Don't Sleep With a Bubba

by Susan Reinhardt

  I finally moved closer to the circle where kids waited. There he was, his backpack half his own body weight, a trumpet case in one hand. As soon as he got in the car, four words summed up his day. “Middle School is awesome!”

  Relief washed me like a warm shower. He continued with excitement, “They have pizza and a Coke machine. We get to change classes and it’s so much cooler than elementary school.”

  I thought my worries were over. But they were only shifting, changing course as my baby had grown from toddler to boy to teen. New worries would soon come. Peer pressure. Lingo I didn’t quite get. Everyone called everyone else “gay,” only it didn’t mean homosexual like it did when we were young. It meant, dumb, stupid. The kids said it all the time.

  “That show is gay. Those pants are so gay. I hated that movie. It was gay. My spaghetti was gay…”

  Then it was raw. “Man, this is a raw Vince Carter jersey. Those golf clubs are raw. I’m so raw, dude.”

  Fads and styles changed quicker than the seasons. Dress styles were first to knock me for a loop. I mean, granted my bell bottoms with the studded tic-tac-toe butt were one thing, but the pants these boys were wearing?

  Seemed every time I looked at a boy in middle or high school, all I’d see was his crotch down near his knees. Soon, my own son picked up on the fad and I had to endure months of saying, “Wear a belt or else!!!”

  The question being, should this be a point worth my motherly battles? Or should I let it go, figuring, “Hey, my kid is an honor student, a musical standout and athlete, and if he wants his boxers to claim space where Levi’s pockets should be, who am I to say, ‘Forget that, son. It’s way too gay and raw’?”

  “Pick your battles,” my dear friend Nancy said. She’s the mother of a preteen, too—a boy who doesn’t sag, but most of the other kids do. She’s lucky in that he’s into golf and the preppy look. She’s more than grateful his skateboarding days and accompanying attire are over. “Wait it out,” she said. “It’ll be something different in a matter of weeks.”

  I used to complain about girls and their crack addict–like clothes. But now the boys are going gung ho with their sagging fad. It seems that if the pockets of their cargos are around their kneecaps, then all the better.

  What are these middle-schoolers thinking? Since I don’t smell pot or beer on the kids’ breath, shouldn’t I just let the chips—or jeans, as it may be—fall where they may?

  I try to think about how bad it COULD be. Remember the hussy girls who wore low-riding jeans and let their thongs show?

  Maybe I should just let this slide, literally. I mean it’s not a tattoo or tongue piercing. It’s not lost virginity or STDs or even drugs and alcohol. This is why the other day, upon noticing once again my child’s crotch was around his knees and he was doing that funny walk they must do to keep their pants up, sort of a Quasimodo hunch and drag, I did what Mama would do and decided a dose of religion was in order.

  “Son,” I said. “We’re going to church. You might want to stay home if you can’t dress any better than that.”

  His face fell. “Good. I like going to church,” he said. “They have great donuts. It’s not what you wear, anyway.”

  How could I argue with that? The boy was WANTING to go to church even if it was because they gave out free food and hot chocolate.

  “Could you please wear a belt?”

  “Can I get real coffee instead of hot chocolate?”

  Everything is an argument with a child this age. Trust me. If it isn’t, you either got yourself a miracle or a future serial killer.

  “I bought you a belt at Target. Where is it?”

  “The dog chewed it in half.”

  “Couldn’t you at least look decent for the Lord?” I asked, sounding like my nagging mother.

  He shrugged. “I haven’t been suspended once this year and I don’t smoke or drink.”

  “Wow. How old are you? Twelve, thirteen?”

  “Middle school, Mom. It isn’t easy. Really. Some days are so gay it sucks. I don’t mind going to church, though. It’s raw, dude.”

  “Please call me Mama.”

  He got in the car wearing baggy khakis and a wrinkled but collared shirt. The poor child had tried. And as long as I don’t see a bare crack, I’m promising to not care less. This too, shall pass.

  I’d do my best as a working mother, spending more quality time with my child instead of nagging at him all night and day. I cooked up a plan where I’d be the Rawest Mother of the Year. I’d buy us a couple of tickets for a Pro Basketball game to see the Charlotte Bobcats play the Chicago Bulls.

  It would be one of those MasterCard TV moments for sure. Priceless. I would be the cool mom taking her son to a pro game. I scored the tickets, and there we were in the oxygen-depleted upper levels of the Charlotte Coliseum: my boy, wearing his extralarge Bobcats jersey and a size “Hefty Lard Ass” pants that sagged to his knees. It was just he and I, having a grand old time eating $7 hot dogs and drinking $5 Cokes.

  The game between the Charlotte Bobcats and Chicago Bulls had gotten under way and I was pretending as if I knew all about sports and Pro Ball. A mom is always trying to impress her adolescent son, an impossible task. I leaned forward in my chair and shouted, “DEFENSE! Block those cocky, mean old Bulls. Come on now, Bobcats, you know you can’t give Scottie Pippen the ball. You gotta watch out for Rodman, too. He’ll sneak up and slam one in.”

