Let's go team!

Well, that didn't take long.

Three weeks after Earbaby said goodbye to all-things gymnastic, she was revelling in the fact that even though she would be taking five dance classes a week (two at one studio and three at her new place), she would have more free time, since at least two nights a week she didn't have any commitments and her latest dance class ended at 6:45. Then she was asked to join the cheerleading squad.

It seems she had missed the tryouts in the spring, when girls who wanted on this newly minted and official squad (EB's school hadn't had a real cheerleading squad in five years) made videos and went through the process of being chosen. But one of those girls quit, and the captain remembered EB had participated on the unofficial spirit squad, where she was a "triple threat": she could cheer, dance and tumble. So she was invited to come on, sans the video tryout.

Of course she said yes.

Two weeks before school started, she met with the captain and a couple of others to learn the routine. The week before school, the girls, 16 strong, baked in the hot sun for three-hour practices to get ready for their first game, which came on the second day of school.

Now EB is having to figure out where she falls in the realm of cheerleading culture. For one thing, as a gymnast, she always turned her nose up a bit at "cheerleaders." Gymnasts consider themselves athletes, and it's been a real push-pull with cheerleading, which has become more than standing around shaking a couple of pompoms and yelling rhythmic versions of Go, team! With cheerleading becoming more athletic (and dangerous), official cheerleading is now under the auspices of USA Gymnastics Association, which should help with the squads getting better trained coaches. So EB doesn't have to feel too bad about becoming one of the people she used to make fun of. (Doesn't that happen to all of us, sooner or later?)

Still, she's seen enough Glee episodes and cheerleader mean girl movies to know that there can be some truth to the stereotype. So she initially balked when the captain started excitedly talking about them going on competitions and getting photos taken and sitting together at lunch. EB's friends are her friends. She doesn't want to sit with the "cool and popular" kids like in the movies.

She also rolled her eyes a little bit when she was told they were to wear their uniforms to school on game days. You know, school spirit and all that.

It's been a bumpy road for this new team. For one thing, all the paperwork wasn't submitted in time for the girls to go on the field for the first, second or third games. They had been practicing and would do their tumbling for the crowd after the first two games (both wins), and were given a lot of support by the football team, the students, the teachers, and the coaches. But the rules of when they could actually perform frustrated them.

And this is when they got their first lessons on how to be a team. By week three, they were snapping at each other and EB said she was going to quit if they didn't get a chance to perform. It wasn't fun any more. I informed her that she was not quitting. Being part of a team means you don't cut and run when things don't go your way the first, second or even third time. They are all still learning the lessons of commitment and perserverance.

As for me, I had to examine how I feel about the stereotypes of girls cheering boys' accomplishments. As a teenager, I was on drill team, as a 20-something, I founded and coached a drill team. As a feminist, I try to eschew gender stereotypes. As the new mother of a daughter I had wanted and waited a long time for, I dressed her in ridiculous amounts of pink. Talk about mixed messages.

So now, am I living vicariously through my daughter and ignoring the anachronistic symbolism? I hope not. When I asked if they would be cheering for basketball, she said she didn't know. And we both agreed (and so did some of her friends) that it would be incredibly sexist to cheer for only the boys' team and not the girls' but we'll cross that time-management bridge if we come to it.

The good news is the girls did finally get to perform. I didn't see it, but EB's dad did (and thankfully taped it for me) and thought they were great. I'm just glad to see all that money for years of gymnastics is paying off somewhere. And although she's in a tough exam school with homework that keeps her up until all hours and eats into her weekend time now, she's getting into some of the fun, social aspect of high school, the stuff you remember decades later when you return for reunions. You may remember the pain of the homework or the disappointment of your team's losses, but it won't hurt anymore. You will remember the football games, the quincenearas, the Sweet 16s, the friends you got closer to because you had lunch together, the joy of feeling part of your school community.

As for that illusion of more free time? Well, when they stopped practicing on Mondays, a friend asked if she was going to rejoin the dance team, that meets only once a week, on Mondays.

Of course she said yes.

Decisions, decisions

It's that time of the year again. As the last month of the summer draws near, we start to assess how much her extracurricular activities are going to cost us (actually, me) -- in time, money, and emotional turmoil.

And Earbaby has finally decided that it's time to let gymnastics go -- this time for good.

I'm a little sad about it. I loved gymnastics, the meets, the friends we made through them. But times have changed. Her best friend from gymnastics left the gym more than two years ago when her family moved out of the area, and even though they see each other once in a great while, the real closeness they had is gone, a consequence of distance and circumstances.

EB went back to the gym last year. She didn't miss the competition and the meets, but she did miss the strength and flexibility the workouts gave her. She was given special dispensation to go only one day a week instead of the minimum requirement of two three-hour evenings, but because the hours had changed from 5-8 p.m. to 6-9 p.m., that came with special problems of its own. She always had a lot of homework, and because she couldn't go early and do it there (no place to sit and concentrate) she missed many days. She couldn't make it up the following week because the other day she would have gone she had committed to a dance class, that she grew to hate (more about that later).

In the meantime, the social landscape had changed. Much of this particular gymnastics team experience came from the relationship with the other teammates. But since she had been pretty much gone from the gym for a year, and off the team for almost two, her friends, those few still around, had become acquaintances. "No one talks to me," was a frequent complaint. I found myself paying a monthly fee for her to only go once or twice instead of four times. Which was frustrating for both of us. She would complain to her dad I was making her go, and complain to me that her dad was always telling her to quit. Both of those things were true to a certain extent. She would tell me she really wanted to do it, but would tell her dad she was stressed from the homework. Finally I told her to stop complaining to her dad, and told him to stop encouraging her to quit every time she complained.

This has been the push-pull of the last school year. Summer came, and she decided she wanted to go back to team. Again. But after she pulled another "I want to go Mom, Mom's making me go, Dad," I told her I wasn't spending another dime on gymnastics (I pay all bills for extracurriculars). If she wanted to go, she had to convince her dad to give up the money. So she did. He paid for the month of July, whereby she immediately decided that she wasn't getting the workout she wanted. It was two mornings a week and one evening of three-hour sessions. But the mornings started at 8 a.m. and depending on who showed up, it was less workout and more game-playing like summer camp. The night session she loved, it was hard conditioning, which was what she signed up for. So once again, the complaints started. But this time, she realized it's just time to call it a day. Most of her friends were quitting too, she said, although they wanted to finish out the summer.

I am sad to see that chapter end, but also relieved. And let's face it, she was pretty good, but not college scholarship good. She's a little too tall and thin for what a school would be looking for, plus, she doesn't really have the competitive fire to put the real work in. This activity has just run its course.

EB took last week off from gymnastics to attend an intensive dance workshop at a new studio where she'll be studying in the fall. She also decided it was time to leave the hip-hop studio she has attended for the last three years.

EB has been dancing since she was three, and at one time expressed desire to dance professionally. She's still assessing her options now, wondering if she can make a living at it, and if she wants to put the work in (she admits to being basically lazy). But last year's dance classes at her second studio (the first one she plans to stay at until she graduates) ended with bad feelings all around. She took three classes, including a company class for one of the dance crews, but grew to hate the politics of the studio. The mean girls ruled, there was no accounting for the overt and covert bullying, the teachers either encouraged it or simply looked the other way, the classes and studio were in constant chaos, and she felt humiliated and marginalized. She honored that commitment to her classes because she had begged to take classes there, but knew she didn't want to go back.

