Let’s talk about SEX…and VIOLENCE?

The other day, I was in the kitchen doing kitcheny-type things (dishes or preparing dinner, I can’t remember which), when DD came up beside me and said something that sounded like the word “sex”. I paused, turned towards her and calmly said, “Excuse me?” She looked at me with a huge grin on her face and said – much louder and more clearly – “SEX!” It’s at this point that I think I made a face much like Ferris Bueller, whenever he gave a glance at the fourth-wall. Uh…

It seems that the little miss, inspired by the kid-requested heavy rotation of the “Pitch Perfect” soundtrack, had decided to latch onto the word “sex” from the Treblemakers’ cover of Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” during the “Riff-Off” medley. Hmm. At this point, I took a quick breath and decided to explain that sex is something between two consenting adults in a committed relationship and how the song is about wanting to TALK about sex before actually DOING anything that would ruin a relationship. Her eyes glazed over and she wandered off, fairly bored and having her sex balloon completely deflated. Score 1 for me?

[Of course, I don’t think that my description of sex is a 100% accurate case; there are plenty of folks who’ve had more than 2 people involved, and “adults” is a bit of a strong term, and “committed” is a state of mind and and and…but I wasn’t in it for accuracy; I was aiming to get her to think it was more than just a game, like “Monopoly Junior”.]

DD has seen movies aplenty before, mostly in the house, and I even screened “Pitch Perfect” for her fairly recently. And sure, the movie has a few mature things in it here and there – but that’s the whole “P” in “PG” – parental guidance. I remember seeing “No Way Out” with my father, on VHS no less, and he sent me out of the room when the infamous limo scene came on. He then called me back out and replayed the scene, explaining that it was a 3 out of 10 in terms of sexual content. Apparently, he was so disappointed in it, he didn’t care that I saw it. I think I found it rather silly back then, and something tells me I’d now find it as laughable as the pool sex scene in “Showgirls”.

Of course, this SEX thing happened in the same week where I took ds to his first movie in the theater. He’s seen movies before, at home, but this was the first time I was taking him outside of our four walls in order to catch a flick. He was excited about the prospect of seeing “Planes” (TALKING CARS AND TALKING PLANES, MOMMY!!!), so I took both of the kids for a show. While he was fine during the movie, I wasn’t even sure that he would make it that far: he lost his nut during the trailers. The very first trailer was for “Free Birds”, an animated feature about a pair of turkeys that try to go back in time to the very first Thanksgiving to get turkey taken “off the menu”.

There’s a scene in the trailer where the more militant turkey (voiced by Woody Harrelson) is squaring off against the happy-go-lucky turkey pardoned by the President for Thanksgiving (voiced by Owen Wilson). When Wilson’s turkey draws a line in the dirt and says not to cross it, Harrelson’s turkey slaps him. Repeatedly. It’s a funny scene, for adults, and dd seemed to enjoy it. DS saw the first slap and IMMEDIATELY turned on the waterworks. He just lost it completely.

I pulled him onto my seat and immediately started cuddling with him, kissing him, stroking his hair, and generally trying all of the tricks that one uses when trying to calm your child. I was really grateful that we were in a fairly empty matinée attended only by people with similarly-aged children; I’m sure that the other parents heard ds and thought, “There but for the grace of God go I…”, much as I do whenever I’m the one with the well-behaved kid, hearing some other kid completely losing it.

And so this all makes me wonder: what age IS the right age to introduce these things? Cartoonish violence, like that of the “Free Bird” trailer, seems perfectly acceptable to me, but I was raised on “Looney Tunes” cartoons. ACME anvils, Wile E. Coyote’s thousand-foot drops into canyons, and point-blank rifle explosions into Elmer Fudd’s face were the norm. None of it was considered real. Wait 15 minutes, and another cartoon will come on showing the same character, back exactly as they were before whatever befell them in the prior cartoon. As much as I love “Marvel’s The Avengers”, I’m absolutely not ready to show that to my kids because the violence is way too much. And the profanity and references to sex in “Pitch Perfect” went blissfully high over dd’s head (or were edited out/explained by me, so as to gloss over them).

