My daughter wants to be Angelina Jolie when she grows up. That’s not how she puts it. She doesn’t even know who Angelina is. But she’s been telling me for years that she wants to “adopt nine or ten kids someday, from all over the world.” I guess that as long as she doesn’t take up any other Angelina tendencies, like making out with a cousin or blowing up her lips to look like two boffing slugs, I think it’s pretty cool.
I’m happy when my daughter tells me she aspires to having kids. It makes me feel like I’m making this gig look easy, which it isn’t, and rewarding, which it is. Interestingly enough, a Living Social psychic tried to tell me a couple of months ago that my daughter was “going to have kids at an early age.” I pressed the woman for details, and she said, “Not too young, maybe around 19.” Excuse me? Because this woman feels that 19 is a reasonable age to have babies—and because she had to ask if I had kids in the first place—it was easy to laugh her off.
The great and wise man-child Justin Bieber tells us we should never say never, but I feel pretty good that my daughter’s not going to fulfill that psychic’s prophecies. However, she might just fulfill her own. I see the kind of sister, daughter, and friend she is, and I just know she’s going to be damn good at motherhood when it’s her turn. And, hey, just look at this list of “Possible Jobs” she made last week:
The last item on that list has “motherhood internship” written all over it. Being a mom to a deserted baby penguin seems like a half-okay set of training wheels for actual motherhood, right? I love my girl’s optimism, her bold vision. Part rose-colored glasses, part bad-ass, I’d say she’s totally on the right track to fulfilling her dream.
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.
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.
After the baby and toddler years, it sure seems like milestones get fewer and farther between. I have to wonder if that’s just what the baby books with the pre-filled headings would have us think. “Baby’s First Tooth” and “Baby’s First Steps” are in every one of those things. What about the other good stuff? There are plenty of other big transitions in a child’s life to celebrate! Here are just five of those “soft milestones” I’m looking forward to:
First Time Not Waking the Whole Blessed Household in the Morning. Your young child believes his body is a human alarm clock. If he’s awake, it must be time for everyone to get up! The most common methods for waking you include (a) mouth-breathing in your face, (b) jumping onto your full bladder, and (c) bombarding you with random, existential questions that have accumulated during the night. One day, he’ll just stop. You’ll wake up after your own sleep cycles end, finding him doing something you wish you’d been awake to thwart. But still.
First Time Expending Energy to Forward Own Survival. Does your child still ask you to get her a drink or snack so as not to have to interrupt her own activities, such as watching television or lounging about in a cardboard box? Measure her arms. If they’re long and strong enough to reach behind to wipe her own butt, they’re long and strong enough to reach up to the water dispenser on the fridge and open the snack cabinet. And it will happen! This milestone can occur either naturally or with some angry admonishments gentle guidance from you.
First Time Caring about Not Smelling Like an Old Fishbowl. Most young children are quite tolerant of their own stank and will gladly forgo wiping, bathing, and daily clothing changes if permitted. One day you’ll be making your daughter cross her heart when she says she really washed her private parts (and not with hair conditioner), and the next she’ll be hogging the shower and using Axe Anarchy for Her Body Spray.
First Time Not Dressing Like an Indigent Schizo Clown. It’s fun when kids start dressing themselves, isn’t it? But sometimes it makes you look like a poopy parent. There’s just something about Crocs-with-socks, a shirt two sizes too small, tights worn as pants, and a homemade hair-bow made of tomato tape that screams Mommy drinks! But one day the tides will turn, and you will know it by the angst-filled morning screams of, “Nothing in this closet FITS me! Aggggh!!! I HATE my life!”
First Time Understanding that the Cat/Dog Hates That Sh**. Does your family dog get that please just euthanize me now look when your young child approaches? Does your cat emit a low growl whenever your preschooler talks? Someday that kid is going to put two and two together and realize that the family pet does not like being cruddled (crushed+cuddled), being transported in the Heimlich hold, having the tail of a toy dragged repeatedly across its face well after playtime has worn out, “fetching” balls that have been thrown less than two feet from where it was standing, or in any other way being demoralized.
Crawling, cruising, first words, lost teeth—these hard milestones are exciting, but I don’t know that they’re any more important than the soft ones. Maybe they’re just the changes that happen more suddenly, so they look more drastic. If you look for the softer ones, though? You’ll see that they’re everywhere. There’s probably one happening under your roof this month. What soft milestones are you looking forward to?
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The Second Magpie 