But she wanted to take hip-hop with good teachers (there is no strong hip-hop class at her original studio). So I reached out to a friend who runs another studio and it looks like EB has found another place. She still has complaints, her ballet isn't very strong, so she will have to take two classes a week to build up on that fundamental, but she does get a really good hip-hop teacher. In the one week she found only one dancer who was less than friendly, one of the "stars," but there's one in every studio. There's more discipline (when the teacher says to switch lines, the kids actually switch instead of the mean girls staying in front and the teachers not making them move back). When she moaned about how bad she was in ballet, one of the other girls assured her that particular class was at a higher level, but her class wouldn't be as hard. She made friends the first day, so was comfortable enough to befriend another newbie who came in later in the week.

But EB has more decisions to make than giving up one activity and switching studios. She also has to decide how much commitment she is willing to make. These classes don't come cheap, so I don't want another year of whining, passive-aggressive dawdling when it's time to go (she invariably would make me late for work), or picking hanging out with her friends instead of being in dance class. She'll be a sophomore, so there will be times when she'll have lots of homework. But her schedule will be structured so there will be few late nights (her last class on any given night will be over before 7, not starting at 7:30 like last year).

In years past, EB has participated in dance, gymnastics, step squad, dance team, cheerleading, piano and voice lessons, and baton twirling. Anything she wanted to try, we let her give it a shot.

But as she grows older, it's time to narrow her focus. Most of her activities have become more time-consuming and more expensive, hence the frustration of paying for something only to have her undermine me by complaining to her dad (who was never much of a joiner, so quitting is always his go-to advice).

I also have to remember to respect her when she decides to drop an activity. I have to let her make tough choices and stand by them, not go back and forth and play one parent off the other. Figuring out how to spend Mom's money isn't the hardest decision she'll have to make. It's just practice for when she's the one footing the bill. That's when the real tough choices have to be made. By then, I want her to have learned how to make them.

Don't tell

Nobody likes a tattletale.

Snitches get stitches.

And wind up in ditches.

At some point in a teenager's life -- and that point is starting to come earlier and earlier it seems -- the probability of drinking and drug experimentation comes into play and they have a decision to make. Will they go along with the crowd or take a step back?

Earbaby recently had to make that decision when she was faced with such a dilemma. Now, even though she no longer goes to my church with any regularity (too many old people), and prefers to go with her dad, because she has friends who go there, she still holds firm to her United Methodist values (don't worry Mom, I'm United Methodist, I don't drink). We started talking early about underage drinking and drug use, specifically marijuana, and about the fact that she would one day be in a situation where she might feel pressured to use.

Although we talked about it early enough I thought, as early as seventh grade she had classmates who had started drinking and using pot. At first it was just acquaintances, and she looked with disdain upon this activity, but soon enough she knew some of the players as friends.

Some kids got into trouble, because they got into some parent's liquor cabinet, got drunk, took pictures, and you know what's next. Yes, they posted it on Facebook, the place where stupidity and indiscretions go for a longer shelf life. When a parent saw it and told the other parents in the group, so many kids were grounded, it was for a short time the talk of school. And that was before they even got into high school.

EB's attendance at an exam school that pulls from every neighborhood in the city exposes her to different cultures, ethnicities and income levels. It also exposes her to the knowledge of bad behavior many parents would like to bury their heads in the sand about. Or worse, laugh it off as youthful shenanigans. But do you really want your 12- and 13-year-old to have the reputation as a pothead? Is it really OK if they drink at your house so they will get used to it and not binge their first weekend in college?

EB grew up knowing our clear rules about drinking. Her dad is a social drinker. I'm a teetotaler. That's a choice I made and I told her why I choose not to ever drink. She, so far, sees no value in it and I've given her the reasons people do use alcohol -- to feel more comfortable in social settings, to be sociable, to have a good time. I've also told her that for some people, having a good time could mean getting blind drunk and doing things they might not do under sober circumstances. And some decisions made while inebriated can become dangerous and/or life-threatening.

I'm not going to say I was objective about drinking. I personally think it's unnecessary. She has heard of her friends getting drunk or high and thinks it's just stupid. That's my girl.

But then there's that middle school/high school parental angst because you don't know your child's friends -- or their parents -- anymore. Enough mishaps have happened that I no longer trust a parent's word as bond. Sometimes they're intentionally misleading, as in not mentioning they will be out of town as they invite your kid over for a sleepover. Sometimes they are evasive, as in leaving a sleepover where your kid is and not coming back and then offering no explanation. Ever.

And sometimes parents just have no clue what their kids are up to even when they're in the house. So when EB went to a sleepover recently, we had several long talks. We talked about drinking, pot use and those parties where kids find whatever is in their parents' medicine cabinet, throw it in a bowl, and take a few, not knowing what they're taking but trying to find a high.

"My friends aren't like that," she said. "They wouldn't be my friends if they were."

While I admired EB's confidence in her friends' characters, I also was 15 once, and happen to know that kids sometimes are totally different outside of parental observation and with older teens around. So I told her that if she was ever in a situation where she felt uncomfortable for any reason, to just call us and we would be there right away to get her. No questions asked and no punishment for her. She was never to get in a car with someone who had been drinking (Does that include Dad? Yes, although after a couple of drinks at dinner, I always get the keys), don't take an open drink from someone, don't come back to a drink you have left, and if you start feeling funny or sick, call and we'll get you home safely. That last part I was thinking of college, but I'm not naive enough to think kids can't get roofied at earlier ages.

With all the eye-rolling and "I know Moms" I wondered if she was paying attention. She was.

The night of her sleepover, I was headed home from work. I was 10 minutes from my door when I got her text "can you come and get me, right now?" I pulled over, texted her back, "text me the address," made a U-turn and headed back out into the night. Thirty minutes later she was getting into my car and I was pulling away.

Turns out the older sister of one of the kids showed up with a boyfriend and a joint in tow. A couple of her friends decided to smoke it with them and EB got uncomfortable. That's not her scene, so she did exactly what she was supposed to and got the heck out of Dodge.

Then the drama began. She was disappointed in the friends, who had an idea why she left, but they were begging her (via text of course) not to tell me why. They wanted to her to lie to me, and she didn't know if she should lie to them and tell them I didn't know. I said, no, you don't have to. Of course, once they knew I knew, they were petrified I would rat them out to their parents.

I didn't. And frankly, I didn't think about it much. Because I don't know their parents. Had EB been with kids whose parents I know, and I would be certain wouldn't shoot the messenger, I may have given it a second thought. But I was more concerned about my daughter getting out of an uncomfortable situation, than snitching on her friends and making EB a target for later. So I told her I had no intention of telling on anyone, but if asked a direct question, I wouldn't lie.

So EB didn't have to worry about being ostracized at school. Some of the kids who had been at the gathering and had left earlier, also were disappointed at the impromptu pot party. And gave it to the kids who took part. EB learned she isn't the only straight arrow in her group.

There were a few lessons learned that night. EB found out she didn't know her friends as well as she thought. She didn't want to judge them, but she was a little disappointed in them. She wasn't pressured into staying somewhere she felt uncomfortable and she knew we were proud of her for knowing how to extract herself with dignity.

Don't tell, they begged her. She didn't. But parents, if you haven't started asking, you may already be too late.

Sibling revelry

One of the downsides of being an only child, and there are a few, is the lack of sibling rivalry. While this may be an upside sometimes to spoiled only children like Earbaby, it's a downside in learning how to negotiate, retaliate, conspire and the fine art of tattling.

