Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (6 page)

A lot of people were gettin’ some. Maybe more than some.

Big Eugene, who could usually be found smoking beneath the pecan trees on the schoolyard while the rest of us in fifth grade played hopscotch, announced that the wilder condoms were something called “French ticklers.” We said, “I know
that”
but Big Eugene, who had flunked an ungodly number of grades and already had a pencil-thin mustache, merely scowled dismissively at us through the haze from his Benson & Hedges. He knew we were lying, and even though we knew deep in our hearts that one day Big Eugene would be flipping off schoolchildren from his jailhouse window, we felt the need to impress him.

All of which is to say that I have some degree of field-trip phobia.

When my daughter announced her class was taking a field trip, I involuntarily shrieked “No!” but then had to realize that it was doubtful the kindergarten classes were going to prison or the dookie factory.

Indeed, it was the zoo. This would be safe and fun, I thought. Animals frolicking—what could go wrong?

Well, for starters, the baboon, who was frankly obsessed with amorous activities that didn’t require a partner.

“What’s he doing?” a few of the kids asked.

My husband, who was the only man who had come along to chaperone, decided he would deal with this question, and deal with it he did.

“That’s just the traditional baboon way of waving hello,” he said, sounding remarkably poised and knowledgeable.

“Oh,” a little boy in the class said. “Should we wave back?”

“Oh, God no.”

Next up: the “desert habitat” where an ancient camel proceeded to amuse the children by leaning down to eat his own shit. Without even moving his legs, the giraffe savored every bite as if it were the Christmas ham.

“Oooh, icky gross!
I think I’m gonna
hurl!”

“It’s just nature,” said one of the kids, trying to comfort my husband.

Not only are field trips different these days, but the very games that kids play on the playground are actually designed to prevent competition.

I know this because, at my daughter’s elementary school “activity day,” there wasn’t a single game of Kill or Red Rover in evidence, much less Kill’s kinder, gentler cousin, dodgeball.

And gone was the highly sexist game that we used to play back in the Wonder Years, the one that required all us girls to wait coyly for the arrival of a line of boys who would loudly announce, “Bum-bum-bum, here we come, all the way from Washing-
ton.”
I forget most of it except that when the boys shouted “Where are you from?” (or, actually, “Where y’all fum?”) we had to shout out, “Pretty Girls Station!” then squeal and run away from those baaaad boys from Washington. Perhaps they were future lobbyists.

The boys then chased the “pretty girls,” and the game ended with a lot of bloody knees and general playground mayhem. No mayhem is allowed these days. Ditto “horseplay” and “roughhousing.”

Kill has been banned from public school playgrounds for quite some time. Apparently the message of throwing a ball as hard as you could at an opponent who was then locked in “prison” but could get “paroled to kill again” was just a tad un-PC. Unless you were the kind of kid who longed to play on Chuckie Manson’s T-ball team, Kill wasn’t real appealing. After all, the game ended only when everyone on one team was “officially dead.”

I was vastly relieved to see that Red Rover had also disappeared. As the smallest kid in first grade, I dreaded Red Rover and pined to sit in the shade beside my classmate Michelle, a plucky little girl who had to wear a clunky metal back-and-neck brace and read during recess, looking
up only to sigh in disgust as the limbs of her classmates were snapped in the name of “fun.”

In Red Rover, the biggest, burliest boy would try to break through the weakest link (Yoo-hoo! That would be
me)
of knotted-up arms and elbows. I would always just shake my arm away and let him come through, much to the horror of my teammates.

Of course, I was also the first one “called over,” as in, “Red Rover, Red Rover, send the shrimpy kid over!” I would then pitifully pretend to break through the linked arms of the other team before going, “Oh! You got me. I’ll just sit over here with the girl with the screws in her skull.”

When I asked my daughter who won the egg-on-a-spoon race, she said she didn’t know ‘cause it was “just for fun.”

Okay. But would it have killed ‘em to keep score?

Although playground games aren’t allowed to be competitive, we parents find ways to compete, such as with homework. Parents love to complain about how much homework their kids have to do every night. It’s our generation’s equivalent of the old walking to school, uphill both ways, in the snow, with
rickets!

You think
your
kid has too much homework? Please, they say, waving a hand dismissively in your face: “My kid spends an average of eight-point-six hours per night just on
math.
Hell, he hasn’t had a bath since 1998. There is simply no time.”

To hear most parents tell it, Little Johnnie is so devoted to
his homework studies that he breaks only long enough to accept a tray of soup and cold cheese sandwiches slipped through the slot in his bedroom door.

Soccer practice? Ha!

Scouts? Who’s got the time?

Karate? Piano? Birthday parties? You must be kidding.

There must be too much homework. What else could explain those horrid wheeled backpacks that zip through school hallways at breakneck speeds, slicing ankles and tripping those unfortunate enough to be in their path? (If I get tripped by one more Diva Starz suitcase on wheels, I’m going to
lose it!
Oops, too late.) These backpacks the size of Guam (which, as I recall from my own geography homework days, is a small country somewhere between Chile and Mustard) must surely contain all the papers and books vital to completion of the night’s homework.

These days, to hear the parents tell it, it’s all homework, all the time.

Except, well, actually, it isn’t.

We know this now, thanks to a study by the Brookings Institution, a famous Washington think tank. (Motto: “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, you
are
stupider than us.”)

The researchers found that, in most cases, too much homework is, uh, a myth, and that truthfully, the great majority of kids have less than one hour of homework a night.

Not only that, but homework has actually decreased every year since 1984. At this rate, pretty soon your kid
should be able to finish homework for five classes in a SpongeBob commercial break.

This is great news for the parents who actually do all that homework. Anybody who’s ever been to a typical school science fair will quickly deduce that it’s incredibly difficult for most seven-year-olds to build a scale model of the space shuttle complete with astronauts that pee real Tang.

So how did we get the idea that American kids are “over-studying”? (As I write this, a Japanese seventh-grader is laughing hysterically somewhere.) Well, some of them are, but just one in ten, and, yes, we know that’s probably
your
kid and we should just shut up.

Face it. We can’t credibly whine about homework anymore. I know. I’m going to miss it, too.

So what do we do if we can’t compete on the playground or in homework?

We resort to Terrific Kids competitions.

To tell the truth, I was never real fond of those “I’ve got a terrific kid!” bumper stickers you see on the steroidal SUVs in the carpool line.

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.

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?