Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank

by Celia Rivenbark

  As we hurried out of yet another sparkling Disney restroom (these people descend on a gum wrapper like a SWAT team), I heard a little boy crying and watched his father get down on one knee to console him. “You know, son, you better tell me what the shit you’re crying about, ‘cause you’re the only reason we’re here!”

  What can I tell you? Failure to get a Fastpass for Space Mountain can make a parent do crazy things.

  As the week wore on, we became a Disney movie unto ourselves. Honey, I Shrunk the Bank Account opens with a tight shot of the three of us wolfing four-dollar hot dogs washed down with Cokes in twelve-dollar souvenir cups in Tomorrowland. I tried not to think about how much delicious Maine lobster that would have bought.

  Is Disney expensive? Well, yes. Is it worth it? You bet your eleven-dollar fluorescent hot pink spring-loaded mouse ears it is.

  Like any place that attracts kids, there were gift kiosks and shops everywhere. I had to admit it was all a lot more cheery than our last family trip, which had included a visit to the traveling Titanic exhibit. After a heartrending tour of the ship, you were dumped directly into a themed gift shop that sold glow-in-the-dark “icebergs” and even a foot-long replica of the Titanic made of milk chocolate. What kind of lesson was that? “Titanic: The Candy Bar That Hundreds Died For! Bite steerage in the morning and save first class for an afternoon snack!”

  I saw plenty of Disney-philes push-pulling huge coolers full of snacks through the parks. I can’t imagine going to the trouble, myself. There’s sensible, and then there’s just stupid-cheap. (Overheard in front of Mickey’s PhilharMagic: “Sissie, it’s you and Memaw’s turn to watch the cooler.”) You’ve already paid $150 for a four-day park pass, and you’re quibbling over a sixteen-dollar lunch? Get over yourself.

  A friend who always stays at the Disney campground (remember, Disney-style camping isn’t exactly roughing it—they have their own shows and cabins with cable) told me she can fix dinner right there and save money on meals out. I told her I’d rather have a threesome with Chip ‘n’ Dale than cook on vacation, but to each her own.

  By the end of the trip, Disney’s merchandising magic had done its job: Sophie became obsessed with Pal Mickey, a “huggable, lovable interactive Theme Park tour guide.” He’s stuffed, stands about a foot tall, and costs $56.33. She tearfully begged for Pal Mickey, and we said no. It was silly, we thought, to buy a stuffed animal that yammered endlessly about park hours and attractions when we’d be home soon.

  On our last day, as we boarded the very last bus that would take us back to the hotel before grabbing a cab to the airport, Sophie seemed to have moved past Pal Mickey. We had gone exactly one hour and thirty-five minutes without hearing about him. Home free, I thought.

  There was only one seat left on the bus. Soph and I took it. And then I saw Pal Mickey grinning at us across the aisle. Soph started talking to his owner, who later became known as “You know, the little girl whose parents really do love her.”

  The little girl’s parents, who were wearing matching XXL Donald Duck sweatshirts and fanny packs emblazoned with all seven dwarfs, glared at my husband and me as if we should be reported to Child Protective Services.

  I could read their minds: Cheap jerks. Buy the kid Pal Mickey. And I hoped they couldn’t read mine: Y’all are really fat.

  The truth is, everybody at Disney World is fat. If you’re not fat when you go, you’re fat coming out. I walked fourteen miles a day and couldn’t zip my jeans by the end of the trip. Go figure.

  I think it’s something in the hot dogs.

  2

  Yo Yo Yo! Where Can a Sista

  Get a Cowgirl Outfit?

  Holidays Make This Mama Wanna

  Get in Your Grille

  So, it’s practically Valentine’s Day, and I’ve found myself paying special attention to how the kindergarten set deals with affairs of the heart.

  “Valentimes,” as my kindergartener explained it, is a very big deal. It’s truly the sweetest age, the last year when little boys will skip together while holding hands and not think twice about it.

  Thankfully, there have been some improvements to the old Valentine system I remember from grade school, when the not-so-popular kids got five or six valentines and everybody else got a whole bunch. It was a hateful little ritual that nobody seemed to notice was slap-your-baby cruel.