EB has heard the word "no" probably a lot fewer times than she should. She sometimes will admit she's spoiled, but a second or two later, will complain about the struggle she has with being an only child, what with not always getting such necessities as iTunes cards on demand, or being told that going to Starbucks nearly every day is turning her into a crack baby, addiction-wise.

My husband and I both are middle children of three. There is no substitution for the shared history of family, both good and bad. If you're lucky, and we both are, you actually like your siblings and as you become middle-aged orphans (we've each lost a parent), that shared history and shared grief can help you through the worst times of your life.

I worry that EB won't have that. She's the youngest grandchild on my side of the family tree and the second youngest on her dad's. Her cousins on his side are closer in age and she used to see them more often, before life got in the way. Now we're pretty much limited to holidays, but when they were younger, and she spent more time with her cousins she is closest to in age, she got a taste of the sibling stuff. The three girls could get along for a good 3-5 minutes before the bickering began. Sleepovers were nightmares for the hosting parent. Yet they love each other and beg to spend time together every family gathering. Now that they're older, I may even relent from my previous ban of sleepovers at my house on my watch.

EB would fight with these two sisters the way she never would with friends. The two sisters would argue about everything, par for the course for sisters about three years apart. EB is exactly 1 1/2 years younger than one and 1 1/2 years older than the other. Just enough of a space for the three to try, and many times fail, to get along for any extended length of time.

Now, on the other side of the family, she is nine years younger than her cousins closest in age. When she was a baby, she was their baby when we saw them, which was only once or twice a year. But as she, and they, grew up, she was able to relate to them not as a cute little plaything, but as a fully formed human being.

This summer I got a glimpse of her getting a chance at being the younger sister. First, Zoe came to visit. Her friend Noelle was getting married and Zoe was in the wedding party. After the festivities, Zoe came to stay with us for a few days before heading back home. And EB, whose baseline demeanor many days is sullen, reveled in her visit.

Her cousin is easily one of the most loving, caring and all-around best people on earth. She has the unique position of being both an only child and a child with siblings. She is her mother's (my sister's) only child, but has older siblings from her father's previous wife. The closest one to her age was a teenager when she was born, and there was a prickly period during her formative years, with her teenage sister having natural feelings of jealousy (how would you like to have been the baby for 15 years and then suddenly "replaced"?), yet now that Zoe is a grown woman herself, their relationship has become closer. Zoe was an aunt at a very young age and her oldest niece is only a year older than her youngest cousin.

Zoe came to her second home here in Boston and swept EB out of her teenaged funk. She could talk to her and tease her (she told EB she was a troll and EB responded she would spit in her food) and EB could give as good as she got, one skill only learned by having and being a sibling.

When she and I went to visit my mother before school started, she spent time with another cousin, Leila, and again got the little sister treatment. And also in a good way. Leila is the last cousin left in the city. Zoe went to teach in South Korea, where Leila's sister Lana is already teaching, and Leila's twin brother Joseph, moved down under.

So for a couple of short days, Leila, herself a little sister, got to be a big sister. The two girls holed up in a bedroom, talking, sharing music, hair tips and facial masks.

EB gets the best from her cousins, if only for a short while. I treasure these relationships with her extended family. She won't have the shared history with siblings that her dad and I had. But with any luck at all, she'll be close enough with her cousins, all of them, to know that even when she becomes a middle-aged orphan, she'll never be alone.

Conflict resolution

There are few things more dramatic, and traumatic, than that first big fight with your best friend.

It's been a little over two weeks, and it's all over now, but for the better part of a week, Earbaby and her closest friend Beth went at each other with the intensity and vitriol never before seen outside the confines of this household. She and I have had these battles, and I understand that it's common in households with mothers and daughters, but this was especially devastating.

Now EB is no shrinking violet, although she has been known to "bawl her eyes out" while in conflict with a friend or two from her inner circle at school. But those usually are resolved within a day or two. When it's been worse than that, sometimes the friendship dies and EB seems none the worse for wear.

But this was Beth, whom EB absolutely adores. It started with a small irritation and suddenly grew into a monster screaming match. But the real culprit here is one I've blamed, explained and complained about many times, of course to deaf ears.

It's our old enemy the text.

As I've told EB many, many times (don't know why I bother at this point), reading a text can be tricky. There are no inflections, no facial expressions (no matter how many emoticons you add) and so there's no context to draw from. The one word hello, can be read as hello, are you there? Or it can be hel-loo, I'm waiting to hear back from you, or hell-looo, in a sarcastic tone. It's one word, but since you apply the context, you read it the way you're thinking the other person meant it.

By the time these two finished screaming at each other mostly through texts, calling each other names other than the ones they were born with, and generally being all consumed with the escalation of a silly irritation, EB had unfriended her best friend on Facebook and was begging me to go in and block her phone number (I refused, and she realized two minutes later she was being impulsive). Beth for her part uninvited herself to a baseball game and a concert she had been invited to months earlier, but both happening within days.

By the fifth or sixth day, EB was exhausted from fighting with Beth, which spilled over to her dad and me. When I told her Beth was probably just as miserable, she answered tearily, "No, she's probably loving this." It will take a few more years before she realizes that no one loves fighting with their best friend. It hurts everyone.

I didn't want to step in. I love them both, and who they are when they are together. I didn't want to call Beth's mom and I certainly wanted EB to learn how to resolve her own conflicts, particularly one that was so painful. And she was in pain. She had never fought with Beth and she had planned on spending as much time with her this summer as possible before vacations and eventually school limited their time. So after the baseball game (she invited another friend, who also had tried to be a peacemaker between the two), I told her not to invite anyone else to the concert she had been looking forward to since she found out about it Christmas Day.

And I told her it was time for the two of them to make up. They had gotten stuck in a continuous loop of "you said this, so I said that" and every attempt to fix the fight deteriorated after rehashing the reason.

I remember years ago when relationship counselors would talk about fighting fair. No name-calling or hitting below the belt with intentionally hurtful things. I always thought it was good in concept, but usually no one worried about rules and fighting fair when hurt and extremely angry. The point is to hurt, isn't it? It was time to learn to stop saying hurtful things before the two "sisters" said something they couldn't take back.

So I told EB it was time to get unstuck. I said she should call, not text (!) Beth and say, "Listen, we were both wrong, and I'm sorry and I love you." No rehashing of the fight, no more talking about it at all.

And she listened. She called Beth, apologized and was happy to hear Beth say the same thing. And she had been just as miserable and sad.

They went to the concert together, Beth spending the night here before and after the big night. They're two peas in a pod again. EB says it's like the fight never happened. This may not be the last time these two have a conflict. As they get older and more mature, they will learn that every disagreement doesn't have to go from zero to DEFCON 1, that they can survive and still love each other. It was a tough week. These two young women in training just got a little stronger, and a lot tougher.

Peace has returned to the valley and life is good again.

The 6 p.m. meltdown -- revisited

When Earbaby was just a toddler going to daycare and then preschool a few days a week, she didn't have bad days at school. After her initial days of getting used to being "abandoned," with her starting to cry when we turned onto the street of her first daycare place, she gradually warmed to playing with her friends and was eager to go see Michelle and Jordan, two girls her own age. We had to go through another adjustment period when we changed daycare facilities, finding the first one lacking in both activities and the ability to keep good teachers. When her fourth or fifth really good teacher left and her activity sheet consistently read "watched Barney on television," I knew it was time for a serious upgrade.

