I should take advantage of that and work a deal with some homeless folks.) She’s independent, confident, funny, and a good big sister—90% of the time.

She blew away her preschool teachers by asking if she could lead Circle Time. Apparently no kid’s ever done that, and her teachers ended up handing her the Circle Time reigns a bunch. (“Today,” she’d report, “I led the kids in some yoga poses and we sang a song about snowflakes.”)

These days as a big second-grader she volunteers at Paige’s preschool reading to the children and leading art projects that she comes up with on her own.

My Kate is the future Most Likely to Succeed.

And yet I’m fretting about all the things she isn’t doing. It’s not that I want her to do more. It’s not that she’s disappointing me in any way. It’s that there are things that I know she wants to do that she isn’t doing.

And it’s all because of clothes.

You may’ve seen me write about this here before. Kate hates clothes. She’s not a nudist, just a super-sensitive kid who can’t stand the feel of seams, stiff fabric, sewn-on decals, and zippers.

We’ve gone through phases with this. As a baby it seemed non-existent, but somewhere along the way she forsook pants for dresses. She whittled her wardrobe down to a handful of acceptable well-washed, worn out, super-soft cotton clothes.

She saw an OT a couple years ago and we brushed her and did some other exercises to desensitize her skin. It seemed to work. A bit, I mean. Even just learning other kids have this problem helped us all.

But it’s far from behind her. I’ll nearly forget about it, then she’ll need new shoes and I’ll realize how not-normal this behavior is that we’ve become so accustomed to.

So we started with another OT this fall. A well-respected woman who’s in walking distance of our house. She gave us some new insights and exercises, and already Kate seems to feel some things are easier. She recently wore a long-rejected shirt that Mark had bought her on a business trip. We nearly fainted when she walked into the kitchen with it on.

At school the other day I caught the end of her P.E. class. She was wearing a red vest along with her teammates. I was thrilled. We went shoe shopping a few days later and to my shock she picked out a pair of tall leather boots.

Things like these are victories. Totally unprecedented stuff.

So, what’s the problem? What I’m worried about is all the things she doesn’t want to do because of an outfit or uniform or some kind of gear.

She used to love ballet. Everyone else wore tutus and tights and slippers. Katie was in a baggy cotton dress, barefoot. This was fine with her teacher, but somewhere along the line from toddler to first-grader Kate decided ballet wasn’t her thing.

She adored choir until the performances last spring where I had to coax her into her uniform while drugging her with TV. This year she quit choir after one rehearsal.

She still has training wheels on her bike since she can’t tolerate a helmet.

And she’s expressed interest in horseback riding and theater, but admitted that the required clothes or costumes made those things a no-go.

I also think she’d love Halloween, but—in my mama brain at least—she sees it as a day when she’ll have to wear something other than her four soft-and-cozy skirts or her three approved cotton shirts. Dressing up is anxiety-provoking. What’s fun about that?

A few weeks ago I’d just about decided that we’d put her in therapy. In addition to the OT, I mean. Might as well come at this from every angle, right? My dad and I had a long phone conversation about this and he agreed it was a good idea. Let’s hit this thing with a hammer.

But a chat with her pediatrician later that day had me reconsidering.

“Is she doing okay socially?” he asked.

“Yeah, totally,” I said. No-brainer to that.

You’ll go through two or three years when she’ll say no to things, the doc said. But you have to trust that she’ll pull out of it. Eventually there’ll be something she wants to do badly enough that she’ll be willing to wear whatever she has to for it.

Putting her in therapy, he contended, will just solidify this as a big issue in her mind. It could make it even harder to shake.

I called my dad to discuss this new perspective. And we agreed that it made sense too.

Oy! What to do?

It’s hard to resist that modern-day reflex to throw as many resources and specialists at a problem as possible. Especially when that problem relates to your sweet young child. Isn’t being a good parent about removing whatever roadblocks prevent your kid from being their best selves?

I said that to a friend the other day who replied, “Or maybe it’s about letting them remove those barriers themselves.”

For now at least I’m back-burnering the therapy idea. Mark agrees. Let’s focus on OT now and see what comes of that.

So then, time to hone my maternal patience skills. Time to sit on my hands when I see Kate yearn to do something that she ultimately decides against because some part of it won’t feel good. Time to sit back and appreciate all the dazzling things that Kate IS doing, instead of fretting over what she’s not.

And time to go put the finishing touches on my own Halloween costume.

Happy Halloween, y’all.

A friend emailed me a link to this excellent short video. (Thank you, Melanie!)
My husband and I related to so so much of it. In fact, Mark said it made him cry.
Check it out, yo.

The Emperor’s New Onesie from Hillary Frank on Vimeo.

Choir Quitter

Kate quit choir. (Try saying that five times fast.)

