Category Archives: parenting

Can we survive the terrible tweens?

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facepalm

photo credit: pixabay.com

Let me start this off by saying something that should go without having to be said: I love my children very much. Even so, the tween years may just put me in the ground. Or, more likely, they’ll make me desperately wish that my body didn’t hate alcohol so much. Sure, the “tween” years are typically defined as ages 10-12, but it’s clear that dd is advanced for her age, since we’re seeing signs of tweenage at the tender age of 9 years old. *cough*

I remember pretty vividly what I was like as a teenager. Let’s say it wasn’t pretty for my parents. I feel like I spent most of my teen years grounded or in some kind of pre-grounded status, hovering between “I slammed that door” and “I’m about to slam that door”. It was the standard issue, run-of-the-mill thing where you want to have freedom and independence (to a point) and constantly feel like you are bumping up against boundaries or requirements that seem restrictive.

“Do the dishes”

I think I pretty much constantly avoided doing the dishes, leaving them for my already overburdened mother, because I just found them to be a chore. I pretty much always considered doing the dishes an awful task until I had dd and suddenly found my sink overrun with dishes and my “works” for my breast pump. My life felt completely out of control: I wasn’t able to produce enough milk for my newborn daughter, I had absolutely no idea how to communicate with this tiny individual who seemed to expect that I’d know EVERYTHING about taking care of her, and there was the rest of my life to balance with all these new responsibilities. Doing the dishes suddenly became hypercritically important. To this day, it’s understood that I’ll disappear into the kitchen for as long as it takes to get the dishes done following any dinner party or get-together, to the point where people have to track me down. It’s not that I’ve become anti-social; I’ve become anti-dishes-in-my-sink-and-on-my-counter-overnight. Call it irony, if you will. I prefer to think of it as cosmic payback for all the crap I put my mother through.

“Clean your room”

OK, so this is one where I’m still pretty much a mess. My “filing system” at home and work is typically chaotic piles that look like posed pictures for a manual on how to be a hoarder. Occasionally, I’ll just lose what’s left of my cool and ritually toss things en masse into a trash bag, and haul it all out without much in the way of sorting or dividing. I’ve learned to let go of my attachment to things I’ve collected over the years. And so it is that when I look at the kids’ rooms and see stuff all over the floor or their dressers, I just nod and consider it genetics. My mother used to threaten to go through my room with a steam shovel. It’s more likely dh will take that hard-line with the kiddos, while I’ll just roll my eyes and move along. As long as the clothes are clean and there are no mammals in the house other than those I’m related to by marriage or blood, I’ll generally shrug it off. I’ve been to friends’ houses where the clutter was so thick that you couldn’t walk without having to step ON things or sit ON things. We’re nowhere near there–and there would be either an intervention first or we’ll get invited to be on a reality TV show (which would trigger an intervention).

“Watch your mouth”

Ah, this is my downfall. My ass continues to be smart to this day (as my father will surely attest–though I’d like to point out that this is MOST DEFINITELY a dominant gene that he passed down to me). After all, better to be a smart-ass than a dumb-ass. And so, it’s completely unsurprising to me that my children have inherited this trait as well. “Backtalk” is actually something that’s both annoying and completely necessary, in my mind. Sure, the kiddos will tend to lose nine out of ten arguments on things where they just want something for the sake of winning the argument, but if they give me a real justification for why they think I’m so wrong (and they’re wrong), they may win. Lately, the tween hormones have gotten dd more on the shrill shrieking tip than just the standard backtalk; it’s like she’s found some really awful frequency that would make most dogs run for cover. I’d actually rather that she just fussed at me or pushed back on me verbally rather than tried to rupture my eardrums.

And yes–I fully expect that there’ll come a time when the kids start swearing at me/us. What they don’t hear from us, they hear from their friends at school (which is how it worked for me). Self-censorship only goes so far. I could avoid using every profane word and they’d still learn them–plus more. THANKS, URBAN DICTIONARY.

*      *      *      *      *

We’re lucky that dd still thinks boys have cooties. It’s 6-year-old ds who has a close girl friend (he’s too young for those last two words to be together). Frankly, I’m not sure how ready I am for the talk beyond what I’ve already had–and we have already done a variant of the talk. Well, I’ve had one with dd. I assume I’ll need to do much the same for ds at some point soon, but it’s hard for me to forecast when.