  Now, because we have Oprah, we’re a little more aware of how this sort of dissing can not only damage self-esteem but also lead to a life of crime or sitcom writing. So notes are sent home saying that “Valentines should be given to every child in the class, not just the cute, rich, and smart ones.” (Well, that was the gist of it.)

  The girls, as you might expect, seem to be ahead of the game on things romantic. They prefer to play house during recess with designated “mommy,” “daddy,” and “baby” instead of the boys’ favorite, some sort of army-man, video-game soldier thing that involves lots of running around for no reason and screaming “You’re my prisoner!” to the pampas grass.

  Not long ago, my daughter confided that one of the little boys in her class had threatened to kiss her on the playground. Apparently a romantic subplot had developed among the soldiers.

  Because hubby and I are basically nerds, we considered this a “teachable moment” and launched a loving but firm and very PC lecture about not allowing anyone to do anything to you that you don’t like.

  But then the truth came out.

  “Well,” she said, “he didn’t really want to that much, but all of us girls chased him and finally caught him and he said he’d kiss us if we didn’t let him go.”

  Ah, well, then. Carry on, soldiers. War does strange things to a man’s brain, I guess.

  With so much romance in the air, the princess has been thinking about her own marital future. “I don’t think I’m going to get married until Vm fifteen,” she announced at the dinner table one night.

  Well, that’s a relief. We were afraid she was going to do something crazy.

  “Where on earth will you live?” I asked.

  “Well, here, of course,” she said. And the groom? “Well, he’ll have to go live with his mommy and daddy. After he gets a job and buys me some stuff.”

  Okay, this might work out after all.

  While Valentine’s Day is a favorite holiday around our house (how can anything dedicated to chocolate be bad?), it’s not as much fun as Halloween.

  This year, we decided that the princess would be a cow-girl. It was so fabulously retro, I decided. You know. Fringed suede vest, maybe a ruffly denim skirt, red bandanna, hat, boots, and a little six-shooter.

  Easy enough, I thought.

  Because I am famously incapable of sewing (having sewn the pockets onto the inside of my final-exam apron back in seventh grade home ec class), it was going to have to be store-bought.

  Our first stop was a famous toy store that has a backwards R in the middle.

  “Where are your six-shooters, hon?” I asked the earnest-faced young man standing in the weapons aisle.

  “Huh?”

  “Toy pistols, hon. You know, maybe a couple of them with a holster so Missy Poo here can be a proper cowgirl for Halloween.”

  He looked at me with disdain. “We don’t carry guns here.”

  “No, of course you don’t,” I said. “I want a toy gun. I’m sure y’all have those here at We Be Toys, don’t you?”

  “No guns!” he kind of shrieked. The princess and I looked at each other, puzzled.

  I tried logic. “But you’ve got machetes, tanks, and missile launchers right here,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”

  “No guns!”

  “Okay,” I said, using my best hostage-negotiator-calm voice. “I got the whole guns-kill-people thing, but what do you think is on the front of that huge green regulation army tank on the shelf behind you? Are those babies going to fire chocolate frosting onto the enemy? I think not.”

  For reasons that I don’t come close to understanding,
I have noticed that, the older I get, the more often I am prone to lapse into a pathetic middle-aged-white-woman attempt at rapper cool when extremely frustrated.

  The first time it happened was when my cable went out and, therefore, my Internet connection. I had spent the whole day home alone with an inability to Google myself. Yes, I know it sounds nasty, but it’s more fun than a big bowl of meth. Kidding!

  Any who, I heard myself tell the nice cable man, “Listen bruh, you better MacGyver something quick, cuz I’m jonesin’ for my broadband.”

  So, it was happening again in the toy store. Frustration leads to rap in me. Fo’ shizzle.

  I eyed the sales boy. “Don’t you see, er, home slice, it’s the same thing? Except we want a six-shooter.”

  “Look, it’s store policy not to carry them,” my vested friend said, hoping that someone, anyone, would page him. And soon.

  “I feel ya, my face gator,” I said, again lapsing into this curious rapspeak and wondering why, even as I was saying it. “But I just want to make a point here. . . . I mean I’m up in here with my girl. I’m in the house and I got the Benjamins, so whassup?”