  My son said nothing but stared at me blankly. The Bulls scored, but the Bobcats ran the ball back down court and sank a 3-pointer. “That’s how to show those Bulls,” I yelled. “You boys can take on Pippin any day!”

  My son gave me a puzzled look and a slight smile. The young man next to me, who had Down Syndrome and a vast knowledge of sports, could contain himself no longer.

  He turned to me and poked my arm. “Scottie hasn’t played for the Bulls since the early 90s…and neither has Rodman.” He rattled stats faster than anyone on ESPN could ever begin doing. I was beyond impressed, but couldn’t stop laughing at how stupid I’d been about sports. The young man with Down Syndrome then started cheering and so did my child, which is a breakthrough for some of us moms with adolescent boys who seem hard to please at times.

  Mothers of this age group often have it tough. Where once our sons would throw their arms around us—even in public—these ’tween years give them the hormones and strong wills to seek out their peers more often than their mommies.

  This is how it should be. It’s the way of growing up and becoming independent.

  I’d been feeling disconnected and wanted to somehow plug back into that direct line of communication with my child. That’s why I bought the tickets, and while I’d never been one to watch many sports events, other than tennis or the Olympics, my son had become obsessed with football and basketball. He knew all the names and stats.

  He didn’t care that the seats were so high that the players appeared like nervous ants in orange. He didn’t care that the one taking him to the game was his mom—often a source of irritation and embarrassment. He only cared that he was seeing his first professional basketball game LIVE!

  And I only cared that he was happy. He kept grinning throughout the game, cheering and clapping. He even allowed me to take pictures without groaning. Midway through the game, we sneaked into a lower section and found better seats. It was at this point I also began to understand the days of Jordan, Rodman and Pippin were over, just like the days when the Doobie Brothers and Eagles had
given way to Usher and The Black Eyed Peas.

  I tried to read the names on the backs of the jerseys, but being in my forties with one contact dried up and tossed under my seat, I made a major mistake. The star player for the Bobcats was Emeka Okafor. I heard them calling out his name several times, and thought it would sound smart to cheer for him, since he was actually on the team, unlike Pippin (whom I’d earlier commented on).

  “Come on, Okra Crow, you can make it, come on and shoot!” No one said a word. I decided to cheer louder to show my child I wasn’t a total fool. “Oh, no. Don’t let them take it, Okra Crow. Defense. Give them the big D !”

  “Who?” my son asked, eyes huge, mouth gaping. “Who are you yelling about?”

  “Okra Crow,” I said, proud of this knowledge.

  “Mom,” he said. “Do you mean Okafor? As in Emeka Okafor, the best player on the team?”

  “Yes, son. That’s what I said. Didn’t you hear me? I said ‘Okafor.’”

  “No you didn’t, you said—”

  “Hey, I think I see Michael Jordan.”

  “Yeah. Right. Mom, that’s too gay.”

  I smiled and said, “I have a permission slip you left on my desk about going to sex education classes at the Health Adventure. Maybe you’ll really learn what gay means when you attend that.”

  After the game, we ate a big meal at Jock and Jill’s and he actually thanked me for the entire experience. Middle-school boys aren’t all the trouble they’re cracked up to be. Even when their cracks are showing.

  A couple of days later, his first sex education class was coming up and he shoved the forms across the table. “Remember, honey, the human body and its many seemingly strange functions is nothing to laugh about.” For nearly two weeks, my son talked about nothing other than his upcoming sex-education class.

  “Don’t forget to sign the permission slip, Mama. We can’t go hear the goods without your signature.”

  You’d think he was getting permission to go to the beach he was so excited. He thought he was in for a real eye-opener, a revealing unlike anything his parents had tried to discreetly, but accurately, tell him on the subject.

  I called Mama to tell her I was afraid he’d start laughing when he heard the word vagina.

  “I told him I wasn’t going to sign the paper unless he promised not to laugh,” I said. “Sex is not a laughing matter.” At that point we both cracked up.

  “I’ll never forget when you were in the fifth grade and I had to sign a similar form,” she said.

  I tried to remember my own sex ed class, but the only memory flickering through my head was the shocking pamphlet on feminine hygiene and the free Kotex and belt I crammed in my dresser drawer and blushed just thinking about.

  “We were all sitting around the dinner table,” Mama said, reflecting back more than thirty years. “I wanted to ask you so badly about that class but you weren’t saying a word. I kept waiting and waiting. Finally, I just up and asked you how the class went.”

  I heard Mama drop the phone and collapse onto the coffee table, which is what she does when she needs to laugh real hard and the phone hinders her mirth. After a few minutes of womanly howling, she came back to the phone, trying to collect herself.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Well, when I asked you what you learned, you just looked at me and Daddy and said, ‘All I want to know is how many times do you do it a week?’”

  I assured her my son’s class was more about voices changing and hairs sprouting in unlikely places; that I was almost certain they weren’t going to get into anything too deep.