With her new place, the director hated planting the kids in front of the television, the teachers took the kids out in the play yard every day, or out for a walk to a nearby park, her preschool teacher was Montessori trained and the kids at the age of four could say the Pledge of Allegiance, knew who the President of the United States was, and were pretty spot on on shapes and colors, things some kids would be learning for the first time in kindergarten. EB loved her new school, and her teacher said she never had a bad day.

Then we learned of the 6 p.m. meltdown. That's when your happy little preschooler has been good all day and waits until you come to finally let out all the stresses of the day. Some parents see it when their kid starts crying just as they arrive. That's actually a good thing -- it's not that they're not happy to see you, it's just that they've been having such a good time, they're not ready for it to end.

EB was always glad to see us. Many times it was her dad who picked her up after he got off work, but if there was a meltdown, it would come after her time with her friends ended. The same way adults need to decompress after a tough day at the office, kids also need time after a full day. They just get to cry it all out. If adults did that after their shift ended, eventually someone would suggest some kind of psychiatric intervention. So we end the day with a walk, a veg-out  session in front of the television, or a glass of wine. But it's still a bit of a 6 p.m. meltdown.

I naively thought those toddler days of meltdowns after a tough day were over. I've since come to put two and two together and realize about half the fights between EB and me (or her dad) are the teenage version of the 6 p.m. meltdown.

We have been marveling (sometimes in horror) her ability to turn on a dime. She can go from happy to sullen in 60 seconds or less. And while you have the patience to deal with a toddler or preschooler who just needs to calm herself, it is downright exasperating to deal with a teenager who just decided to get outright nasty because you don't have the time, energy, or money to take her for a brand new wardrobe at that minute, or stop by the drugstore for the 12th time that week so she can try yet another hair product her friend recommended to make her hair look the way her friend's hair does.

The ridiculosity (urban dictionary) of trying to guess the mood changer is angrifying (yes, urban dictionary word too). Toddler meltdowns are expected and usually after a time they can be distracted and soothed. Teenage meltdowns can last for hours, or even days, and they can be more verbally violent than the worst tantrum thrown by a three-year-old. A three-year-old saying I hate you hurts. A 14-year-old saying it just makes you thoroughly ticked off.

Granted, teenagers are pushing the envelope all the time. They are toddlers with better verbal skills, more freedom than they can handle, hormonally challenged and unbalanced, too much reliance on and influence from friends, and yet, strangely, a total lack of cognizance of consequences for their bad decisions.

Earbaby didn't have many tantrums when she was younger, although that could be my amnesia kicking in. I do remember when she used to kick up such a fuss over having to leave the park, I was beside myself, until my sister suggested I prepare her by saying, we're leaving in 10 minutes, and then counting down. It worked and she would come along easily, having learned how to transition from one activity to another.

It worked at four, it doesn't work at 14. When I say it's time to go, or give her a time limit on when to come home, she pushes back. The teenage meltdown is negotiation, cajoling, defiance, tantrum and then sullen acceptance. By the time it's all over, everyone is angry and exhausted, too many bitter words have been spoken, forgiveness seems almost an impossibility, and then -- she turns on a dime, sits in your lap for a hug (!) and tries another tack to get her way.

Consequences are just another negotiation tool. When EB was grounded for outright defiance, she refused to accept her culpability, instead turning it into an attack of the rules and the whole parenting dynamic. She didn't become contrite, she became contrary. This meltdown lasted for the better part of a week before the realization dawned that throwing a tantrum wasn't going to work, it only made me angrier and more resistant to giving her a break. And that apology for being openly disobedient? Well, let's just say I'm not holding my breath.

The one thing I am sure of with this whole new phase of defiance and irrational behavior, is that it will only get worse before it gets better. I remember when EB was little and having a tough day and I would tell myself that, one, these days would pass, and two, I would miss her at that age. Both of those things are true.

But should I (and she) survive these teenage meltdown years, I'm betting I won't miss these days. At all. But I do wish the one thing all mothers wish for their children. I hope she has a daughter one day -- who is just like her.

Living history

Last weekend Earbaby, my husband and I traveled to my hometown to surprise her grandmother, my mother, for a 90th birthday celebration. Much of my mother's extended family in town would be there, including cousins and second cousins EB had never met, but I grew up with. It was a chance to connect and reconnect with the side of  her family that she rarely sees, simply because of geography.

When I moved to the East Coast, many, many years ago, it was as a single woman looking to upgrade both her job and her living situation. I managed to accomplish both. But no matter how many years I live here, and maybe even if I die here, when the plane touches down in the midwest, I'm home. Ironically, I'm starting to feel that way both going and coming.

But EB feels she has two homes also, the one she was born in, and the one where her mother's family lives. And she misses that one most acutely. As my mother ages, EB knows she needs to grab that part of her life before her own mother becomes a middle-aged orphan.

"I need to see Grandma," she will tell me several times a year. "She's just so cute and adorable."

This last trip was fun, satisfying, and as always for her and me, too short. She didn't really get any one-on-one time with her grandmother, and as she gets older, she wants more of that than time and circumstances can promise. Her friends see their grandparents all the time, she says, some of them every day. But she doesn't get that luxury, so this trip was special, and she's already asking when we'll pass this way again.

However, her summer is already filling up with plans of summer camps and dance classes, and obligations of summer reading and dialectical journals. I'm also wondering if I should think about preparing her for freshman math by continuing the services of her tutor. It might be a good preemptive strike, and she also just might rebel.

I want her to have some down time too, so a summer concert, baseball game, and a trip to California are also planned. Yet, she needs to spend more time with Grandma, who although healthy despite having lost her sight to glaucoma and cataracts, still has more years behind her than in front of her.

So this weekend was most important in celebrating her time on this earth thus far. My other sister and her husband flew in from their newly relocated home in Florida, my mother's last living sibling, her "baby" brother and his wife came in from Oregon, and other relatives, including a grandniece from New Jersey, all came together.

My mother is a shy woman, and as I reflect, probably painfully so. She never made many friends on the block where she has lived for 50 years, and the two closest ones have died. Her family members are the only  people close to her.

But this trip, although about my mother, was about EB too. As a biracial child, she has two sides of her family who look distinctly different. And although she spends almost all her holidays with her father's side of the family, as she gets older, she notices and is hurt by things surrounding the cousins she's closest to in age.

"We're Republicans," her cousins tell her proudly. "My dad says your mother is a Democrat, which I guess is O...Kay ..." And the "but" is implied. Or their friends ask how can she be their cousin, since she's not also white, is she adopted? The hurt is there, although I can only partly understand it, and her father dismisses it entirely. He's not being insensitive so much as incredibly obtuse. When you grow up as part of the majority, marrying a person of color doesn't necessarily increase awareness. Where I'm ready and willing to address it, both as a mama bear and as a person of color, my husband sees it as unnecessary to acknowledge at all. It makes both EB and I frustrated.

But they also are her battles to fight sometimes. When some kids across the street from my mother's called out to her, "hey white girl, I like your hair," I was ready to walk across the street and talk to them. My husband didn't hear it and didn't want to say anything, and EB was hurt, "they're giving me dirty looks," but didn't want me to go all scary black woman on them either. Still, coming to her mother's home is a different kind of comfort to her. No one asks if she's adopted, and she has first cousins who are also biracial. Plus the way we interact as a family is totally different. "I feel more black when I come here," she tells me. She also sees the way my speech pattern changes, relaxes, and becomes, as she says, "more black." I explain that I'm more myself, and it's not a conscious change, this dialect switch, just a natural part of being with and among one's own people.