“I have to help every day. It’s so boring!” – ds

I get it, kid, I really do. I feel ya. Been there, done that. Reliving this and watching them start down the path of *all the hormones at once*, I feel badly that it’s yet another thing I can’t shield them from. And yet, it’s a rite of passage, so here we are.

Time to buckle up; it’s gonna be a long few years.

When is the right time for my child to do…anything?

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girl walking away

photo credit: pixabay.com

When I was a kid, the nearest playground was a little more than a quarter-mile away. To get there, I had to walk three long blocks and cross a three-lanes-in-each-direction road that didn’t have cross-walks ANYWHERE NEARBY. Somehow, we were allowed to go there without much incident. In recent days, my decision to let dd and a fellow third-grade playmate go unsupervised to the playground nearest us (well within a quarter-mile radius and not even requiring a street crossing) was, shall we say, highly challenged by a parent of the child that went with her. Granted, every parent is entitled to their own limits and I get that, but I appreciate that future meet-ups will have supervision rules discussed up front so that everybody is on the same page.

The incident got me thinking about just how little we know when it comes to when the right time is for…anything our kids might want to do. All those hard-and-fast rules aren’t so hard or fast when every household is different, and it always, ALWAYS depends on the child(ren) in question.

We had run into this larger issue of readiness a few months back, when dd first started to pester us in earnest about earrings. Over dinner with friends, we discussed the conundrum at length: Is a third grader responsible enough to take care of her ears so they don’t get infected? What IS the right age for a child to get their ears pierced? (DH blanched from one couple’s story of their niece’s lackluster approach to earring care leading to multiple infections and at least one re-piercing.)

Of course, there are people who have their kids’ ears pierced at very early ages, in which case the issue is pretty moot; initial care is handled by a parent/caregiver, and the child grows up just knowing “I’ve pretty much always had my ears pierced.” I didn’t get my ears pierced until around age twelve, possibly because my parents waited until they thought I was responsible enough to take care of them on my own.

We had originally set the same requirement for dd, until she really kept coming at us OVER AND OVER AGAIN–begging, pleading, and generally bugging the crap out of us to get her ears pierced. Finally, one night as we cuddled at her bedtime, she ‘fessed up: “All the cool third-grade girls have their ears pierced,” she whined plaintively. Ohhhh. Okay.

I told dh about this, to which he (so New Englandly) responded, “Well, that’s a perfect reason NOT to get them pierced!”

I didn’t even blink before I shot back, “You don’t understand girls.”

 

Amy Poehler in Mean Girls

photo credit: observer.com

 

And no, I’m not pretending to be Amy Poehler’s character from “Mean Girls”, the super-cool mom who’s totes okay with aaaannnnnyyyything. I’m just saying that I have not-so-vague memories of what it was like being a third grade girl who didn’t fit in because she wasn’t thin or pretty enough, and it sucked. A lot. And really, if dd has already announced her desire to get her ears pierced, does she need to wait three more years?

I brokered a sort of détente: dd would have an eight-week chart of responsibilities involving personal care in one manner or another (e.g. brushing teeth, brushing her hair, showering, etc.), and she had limited room for misses. If she didn’t meet all the requirements for a given day, and that happened more than twice in a week, a penalty week would be added. As it happened, we had to invoke that rule only once–and it ended up being rescinded just as quickly due to a well-timed critical show of responsibility. She pulled a massive save on a night when dh was out and I got sick; completely un-prodded, she took over clearing the dinner table and getting both herself and her brother ready for bed while I was recovering from my ailment.

 

DD's responsibility chart

A partial view of a much larger chart

 

And so it was that she got her ears pierced earlier this month, picking out earrings that were close to but slightly more colorful than the ones chosen by one of her BFFs from school. She complained mightily for a few hours about how much it hurt to have them done, and she’s not always keeping on top of cleaning them without being reminded, but otherwise she’s got it under control and she’s clearly doing well enough that I have high hopes for her making it through without infected lobes.

 

earring

 

The thing is, the age of twelve that we initially set as a target was somewhat arbitrary; it was picked because that’s when I foggily remembered getting my ears pierced, and who knows how long I similarly bugged the crap out of MY parents leading up to that day. No matter what day or what year dh and I picked, we could always be wrong.

You’re not supposed to introduce babies to solid foods before six months old, yet there are people who have done it for centuries (or millennia), and the children still lived. Guidelines for kids’ sleep requirements and bedtimes vary depending upon the source, with general ranges being as close to a rule as you’ll find. What we know about when it’s safe or okay for a child to do so many things is often subjective, and I’m glad that I listened to my gut instinct about the earrings and let her have the opportunity to prove herself.

