School Matters: Who Knew the Earth Had a Foreskin? (from the Momplex Blog archives)

March 12, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny4 Comments

I am a writer, so people are often surprised to learn I skipped a grade in math. Maybe it’s not because I’m a writer that they’re surprised. Maybe it’s because I seem kind of dumb with numbers. In truth, I sort of am. It’s not so much that I’m naturally, intrinsically dumb with them. It’s just that muscles atrophy when you don’t use them. (I know my brain isn’t a muscle, but just go with it.) After two decades of me writing and editing for a living, the math part of my brain looks like this:

Just for reference, here is the writer side of my brain:

So, just to be clear, here is the whole thing:

(Guess where the art center in my brain is located?)

I have not needed my full gamut of math education nearly as much as my math teachers threatened I would—until now. But because of recent experiences in my life, I just want to warn all the little kids out there: YOUR MATH TEACHER IS NOT LYING. YOU REALLY DO NEED TO PAY ATTENTION IN MATH CLASS, BECAUSE YOU REALLY ARE GOING TO NEED IT ALL.

The most important reason to retain it–the teachers don’t tell you this–is so that you will not look stupid when, later in life, your child asks you for homework help. I mean, what are you going to do when your fourth-grader is coming at you with questions like, “Which one of these is a rhombus?” and “Did I get the area of this triangle right?” And there you’ll be, hanging onto your shred of dignity, squinting over a Stove Top Stuffing box as you and your grade-skipping self struggle with mental math to make one-and-a-half times the suggested amount. What? You’re going to sneak over to the iPad and whisper, “OK, Google…how to calculate the area of a triangle” right in front of her? No! You’ve got to prove your salt by knowing as much as she thinks you do. Don’t you know a 10-year-old girl is just one hormone-surge shy of deciding you’re the world’s biggest idiot?

If the math doesn’t kill you, the science will. Because someday, as God is my witness, your 5-year-old is going to demand answers. Like, is Pluto a planet or isn’t it? WELL, IS IT? And when you answer incorrectly, your daughter’s friend from the fourth grade is going to survey you with shriveled brow and an Elvis lip and say, “Um, Pluto used to be a planet.” (I wasn’t sure if she was correcting me or wiping me off her shoe.) God, I actually knew that one! I did! But she caught me off-guard!

But therein lies my point: As a parent, you’ve got to be ready to do things like name the planets, spell Potomac, and define a hypotenuse off the top of your head and even while cleaning pee off the base of the toilet. (Which is what I was doing during the Pluto debacle.) Your teachers are telling you that you need to remember this stuff because you DO. Total recall, people, or you’re going to screw up your children.

Tonight as I was getting my daughter ready for bed, I told her how embarrassed I was at her younger brother’s parent-teacher conference this morning:

“Out of the blue, do you know what he blurted? He said, ‘Someone in my family—I think my mom—said you were wrong about something even though you think you’re right.’”

I told her how I’d explained that he must have overheard a conversation about my daughter’s teacher. I mean, that teacher is the one who changed my daughter’s spelling of blond to blonde, which technically wasn’t correct, given the context and this one weird spelling rule that most people don’t know.

“But, geez, I just sounded ridiculous,” I told my daughter. “Because your brother then pointed at his teacher and said, ‘No, Mom, someone in our family said that about HER.'”

Turns out, it was my daughter. “Sorry, Mom,” she said, “but his teacher had taught him that at the end of the earth there’s something like lava.”

“Honey, she must have meant the center of the earth, which is pretty much like lava,” I said.

“I know, Mom, but she said end of the earth, and anyway, it’s not lava.”

Do you know what I said? I said, “Well, that’s just an easier way for a preschool teacher to explain that stuff to little kids. And I know it’s not lava, but it’s similar. It’s smegma.”

