Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank

by Celia Rivenbark

  Here’s a flash: They’re not mammals. Not even close. But they come under the heading of “sea creatures,” so that was good enough for me. While other, smarter mommies had assisted in constructing dioramas of rain forests, working volcanoes, and battery-operated solar systems, we chose a mammals-from-the-sea theme housed in a shell-lined shoebox. Which would’ve been killer if we had left out the turtle. This, coupled with my “help” on two math homework problems that turned out to be wrong, resulted in my firing.

  Of course, I know that turtles aren’t mammals. They are ambivalents, which can live on air or underwater and write with their right or left flippers. They also almost never vote.

  Although the science project ended poorly, it wasn’t a waste of time, because we also got to learn about the dwarf sea horse. These tiny creatures have a colt’s head, a monkey’s tail, and a chameleon’s independently roving eyes. (“You talking to me?You talking to me? Oh, I give up.”)

  While all that is fascinating, the coolest thing we learned is that the dwarf sea horse doesn’t have a stomach. That’s right! It has what is called “a continuous gut.” This anomaly is only found in the Florida Keys and, occasionally, the nation’s finer Golden Corral restaurants.

  The dwarf sea horse searches constantly for food, all day and into the night. Although I don’t have the head of a colt, I must have some dwarf sea horse in me.

  Another cool thing we learned about these weird little creatures is that the male gives birth. That’s right! The female, who is desperately out there trying to find a late-night drive-through, deposits the eggs in the male’s pouch, and he takes care of them, presumably giving up caffeine and highlights just to be on the safe side.

  Studies have shown that although the males carry the babies, they actually invest about half as much metabolic energy as females do in producing offspring. Everybody say duh-huh.

  So, in conclusion, turtles are not mammals, Donald Trump is a mammal but not warm-blooded, and I am, at least in the eyes of one elementary school student, toast.

  6

  Hilary Duff & Us

  When Motherhood Hits Those Inevitable Valleys,

  We’ll Always Have “the Hils”

  Hons, I am finally a hero in my daughter’s eyes. Not because I snatched her from the jaws of a rabid dingo or plucked her from a deadly riptide. No, no. I’m a real hero because I have secured tickets to the Hilary Duff concert.

  To those of you who don’t know Hilary Duff from Howard Duff, this is a Very Big Deal. It’s like if you were a parent back in ‘64 and came home one day waving tickets to The Ed Sullivan Show and asking, “Hey! Who’d like to see four mop-topped cuties from Liverpool perform tonight?”

  Hilary is a squeaky-clean teen queen with a passable voice who plays to sold-out audiences of “tweens.” My daughter and her best friend adore Hilary. They sleep in Lizzie McGuire nightgowns (Hilary’s TV show character—try to hang here, will you?), they wear Lizzie tennis shoes, they carry Lizzie purses.

  As role models go, Hilary’s okay. There was that reported flap between her and the tiresomely tough Avril Lavigne (Hil said Avril didn’t appreciate her fans enough—sigh) and a spat with Lindsay Lohan at the Freaky Friday premiere (Hil stole her boyfriend, hunkette Aaron Carter), but generally, she’s no diva. I know it’s true ‘cause I read it in Bop magazine.

  At forty-seven, I knew I’d probably be the oldest mom in the Bi-Lo Center in Greenville, South Carolina, and even as the tears of joy spilled like tiny diamonds down my precious daughter’s cheeks, she managed to choke out, “Uh, can you maybe sit behind us or maybe somewhere in the back?”

  Ouch.

  Just for that, my friend and I intend to do as our foresmothers did before us and embarrass the dookie out of our little girls. I’m going to jump up and down and make those hand signals that the kids all make, the ones that I’m not sure whether they’re gang signs or mean I love you in Hawaiian. I’m going to sing along to all of Hilary’s songs, wear a belly shirt that says MRS. TIMBERLAKE, and get something unprintable pierced.

  Although I’m whining a bit about the long drive, the high ticket prices, the inevitable purchase from the Duff Stuff kiosk, and so forth, I’m actually pretty excited.