And that's the part of living history, being a part of it, and living through it. She has the history of her 90-year-old grandmother, who grew up in a little southern town you couldn't find on a map, without indoor plumbing, who was the valedictorian of her high school, who can still do word puzzles and math in her head, but was too afraid of surgery to go for the laser procedure that could have saved her sight. It was the saddest thing to hear her say she wishes she could see, as she felt how tall her youngest grandchild has gotten. That was the cautionary tale of history. The decisions you make could change when it's too late. She'll never see how beautiful all her grandchildren have become, from the oldest who is nearing 30, to the youngest who is nearing high school.

I hope my mother lives to hear her youngest grandchild graduate high school. Graduations are big deals in our family, one that grew up with the expectation of higher education because we were taught at an early age that education was one thing that couldn't be taken from you with all other things being unequal. It may not happen, but here's hoping.

And I hope EB learns the beauty of the phone, not just for texting, but for talking. My mother is a wealth of information of decades gone by. She lived through the depression as a young girl, EB should know about that. She worked taking care of kids before she left her mother's house to go to the big city (alone) to go to school. EB should know about that too, as well as the value of hard work, living with racial and gender discrimination and persevering. She should know that not making a decision about anything, health, school, anything, is a decision in itself.

Earbaby should learn about the beauty and value of extended family, and then the beauty and value of making friends to ease your way. She should know that even as an only child, she has siblings of cousins, second cousins, family friends and many others who will make sure she will never be alone.

She should know that her own life story, her history, comes from all over the country, not just all over the East Coast. That she is a citizen of the world and she makes her own destiny. EB should know that her grandparents on both sides live within her and through her.

And their legacies will give her the strength and courage to make some history of her own.

Terror as the new normal

In the blink of an eye, everything changed. Again. And things will never really be the normal many of us grew up knowing.

Earbaby, her best friend Beth, and my husband and I were in New York when the Boston Marathon bombings happened. We were walking in Central Park, enjoying the glorious, if physically exhausting, spring day on school vacation week when an alert came up on my husband's phone.

See, this vacation week was different from so many others. We had decided on taking a four-day trip to New York City instead of our usual weeklong excursion to the Gulf Coast of Florida. Condo rentals and airline fares being what they were, we decided a short trip was better than none, and EB got to bring her BFF, an incredibly joyous, gracious, and grateful young lady who brought out the best in EB, who was putting on her best bipolar Barbie act, even as she apologized for her quick-change demeanors.

But she and Beth got to take in a Broadway show, an off-Broadway show, Times Square, two hip-hop dance classes where they more than held their own, a hansom cab through Central Park, and lots and lots of walking and window shopping. These two giggling 14-year-olds danced, pranced, texted, tweeted and instagrammed all over the island that is Manhattan, excited to have a few days in the city that never sleeps.

But the trip in the afternoon of its second day was marred by alerts on my husband's phone of a bombing back home, and then, minutes later, another. My husband and I looked at each other with dread. Please, let it be a gas explosion and not a terrorist attack, I said. But I knew. And before I told the girls what had happened in their hometown, I had to walk away, sit down in a corner and pray.

The question never arose whether to tell, or try to keep it from them. These girls are internet savvy, with smartphones and their own world of constant communication. We told them what we knew at the time, which wasn't much. We knew some people were killed and many, many more grievously injured.

We all knew someone who was running, watching, or otherwise engaged in the extravaganza of Patriots Day and the Boston Marathon. And though we tried to keep the trip upbeat, we had to check in with everyone first, and let other friends and family know we weren't there (Facebook, I'm not home, please rob my house), so there wouldn't be endless phone calls from around the globe.

And we had to make decisions. Do we stay close to the hotel, or go out to dinner as we planned? Cutting the trip short wasn't an option, but we noted increased police presence everywhere we went, from Times Square to Chinatown, to the train station where we came in and out, passing by police and their hardworking dogs.

Days later, after returning home and seeing the rest of the story unfold with police officers shot, one fatally, one carjacking, one dead suspect, a lockdown of the entire city, and an injured but captured suspect, I realized that our new normal is worrying about the eventuality of terrorism.

It had sneaked up on us, worming its way into our subconscious, slowly elevating our anxiety level. A few days before September 11, 2001, I remember reading about a bombing at an outside market in the Middle East. EB was just a toddler then, but I remember thinking presciently that Americans probably would never understand that kind of horror unless it happened here. Days later, with EB in her high chair eating breakfast and watching Barney, my husband working in Washington, D.C., on a quick three-day trip, the first plane hit one of the Twin Towers. A friend called to tell me, and the rest of the world watched the second plane explode into the second tower. Two other planes went down, one of them at the Pentagon, four miles from where my husband was staying. The skies went silent. The horror had been visited upon us.

Now, this wasn't our first visit with terrorism. Homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh should have opened our eyes. But we weren't ready for the new normal that other countries have lived with for centuries. So we decided that was an isolated event (we decided all the bombings, from '60s radicalism to Ku Klux Klan atrocities and beyond were isolated events), and moved on, hoping for the return of the old normal.

The Twin Towers going down changed all that. And we entered our formerly unprecedented world of alarm at unattended luggage, fertilizer in large amounts, foreign-sounding names, and see-something-say-something diligence. As Americans, we won't be ruled by fear. As parents, siblings, friends, partners, we are haunted by the what-ifs. What if we hadn't gone to New York and had taken the girls down to cheer the marathoners? What if the train had been bombed, instead of the race route? What if the terrorist suspects started in Times Square, as one of the unfolding stories now says they were headed? How could I live with myself if something happened to either child entrusted in my care?

We have forgotten the time when one could get on a plane without first being thoroughly searched, removing belts, shoes, liquids and personal items in front of strangers, and then reassembling oneself a few feet away. My mother has joked that eventually we are all going to have to just show up naked. With the new body scans, some of us believe that time has already arrived. If you see an unattended bag, no longer would you try to turn it into the lost and found. Now you report it to the authorities, who may choose to have its contents euthanized.

Many people that day rushed toward the explosions, looking for ways to help. These modern-day Patriots  may have been going against their instinct of self-preservation, or it may have been their instinctual thing to do all the good they could for as many as they could, for as long as they could. It points to their inherent decency to look to help without knowing whether they could be the next victims.

Later on, when all the postmortems have been done on this heinous event, we'll go back to normal. But it's not the old-time normal of days long gone and never to return. It's the new normal of surveillance cameras, keeping mental pictures of  "suspicious" people, unconscious racial and religious profiling, and taking no one at face value. It's seeing something and saying something.

Living our lives, knowing that potential terrorists may live and walk among us is our new normal. And that's the real tragedy.

Anti-social media

They're always plugged in, tuned in, turned on. Everyone has their own reality show and theme music. And they never want to let go, chill out, or go dark. This is the social media generation and my only hope is that Earbaby doesn't become so consumed with it that she forgets that every moment, random thought, or event doesn't have to be recorded for posterity.

EB's generation is unlike any other. But the similarities that make today's teenagers like their parents and their parents before them are also what makes them vulnerable to what I call the anti-social media.

It used to be that teenagers made bad decisions, worked through them, matured, and left the past behind, only to revisit their sepia-covered, homogenized and cleaned-up versions when they met their peers again at high school reunions. Granted, some people still held grudges with the mean girls and the jerk jocks, but 10, 20, 30 years later, if we're smart, we've learned to forgive and move on.