Yes, I seriously said smegma, as if the Earth is one big foreskin. No, I did not realize my mistake right away, not even within a minute. My excuse? This:

On a more serious note: Remember that I’m donating 80 percent of the profits from March sales of my book to the Restoring Hope Transplant House–a home away from home for transplant recipients and their families. Already own one? Recommend it to a friend, or better yet, buy some copies as gifts.

advice · beauty · motherhood

Not as Old as My Caftan Implies (from the Momplex Blog archives)

November 7, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny6 Comments

I’ve been feeling old lately. I don’t need a Boy Scout to help me cross roads or anything. And I don’t sport giant, black fit-over sunglasses while navigating my town car to Jo-Ann Fabric. In truth, I’m 20+ years from Social Security, and women much older than I am compete in marathons. So, it’s not that I actually am old. It’s just that I’m not young either. I know this to be true because I own a leopard-print caftan, use a pill box, and resent all my tattoos. Take heed, young folks. These are the signs.

Last month I had my husband and the doctor he works with repair my earring holes. By repair, I mean carve with a scalpel and stitch shut.

You could have stuck a pencil in those holes before the repair. Kids these days call them gauged ears, but my contemporaries and I blazed that particular fashion trail. I call them ‘80s ears: stretched-out lobes from wearing giant earrings to complement giant perms. Those holes are ugly, whatever your age, and they look particularly bad on a 41-year-old woman. They had to go.

As if that wasn’t enough, I then tried to have my ankle tattoo lased. I got part one of this tattoo (the flower) while avoiding studying for my final exams in college. I got part two of the tattoo (my signature) during the presidential debate between Clinton and George H.W. Bush. It was inked by an artist who did some of Billy Baldwin’s tattoos. I know this because, while she was giving me the tattoo, I was staring at pics of her with Billy and the tattoos she’d given him. She, on the other hand, was staring at the debate on her portable TV. I think my sloppy tattoo bears evidence of that.

Before laser treatment:

After laser treatment:

So much for that little enterprise.

And then I realized: This is something old ladies do. Try to fix wee little aesthetic details on parts of their bodies to counteract the giant hoof-print Father Time is leaving over every inch of them. Oh, my ass has dropped five inches and I’m developing a chin wattle. Better get that mole on my arm removed and buy a new pair of earrings! When I was 22 and could walk around wearing wooden stilettos like Bad Sandy from Grease, any given Friday night, I didn’t even notice that mole. For sure nobody was looking at my earring holes.

Last weekend I went to Denver to visit my aunt, a woman who may or may not have giant earring holes. I don’t know, because she’s got giant boobs, and those magically turn everything else into minutiae. While I was there, she and I drove out to SkyVenture Colorado. This is an indoor skydiving facility, and since I’m writing a book about the guy who engineered the thing, I wanted to give it a whirl. I thought it would be scary for me, since I’m afraid of heights. But no heights were involved. In fact, it was deliriously fun. You pretty much step into a column of wind and fly, with the floor not all that far beneath you. You learn how to master the wind with tiny movements of your body and the help of a skydiving guru.

When I stepped out onto the wind column, I felt young. I wanted to yell some happy expletives. Because even though my pastor doesn’t know it, even though my kids don’t know it, I do that. I like to do that. I’m a tattooed girl who used to wear Bad Sandy heels and rock a perm Felix Baumgartner could’ve spotted from his space dive. I felt alive, happy, wild, even sexy. And then I got home and watched the video of my flight:

Yes, that’s me sporting a pink, nylon fat-suit, my arms palsy-shaking like Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond. That’s me not looking nearly as vivacious as I felt. I think I even have a mullet.

What’s that thing Forrest Gump says? Stupid is as stupid does? I’m wondering if maybe sexy is as sexy does, too. Youthful is as youthful does. Fun is as fun does. Happy is as happy does. It’s not about the big earring holes or the faded tattoo or the pregnancy stretch-marks. (Did I fail to mention those?) It’s about joy, which has no age. And in a funny way, that means it is about the earring holes, the tattoo, the stretch marks, for all of them are talismans from great times in my life. And reminders of more to come. I’m not sorry I closed up those earring holes. I’m not sorry about the stretch marks. I’ll make new talismans. There’s more to come. Until I’m dead, I’ll keep making them.