  Alas, we finally accepted defeat, but only after I’d, I think, flashed some gang signs and announced “It’s all good” to no one in particular.

  We got back into my ghetto sled and moved on to search for the costume components. Six stores and endless rap frustration later, the closest we’d come was something called Diva Cowgirl! It was a hideous hot pink shiny metallic skirt with a fringy top. Frankly, it looked like it would have been more at home in an Old West brothel, worn by one of those hoochie mamas you always saw hugging the bar at Miss Kitty’s saloon on Gunsmoke.

  Once again, I silently cursed the fact that I was a craft feeb. Across town, my friend was busily stitching a VW Beetle costume, complete with working windshield wipers for her daughter.

  Bitch.

  We even stopped at the fabric store, where I thought I could buy some cow-print fabric and cut a little vest out.

  “Mommy, what are you doing?” asked my daughter, horrified.

  “It’s a pattern. Mommy can use this to make your Halloween costume. How hard can it be to make a vest?”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  Whoa. That hurt. Although it was a perfectly reasonable question.

  That night, I discovered everything I wanted on eBay, the catch being that it would cost $150 or, with shipping, about $386.

  The white sheet with cut-out eyeholes was starting to look really good.

  But not good enough for the princess, who ended up borrowing a fabulous real suede cowgirl outfit from my friend Amy, who always comes through in a pinch.

  Amy’s one of those friends who is relentlessly prepared for everything. So, in less time than it took for me to transform into Gangsta Mama, I had everything we needed, including a tiny little pearl revolver and matching holster.

  We loved the cowgirl outfit so much that it became that year’s Christmas card.

  My friend Mona, whose kid is not allowed to play with guns and therefore spends all day fashioning Uzis from bent pecan tree limbs, was horrified.

  “Is that a gun in that holster?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Well, hell yeah, Mona. She’d look pretty goofy wearing an empty holster, now, wouldn’t she?”

  “You shouldn’t encourage that sort of thing,” she said while I watched her son turn a magnolia seedpod into an amazingly realistic grenade.

  “Fire in the hole, y’all!” he hollered.

  Once we got past the horrors of Halloween, there was scarcely time to take a breath before it was time for the annual Freeze Your Ass Off Fall Festival Fundraiser at school.

  If you have a kid in elementary school, you know all about the Fall Festival, which is held to celebrate the old-time notion of “harvest.” This is a cute idea, I guess, but if you think about it, it’s not like any of these kids has brought in a crop or will ever contemplate going to the barn dance with a gal named Millie.

  It is, however, an excuse to have fun and raise a little money, usually for the PTA, which I most certainly believe in and would never, ever say anything against on account of these people have more power in their pinkie toenail than I will ever have in my whole pathetic life. So, go PTA!

  The Fall Festival, then, isn’t about celebrating a bounteous harvest. No, no. It is about finding the one dummy in the planning session who says, “Sure! I’ll run the popcorn concession.”

  Looking back on it, I was actually smug about my assignment. Let the rest of them run the bingo, the salmonella—er, petting zoo—or the thing I did last year: the throw-the-beanbag-through-the-clown’s-eyes until you either win a prize or burst into tears and scream “Mean lady!” and get two prizes and all the change in the mean lady’s pockets.

  The popcorn concession, as it turned out, was a two-foot-tall glass box that said Hot Popcorn on it in happy red script. It was stashed on the floor of a broom closet and weighed approximately eighteen hundred pounds.

  After a few minutes of huffing and puffing, I found Hans and Franz to help me tote the thing across the playground.

  Okay, I said, looking at the empty glass box, start popping! After a few wretched moments, I realized this was no microwave but rather some sort of Amish popcorn concession that used—get this—oil and actual popcorn kernels.

  All alone at my post and surrounded by freckle-faced accusers who wanted to know when the popcorn would be ready, I decided to read the directions. Turns out you had to heat the thing for eight minutes. Next, you had to measure oil into the basket gizmo. Then (and here’s the tricky part) while the blasted thing rotated with tiny blades that stir the kernels, you had to dodge the blades to continually add kernels.

