Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank Read online

  I mean, everybody’s kid is terrific, right?

  What kind of insecure weirdness is at work when we must have a bumper sticker on our car just so everybody else will believe it, too?

  Who cares? Should we drive more carefully in the presence of a vanload of Officially Designated Terrific Kids? (“Watch ‘em, Marvin; that’s the future of our country ridin’ in that Yukon.”)

  What kind of a parent believes that this “terrific kid” endorsement is an accurate tool for predicting future successes?

  Yoo-hoo! Over here, everyone! That would be me.

  It’s not easy to admit that at the Terrific Kids assembly at my daughter’s school, I was as green as a toad when two of her friends were designated “terrific” and stepped to the stage to receive their stickers and certificates.

  The very, very smallest part of me wondered, “What’s so terrific about them?”

  They’re adorable, sure. Good students, absolutely. Helpful and obedient? Check.

  So where’s our bumper sticker?

  Oh, this is just so embarrassing. I’ve now officially become one of the people I used to make fun of. What’s worse, I’m not sure it won’t rub off on my kid. Will she take on my awful competitive nature and begin to say things like, “Hmmmm, sure would be a shame if something were to happen to Little Susie to make her somehow less ‘terrific’!”

  I don’t think I have to worry about that just yet. So far, my kid seems oblivious of any of this and prefers to concentrate on her poetry studies, which are frankly limited these days to Girls go to college to get more knowledge I boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.

  Parents show up for the Terrific Kids assembly with camcorders and bouquets of flowers. So now, the kids who don’t get flowers from their parents pout, and the ones who did get flowers have won the unspoken “My parents love me better than yours love you” contest.

  I swear it almost makes me long for Red Rover.

  8

  The One and Done Club

  Sure, I Could’ve Thrown a Litter

  Like You, but How Much Ballet Can a Mom Take?

  My mom-friends and I have decided that it’s going to be a looooong summer now that the kids have been out of school for eighteen days, eleven hours, and twenty-six minutes. Not that we’re counting.

  There’s one mommy in the group, okay, me, who crudely scratches lines, diagonally crossing every four, to show how many days of “summer vacation” have passed. I feel like Tom Hanks’s character in Cast Away, only I haven’t started talking to a soccer ball wearing a face drawn with my own blood. Yet.

  There’s a noticeable difference between my mom-friends who sagely scheduled summer camps for their kids and, uh, the rest of us.

  “After book-publishing camp,” one said smugly, “Sallie Jo will do one week each of Tuscan cookery and Tae Bo, and then we’ll round out July with horse camp, cursive hand-writing camp, and pre-Olympic diving.”

  Those of us who rejected the notion of a rigidly scheduled summer of activities (that’s right, the crazy ones) are cursing that we said, a mere eighteen days, eleven hours, and twenty-six minutes ago, “Children don’t need all this organized activity! They need free play time!”

  Well, no. That’s why they call them children. They need a nice, paid instructor to show them pipe cleaner crafts and oversee relay races all day. What they apparently don’t need, much to my shock, is a ham sandwich in front of Days of Our Lives with Mommy.

  When my daughter complained of boredom the other day, I said, as lovingly as possible, “Shhhh! Lexie’s gettin’ ready to tell Abe that Brandon’s the father of her love child. Don’t you know nothing about a story arc?”

  She sighed heavily and retreated to her room to read a book. Freak.

  I guess the thing I hadn’t counted on was that, even on a day like yesterday, which included a three-hour playdate with a friend, a T-ball game, and a birthday party at an amusement park, my daughter would actually say, “I’m booorred” in the twenty-three-odd minutes we had between rushing from place to place.

  My daughter and her friends are under the delusion that they’re tiny passengers on an invisible cruise ship, and we moms are the cruise directors. (“First up, Styrofoam peanut tower construction, followed by Slip’N Slides and slushies on the Lido deck at fourteen hundred hours!”)

  My friend, also the mother of an only child, promised to wave to me from the back of the white van after she gets her arm out of the straitjacket that she’ll surely be wearing by summer’s end.

  I’m sure she’s exaggerating. I don’t think you can really get an arm out of one of those things.