Old is as old does.
(But I’m still going to color my roots.)

advice · government · humor · motherhood · poop · preschoolers

Whack-a-Mole: Parenting in an Intrusive World (from the Momplex Blog archives)

February 13, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny7 Comments

Poop-slinging is not just for primates. I know, because I experience it as a mom firsthand all the time. I’m not talking about literal poo once flung at me by kicking baby legs—technically, that’s not slung. I’m talking about the endless heaps of crap the world puts on parents, day in and day out:

Sexualized monster dolls with anorexic thigh-gap and Kris Jenner eye makeup
Vaccination, breastfeeding, and red-shirting debates that outheat the meetings of the Continental Congress
Surprise commercials for things like CSI: Cannibal Ear-Rape Unit during family Christmas specials
Endless scare campaigns about eating high-fructose corn syrup, GMOs, aerosolized feces, snow, etc.
Magazine covers with the lying liars who make babies in Hollywood and the lying liars who help them lie about the baby weight they “melt away” three weeks post-partum through a combo of Pilates, coconut oil, and Acai berries. Liars.
Know-it-alls forever saying, “If I were a parent, I would never…” [insert karma’s placeholder here] as if it were as simple as boiling an egg or crate-training a dog
YouTube instructional videos for DIY push-up, padded training bras
Absurdly expensive athletic programs that require 12 practices a week and a second mortgage, until the third grade, when it all doubles
My personal nemesis, the bottomless sea of paper: teachers’ notes, permission slips, school calendars, snack lists, book fair circulars, fundraiser order forms, and really bad artwork that only qualifies as artwork because your child wrote his/her name on it during art class

It’s nothing, really. I’m sure every generation of parents has it’s crap, and I’m not complaining. I do my best to roll with the punches and stay ahead of the whack-a-mole game that is raising kids. But sometimes I just have to laugh at the absurdity of what gets slung at me by our hyper-ridiculous society. Look at the headline of a note I received today from the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health:

An Intervention!!! Exclamation Point!!!!

No pressure there, right? Screw the “happiest kid on the block.” We’re going for global domination! Basic rule of thumb I’ve learned as a writer: Be wary of exclamation marks. They often indicate hysteria, fake excitement, ignorance—or, in this case, all three.

Turns out the university thinks my kid is fat. And they want to do something about his dangerous fatness—as well as mine and his dad’s—through a special web-based program to help us exercise and eat healthier meals: “All parents and children will be weighed and measured at the first visit, and again at 6 month and at 12 months.”

Um. Really?

This letter took me off guard. It explained that an enclosed body mass index (BMI) chart—on which my son’s latest BMI was shown—indicated that my son is heading for heart disease, bone problems, and diabetes. Basically, they called my kid fat, and then very subtly indicated that my husband and I must be fat, too.

Thank God SOMEBODY'S looking out for my kid. — Thank God SOMEBODY’S looking out for my kid.

Most of you don’t personally know my son. Let me just say that I regularly worry he isn’t eating enough. He even has a little preschooler six-pack. You know what I’m talking about, right? I’d kill to have his abs.

The BMI is an arcane tool, and you can Google to your heart’s content to find out why. Basically, it’s an oversimplification and doesn’t really measure what doctors purport it measures. My husband used to always tip the BMI index at “obese” when he was in the military. Then they’d do what’s called a “tape test” to measure his various body parts in proportion to one another (no penises, I promise) and conclude otherwise. In other words, the BMI is flawed.

So, I wrote a harsh letter to the university. It had more to do with my critically anorexic cousin—now in her 20s—than with my son. That the medical community would start imposing diets on 4-year-olds with six packs? Please. Let’s sling some more poop at parents. I’m sure there are kids who will benefit from the program, but I could not help but wonder about the 11-year-old girl who might intercept that form letter, who might be perfectly well proportioned, and who might head up to her bedroom sobbing because the numbers show she’s “fat.” And the doctors want to pay her family a $100 research reimbursement to see if they can un-fat her!

Maybe the medical school undertook this ill-researched project to jump through a funding hoop. I’m certainly not signing up. I don’t aspire to having the “healthiest kid on the planet,” but I don’t think I’m terribly far from just that. I aspire to having normal kids who walk the usual tightrope of living, who aren’t scared to death by all the poop being slung at them and their parents over the course of their sweet little childhoods. I want kids who are prepared to take the reins when it’s their turn to be mommies and daddies. I suspect there will be ever-more poop slung at them. But just as I was there to wipe it off their bums from the start, I want to be there to wipe it off their faces someday so they can still see straight.