Why (Our) “Redshirting” Is None of Your Beeswax (from the Momplex Blog archives)

January 6, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny15 Comments

My son, now four, was born a week before his due date and three weeks before the academic year starts. I don’t work in education and we don’t put our infants in school in Wisconsin, but trust me, there’s good reason why I took note of those three weeks. They quickly became the rest of the world’s license to have an opinion–sometimes a flared-nostril one–about our family’s personal beeswax.

Having begrudgingly “Ferberized” our colicky firstborn when she was nearly nine months of age as well as breastfed her for a year after that, you’d think we’d be used to opinionated nostril-flarers. At least in those cases, everyone was calling a spade a spade. Nobody was suggesting our sleep-training was a crazed effort to get her rested up for a career as a triathlete. Nobody accused us of making her “cry it out” so she’d have lungs strong enough to contend in the Tour de France.

I want to be clear that those three weeks aren’t the only judgment-magnet we’ve had with our second-born. After all, we didn’t circumcise the kid. In Wisconsin, that’s as suspect as not owning a Packers onesie or, worse, not teaching him to say Lambeau before he could say mama. Again, at least with this issue, we’ve all been talking about the same thing: foreskin cheese, disease-susceptibility, locker rooms, and whatnot. There was no indication from anyone that we might be leaving him uncut in a crazed effort to reduce water-drag for a future in professional swimming.

But those three weeks? That little period of time that makes him eligible for kindergarten even if he’s not ready for it? Those make people delirious. My best guess is it’s partly because the stupid term for it, redshirting, which derives from the sports world. In sports terms, these days, it’s basically about holding a kid back so that he’ll be bigger and stronger than his classmates on the field, court, or diamond. A lot of people still think that’s all it can be about. “So, is your family, like, really big into sports?” people have asked us when they get wind that we might hold our kiddo back. Really? WE are those idiots you see walking around in the opposing team’s colors, unwittingly, at the supermarket while mobs of Packers or Brewers fans stock up on jarred cheese and beer.

Every time I read an article about redshirting, the sports thing comes up. And I am so flippin’ tarrrrrred of it. Redshirting–even the word makes me cringe–isn’t always about sports. In our family, and I would venture to say in many families, it’s very simply about not sending a kid to school before he’s ready. It’s about being told by all of the education professionals we’ve asked that, if there’s any question at all, we should err on the side of holding him back. It’s about being told by all of the parents we know who’ve made the same decision that, yes, they’re so happy they held off. It’s about knowing just two families who went the other direction and are glad they did–but who also felt in their hearts that their kiddos were ready. And it’s about knowing many more who didn’t hold off but wished they had. What would you do? Actually, don’t answer me that. Because I don’t care what you would do unless you’ve been there yourself. You hear me, nostril-flarers?

Our son was diagnosed when he was two and a half with a “significant developmental delay.” Which sounds very dramatic but is basically an exacting label needed in order to qualify for certain early childhood services. Actually, because he confused the speech-language pathologist and early childhood educator who came to assess him, he was referred to a neuropsychologist. The diagnosis, if you can call it that, was “quirky” and then “significant developmental delay” (by six or seven months, according to their best estimate).

Why is he delayed? Coulda been the chronic ear infections through his first year. Coulda been a processing disorder that will make itself known later. Maybe he just wasn’t digging the tester. Hell, we don’t know. Has he caught up? Not sure. What we do know is that we’re asking all the right people for their guidance–his preschool teachers, early childhood development specialists, and parents who’ve been there. Yet their advice comprises maybe half of why we’re probably redshirting.

The biggest reason is simply that we know him best. We are his parents. We care about him most. You have an opinion about our redshirting? Got flaring nostrils about it? That’s your problem. Those three weeks are ours to do with them what we see fit. Mind your own beeswax.

friends · humor · motherhood · preschoolers · sons · speed-posts

The Shame of Hand-Me-Downs (from the Momplex Blog archives)

January 3, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny8 Comments

My son has almost no clothes of his own. By that, I mean he wears almost exclusively hand-me-downs. I can’t even begin to fathom how much cash this has saved me. Land’s End snowsuits, firetruck galoshes, and warm cable-knit sweaters are nothing to scoff at. I’m grateful.

BUT.

This year my son started preschool, and among his classmates is the younger sibling to the kid who used to own my kiddo’s threads. And several times a week we are greeted in the preschool cloakroom with one of these lines:

“Hey, I know that shirt! That’s one of Sam’s!”
“Oh! Our favorite pants! Sam loved those!”
“Hey! There’s another one of Sam’s sweater!”

And so on.