  One of the only camps I did sign up for was ballet camp. I’ve always wanted to be one of those dedicated and cheerful “ballet moms” who researches summer dance camps for months and even sells cookie dough and Christmas wrapping paper for ballet school fund-raisers.

  Ballet is beautiful, but I’m a new soul, incapable of appreciating scene after scene of young girls standing on their toes and mincing about and then standing on their toes and mincing about some more. And the plots? Sneaky fairies and magic feathers and stuff. Oh, just let me eat my own flesh till I quietly disappear. Still, the princess likes it a lot, so off we went to see her school perform something called Coppelia.

  Now for those of you who don’t know pointe from pintos,Coppelia is a famous comedic ballet. Like most ballets, the plot is paper thin but, hell-o, what can I say? The male lead gave me new interest in ballet. On account of he was FG. Fully gorgeous, I mean. I saw Baryshnikov perform years before he was reduced to playing one of Carrie’s many boyfriends on Sex and the City, so I know a little about how a well-placed man in tights can give you a, uh, deeper appreciation of ballet.

  Coppelia is pretty to watch, I suppose, but the plot is maddening: handsome dude falls in lust with a mannequin, thinking she’s real (he’s purty, but he’s dumb); his fiancee finds out and gets jealous; fiancee exposes mannequin for the fake she is; handsome dude and fiancee have huge church wedding and live happily ever after.

  Okay, how stupid do you have to be to go ahead and marry a man who just dumped you for a mannequin? But this is ballet, friends, and it’s all part of the damn magic.

  I don’t “get” ballet. Take Giselle, for instance. In this one, a simple peasant girl named, well, Giselle, falls in love with a nobleman in disguise. When she finds out who he really is, and that he’s betrothed to another, she has, like, a giant hissy fit and dances herself to death. Literally! Of course, because it’s ballet, nothing is as it seems, and Giselle’s love survives being buried. Unfortunately, she never manages to shake the Evil Queen. (Ballet is real big on Evil Queens.) She goes back to the grave, and her true love grieves for her forever and ever. This doesn’t exactly put us all in the mood for pie, now, does it?

  Or what about Firebird, another famous ballet, in which a guy named Ivan wanders into a “mysterious forest” inhabited by a magical firebird. Ivan cons the bird out of a “magic feather” that will keep him safe from the evil in the garden, including spells by mad magicians and such. I know. I’ll bet you could’ve used a magic feather the last time you were “enchanted” by a mad magician, too, huh? Anyway, the fire-bird returns to help and lulls the forest monsters to sleep. In return, Ivan agrees to smash the magic egg that has cast a spell of evil over the forest forever. In the end, life gets really good in the forest, though there is no mention of cable.

  All of this is fine if you’re into it, but I’d much rather watch Denzel in Man on Fire for like the bazillionth time. That part where he puts the explosives up the bad guy’s ass and then sets the timer and hands it to him? Now that’s entertainment!

  The princess loves ballet, though, so I attempt to be supportive.

  Over the years, I’ve discovered that there are two kinds of ballet moms at our school: First, there’s the kind that stays the whole hour watching anxiously through the cut-out window, enjoying every inch of little Cherish Rae’s progress while monitoring
the student-teacher ratio in case she needs to complain to the director. Which she will.

  And then, there’s the other kind, like me. We use that same hour to buy an entire week’s worth of groceries, careening back into the parking lot just as class ends and the kids are getting their hands stamped with cute little red-ink ballerina figures.

  When she was really little, I used to try to con my kid. “You were great!” I gushed, trying desperately to hide the eighteen bags of groceries that had magically overflowed into the backseat. Well. Her father believes there’s a grocery fairy—why can’t she?

  There’s also the carpool fairy, which would be me, if you can envision any fairy being twenty pounds overweight and wearing a shirt her kid tie-dyed over UNC sweatpants.

  I’ve chauffered my daughter all over town this summer, not just to ballet. I have to admit that I’m going to miss, sort of, the backseat chatter that has kept me amused and confused.

