Month: May 2013

motherhood

I Am Not a Search Engine…But I Let My Kids Think I Am (from the Momplex Blog archives)

Jenny4 Comments

Butterflies pee blood. That’s what my kids learned today from the Grow-a-Butterfly Kit I bought for them. Actually, since I’m the one who shouted this information while witnessing blood spraying from a newly emerged butterfly’s lady parts (they’re all girls in my mind), it’s probably more accurate to say they learned it from me.

My children learn most of their erroneous facts about science, nature, history, and the cosmos from me. Turns out I shine only with the basics, like answering whether apples grow on trees or underground like potatoes. Though I absolutely have tried, I cannot explain why we don’t have watermelons growing all over our yard after we’ve spat so many melon seeds there over the years. It’s also proven difficult for me to explain how a photo travels from my smartphone to my computer, and the reasons I never wet the bed. This is because (1) I am not a walking encyclopedia and (2) never seem to realize how full of shit I am until I’m knee deep in what’s come out of my own mouth.

If you have a young child, I hope you’re in the same boat. Because it’s not just misery that loves company; it’s ignorance and ineptitude, too. I don’t want to be the only mom who’s a walking, weekly confirmation of her children’s suspicion that, yes, we really do forget most of what we learn. But, come on, how the hell am I supposed to remember what a scalene triangle is? And why? Oh, wait. I know why: Because some evening, my third-grade daughter is going to flop down next to me at the kitchen table with a geometry worksheet, and ask me to remind her. That’s when I will excuse myself to use the bathroom, sneak a peak at our American Heritage dictionary, and come out acting like I totally knew.

So help me, if you’re able to explain on demand to a child how wind is made, why conifers don’t go bald in the winter, or how worms survive after being chopped with a garden spade, I hate you. It only means you’ve got a better memory than most and/or spend too much time on the Internet. And it’s making the rest of us look bad.

As it turns out, butterflies don’t actually pee blood. Some online almanac tells me it’s meconium. (That’s newborn caca, to the layperson.) Sometime later today, probably while putting the kids to bed, I will issue the retraction of my misinformation from this morning. I will swallow my pride and be honest, confessing I had to look it up on the Internet, slowly but surely handing over my authority to Google, slowly but surely revealing I’m not as brilliant as they used to think I was. That’s okay: My preschooler, who witnessed the caterpillars quadrupling their size, saw them climb to the ceiling of their tent, watched them sealing up as chrysalises, and finally saw them emerge a week later as butterflies — he told me today that it wasn’t that interesting watching them come out, that he’d rather have seen them going in.

The bloody show
The bloody show

I may not know everything, but for now, I’ve still got the kids beat.

bravery · death · headline news

Brave New People: Raising Courageous Kids (from the Momplex Blog archives)

Jenny1 Comment

Yesterday, there was an FBI manhunt in our neck of the woods for an on-the-run murder suspect described as “extremely dangerous.” It began near my daughter’s school and gradually progressed toward my son’s. They were both in “hard lockdown” inside their classrooms for a couple of hours. Bus-riders were in lockdown even longer. Hard lockdown, or “code red” as my daughter knows it from the practice drills, means nobody is to go in or out of the school, shades are to be drawn, lights turned off, doors locked, and kids huddled in a pre-designated safe spot in the classroom.

My 4-year-old son goes to a little church preschool and was pretty oblivious to what was going on. My daughter is older, in the third grade, and can’t have the wool pulled over her eyes so easily. She was clearly shaken up by the experience. After being able to sign her out of her classroom, where the kids were indeed sitting in the dark but watching a video and not cowering in tears as my over-active imagination had feared, I asked her what she knew about the situation. Obviously, she knew they were on code red. She explained that she knew that code red could mean there was a bad guy in the school. And she knew–or thought she knew–that this dread scenario for which she’d drilled was basically really happening. That’s because she overheard her teacher telling another adult that a bad guy was nearby.

“Mom?” she asked as I filled out more of the story for her. “Did he kill anyone?” I told her that he was in trouble for a murder case that had occurred in the past, that nobody had been killed today, and that the police would be able to capture him. I watched her eyes scanning outside our car, looking nervously for this bad person.

Later, as she wrapped her lanky limbs around me like a baby chimp and curled in my lap for a hug in a way she never does anymore, my daughter asked, “Mom, did that man kill a grown-up or…well, you know, someone smaller?”

To tell you the truth, I don’t know, but I told her it was a grown-up. What a scary afternoon she had. I spent much of last night thinking about something that’s been weighing on my mind for a couple of months now. I brought it up to my husband just after the Boston Marathon bombing, but it had been brewing in my head since December 14 of last year, the day of the Newtown massacre.

“I’m starting to feel like there’s a strange thing we have to do,” I said to him. “I think we’re supposed to figure out how to raise brave children. I think that might be one of our jobs.”

The thing is, I’m not sure how to do that job. Bravery has never before been something I saw as an essential life skill for me when I was growing up, and certainly not for everyone. Bravery was the domain of soldiers, police officers, and, quite frankly, men in general. But the more bad I see in this world, the more I think it’s a critical life skill for everyone. Our younger generations are growing up every day with this constant onslaught of frightening news from every direction. I think about how we’ve been at one war or another for most of their lives, how terrorism isn’t an overseas thing to them like it was to me when I was a kid, and how, strangely enough, they don’t seem any braver for it. If anything, they seem more calloused.

I don’t want to raise calloused people. I also don’t want to raise people who rely entirely on the decisions and actions of others for their safety. For now, it’s fine, but for when they grow up, they need to be brave. I want to raise kids who can think for themselves in crisis situations, who can respond with confidence and courage, not with deferential resignation. I want to raise them to have mettle that exceeds my own. How do you raise the type of children who, as adults, will go rushing into the mayhem of a bombing aftermath to help the injured? Because the world really needs those people. How do you raise the type of children who don’t retreat from evil but take it on? Because the world really needs those people. In this world, in these days, how do you raise brave people instead of calloused ones? I don’t know yet, but the world is always going to need them, so someone’s got to do it. I’d sure like to try.