  It was then that I realized that the proper name for this particular corner of Fall Festival hell was Let’s Visit the Whirling Popcorn Machine of Death.

  Burn, spatter, dodge, weave.

  I finally managed to make my first sale, and the kid complained that the popcorn was burned.

  “Yeah? Well, so am I. Get used to it.”

  He looked hurt.

  “Oh, all right. And here’s all the change in my pockets.”

  We’d barely had time to take a breath after all the “fun” of the Fall Festival when my daughter announced plans for Thanksgiving.

  As she sat in the backseat on the way to school, she solemnly examined her cuter-’n’-hell hot pink velour pantsuit.

  “What’s wrong, pumpkin?” I said cheerily after seeing a definite frowny face in my rearview window.

  “We were supposed to wear black dresses so we could be pilgrims today,” she said petulantly.

  “Huh?” I asked, mildly irritated that the Allman Brothers classic “Blue Sky” had just come on the radio and, instead of listening to it, I must now discover that, through no fault of my own, I was pilgrim-deficient.

  “You know, Mommy, for the Thanksgiving feast. You’re making the mashed potatoes and it’s at nine thirty and all the other mommies are going to be there and one of them’s even going to make gravy!”

  Okay, that hurts. Every kid in the neighborhood knows that I make the worst gravy in seven states. It is notoriously thin and flavorless and is eventually tossed with great drama and some few tears onto the backs of lingering yard cats every danged Thanksgiving afternoon.

  “Whoa,” I said, while the Brothers crooned about blue skies and sunny days and Lord knows what they’ll do if she takes her love away.

  “Okay,” I said as calmly as possible. “A costume? You’re supposed to wear a costume?”

  “Well, just a black dress, kind of pouffy, you know, like the Pilgrims wore to eat with the Native Americans.”

  “Indians,” I growled.

  “Mommy!”

  Oh, spare me a PC grade-schooler. And why had I picked this morning to give up caffeine? Why hadn’t I given up, I dunno, maize instead?

  “Honey,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me about this last
week? You know Mommy needs a little more than (looks at watch), hmmm, thirty-six seconds’ notice.”

  “There was a note in my backpack. Didn’t you read it?”

  Busted. Okay, I admit it. There are so many notes that I may have missed a few. Late library books, homework sheets, Picasso-like artwork—I tell you, hons, some days I expect to pull a live squirrel monkey out of that thing.

  OKAY, DO NOT PANIC, I thought. I thought it just like that, in capital letters. There was still, after all, twenty-two seconds to return home and throw on the most somber and Pilgrim-like dress she had, and that’s what we did.

  “Thee looks beautiful,” I said as we raced into the school, a ten-pound bag of potatoes slapping against my sweatpants.

  “Thanks, Mommy,” she said with a bright smile. “Oh, and Mommy, don’t forget, I said you’d make the corny-copia.”

  Thee is so grounded.

  3

  Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old

  Like a Skank

  The princess had just graduated to a size 7 when everything went to shit. We headed for our favorite department store, ready to take that leap into the new world of 7–16. Bye-bye, 4–6X, I thought to myself with a tug of sadness. My baby was growing up.

  And apparently into a prostitute.

  “Where are the sevens?” I asked the sixty-something clerk who wore her glasses on a chain just like me.

  “You’re standing in ‘em,” she said.

  Oh, no, I thought, looking around. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.

  “There must be some mistake,” I said. “These are, well, slutty-looking. I’m talking about clothes for a little girl in first grade.”

  “That’s all we got.”

  “But these look like things a hooker would wear!”

  She smiled sadly. “You have no idea how many times I hear that every day.”

  Okay, breathe. This is just some weird marketing experiment. Right?

  I went to my second-favorite department store and was invited to peruse the awfulness that is Tweenland! A better name would be Lil Skanks!

  Sequins, fringe, neon glitter tank tops with big red lips on them, fishnet sleeves, scary dragon faces lunging from off-the-shoulder T-shirts. Whither the adorable seersucker? The pastel floral short sets? The soft cotton dresses in little-girl colors like lavender, pale pink, periwinkle blue? This stuff practically screamed SYRINGE SOLD SEPARATELY.