  You see, little girls have a ginormous capacity to giggle at things that no one over ten would ever “get.” My personal least favorite is the game where one says, “I one an elevator,” and the next one says, “I two an elevator,” and, ohmigod, we can see where this is heading, eventually: “I eight (ate) an elevator.” Hilarity ensues. They never get tired of this game, even though the “joke” is pretty obvious after the first ten or twelve items.

  This summer, much of the backseat banter has concerned teen idols, or as we like to call them in our household, Chad Michael Murray.

  DAUGHTER SOPHIE: Oh, Chad Michael Murray is really cool. A girl in my arts camp said she knows somebody whose cousin lives next door to him, and she can get his autograph for us!

  FRIEND: (Brain-piercing squeal) Eeeeeeee! That. Is. So. Totally. Cool.

  SOPHIE: That’s right, and guess what?

  FRIEND: What?

  SOPHIE: I forget!

  FRIEND: Yeah! Me, too!

  (Loud, prolonged giggles for roughly eight minutes while you wonder if constant exposure to high-pitched noises can sever your brain stem. I do kno w for a fact that certain noises can make you nuts. A kindly woma n at church once gave m y daughter a “talking prayer bear” that recited the Lord’s Prayer. Sadly, it was with a thick Japanese accent. You haven’t really lived until you’ve tucked your baby into bed and heard her recite what sounds like a badly dubbed Jackie Chan movie ending with a karate-chop “Ahhh-men!” Back in the car, though.)

  SOPHIE: I like Bratz bu t no t Yasmin. Momm y says Yasmin looks too skanky.

  FRIEND: What’s skanky?

  SOPHIE: It means pretty. But in a grown-up way. Like Mommy’s kinda skanky, not young or anything.

  FRIEND: I get it. My mommy’s skanky, too!

  SOPHIE (pausing for effect): Well, is she stanky, too?

  FRIEND: Eeeeeeeeee! (squealing and uncontrolled spewing of McDonald’s chocolate milk all over backseat of trusty Taurus)

  And, while we’re on the subject, memo to Morgan Spurlock, who made the fabulous and shocking documentary Super Size Me, in which he almost dies after eating McD’s food three times a day for a month. Dude—thanks for ruining my life. No more fast food after watching that one. Now I have to “plan menus” and “buy groceries” and, ohmigod again, “cook.”

  It could be lots worse, I guess. At least I don’t stank.

  Chauffeuring my kid around town has gotten harder now that there’s a new law requiring kids under eight to use booster car seats for safety’s sake.

  Have you ever tried to tell a kid who’s been out of a car seat for more than a year that she must get back in one because it’s the law?

  ME: Honey, remember that car seat that you were so happy to get out of when you were six? The one that your eight-year-old friend used to laugh at?

  SEVEN-YEAR-OLD (warily): Yeeessss?

  ME (very quickly): Well, they changed the law, and now you’re going to have to get back on that booster seat until you weigh eighty pounds, so if you don’t like the idea, you better start eating a lot of macaroni and cheese really quick.

  KID: So let me get this straight. Fat kids don’t have to use a booster seat?

  ME: Honey, Jit is a very negative word. In the South, we prefer to use words and phrases such as big-boned, or prosperous, but never fat. It’s quite rude.”

  KID: Are you serious? I have to ride in a car seat again? Like a baby? Why don’t you just rent me some Wiggles videos and make my humiliation complete?

  ME: Hon, all your friends will be in booster seats, too. Well, I mean, except for the fat ones. Oh, sorry! And look, it’s not like the car seat really little kids use, the one with the vomity-smelling padded bar in front and all those dried Cheerios in the cushions. It’s just the booster seat. No one will even know you’re sitting on it.

  KID: How long do I have to do this?

  ME: Well, like I said, you have to hit eighty pounds or until you’re eight years old.

  KID: My life is over.

  ME: Oh, honey, don’t be so dramatic. It’s for your own good.

  KID: Can’t we just say that I’m eight years old in case you get pulled over?

  ME: That’s lying!

  KID: What about the time we went to the circus and you said I was five when I was really six so you could save five bucks on admission?

  ME: Well, that’s different. You were acting five that day.

  KID: It’s not fair. How can they change the rules?

  ME: Dunno, sweetie. You got two choices. Suck it up for a few months or gain twenty-three pounds by January first.