  Your first concert is something you never forget, and I’ll be right there, in Section 6, Row D, to see my baby’s reaction. I got a little misty recounting to her my first time: a two-hour trip to see Humble Pie and King Crimson with my sorta-boyfriend’s kindly daddy driving six of us and waiting in the parking lot for three hours.

  “He was a hero just like you, Mom,” she said.

  Word.

  Fast-forward a few weeks, and there I am, crouching behind the wheel well of Hilary Duff’s tour bus. It’s so big and gorgeous that it brings tears to my eyes.

  From a distance, I must’ve looked like the world’s oldest tween queen stalker. Not like that crazy-eyed one who just got arrested for harassing Catherine Zeta-Jones because Michael Douglas is her soul mate, but a kinder, gentler stalker who just wants a cool picture for her kid.

  As I stood with my friend and our daughters on a sweltering sidewalk in Greenville, six hours from home, I wondered aloud if we should hang out in the lobby at the Hyatt in case “the Hils” was staying there. We’d heard that earlier in the day in the breakfast buffet, and I’d immediately lost my appetite and started squealing and flapping.

  Duff stalkers were everywhere that day. It’s just that most of them were size 0 and looked eerily like Duff herself. I, on the other hand, was wearing my official Mommy big-shorts, the khaki ones that make my ass look eight ax-handles across, and carrying two cameras and a camcorder, just in case. I was also seized with an irrational urge to tell every kid walking by to “stand up straight, and get your damn bangs out of your eyes.” The world’s oldest and most uncool Duff stalker.

  Sophie’s friend Emeline had won backstage passes to meet Hilary, so we were feeling pretty smug as we walked from our hotel to the arena, where we saw many thousands of other little girls dressed in short pleated skirts, jeans jackets, and hair adornments, most trailed by tired moms.

  We were whisked to the side with the other “meet and greet” winners—an intimate gathering of about two hundred, as it turned out—and escorted to the rear of the convention center, where we passed roadies cooking hamburgers. Someone squealed at the sight of an enormous suds-filled washing machine: “I’ll bet Hilary’s clothes are in there!” Sophie said I was embarrassing her. Well. It could’ve been her clothes.

  When Hilary appeared from behind a blue curtain, well, I ‘bout died. I have met the Queen of England and Dan Aykroyd in my day. Once, Melanie Griffith filmed a movie right across the street from my house, and I found Antonio Banderas standing on my very own sidewalk. And, yes, it’s true, he’s really short, but it didn’t matter because how many times are you going to walk out to your car and go, “Oh, hi, Antonio!” and have him smile back and wave. I tell you this so you don’t think I’m like some hick who’s never seen a celebrity up close and personal.

  And here stood Hilary Duff, way tinier than she looks on TV.

  We got pictures of Sophie and Emeline with Hilary before being shooed out by a very large bodyguard. The concert was fun. At sixteen, Hilary was all high-energy pop/rock without a hint of naisty. There was something unexpectedly touching about all those little girls sitting beside their mommies, singing all the words of all the songs together.

  I wanted to hold on to the moment because I know that the future holds awful arguments about dates, driving privileges, and general distrust. But like every other mom at that concert who found herself holding up a glow-stick instead of a Bic lighter, I know that there’s a good chance that it will be healed just a little when we turn to each other and say, “Remember the time we met Hilary Duff?”

  7

  Field Trip, Fornification, and a

  Shit-Eating Giraffe

  Who Says School Can’t Be Fun?

  School field trips to celebrate the
end of the school year are better than I remember. My daughter’s recent trip to the zoo sure topped my own memory of a two-hour bus ride to the maximum-security Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, where we were given a less-than-PC tour. (“Now over here, you got yer crazy-eyed serial killers. . . . Over yonder, you got yer habitual fornificators.”)

  I’m fairly confident that the reason crime is on the increase is that nobody takes those field trips anymore. That’s why you have your fornificating going on right and left.