She’d joined a community youth choir last spring—a pretty well-known group where the older kids get to travel once a year and have cross-cultural experiences with singer nerds from other countries. Aside from voice training, she was learning how to read music and studying something called “music theory,” whatever that is.

Growing up my family prided itself on its deeply-rooted musical ineptitude. Mark, on the other hand, can play several instruments and was also a choir geek back in the day. He hauled out some old cassette tapes when Kate started last year and filled the house at high decibels with crackling recordings of his past performances. Kate would run home from rehearsals to sing him the new songs she’d learned and show off the sheet music in her binder.

It all seemed like such good clean fun.

But aside from all the “it’s good for you like broccoli” reasons for Kate to be in choir, Mark and I just wanted her to have a special thing that she’d get good at and stick with. Whatever that was.

My friend Sydney was a figure skater when we were kids. She went to a rink out on Route 6 for private lessons.  It wasn’t some after-school elective our other friends did. This was her own thing. She even had performances where she got to wear bee-yoo-tiful pastel outfits—and make-up. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was jealous that Sydney had a weird special talent. Something that was just hers, that she was good at.

So, Kate quitting choir sent Mark and me into a tailspin.

Now, I don’t shy away from parental challenges. I was happy to strong-arm Kate into continuing. I figured that if I did it could well be something she’d thank me for some day. It’s not first-nature to me, but I guess I’m a Wanna-be Tiger Mom. Or at the very least, I like to direct the course of my children’s activities (that’s a euphemism for being a control freak). And having my twerpy seven-year-old resist my well-laid plans rubbed me the wrong way.

But how do you drag a crying second grader out of a car, thrust her into a building, and make her sing? The day of her second rehearsal this fall she decided she was just not going. The conductor this year was strict. She didn’t like the songs. She was tired from her longer school days. And, she proclaimed, she was not going to get out of the car.

She’d promised us she’d go to try it out at least three times this year. We figured she just needed to get back in the groove. But it turned out she only made it there once.

So we had a family meeting. Or Mark and I at least tried to be all Brady Bunch formal about the somber-toned, sitting-on-the-couch discussion we had with her. Oh we were disappointed. Oh she had not held up her end of the deal. But here’s the thing—we were going to let her pick something else. Something she was interested in. Something she could stick with.

That, by the way, was Mark’s idea. My inner “course-director” was not keen on giving her free reign. I wanted to point her towards some classically character-enriching activity so she could, you know, perform for our dinner party guests. At least in my alternate fantasy life.

But I also thought about those kids who have some weird fondness for, like, the tuba. Perhaps there was something she cottoned to and would want to pursue without any urging from us. I do not need to repeat that parking lot meltdown any time soon.

We gave her some time to think, and a couple days later she came to me and simply said, “Horses.” Not “I want to learn how to ride,” just “horses.” Whatever the hell that meant.

I confess. I was ready to dismiss the idea summarily. I know the horse-hugger girl type, but that was never me as a kid. And I guess I can’t easily rally behind something I don’t really get. But I resisted putting the kibosh on it. If Mark’s plan to let Kate pick something was going to work, I needed to kick aside my inner control freak.

So I checked with some mama friends who’d sent their kids to camp at a local horse ranch. And get this: It turns out the place has a class called Fun with Horses. It’s not riding—it’s learning about things like how to teach horses tricks, what they like to eat, how to brush and care for the beasts. The kids even get to braid the horses’ manes, which did sound like some form of crack for Kate.

This is why I love the Bay Area. Your kid wants to take “horses” and it turns out there actually is such a class.

She starts in two weeks. After that we’ll consider whether she wants to move onto riding lessons, although Kate’s clothing sensitivities have her currently unenthusiastic about that. Suffice it to say that the kid who can only tolerate wearing a handful of old, well-worn cotton clothes is not keen on the idea of tight, seam-laden jodhpurs, stiff tall boots, and a helmet.

And unless we win the lottery, that’s frankly okay with me. I’ve had several parents look at me wild-eyed when I mentioned Kate’s interest in horses. “The cost!” they bellowed. “The time commitment! The travel! The begging for a horse of their own!”

Oh, and did they mention the cost?!

Maybe the thing Kate’s about to stick with and get good at isn’t gymnastics, or singing, or even horseback riding. Maybe it’ll be mucking stalls and horse hair-dos. And unless I want to drag her screaming from the car into some class she isn’t keen on, until her fascination with the clarinet naturally emerges I guess I’ll just have to make peace with that.

Have you wrangled with your kid’s extracurricular activities?  (Please tell me I’m not alone.) What’s your take on it all?

School Pride

A few weeks ago some moms and I took our kids to the local old-timey ice cream parlor after school. While the wee ones ran around outside licking each others’ cones and tossing pennies in the fountain, the mom folk got to talkin’.

Here’s a snippet of our conversation:

Monica: “So we’re still not sure what team Hank is playing on.”