Giving my children the freedom to fail is scary, but it’s time to do more of that with dd. I shouldn’t always do for her anymore what she must do for herself, and I just need to be available to support her or comfort her if she stumbles or falls. I don’t know which one of us is more ready for this shift, but it’s clear we’re already finding out…together.

Scar tissue, aka “I wish I could take the pain away, kiddo”

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I don’t often look at the scar on my abdomen. I have a line across my lower belly, a narrow-lipped grimace, the remnant of 8″ incisions cut into me twice over for the births of my two children. I don’t regret the c-sections that gave me that scar, nor do I particularly care whether or not it ever fades completely from view. I doubt it could and, even if it did, a phantom of it would still remain in my mind because of how it connects me to two of the most important people in my life.

My dd will likely now have a scar, although at the tender age of eight and three-quarters years old, hers is from a decidedly less miraculous reason than the birth of a child. In her case, it was just a freak accident.

At camp yesterday, her group was playing a game where they tossed a partially-filled sport drink bottle from kid to kid. If a kid failed to catch it, they were “out”. Apparently, one of the kiddos didn’t catch the bottle and was flagged as “out”. This kiddo’s reaction was to hurl the bottle angrily at top speed–and I guess dd’s forehead was right in the path of the projectile. There’s no indication that it was anything other than an accident; it was an eight year old kid acting out because she was ticked off over getting booted from a game. Even so, it made for quite the day.

I closed up what I could from work as fast as I could (a testament to my AMAZING co-workers that I was able to delegate a few must-do’s to others), and then I raced at top speed to pick her up from camp. Bearing in mind that when camp called, they told me that they thought she needed stitches. Here’s me figuring that they’re possibly exaggerating. Maybe it’s just a big scratch or something.

Yeah, I was dead wrong.

The gash on dd’s forehead was a little less than an inch long but incredibly deep. It reminded me of the lash marks on the faces of characters from the battle between the Sentinels and residents of Zion in the last “Matrix” movie. NOT. GOOD. She was in decent enough spirits for a kid with an open wound on her head, though, so we went home to change her into clean clothes and headed off to get to the Urgent Care center as they opened. (Our doctor’s office can’t put in stitches, and the copay for the co-located Urgent Care is the same as a doctor’s office visit copay, as opposed to the ER copay–which is 4x as much and boasts at least the same waiting time, if not more.)

Everyone at Urgent Care was very sweet, and it was only when the triage nurse needed to irrigate the wound to clean it when dd howled, cried, and tensed her legs in obvious pain. Even so, her struggling was minimal and she squeezed my hand almost as hard as I squeezed hers, both of us so completely frustrated by my inability to wave a magic wand and make it all not be so.

The nurse practitioner was fantastic, as was the pediatric nurse; they numbed her up with a topical mixture heavy on lidocaine that made the injectable lidocaine (which was, unfortunately, still necessary) that much easier for her to handle. Five stitches and a total of two-and-a-half hours later, we emerged into the sunlight, ready to continue our afternoon.

We’ve been given strict limitations on her physical activity for the next 7-10 days (or as long as it takes for the wound to close up), and there are further instructions to keep her from scarring too much. We need to apply sunscreen daily to the site for at least 1-2 years. We need to apply Vitamin E oil daily to the site for at least 1 year. And all of this should (hopefully) preserve dd’s previously pristine face.

And yet I know this is possibly fruitless. She may end up with some kind of scar, due to some other eight year old girl’s dumbass temper tantrum.

I don’t mind that I have a scar. I earned mine at 33 (and again at 36), and I did so knowingly, going in with the understanding that my surgeries would result in a scar. I just wish I could protect dd (and ds) from the scars that are yet to come. Let this be the worst one she ever has to bear. Let this be the toughest visible reminder she has of the fact that other people, sometimes, are just assholes. Because yes, even eight year olds–especially ones that apparently only grudgingly gave half-hearted apologies for opening up another’s forehead–can be assholes. Let’s just call a spade a spade.

I wish it could be not so for her. And that is one of the toughest things that any parent has to bear, how little we can do sometimes to remove burdens from our kids. So I hope that if she does have a scar, her primary memory of it is not the angry, tantrum-throwing brat who hurled that bottle at her. I hope that her main memory is of how badass she was as she took five stitches to the head without so much as a whimper. She’s so strong. She’s so amazing. And she’s more than any scar she’ll ever carry.