MOXIE MOM on Life & Kids
Musings on Teens
Just in the last few days, I feel like I suddenly have a teenager living in my house. (I’m sure by next fall—2010—I’ll be realizing I didn’t at all, but enough friends have commented on Leah’s stature and composure that I know the change is noticeable.)
I think the first shift was the haircut this week—very slight, really, going from long straight hair to long straight hair with a tiny bit of layering around the bottom (truly, I can’t tell the difference) and some side bangs that aren’t true bangs but do manage to flop across Leah’s eyes to give the impression of indifference, even if she’s not actually feeling that way. Gone is the pony tail that was the style of choice for about two years. Because long hair gets in your face, after all, and a pony tail is just so sensible. Only sensible isn’t the operative mood anymore.
I miss that pony tail even though I was the one to encourage wearing hair down.
Vocabulary: All at once, “emo” is top choice (pronounced eemo). Have you heard it? I hadn’t until last weekend. Neither had Leah, as far as I know. Granted, we were hanging with cousins, who range in age from 12 to 18, so how can you not catch up on the latest teen stuff? Emo, for the uninitiated, is short for emotional. I thought it was the name of a cute puppet from a show I hadn’t heard of.
Tight clothes: Okay, these have been creeping in over the last year, but now that school is just around the corner, Leah and I are in heated discussion about jeans and what size she should be wearing. I maintain that although, yes, she seems thinner than last year because she’s now taller and moving out of the squattier 10 & 11-year-old phase, her jeans should still be a size larger than those I bought last summer. Right? She’s not convinced. At all. But today, she agreed to let me exchange some of her new denim purchases for the next size up if I let her keep one pair of the tighter ones. Done.
Makeup: Definitely being used, although I will admit she wears it gracefully and minimally. I am keeping my mouth shut on this one.
Hard to say what’s coming next. Cell phone, I’m guessing. We’ve managed to put her off all summer. My sister-in-law nearly laughed out loud when I expressed doubt. All her kids have them, as do all of her 12-year-old daughter’s friends. Not having one is not even a conversation.
I sound like I’m complaining, but in truth I am amazed every day by the metamorphosis I see going on in my house—rather like a moth, pretty but a little plain, changing little by little into the luminous colors of a butterfly, if moths could do this, with new beautiful wings that flutter and stretch and brighten a little more each day.
1 commentChildhood Icons
Yesterday, Ty and I were hanging around the house together after his soccer camp, when he wandered through the kitchen past the radio and the breaking news it was airing.
“Hey,” he said, after he came to find me, “you know Michael Jackson?”
“Yeah.”
“I think he died.”
“He died?” Isn’t he my age?
We both headed to the kitchen to listen the news, and sure enough, he had “apparently” died. Apparently? Not too long later, the newscasters were saying he did die.
Wow. Michael Jackson has died (and it turns out he was older than I thought, though not by much). I didn’t own any of his albums when I was in high school, but I certainly remember his hits and his moonwalking taking the country by storm, although it wasn’t until yesterday that I learned his album “Thriller” was the top grossing album of all time (and now I can’t get that song out of my head). Even more memorable, I have been to the gate of his Neverland Ranch in California, very close to a private school my grandmother worked for, where I somehow managed to mar the landscaping with the car as I took the little loop drive at the entrance a little too sharply. My sisters guffawd when I did it. “You ruined Michael Jackson’s landscaping!” Thankfully, no guard sat in the guard box, or whatever you call it, and we escaped undetected.
When Curt got home from work, I asked if he’d heard the big news, and of course he had.
“Farrah, too,” he said.
“Farrah Fawcett died, too?!”
“Well, she had cancer, you know.”
“I know, but still. I loved that show!”
“You did? I thought that show was a guy thing,”
Oh. Well, maybe it was, but growing up as I did with no TV in the house, I was desperate to watch anything, and I remember loving the tough chicks with the big hair in their stylish clothes. Did other girls? I have no idea.
“What show?” Ty wanted to know.
“Charlie’s Angels,” I told him. “Remember when we watched the movie Charlie’s Angels while we were at Disneyland? Farrah Fawcett was one of the original angels in the TV show.”
Sorry, the movie will never cut it for me. No one could replace Farrah Fawcett. I’m not sure why she looms so large in my mind, but likely because I was ten or so when she was so hot, and watching girls kick ass was cool. It was the age of feminism, after all, and I don’t recall too many other models of sexy feminine strength, except maybe that show Isis that kids watched on Saturday mornings. Anyway, Farrah, with her red bathing suit, curling ironed hair, and white, white teeth, will always be one of those indelible associations with childhood in the 70s. Michael Jackson was cool, too (although he got too weird for words), but I never related to him like I did the girl power Farrah embodied for me.
I wonder who the icons will be for my kids when they’re adults. I hope it’s not Miley Cyrus.
2 commentsLast Day of School
Today is the last day of school, and I have two hours before Leah comes storming home, elated to be out for the summer. Ty, an hour after that. Yikes. Where did the time go? How is it I now have a seventh grader?
As I do every summer, I’ve been thinking about what the kids can do around the house so I can get some work done (ha!).