Given the dearth of G-rated films in the movie houses these days, I feel like I’m backed into a corner to either live on a steady diet of DVDs or take them to/show them movies that are in the PG range…and ds’ sensitivity may preclude a lot of his viewings. Trying to get a sense of whether it was just that movie or all violence in general, I did play about an hour of “Looney Tunes” for the kids this past weekend, and both kids saw Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Gossamer and Marvin the Martian in some of their most famous pieces. Both laughed. There was no crying whatsoever.

So, maybe it was just that trailer. Or, maybe it was that ds was extra-sensitive from being hungry, since he hadn’t yet really plowed into his food at that point. Or, maybe still, part of what we need to do – much as my dad did for me with that lukewarm sex scene in “No Way Out” – is pick what we think is good enough for acclimating them to the stuff gradually, so they will eventually make their way to the harder stuff they’ll really want to see in later years. I can’t figure what the perfect approach is, but for now I’ll just labor under the impression that letting them pick the pace at which they “progress” up the ratings scale will probably work far better…and just help them along the way as I can. Honestly, I’m not sure what else I can – or should – do, when faced with so few new feature options that are free of sex and violence.

And yes, I know that Bambi’s mother got shot in, like, the first 10 minutes of that movie, and Scar is a scary lion, and Maleficent is a scary witch and…OMG NOTHING IS SAFE. Oh just forget it. I think I’ll just put “CARS” on repeat. Don’t mind me.

Parenting dilemma #347: When to start grounding your kids

As someone who spent the better portion of my teens in some state of “grounding”, it should come as little surprise that my firstborn would get an early start on things. Yes, at the tender age of 6 (just turned, even!), dd has now experienced her first grounding. It’s not something I planned but, you see, I was at my wit’s end.

Backing thing up a little…

A few weeks back, dh went on a work trip out of town for several days. While he was gone, dd was INSISTENT that she needed to sleep in my bed (much as she was steadfast that she couldn’t sleep alone while I was out of town for BlogHer’12 earlier this year), and I – foolishly? – gave in to this request. Now, it’s easy to cluck tongues and remind me that this is only going to lead to bad things, but let me start off by saying: A) I KNOW, and B) it’s awfully easy to say “don’t do it!” when you’re not the one facing the night of lost sleep while shuttling back and forth between bedrooms trying to get her to SHUT UP already. This isn’t to say that I think co-sleeping is a bad thing, no matter what the AAP says. My daughter is six, and it’s unlikely that she’s going to experience negative effects from co-sleeping other than future difficulties breaking the habit and the fact that my bed is higher off the ground than hers (longer way to fall).

This started in the first night dh was gone and continued for the next several nights, while he was away. Naturally, when dh managed to luck into an earlier flight than expected, one that returned just before midnight (so he could sleep in his own bed one night earlier), she planted her feet in full-on rebellion and tried to wheel and deal. She’d be quiet if she could sleep in our bed until dh came home and then he could move her to her bed. Uh, no. *freaks out* She’d be quiet if she could sleep in our bed all night. NO. *freaks out* Head, meet wall. Repeatedly. I can’t fully remember how it all went but I seem to recall that I didn’t get her to stop fussing until about two hours or so after I put her down. Maybe 2-1/2hrs. It’s all a blur.

And then we get fast-forward to this holiday weekend, where it seemed like things were going downhill fast, as the little miss decided on Friday night that she needed to be in our bed. Over the next several hours, it became apparent to both me and dh that she was going to insist on coming into our bed even though both of us just wanted our space. He didn’t feel well thanks to some kind of stomach bug, and I have been fighting a miserable cough for weeks. My initial attempt to get her to sleep was around 7:30pm. We would be fighting this battle with her, on and off, for the next 2-ish hours.

I tried reasoning with her. I tried appealing to her sense of self-preservation (“You don’t want to get {whatever crud it is that we have}!”). Nothing worked. DH tried similar appeals. Both of us even threatened to take away privileges, as a last-ditch effort. Still, nothing worked.

Sure enough, she ended up in our bed around 1:20am.

At that point, I’d already told dh I wanted her grounded, not sure what that would mean much beyond “you’re not allowed out of your room except for potty breaks and meals”. She agreed to be grounded in exchange for sleeping in our bed, to which dh responded, incredulous: “I’ve never heard of anyone asking to be grounded before!” I suppose it’s also easy to be incredulous at 1:20am. At that time of day, at our age, any activity is surprising.