Now that permanent record your parents warned you about when you got into trouble actually exists somewhere on the internet. We've decided to record every indiscretion (hello, underage drinking, risque party behavior) and post it for future friends, family, neighbors and employers to see. Every random thought, no matter how banal, is worthy of a tweet. Every plate of food must be posted on Facebook. We must check in everywhere we go. (Hello FB friends, I'm out of town, feel free to break into my house, since I mentioned earlier that I forgot to lock my back door on my way out! Oh, and since I forgot to check my privacy settings, this could go out to the entire FB community!)

Some of this is amusing, or just plain stupid. But I'm also concerned that the pathological need to record every thing you do is giving birth to a generation of sociopaths.

Think about the Steubenville, Ohio tragedy where a young girl got so drunk, she fell unconscious and was carried around like a rag doll and sexually assaulted. Two of the boys involved were found guilty of the rape, but it took an outcry from the community to even bring charges because members of the revered football team was involved. The girl was underage, she made a bad decision in drinking, much less becoming incapacitated. But a bad decision is only that. It wasn't license to assault, photograph and dehumanize her. The real bad guys were the ones convicted, as well as those who stood by, did nothing, or took pictures and sent them over the internet. That kind of uncaring, sociopathic behavior is indefensible.

Granted there were rapes, gang rapes and lots of drinking, drugging, and criminal behavior when I was in high school and in college. It came down to the proverbial he said, she said. And while there was no photographic evidence, I'm starting to wonder if the recording element in these assaults is part of the reason they are exacerbated.

See, everyone is in a reality show with their own theme music. Some of these sociopaths in training already lack empathy and violating another human being, either through sexual assault, or another violent attack like a beating, is just another episode.

EB isn't on Facebook the way she used to be. She does still follow people on Twitter and Instagram. Her big thing right now is the neverending texting. But every argument, misunderstanding, disagreement with a friend has recently been because of something that was read, retweeted, or posted on some social media site. I've advised her to stay off these sites when she wants to talk (yes, talk, not text) with her friends. We still haven't evolved to the point where people can tell when you're joking, or being facetious, or even being dead serious. There aren't enough emoticons yet to express what you mean.

When she is upset because of something she posted that was misinterpreted, I say a version of "I told you so." (Yes, I know, not helpful.) But I want her to understand real privacy, not the teen version of privacy, which means "everybody but my parents." I want her to understand that anything that is posted can be hacked and looked at by anyone. That her bad decisions now don't have to follow her forever. And this isn't a reality show.

This is her real life.

The long and short of it

February has been one cruel month here. The shortest month of the year and some of the longest reasons for frustration and despair -- and it's only going to get, better? Maybe. In less than 12 hours Earbaby officially turns 14. The road is getting bumpier and bumpier.

The last four weeks have seen a massive snowstorm of some proportion. I don't know if I could say it was epic, that word is overused, but it was big (25-plus inches) and sloppy, and wet, and frustrating. But I didn't have to do too much shoveling (one of those reasons to get married, along with the removal of dead things on the premises), and luckily it fell on a weekend when I was already scheduled to be off. Unfortunately for EB, the reason I was off, her first semiformal dance, was also postponed.

So the first full day of the storm I stayed inside, while my husband shoveled for hours, the dog played until she was exhausted, and EB went outside for a bit, coming in covered in white and proclaiming it looked like a post-Apocalyptic world out there! I was happy baking brownies and was impressed she knew the word post-Apocalyptic. But then, she goes to a great school.

The next day, after church was canceled, giving me two full days with no commitments for the first time in I don't know how long, I ventured out to help my husband and our neighbors clear the driveway enough to get my car from across the sidewalk and make some headway around the rest of the property. EB didn't have school for a few days after the storm, so she also got several do-nothing days out of this winter blast.

But it wasn't all snow angels and baked goods.

February also marks the middle and end of the dreaded third term in EB's school, and things have taken a sudden downturn in some of her classes. Last year we saw the decline from the first to the second term, but were still shocked by the big drop of the third term when she didn't make the honor roll. This year she actually improved from the first to the second term. Then two things happened.

First, her wonderful, young, and enthusiastic science teacher turned out to be temporary and she left, bringing back the assigned teacher, who is older, a lot less enthusiastic and is alleged to be quite surly. I say alleged, because when I met him, he was OK, not particularly pleasant, but not surly either. Anyway, EB went from an A in science for two terms to getting a warning notice that she was failing. Which was the reason I met with the new/old teacher anyway. The second thing that happened in this cruelest of months is EB's math got harder.

I was actually proud of her though when she said, "I think I need a tutor." I had been pounding into her little head that if she needed help, asking for it was a sign of strength, not weakness. Apparently she heard it. We found her an excellent math tutor (who came out after the snowstorm even!) and she's starting to feel better about math. She's even asking for a science tutor. We're actively looking.

I'm not sure she'll make it through this third term unscathed, but she has two more terms to get back on track, so I'm trying not to get too upset about it.

What has upset me is her attitude, which I'm told isn't going to be any more pleasant in this coming year. Rarely does a day go by that EB doesn't ask for something. Her semiformal was rescheduled for this weekend, so after buying her a nice dress, nice heels, two nice little shrugs to choose from and getting ready to shell out more than $100 for her hair and nails, she manages to ask for more stuff. She needs certain shoes to wear to a dance (not the semiformal, another dance). She needs shoes for a dance competition in a week. She wants, wants, and wants, and I want her to nip this shopoholic gene in the bud. And gratitude? It's fleeting. Thanks mom, is usually followed in the next few hours by, Oh, I also need ...

And to end it all, the ridiculous Cocoa managed to get skunked yet again (No. 12), this time at 8:30 in the morning. We apparently have the only diurnal skunks in existence, so while we knew nighttime, dawn and dusk weren't safe, now, daylight isn't either. Meanwhile we're spraying her and every surface of the house with skunk odor removal all the while knowing that we, and everything in this house is going to stink for at least two months.

Fourteen years ago, I was awaiting the birth of my first and only child. I didn't know if it was going to be a boy or a girl. It was scheduled, so I already knew the place and appoximate time.

I wouldn't take any of it back, but as we venture even farther on the road of teenage-hood, I'm strapping myself in a bit tighter. Happy Birthday. Help me, Lord.

Nightmares

Many, many years ago, when I was young, single and living in a small desert town in southern California, a tragedy happened that still leaves me cold.

A little girl convinced her protective mother to let her spend the night across the street at her best friend's house. The mother, who had always said no, finally relented and the two girls were warm and cozy in the best friend's house on the corner. A very drunk driver sped along that night, missed a curve and careened into the house, killing the friend on her first sleepover and permanently disabling the best friend, who woke from a coma days later in a full body cast, not knowing what had happened.

This tragic story has weighed on my mind for more than 30 years. Now that I'm a parent, I worry and pray for that mother who lost her child. I wonder if she blames herself for giving in. I ask her Creator to grant her peace, and let her know she did nothing wrong, but the man who decided to drink and get behind the wheel of a car is the only person responsible.

And every time Earbaby asks to sleep at a friend's house, I offer up a prayer for safety.

When EB first started having sleepovers, either here, or at a friend's or cousin's house, I knew all the players. Whether they were relatives or friends, I knew who was going to be home when my daughter was a guest in the house. And except for occasionally when her cousins slept here, I always made sure I was the person who was going to be home when EB had friends over. I wanted to assure parents in the way I wanted to be assured that everything was OK.