Lynn: “Really? Wow….”

Monica: “Yeah, sometimes I’m totally convinced that he’s gay. Other times? Not so sure.”

Jenny: “Well, he’s still super young. All in due time, right?”

Fran: “Sure, but if he IS, wouldn’t that be SO AWESOME?”

All of us: “Yessssss!”

Indeed. In many parts of the world a parent might be dismayed at the thought of their child being gay—horrified even. Here in the Bay Area we are downright thrilled by the prospect. It’s just one of the many reasons I love living here.

I consider myself a pretty liberal, open-minded person. I don’t care who you pray to, what you look like, or what foods you eat or abstain from. Gay, straight, whatEVER, that is your choice and good on ya. And I hope that I’m raising my kids to feel the same way.

Which is why I was shocked by my reaction to an event at my daughter’s school recently.

It was a few weeks ago. My mother-in-law was in town from Ohio, so I took her to the Tuesday morning assembly. It’s fifteen minutes of feel-good singing, storytelling, music, and announcements that never fails to deliver a mega-dose of warm fuzzies.

Even though San Francisco’s huge Gay Pride parade is this weekend, they were having a special assembly about it since school wouldn’t be in session near the actual event.

Each classroom was given a color to wear, and that morning instead of sitting in the auditorium wherever they wanted, the hundred or so children were arranged in the shape of a rainbow. The rainbow flag being the symbol of gay pride, and all.

It was adorable. Nearly as cute as my rainbow fruit salad (which happens to have no affiliation to the gay community). Parents were snapping photos and taking videos. The kids were clearly into it too. Typical Tuesday morning love-fest.

Some teachers came to the front of the auditorium and started explaining what Pride Week was all about. And then the slide show started. And no, no, there weren’t any photos of men in leather chaps with their butt cheeks showing. Though, honestly, that wouldn’t have bothered me. (They’re always so toned, those boys!) It was the words that got me.

A list came up on the screen. Essentially the message was that you should be proud to be:
Lesbian
Gay
Bisexual
Heterosexual
Transgender
Queer
Questioning
Intersex
Ally

To which I thought, INTERsex? What the hell is that?

I also wasn’t quite sure what “Ally” referred to.

I felt kinda like I did when that Ann Landers sex quiz went around my school in ninth grade. When you answered the questions and tallied your score you’d find out how experienced you were. I’m not sure why I even took the quiz. I was fully aware that my rating would be “pure as the driven snow” or maybe “still has that new car smell.” But what really intrigued me—and my friends—about the quiz was the sex acts that were listed that we’d never even heard of, forget done.

Without having the Internet at our disposal (I’m OLD, people) we still managed to find out what “fisting” and “rimming” meant. Then we wished we’d never asked.

Anyway, the school Pride presentation went on to take each of the terms and break them down. A couple teachers narrated each slide that popped onto the screen. For “Gay” there was a collage of photos that included two daddies sitting on a couch with their children. For “Lesbian” I think there was an image of two women getting married, some two mom families, and two women holding hands. The teachers said things like, “Men who love other men are gay.”

I was totally down with it.

They even slipped a “Heterosexual” slide in there with a picture of the Obamas. (Refreshing to see them labeled not as ‘black’ for a change, but as ‘straight.’)

But really, I was just wondering when the hell they were going to get to “Intersex” so A) I’d find out what it meant, and B) I’d see how they were going to handle that photo collage.

I was also curious about what were they going to say about Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning. This crowd included kids from kindergarten to fifth grade. What was the lowest common denominator of age-appropriate info they were going to share?

And of course I couldn’t help but see all this through my mother-in-law’s eyes. Of all the sweet kids-playing-piano assemblies we’ve had, she had to be in town for this one. I mean, I don’t think that this kinda presentation is standard fare for the public schools in Ohio. It all seemed very California.

Interestingly they didn’t end up having a slide for each term. At least, as far as I can remember. And there was one for “Intersex,” but there was just one image, not a collage. It was a photo of a husky woman on a hiking trail, and one of the female teachers presenting said, “This is Leslie, a friend of mine from college. She is intersex.”

Wait—whaaaat? It felt like I’d been shown a photo of Pat from that SNL skit. And I still didn’t know what Intersex meant.

There was a coffee gathering for parents after the assembly. Being unabashedly outspoken as I am, I mentioned to a couple mamas that I was a bit surprised by the presentation. And moreover I was shocked by my own reaction to it. Usually I’m totally down with whatever that school does.

“The gay and lesbian thing—no brainer. No issue there,” I whispered to some gals by the coffee urn. “I guess I just wonder if they needed to get so technical and label-y about it all.”

A couple women nodded their heads. Another one quietly said, “Yeah… What’s Intersex?”

Exactly.