  The annual field trip to prison had the desired effect, which was to scare the livin’ crap out of every little Southern boy and girl so that they would never go astray. It worked, too. To my knowledge, not a single kid in my fifth-grade class ever pursued a life of crime, and I can tell you it’s because none of us ever truly recovered from seeing those prisoners waving good-bye, tattooed arms stretching through the bars, giving us the finger.

  I realize now that having hundreds of North Carolina school children file by and gawk at you is a violation of all kinds of prisoner privacy and personal rights and so on, but bottom line, we were so scared after that ritual, we just wanted to go home and hug our mamas and never so much as jaywalk.

  It was an incredibly effective deterrent but not the sort of thing you can do today with entire busloads of children. A parent today could sue, claiming that their kid was posttraumatic-stressed by the whole thing.

  It would be cheaper and just as effective to force school kids to watch every season of HBO’s Oz on DVD.

  After a few hours of seeing what can happen if you get the wrong cellmate (the creepy white supremacist who makes you wear mascara and lipstick, for example), you’d be scared straight, all right.

  Of course, the prison field trip wasn’t the only one we took. There was the annual trek to the local waste water treatment facility, or as we called it, “the dookie factory.”

  Sure, it was a small school in a poor, rural county, a hundred miles from, well, anywhere. It wasn’t exactly like we could dash over to MoMA for the Diane Arbus retrospective, so we had to make do with what we had. Still, it’s hard to imagine why anyone thought it was a good idea to give sewage plant tours to snickering adolescents. The highlight was observing the trap that catches the condoms.

  A lot of colors and styles were evident, which made us all look at our boring little town in a whole new light. Apparently, there was a steamy side to life out there beyond the rows of corn, tomatoes, and soybeans.

  A lot of people were gettin’ some. Maybe more than some.

  Big Eugene, who could usually be found smoking beneath the pecan trees on the schoolyard while the rest of us in fifth grade played hopscotch, announced that the wilder condoms were something called “French ticklers.” We said, “I know that” but Big Eugene, who had flunked an ungodly number of grades and already had a pencil-thin mustache, merely scowled dismissively at us through the haze from his Benson & Hedges. He knew we were lying, and even though we knew deep in our hearts that one day Big Eugene would be flipping off schoolchildren from his jailhouse window, we felt the need to impress him.

  All of which is to say that I have some degree of field-trip phobia.

  When my daughter announced her class was taking a field trip, I involuntarily shrieked “No!” but then had to realize that it was doubtful the kindergarten classes were going to prison or the dookie factory.

  Indeed, it was the zoo. This would be safe and fun, I thought. Animals frolicking—what could go wrong?

  Well, for starters, the baboon, who was frankly obsessed with amorous activities that didn’t require a partner.

  “What’s he doing?” a few of the kids asked.

  My husband, who was the only man who had come along to chaperone, decided he would deal with this question, and deal with it he did.

  “That’s just the traditional baboon way of waving hello,” he said, sounding remarkably poised and knowledgeable.

  “Oh,” a little boy in the class said. “Should we wave back?”

  “Oh, God no.”

  Next up: the “desert habitat” where an ancient camel proceeded to amuse the children by leaning down to eat his own shit. Without even moving his legs, the giraffe savored every bite as if it were the Christmas ham.

  “Oooh, icky gross! I think I’m gonna hurl!”

  “It’s just nature,” said one of the kids, trying to comfort my husband.

  Not only are field trips different these days, but the very games that kids play on the playground are actually designed to prevent competition.

  I know this because, at my daughter’s elementary school “activity day,” there wasn’t a single game of Kill or Red Rover in evidence, much less Kill’s kinder, gentler cousin, dodgeball.

  And gone was the highly sexist game that we used to play back in the Wonder Years, the one that required all us girls to wait coyly for the arrival of a line of boys who would loudly announce, “Bum-bum-bum, here we come, all the way from Washing-ton.” I forget most of it except that when the boys shouted “Where are you from?” (or, actually, “Where y’all fum?”) we had to shout out, “Pretty Girls Station!” then squeal and run away from those baaaad boys from Washington. Perhaps they were future lobbyists.