1. Read (uh huh).
2. Help yourself to food (and I don’t mean cookies) rather than ask Mom to do it (right).
3. Play games with each other (in my dreams).
4. Go places together without me, say, to the park or the corner store or the school playground (still in dreamland).
5. Stay off the computer except for the allotted time allowance (good luck to me).
This is what I imagine really happening: The kids will not read or play games or go places together. They’ll lie around and moan that they’re bored. They’ll ask me to fix them breakfast or lunch, or at best, they’ll fix themselves something and leave the kitchen in a complete shambles that they’ll only sort of clean up when I ask them to, and I’ll end up wishing I’d just made the meal because the cleanup will be so involved it isn’t worth it in the end. Instead of relying on each other, they’ll call friends, and I’ll end up in charge of a couple of 9-year-old boys who need food (often) and who will hunker over Heroscape all afternoon in the confines of a small, upstairs bedroom, getting no exercise whatsoever while I crank on work. Leah will beg me to take her shopping for summer clothes she could use but doesn’t really need because she feels most loved by those around her when they buy things for her. They’ll bicker every day and chase each other around the house to torment each other and Ty will come running to me to hide behind me for protection after he instigated whatever it was that pissed off Leah. They’ll spend way more time on the computer than I realize. Two weeks into summer I will be looking at the calendar. When is it school starts again?
In truth, I do love summer. I love the sleep-in mornings (theirs), berry picking, flip flops, summer sunrise, dry grass, leafy trees, music in the parks, riding bikes, warm(ish) evenings, trips to the library, going to Mallards. It’s all good. Really, who doesn’t love summer? Now, if I could just do something about that bickering…
2 commentsMeat
Sometime in the last week, Leah suddenly and inexplicably returned to eating meat. I think it might have been the night we were having hot dogs for dinner.
“I’m not going to be a vegetarian anymore. Can I have a hot dog, too, please?”
But of course.
“Does this mean you’re going to be eating all kinds of meat or just hot dogs?” I asked.
“Mm, I don’t really know. Hot dogs, I guess. Is that okay? I mean, is it weird to just eat one or two kinds of meat and not all of them?”
“You can do whatever you want.”
But you know what I’ve noticed? Every time I ask her if she wants whatever meat we’re having, she says yes. And chows it. It makes me wonder if her growing body craves meat the way pregnant women crave it. I don’t know much about these things, other than what I experienced with my own pregnancies. I was a partial vegetarian—seafood only—back when I got pregnant with Leah (nearly thirteen long years ago), and I took to eating a can of tuna a day. Ack! This was back before there were any limits recommended, and I still wonder how much mercury might be floating around in our two bodies. Or is it settled in a heavy layer on the floor of our stomachs? By the time I was pregnant with Ty, the recs were out, so I ate chicken instead. Now I eat anything. Well, tuna freaks me out.
(Or maybe it was all that track that brought Leah back to meat. By the way, the second day of the city meet went swimmingly for her—she and her teammates won the 4 X 100 relay, and they were stoked. So was her mama.)
Anyway, we accommodated Leah’s vegetarian diet for over a year, which didn’t feel like a deal since I did the same for myself for fifteen years. We served up tofu in place of pork chops, bought all manner of veggie burgers (still do), and combined beans and rice, which I’ve since learned is an outmoded idea.
At one point, I wondered if she was getting the nutrients she needed, as a pubescent girl. Did she need more protein than an adult woman needed? More iron? More calcium?
I went through a phase of checking out veggie cookbooks from the library and figured out that no, a veggie diet is fine, and that it’s more important to eat healthily across the board than to substitute protein for protein. I also figured out that my kids’ diets, both of them, were sorely lacking in the greens department. (But really, what kids’ vegetarian cookbook recommends kale, for Pete’s sake? What planet are these people on?)
Still, I went through a phase of thinking about my kids’ diets, worrying they weren’t getting their daily sources of iron and calcium (sugary yogurt doesn’t count in my book). I even tried a peanut butter squash stew thing that one book proclaimed a kids’ favorite. The result? “You have got to stop reading these cookbooks, Mom,” Leah said. She and Ty refused to touch the stew.
So I quit reading. And I stopped thinking about what my kids ingest except only in the most general way—have they had any fruit today, or something vegetable-y? I figure as long as their diets aren’t too processed, we’re probably doing okay.
And the meat eating? Bring it on. It’s awfully nice cooking one menu for everyone. Of course, if we’re not eating burritos or pasta, there is the Ty conundrum.
“What am I going to eat, Mom?”
4 commentsModern Motherhood
A couple days ago, Leah asked me if she could start shaving her legs. On Facebook.
Is this the girl equivalent of playing alongside your boy so he’ll talk to you? (Shoulder to shoulder, I believe is the phrase.) Or is it that our children—girls—are now relying to screens, as they rely on texting friends, to communicate with their parents?
My first thought, when I got the message—one of those pesky little emails you get whenever someone writes on your wall—was that she’d alerted the rest of the world with her request. I asked her if she’d meant to go public with such a personal question (which begs the question why am I blogging about it? More on that in a minute.).
“It was just to you, Mom; no one else knows.”
Ah. And indeed, when I checked, she was correct. I think I need another Facebook tutorial, so challenged am I with this popular communication tool.
So we talked about the issue at hand, in person, which she didn’t seem to mind, although I couldn’t think of much to say except yes, and who else in her class was shaving her legs, and was this popular now?
There is that whole argument that my mother gave me at that age, which is that leg hair will grow in thicker and darker once you start, but it didn’t stop me—is this even true?—so I figured why go there? Also the argument that she just doesn’t need to, too young, etc. But the reality is we’re here. At the leg-shaving stage. Everything is at hand these days.
Which leads me to reassure you I won’t be giving pubescent updates when milestones are reached. Privacy at stake and all that.
But Facebook… I couldn’t resist this latest development. (You know, if it gets the conversation rolling, I’m all for it.)
I wonder where the parents of today’s infants will be in ten years.
4 comments