These terms were easy when EB was going to a small neighborhood school where you met all the parents in the schoolyard and knew who belonged to whom. Even so, there were some parents who never allowed their kids to sleep anywhere but in their own beds, and I had enormous respect for that. When EB had a sleepover birthday party, we offered a half-sleepover option. All the girls came in pajamas for the party, and the parents got a night out if they so chose. The kids who weren't staying were picked up right before the other ones headed to bed. It worked out great and no feelings got hurt.

But as EB gets older, everything gets more complicated. Friendships, even sleepovers, come with all kinds of snafus. And I've decided to put a moratorium on EB sleeping anywhere but here.

With the new bigger school, I don't know who her friends are. I know names, see their faces on Facebook, and every once in awhile get to meet them at some school function, or when I pull chauffeuring duties for some activity or another. But the constant dramatics of eighth grade girls, their fights, foibles, making up, choosing up sides, makes one's head spin. Add the drama of the sleepover and the recipe for disaster grows.

From the time when she was old enough to have playdates with school friends, the rule has always been that I have to meet the other mother. I would need to see her in person, or now that she's older and her friends live all over the city, I would have to have a conversation on the phone.

However, EB's last two sleepovers have made me less trusting. The new rule, no sleepovers at anyone's house if I don't know them. Period. Because, and this did surprise me, other mothers lie.

The first time this happened, the mother and I had a long conversation because the little girl had been begging to have EB sleep over. It was just the next town over, and the mother assured me they would be fine. What she didn't mention was that she had no intention of being there, that she was going out of town with her boyfriend. Imagine my surprise (anger) when I discovered that, although the grandmother was there all night and perfectly responsible and capable, the woman I talked to a few hours earlier never showed.

EB was banned from that house and when she got tired of making excuses for subsequent invitations, I told her to tell the truth, that since her mother didn't tell me she wasn't going to be there, I was angry and EB wasn't allowed there ever again. It worked, the invitations stopped.

The next time was more recent when the mother of a school friend called me and invited EB and another girl over. Yes, she was a single mom with another daughter, but there was no boyfriend in the house, and she would be there all night with the girls.

Except she wasn't. My husband and I got a call around 1:30 a.m. saying the other daughter had an asthma attack while staying at the grandmother's and the mom left, supposedly for 15 minutes, but had been gone an hour. The girls couldn't reach her cell phone and they were nervous about going to bed. An hour later the mother still hadn't returned, so the other guest's dad, who was five minutes' drive away, picked them up, dropped the host girl to her grandmother's (different grandmother) down the street and brought EB and his daughter to their home, where we got her the next morning.

Again, there was no explanation, no apology. I even called and left a message (and I wasn't a raving lunatic or anything, just asking for details), but the mother never got back. So I'm done.

I'm done with EB sleeping over friends' houses, unless they are friends of long history. If I can't pick them, or their parents, out of a lineup, don't even bother to ask. Parents can sound perfectly sane, lucid and responsible over the phone, and still cut out in the middle of the night and never give any apology or explanation, plausible or otherwise.

I'm not worried about drunk drivers driving through houses in the middle of the night. But in a world where we hear of drive-by shootings of innocent victims, sexual assaults and other horrible things that happen at sleepovers, I've decided to be a lot more protective, even if it makes me seem paranoid.

Subterfuge and shading the truth is something kids, and teens will do. But when you can't trust parents to be responsible and trustworthy, well, that's a nightmare.

Season's greedings

The tree is down and put away. All the extra stuff accumulated over the Christmas season is slowly being added to the excess of stuff we already own. The weather is colder, then warmer, but destined to get colder and more bitter as we lurch toward the full bite of winter. The bills from the holidays are trickling in, just as the car insurance, homeowner's insurance and real estate taxes make their first-of-the-year appearances. A trip to the mailbox fills us with dread and that sense impending doom.

So why the heck are we still hanging out at the malls looking for after-Christmas sales?

We just can't get enough of more new stuff can we? We can't always throw out the old stuff, especially if it's still functional in some capacity. But Christmas isn't the time for purging, it's the season of hoarding.  I'm looking in the mirror now when I say this. And my mini-me,  Earbaby, can't stop wanting more stuff, and somehow she keeps getting it. I feel like writing on the mirror in lipstick, STOP ME BEFORE I SPEND AGAIN!

We had a wonderful Christmas. I enjoy the holiday itself, despite the stressful buildup of cleaning up (hiding the junk) before my in-laws come over for the day. I'm blessed with wonderful in-laws, and a caterer to die for. It's my favorite holiday because we get to host many of our favorite people.

But it's also the toughest because of all the stuff. EB cleaned up this year as always. The  absence of Santa Claus (her first full year as an official no-longer believer) didn't shorten her wish list, which grew from only wanting one extravagant set of headphones (she didn't get them) to wanting more expensive footwear than a person without a job had a right to own.

No matter. She came away more than satisfied with what she got, as did I. My husband outdid himself for both of us, even though I told him, really, this year, I want nothing (and no, I didn't give it back).

And yet, the money is still flying out of our wallets like geese heading south for the winter. Those dead presidents though fly farther and faster into the retail shops (curse you Target), as we buy more stuff before we can put the Christmas stuff away. We have to buy new accessories for the new stuff. We have to buy new storage bins because the original cardboard Christmas tree box just won't cut it anymore after six or seven years. EB went to a dance and wanted to buy a new top to wear (she didn't get it, there are new never-worn tops still in her closet). But she still managed to find other stuff she needed.

Now comes the seasonal affective disorder, not just of gray, cold days and little sunlight, but that stark cold reality of having to pay the piper.

I wish I could be a better example for EB on this. I wish I could go past a Target without going in. I wish I could walk into a CVS for one item and walk out with just the one, and only one thing I went in for. I wish the footfalls of the mail carrier didn't make my expression change to one of a deer in the headlights.

And I wish EB wouldn't keep talking about what she now wants for her birthday in March. Maybe by the time it rolls around though, I'll have finally gotten everything put away from her Christmas motherlode.

Dear Santa, next year, really, just bring me peace on earth. A little goodwill toward all should take up a lot less room. Maybe it could even fit in that little space left under the bed.

Epic failures

We've failed our children. Not just you, not just me, all of us. We've failed, because we can't keep our children safe.

As a parent, from the first time you lay eyes on your little one, you know your life has changed forever. This fully-formed tiny person runs things now. Sure they only cry and poop at first, but their schedule is your schedule now, their needs come way before yours, and doing everything to keep them warm, dry, fed, clothed, sheltered, safe and loved is, or should be, your No. 1 priority.

Your No. 1 priority can't be the latest fashion craze, diet fad, or the goings-on of various "reality" shows and stars, or celebrity drama and gossip. It can't even be your job or career, except how it affects how you can keep your little one, fed, clothed, sheltered, etc.

And our babies are always our babies. When they're 3 minutes old, 3 years old, 13 years old, 30 years old, they're always that tiny being somewhere in your mind. If you're grown, and your parents still say, you'll always be my baby, believe them.

My Earbaby is 13. But as the horrific tragedy of Friday, Dec. 14 in Newtown, Conn., unfolded and revealed itself, I continuously flashed on one of my favorite pictures. It was taken at her K2 graduation many moons ago by her friend's mother. EB and her friend, two sweet little girls, had their heads together smiling, while wearing white felt graduation caps. EB is missing her two front teeth. It's such a great picture, it has shown up from time to time as a computer background, much to her chagrin. But this picture of two little girls, cheek to cheek, always makes me smile. Except now, when I think of it, it can also make me cry.