For some reason, it’s starting to get embarassing to me. Like none of his clothes are ours. Like we never buy him anything new. Like we’re riding someone else’s wave. I find myself wanting to shush her, to say, “Do you have to announce that every day?” Which makes me feel like a real jerk. Because it is just that: real jerky. Maybe it’s just the repetitiveness? Like Ned from Groundhog Day who greets Phil every deja vu morning with the same thrilled Hey! Phil!? Phil!? Hey, Phil Connors! I thought that was you! Hey, hey, now don’t you tell me you don’t remember me, because I sure as heckfire remember you!” Look where THAT got him:

Sweet relief, look how good Phil feels after that release!

Oh, my god. Am I seriously suggesting that I punch a dear friend in the face because she’s happy to see her kid’s old clothes again? Do you know what this is all about? Well, I might. You see, I’m a little sister, the one who got all the hand-me-downs in my family. Even if I loved them, weren’t they somehow always not quite mine? Weren’t they always a little worn and pilled already? Didn’t my sister used to get to dictate which ones could be released to me? Like, did I EVER get that #$!@ng awesome Tweety Bird t-shirt she had in the first grade? No. I got her stupid jeans.

This is starting to look to me like a classic case of PTHMDS, Post-Tramautic Hand-Me-Down Syndrome. You know what? I had better get the heckfire over it, because Land’s End snowsuits, firetruck galoshes, and warm cable-knit sweaters are nothing to scoff at. And like I tell my 4-year-old son, we don’t punch our friends.

humor · sexuality

What Turns You On (from the Momplex Blog archives)

December 23, 2012February 27, 2023 Jenny1 Comment

One of my childhood friends—I’ll call her Jane—had a big golden schlong in her parents’ closet. It wasn’t hers, of course. It was theirs, but Jane must have felt some measure of ownership over it, at least enough to figure it was hers to show me one afternoon after school.

“Look at THIS,” she said, her eyes flashing darkly as she cackled and produced the metallic member from one of a seeming zillion boxes stacked willy-nilly in the closet. It was like Mr. Ollivander plucking the perfect wand from his inventory shelves in the world of Harry Potter. “Can you believe THIS!?” The thing is, it wasn’t immediately clear to me just what THIS was. Was her mother a gardener? Was THIS some sort of dazzling county fair award for having grown the biggest cucumber?

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a vibrator,” Jane answered matter-of-factly, as if this would clear things up for me. It didn’t.

At my home, my parents had a little vibrating contraption, too, but I’m pretty sure they’d picked it up from the health and beauty aisle at the S&H Green Stamps store. They kept it plugged in right in our living room sometimes, and my sister and I would use it to massage our legs, arms, heads, even the dog. It was a heavy, substantial appliance sort of thing, because it was a back massager. It boasted two fist-sized knobs that would squeeze in and out—and vibrate. So, of course, when I looked at Jane beaming about her parents’ “vibrator,” all I could think was Why would anyone want a leg massage with THAT? When she clarified, I wanted to barf.

Years later, another friend—I’ll call him John—introduced me to porn in the form of a Brazilian film called The Lady on the Bus. It was really a gateway to porn, more of an “erotic genre” film that tells the story of a grieved woman trying to heal herself by way of nymphomania. She spends the whole film soliciting sex from strangers on city buses, doing it in weird places and shouting out terrible lines like, “Beat me senseless!” I knew I shouldn’t have been watching it, but the dialogue and acting were just so ridiculous that it was comical. John had a screening of sorts for me and a handful of other friends, and to this day he can still quote a good deal of it that will still get me rolling with belly laughs. No matter how funny I found the dialogue, though, I distinctly remember wanting to leave the room during the naughty scenes. I simply did not want to watch other people having sex.

Klassy...and so literal. — Klassy…and so literal.

Let’s not drudge up every story that explains why. I’ll just say here that the sex and porn industry aren’t exactly my raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. That’s why it’s so funny and so wrong that a porn-peddler was the one to co-opt the original blog domain for the Momplex. I can’t tell you how many times I inadvertently type in the old URL and get a startling eyeful. I still cannot get over the fact that my mommy blog turned overnight into an online portal for porn and sex toys. What were those pirates thinking? That I’d pay the ransom that is the ridiculous price they’ve put on the domain’s head? That people who’d grown accustomed to visiting my blog might be interested in some porn instead?

If you’re going to turn a mommy blog’s domain into a porn shop, I suggest you do it differently. Do it right. Show pictures of a week’s worth of meals neatly organized in a freezer. Show full, gorgeous glasses of wine. Show kids doing their own laundry and dishes. Show men’s underwear, in the hamper. Show a toilet with the seat down, no pee on its base. I’d show a lot of things if I were peddling porn on the old Momplex, but none of them would be vibrators or skin flicks or people cupping their naked body parts with their heads tilted back in rapture. You can get that crap anywhere. Tired mommies deserve the good stuff. I’d beat them senseless with pictures of cozy places to nap.