So, Saturday morning began the DAY OF THE GROUNDING. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t come with me on a trip to Kohl’s to buy presents for the kiddo whose Christmas we’re underwriting through an “adopt a child” program. She didn’t get why she couldn’t go out to play. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t linger in the den after a meal was over.

I feel for her, really I do. But having already revoked her privileges to her bike, her scooter and TV for a WEEK over the fuss she put up the night dh was coming home from his trip, I wasn’t sure what I could take away that would have an impact. We’re looking at implementing some kind of system that will be more along the line of positive reinforcement, probably in conjunction with her responsibility chart (using only a handful of items as the responsibilities we’ll track).

There’s a part of me that says that there’s nothing we can do to get a six-year-old to fall in line, but there’s another part of me that’s sure this isn’t true, that there are disciplinary and proactively reinforcing measures that will work. I’m just not sure what they are. I’d prefer not to have to ground her again anytime soon, especially since I’m not really sure that it has any real effect at this age. If anybody has any suggestions – short of corporal punishment, which I’m desperately trying to avoid – I’d love to know. What has worked for you with your kiddos, ’round about that 6yr age range?

Having an “out of mommy” experience

Today, dd starts Kindergarten. It seems improbable that I’m the mother of a kindergartner. How is that possible?

It’s funny how, as she leaned on me yesterday morning – fussing and crying because I wasn’t coming with her on her school “visit” day events thanks to work commitments – I wasn’t even sure how this was happening. This was my child, clearly, and I was supposed to comfort her as best as I could for someone who had already RSVP’ed to a full-day meeting at a vendor’s site. And she looked at me and called me “mommy” and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I had a child who was so grown. Just unbelievable.

For the longest time, before I met dh, I never wanted kids. They always seemed annoying. Loud. Sometimes cute, but more often than not, I was happy when I wasn’t required to do anything for them. When dh and I started dating, we (fairly early on) had to have “the talk” about how we’d ever raise kids. I shrugged and said, “Of course, any kids of mine would be Jews.” (Being Jewish, and being female, that’s the law, dontcha know.) He seemed confused, since he was raised American Baptist. Oops. Guess that’s something we’d have to figure out.

Eventually, we did figure it out – we’d raise them with both sets of traditions. And we do, muddling through it all as best as we can. Neither of us is religious, though we have religious identities and we both are spiritual people to varying degrees. We don’t attend synagogue or church, and we typically only do our big nods to organized religion on the respective high holidays – Passover, Easter, Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah and Christmas (I omit Yom Kippur from my list for various reasons which could be a blog post unto itself).

When we decided to have kids, and then got pregnant, there was a part of me that really went “Oh, crap” rather frequently. Once I was pregnant, there was no turning back for me, and it seemed inescapable that I would become a mother. What on earth did that mean? I remember crying on my pillow one night while pregnant with dd, snuffling over the fact that I was worried I didn’t have a maternal instinct. DH calmed me down and told me that there was no way that was true, and he was right. When I had people reporting to me, I often defended them like a mother lion protecting her cubs. If they went wrong, I’d set them straight, for sure, but I tried to shield them from other people’s BS as much as possible. In other words, just like a mom.

So then we come back to my moment of reverie: dd hanging on me, anguished and looking only for her momma. And that’s me. And though I know she’s mine, there’s something odd about seeing this tall, slim, gorgeous girl coming to me and looking at me as though I can make it all better. I wish I could…but even the most super of all moms isn’t able to make everything all better all the time.

And I wasn’t able to get her to stop crying completely before I left for my all-day meeting; she was wailing for me as I walked out the door. But dh assured me that she’d calmed down not long after I left the house, and later reports from both of them showed that she had a good time visiting at school with her new teacher and the people running the after-school program. And today, I get to walk her up to school on her first day.

So mommy will be there sometimes, but not all. And no matter what, mommy is me. It’s as undeniable as the air I breathe. There are clearly days where it will seem strange, as though I blinked and my life fast-forwarded years in a heartbeat. But as bizarre as it may seem to stare at this wondrous beauty of a girl who can’t possibly be old enough for elementary school – and yet clearly is – the look in her eyes reminds me of the perfect truth reflected in her eyes: mommy is me.