  KID: Was that a Krispy Kreme we just passed?

  Getting out of the car seat is a rite of passage that’s right up there with losing a tooth.

  It means that your baby’s growing up. I’ll never forget when my daughter, then five, held her fist out to me, then opened it slowly.

  There, in the palm, was one perfect, pearly tooth that had inexplicably escaped its rightful home in her mouth.

  “The Tooth Fairy’s gonna come tonight!” Sophie squealed and danced around the kitchen clutching the tiny tooth while pointing to the hole where it used to be, bottom front and center.

  “Swell,” I said, finishing my coffee and dabbing my eyes. This was more in-your-face proof that my baby was growing up. I launched into a pathetic recitation of all the wonderful meals that little tooth had chomped on, the zillions of chicken nuggets, the pizzas, the broccoli and carrots. Yeah, okay, I made up those last two.

  Then it dawned on me. Trying to be cagey, I said, “Hmmm, by the way, how much does the Tooth Fairy pay for teeth these days, do you know?”

  “Well, Lucy got seventy dollars.”

  Lucy’s my daughter’s rich friend. Every kid should have one. Lucy’s mother would never shriek, “I told you we ain’t paying for that shit” if she gave away all her Lifetouch school pictures, including the “Bonus Little Patriot” flag-embossed keychain before she even got home like my kid did.

  This was a Teachable Moment, though. It was time, once again, for a reminder of How Things Used to Be.

  “Darling, when Mommy was a little girl, I got a shiny quarter from the Tooth Fairy, right under my pillow.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Well, back in Mommy’s day, that was about half of what you’d need to buy the latest forty-five from Creedence Clearwater Revival.”

  “Huh?”

  “CCR. You know, ‘Bad Moon Rising’?”

  “Were they better than Maroon Five?”

  “Uh. Well, actually, no.”

  Later that day, I decided to poll the mommies on how much the Tooth Fairy brings.

  Most said between five and ten bucks for a first tooth. I decided the tooth fairy would bring five dollars and a disclaimer that all future teeth would bring one dollar.

  “What’s a disclaimer?” my daughter asked, reading the letter the next morning.

  “Well, it’s like those things at the bottom of ads for prescription drugs that tell you in little print that there’s a halfway
decent chance that if you take the pill, it’ll cure you but you’ll also get excessive ear hair and a craving to eat dirt.”

  “Oh.”

  Later, I discovered there’s no pleasing the mommies. One said five bucks was ridiculously high; another said she wouldn’t consider giving less than twenty dollars for a First Tooth. But she’s the one who dressed as the fairy and made little fairy dust footprints on her daughter’s carpet so we all know she’s a nut job, right?

  Having an only child means that we get only one chance to do it right. There isn’t going to be a do-over, and there’s always some well-meaning person to point that out.

  The perky hostess at the family-friendly restaurant looked at our little party of three, still wearing church clothes and thinking only of cinnamon pancakes.

  “Just one child?” she asked, digging into a basket for crayons and a kiddie menu containing enough activities for a cross-country drive.

  “Well, yes,” said my husband, a trifle defensively. “Of course, there are days when she seems like more than one, but, no, it’s just one. I mean we were kind of late getting started, if you know what I mean, and we’re not getting any younger and so we just decided—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, shut up,” I hissed. “She just wants to know how many kid menus to grab.”

  “Oh.”

  As parents of an only child, we’re used to the “just one child” comment. There’s never any malice in it; at least I don’t think there is.

  Occasionally, well-meaning friends will beam and say things like, “I know she’s not spoiled!”

  Well, of course she is. And if I’d thrown a litter like some of them did, they’d all be spoiled, too. What’s your point?

  Very occasionally, someone will tsk-tsk and say things like “I bet you want a little brother or sister” to our daughter, and my jaw just drops.

  “I’m forty-six years old! “I want to scream at them. I mean, sure, I don’t look it. . . . Anyway, where am I supposed to get one of those? It’s not like they’re hanging out on an end cap at Target, and I don’t want to be one of those freaks you read about in the Enquirer that had a kid with “borreyed” eggs at age eighty-six or some such.