  “I believe some of the boys are starting to stink,” I said. “I think they’ll just tell them about Arrid Extra Dry.” I then remembered my own first experience with deodorant, a jar of something wet and nasty called Tussy, the smell of which makes me want to cry with memories of locker rooms and polyester gym suits. Memories of the developed girls who wore bras and shaved their legs and laughed at those of us who had no secondary sex characteristics to speak of.

  Soon after I signed my son’s permission slip to go to sex ed, I bumped into my friend Dottie whose boy was in my child’s class.

  “You’re right. That’s all they’ve been talking about,” she said of the sex ed sessions—one for the girls and one for the boys. “A group of the boys were telling me they wanted to go into the girls’ class and I said, ‘Oh, no you don’t.’” She and I both fell onto the pavement laughing. “Going there would for sure turn my boy gay hearing all that mess we go through down there, honey.”

  That night, after my child slipped into an exhausting, sweaty sleep of boys who run hard all day, shower and smell of Pantene and Arrid, I couldn’t help it and climbed into bed with him, as if he was once again 5 years old. I was careful, not wanting the springs to squeak and him to wake up and catch me in the act.

  He doesn’t know this, but I plan to slip beneath his covers, listen to him breathe, watch his eyelids as he dreams until he’s long grown. I’ll think about the Robert Munsch/Sheila Mc-Graw book Love You Forever , and won’t be able to stop the words from going through my mind.

  Whatever God Sends

  Note: I wrote part of this when pregnant and also later, after my diva was first born in 1998.

  H ere I sit, same seat cushions, same doctors’ offices, one year later. I press my back into the wooden chair, heels nervously grinding the carpet and heart racing as if it has jumped the track.

  I have been here before, not knowing if I would again face one of the hardest moments of my life. I am wondering, fearing, that I’ll hear the same news again.

  Today is a cold November afternoon, no sunshine, nothing but bitter breezes that whip and slice through clothing and bone. I am hearing the words of last year repeat themselves in my mind.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor had said, patting me. “It just stopped growing. It happens so often. One in five pregnancies, by our best estimates.”

  I had stared at the black screen of the ultrasound machine, the motionless patterns of what was, what would never be. My baby had died without warning, without the symptoms to gradually prepare a mother for such news.

  “It just happens sometimes,” the gentle doctor said, and I reached for her neck and hugged her, a near stranger, my mascara bleeding onto her dress.

  As I sit here waiting, writing these words on a yellow legal pad as part of the journaling I do while pregnant, my stomach is as queasy as a child’s before getting a set of shots. It will be different this time, I tell myself over and over. Last time it was random, right? Nature’s way of selecting the fittest, the strongest, the finest. My eggs were old. Now they’re even older, but it doesn’t matter, there are millions, right? And some still have to be in pretty decent shape.

  A door swings open and a nurse appears, chart in hand, and calls my name. I follow her to a corner and step on the scales, something I never do during my regular doctors’ visits.

  “May I take off my shoes?” I ask, feeling silly but knowing I’ve gained much more than necessary because I got mad and threw that famous book What to Expect When You’re Expecting under the bed when I got to the part where it listed what you should and shouldn’t eat. The whole book scared the daylights out of me, and though the advice was good and reasonable, my hormones and cravings had other plans.

  The doctor gives
me a raised eyebrow and a smile, and slides the scales farther and farther right. I exhale every bit of air in my lungs, as if that will help.

  Afterward, I move to another row of chairs, another brief wait for the next stage of this visit. A slender woman is seated beside me and we talk, sharing this common condition that bonds all women, women unlikely to connect on any other level. She tells me about her two previous miscarriages; I tell her about the baby I lost last year.

  “I wasn’t too far along,” I say. “Were you?”

  “Three months,” she says, hand instinctively going to her belly. I feel myself begin to panic, the metal taste rising in my mouth. On this very November day, I am as she was—three months pregnant.

  The nurse comes by and I wish the woman next to me good luck, and we wave in that conspiratorial way of expectant mothers. I follow the nurse down the long hallway, staring at the thick soles of her shoes, unable to meet anyone’s eyes.

  She takes my blood pressure, watches my chest rise and fall as she counts the respirations. “Slow down, sister,” she says. “You’re panting as if you’ve done an hour on the StairMaster. The doctor will be in soon to check the baby’s heartbeat. Just relax, hon,” She disappears, leaving me alone with my shallow, rapid breathing and damp hands, the thoughts that keep returning to last fall when there was no heartbeat on the ultrasound screen.

  “Dear God,” I pray silently, “please let it be all right. I won’t ask for much else all year. I promise. Well, I promise to try to keep the promise, anyway.”

  It is quiet other than the distant thumping of footsteps in the hallways, the mumble of voices, doctors talking to nurses, patients laughing, happy with their own news. I stare at the room’s four walls. The dispensers of latex gloves. The black cords snaking from machines that tell fates. A box of Kleenex. For tears? For troubling news? For joy?