Call me square, but I’d rather not have my child wondering about the finer points of various sexual orientations until she naturally starts to think about them herself. I always thought Mark and I would decide when and how we’d to talk to our kids about that stuff. I was kinda surprised that the school took the liberty to delve into it on our behalf.

And I guess what really struck me was how freakin’ comprehensive they were. Couldn’t they have just stuck to a high level “accept everyone” kinda message?

“I feel really weird admitting this,” I mumbled to the mamas, “But if my five-year-old came home and started asking me about the terms they were talking about this morning? I’d be kinda annoyed.”

One mom put her hand on my arm and said, “What they couldn’t grasp probably just floated right over their heads.” And as I grabbed another slab of coffee cake, I agreed and hoped that was true.

That night at dinner Mark asked the girls how their days were. Kate piped up, “At assembly today we all looked like a rainbow!”

And that was that.

What Happens in Dayton…

Someone slid me their resume under the door of a bathroom stall once. A stall that I was peeing in.

It was certainly a memorable way for that person to “get her name out there,” but I didn’t end up hiring her. In fact, I had no authority to hire anyone at the time. Too bad she didn’t know that.

This all happened years ago. It was my first-ever professional conference, held by some women in broadcasting group. And I was as nervous and green and wide-eyed as a gal could get. But I was also working for CNN at the time. You may have heard of it. And little did I know the reaction those three letters on my badge would elicit from that mob of viciously competitive, turbo-coiffed, wannabe anchorwomen.

From the moment I slipped that lanyard over my neck I was stalked like a Coach purse at a T.J. Maxx. People applied lip gloss before approaching me, thrust their reels into my bag, and crammed their complete career histories into introductions at the breakfast buffet.

If anything the experience left me doubting whether I wanted to stay in TV news. Those women were not my people.

But last weekend, in Dayton, Ohio of all unlikely places, I had the good fortune of attending a conference with 350 humor writers (mostly women, with a smattering of husband purse-carriers and a gay man or two). And it turns out that those folks are my people.

And true to how I operate—now a jaded veteran of the conference scene—I learned much more outside the sessions than I did from any of the PowerPoint slides.

I mean, I met a totally witty and glamorous woman from Boca who it turns out home schools. I was shocked. She didn’t have stringy brown hair, and wasn’t wearing a poncho she and her five children weaved. She didn’t have a collection of KILL YOUR TV and MY CAR RUNS ON FRENCH FRY GREASE pins on her hemp bag either.

So that’s one thing I learned. Those homeschoolers can be anywhere really. You can’t pick ‘em out of a crowd any more. Which is kinda refreshing, right?

Other things: Since I got back I started journaling for ten minutes every morning. It took two writing teachers and a speaker at this conference urging me to do this before I finally drank the Kool-Aid. (Apparently I’m highly suspicious of smart people trying to teach me something.)

But here’s the thing. It turns out that dumping your early morning thoughts onto paper (yes, NOT your laptop) is wonderfully cleansing. It’s like the feel-good hit you get from clearing out your closet, but with your brain. And instead of “wasting” my words, as I feared I might do, I’ve found it actually warms me up to do even more writing.

So I learned that too.

And the keynote speakers were all so dazzling I sprang from my seat for standing ovations—either dabbing my eyes with my napkin, or waving it in big churning circles over my head howling, “HOOOOO-eeee!!!”

But after each speech I still wanted more more more.

Like, I want to be Connie Schultz‘s best friend.

I want Ilene Beckerman to adopt me. (She wrote her first book at age 60. Sixty!!)

I want to go back to college to have Gina Barreca as a professor. Or hire her to do stand-up at my next book club/wedding/kid’s birthday party/bris.

I want to get to the bottom of Alan Zweibel‘s relationship with Gilda Radner. Did they do it or didn’t they? I’m just saying, it’s human nature to wonder. Like how you want to know whether or not figure skating couples are schtupping.

I want to swap Italian-girl stories and meatball recipes with Adriana Trigiani.

And I want to have even one-eighteenth of the success that any of these writers have had. And for a math-phobic like me, that’s saying a lot. Or at least, I think it is.

Finally, a word about the Bombeck family. They were all there, and at our meals each one read their favorite column of Erma’s. (Cue more tears into my napkin—many from laughing.)

I’m no event planner but if you ask me this conference has legs. In the alternating years when it’s not being held, I think Bill Bombeck (Erma’s widower) should lead a workshop on spousal adoration. All I can say is, my husband does a damn good job of this himself but he’s not carrying around my autograph book from elementary school and reading from it lovingly. There’s always room to up your game, and I think the husbands of America can learn as much from Bill as us wives have from Erma.

I humbly clutch my housecoat for a deep curtsy to the attendees, speakers, and organizers of the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. Thanks for the laughs, the insights, and the three pounds I gained from all those Midwestern desserts.

And thanks too, ladies, for only passing me toilet paper under the door of my bathroom stall.