  The boys then chased the “pretty girls,” and the game ended with a lot of bloody knees and general playground mayhem. No mayhem is allowed these days. Ditto “horseplay” and “roughhousing.”

  Kill has been banned from public school playgrounds for quite some time. Apparently the message of throwing a ball as hard as you could at an opponent who was then locked in “prison” but could get “paroled to kill again” was just a tad un-PC. Unless you were the kind of kid who longed to play on Chuckie Manson’s T-ball team, Kill wasn’t real appealing. After all, the game ended only when everyone on one team was “officially dead.”

  I was vastly relieved to see that Red Rover had also disappeared. As the smallest kid in first grade, I dreaded Red Rover and pined to sit in the shade beside my classmate Michelle, a plucky little girl who had to wear a clunky metal back-and-neck brace and read during recess, looking up only to sigh in disgust as the limbs of her classmates were snapped in the name of “fun.”

  In Red Rover, the biggest, burliest boy would try to break through the weakest link (Yoo-hoo! That would be me) of knotted-up arms and elbows. I would always just shake my arm away and let him come through, much to the horror of my teammates.

  Of course, I was also the first one “called over,” as in, “Red Rover, Red Rover, send the shrimpy kid over!” I would then pitifully pretend to break through the linked arms of the other team before going, “Oh! You got me. I’ll just sit over here with the girl with the screws in her skull.”

  When I asked my daughter who won the egg-on-a-spoon race, she said she didn’t know ‘cause it was “just for fun.”

  Okay. But would it have killed ‘em to keep score?

  Although playground games aren’t allowed to be competitive, we parents find ways to compete, such as with homework. Parents love to complain about how much homework their kids have to do every night. It’s our generation’s equivalent of the old walking to school, uphill both ways, in the snow, with rickets!

  You think your kid has too much homework? Please, they say, waving a hand dismissively in your face: “My kid spends an average of eight-point-six hours per night just on math. Hell, he hasn’t had a bath since 1998. There is simply no time.”

  To hear most parents tell it, Little Johnnie is so devoted to his homework studies that he breaks only long enough to accept a tray of soup and cold cheese sandwiches slipped through the slot in his bedroom door.

  Soccer practice? Ha!

  Scouts? Who’s got the time?

  Karate? Piano? Birthday parties? You must be kidding.

  There must be too much homework. What else could explain those horrid wheeled backpacks that zip through school hallways at breakneck speeds, slicing ankles and tripping those unfortunate enough to be in their path? (If
I get tripped by one more Diva Starz suitcase on wheels, I’m going to lose it! Oops, too late.) These backpacks the size of Guam (which, as I recall from my own geography homework days, is a small country somewhere between Chile and Mustard) must surely contain all the papers and books vital to completion of the night’s homework.

  These days, to hear the parents tell it, it’s all homework, all the time.

  Except, well, actually, it isn’t.

  We know this now, thanks to a study by the Brookings Institution, a famous Washington think tank. (Motto: “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, you are stupider than us.”)

  The researchers found that, in most cases, too much homework is, uh, a myth, and that truthfully, the great majority of kids have less than one hour of homework a night.

  Not only that, but homework has actually decreased every year since 1984. At this rate, pretty soon your kid should be able to finish homework for five classes in a SpongeBob commercial break.

  This is great news for the parents who actually do all that homework. Anybody who’s ever been to a typical school science fair will quickly deduce that it’s incredibly difficult for most seven-year-olds to build a scale model of the space shuttle complete with astronauts that pee real Tang.

  So how did we get the idea that American kids are “over-studying”? (As I write this, a Japanese seventh-grader is laughing hysterically somewhere.) Well, some of them are, but just one in ten, and, yes, we know that’s probably your kid and we should just shut up.

  Face it. We can’t credibly whine about homework anymore. I know. I’m going to miss it, too.

  So what do we do if we can’t compete on the playground or in homework?

  We resort to Terrific Kids competitions.

  To tell the truth, I was never real fond of those “I’ve got a terrific kid!” bumper stickers you see on the steroidal SUVs in the carpool line.