Because that's the same age as the 20 babies that were slaughtered right before Christmas. Twenty babies and six teachers and administrators who sacrificed in an attempt to keep these children safe from a troubled individual with several guns.

It makes no sense to demonize the shooter, or his mother, who was the first victim of his massacre. One may overdose on all the stories of who, how, why, when this happened.

We may continue to debate Second Amendment vs. assault weapons ban vs. the lack of mental health facilities and solutions until the cows come home. Or until the next massacre. Or we can do something.
Yes, we can pray, sign condolence cards, voice our outrage on all social media sites. And we will feel a little bit better. Or we can become activists. Who's your representative in Congress? Call, write, email, pester your representatives. Tell them we want better help for troubled people instead of budget cuts to the health care system and the facilities. Tell them we want to end the madness that a ban on assault weapons is unconstitutional, as if everyone needs military-style weaponry in order to feel safe. Realize that your right to bear arms doesn't trump my child's, your child's, our children's rights to be safe in their own school classroom.

And stop arguing stupid platitudes about arming school administrators. Adding more guns was a stupid (and supposed to be funny) argument when Archie Bunker said it about 30 years ago, saying it was a way to stop hijacking, arm all the passengers. Get rid of gun shows with their lack of background checks. One can be a sportsman, hunter, competitive shooter (I've even covered those events in the past), without deciding that blowing away other citizens, large and small is the sacrifice worth making for your own pleasure.

Just like your right to smoke ends at my nose, your right to drive drunk ends before you plow into my car or mow down that person in the crosswalk, your right to own guns ends before the bullet hits the 40-pound kid learning her ABC's and getting excited about Santa Claus.

Let's stop wringing our hands and shaking our heads. Let's stop sacrificing our babies and our caregivers and act like the civilized society we all pretend to be. Until we become lovers of something other than our selfish need for false power and confidence and bravado from an instrument of death, we're epic failures, as parents, caregivers, adults -- and human beings. We've failed. All of us.

The Art of No

So, just when did "no" become a four-letter word?

As my husband and I navigate the sometimes-choppy waters of rearing a young teenager, we're starting to wonder if we are the reason for the moodiness, the backtalk and the too-often-for-our-taste disrespectful tone coming from Earbaby. Don't get me wrong, most of the time EB is a really, really great kid. But it's like that old ditty about the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead. When she's good, she's very good, but when she's bad, she's horrid.

We're relieved that we are the only ones who actually see the "horrid" side. The worst she has been in public is silent and slightly sullen. Not unpleasant, but not outgoing either.

But with her dad and me, the tone sometimes gets ridiculous. We're still having that fight (which I fear will go on forever) where she has to have the last word. When she was younger, her dad and I would never say shut-up. We thought that was rude. But as she got older, bolder, obstinate and more mouthy, "be quiet," or "hush," or even "stop talking" and "shut your mouth, now" couldn't stop her. She still has to say something, anything, even when told not to say another word. So yes, once you've reached the limit, "shut-up" enters the lexicon. I would say I have no idea where she gets that stubborn streak, but since I always have to have the last word myself, well, I'm not going to tell that lie.

Still, no is a word we've tried not to use too much. As an only, overindulged child, EB only rarely isn't given what she asks for. And sometimes that makes her ungrateful, and nasty. And mouthy.

So I've started saying no. After several particularly obnoxious backtalk sessions, I've put my foot down. And kept it that way. Recently when she decided she was going on an outing with some friends for a birthday celebration (a rather pricey outing at that), she promptly followed it up with a few days of no-doubt hormonally-based major attitude. I told her she wasn't going. She didn't believe me.

Which I can understand. Most times, after a half-hearted (and sometimes full-hearted and tearfilled) apology, we relent. But we're quickly learning that her good behavior and apologies are shorter lived when she eventually gets her way. So imagine her surprise when I said the ultimate four-letter word, and stuck to it.

She appealed to her dad, who had already been warned not to undermine my decision. Because we're both softies at heart, it's tough when one parent doesn't agree. But this time, because we've both been frustrated by the utter lack of gratitude and disregard for the rules, he was on board, although I was going to go to work that night and he'd be stuck with the sniffling, emotionally distraught child, who didn't get to enjoy her outing with her friends.

But guess what? She was OK afterward. She missed a good time, and learned a good lesson. Actually, she learned more than one. She learned that every invitation isn't an automatic yes, even when you're nasty and act as if you're entitled to whatever you ask for. And she learned that we can actually say no. And mean it. Well, maybe that last lesson was more for us.

Yes, I know, she'll be the one making our life decisions for us when we're old and infirm, and she could hold this over our heads. But she'll also learn that respect and gratitude will carry a lot more weight in life than an obnoxious sense of entitlement.

Saying no and meaning it is a lesson for all of us. If she learns to hear it, she won't be devastated the first time she doesn't make a team, hired for a job, or get picked for some honor. If she learns to say it and mean it, she'll know how to stand up for herself when someone gets too familiar or too pushy, either physically or emotionally.

That two-letter word isn't just for toddlers anymore. Hearing it, saying it, and meaning it is a lifelong lesson for all of us.

Political prisoners

In one week, we as a country will go to the polls and decide who will try to run these United States for the next four years. We've come back from the brink of depression, but not fast enough for some people. We've had four years of triumph, strife, wars ending and continuing, unemployment numbers creeping down, inertia in Congress, health care for all debated, then made into law that withstood a Supreme Court challenge.

We've seen mid-term elections that showed people's distrust and dislike of the government as a whole and the President as an individual. And we've seen an increase of hatred, racism, disrespect and division.

And in one week, this will all continue. It probably will get worse.

We're all trapped. We're trapped by those who still are angry from the last election (you could hear crickets chirping in the schoolyard of EB's former school the day after President Obama was voted in) and we're trapped by those of us who believe this tide will unfortunately turn back to the elites, the haves, who have declared war on the havenots, who are eager to vote against their own interests.

And we're trapped by all the commercials. Forget for a minute the harsh political rhetoric that passes for conversation these days. We're constantly bombarded by sound bites, videos, nonsense phrases (binders of women?), zingers (horses and bayonets?) and no real discourse. We're all shouting across the aisle.

I'm tired. If President Obama is reelected, I'll be happy for a day and then go back to taking all the racist rants (which are hundredfold on the internet) as personal affronts. If Mitt Romney is elected, I'll be disappointed and then wait and see if this "businessman" can really create 12 million good jobs in a year. And when health care for all is repealed, Planned Parenthood is defunded, I'll watch while the haves again dump on the havenots and everyone turns a blind eye.

I'm tired. I'm tired of the commercials that come four at a time, first one side then the other for the national race, then the local races each have a go. I'm tired of hearing people say things like "I'm undecided, do I give up my reproductive rights to get a job?" Really?

We're all just prisoners of this dance. The money spent on all these elections could feed every hungry man, woman and child in America for years. We're asked to give more. Every day there are 10 emails asking for me to give a little bit more for this candidate or that, support this race or that one. On Facebook, we're zinging each other with this video, that photo, liking this candidate, challenging that one. Someone is making a lot of money, and it's surely not those of us in this seemingly endless political dance.

EB gets only a little of it at school. She says all but one of her friends in her Humanities class group is a Democrat, the other one likes Romney. But out of respect for him, when they had a class project to make a political ad, they didn't use either presidential candidate. They did a different advertisement for their project. How is it that 13-year-olds can figure out and respect each other's beliefs and those of us old enough to vote can't?

I remember when I was around her age, actually a little younger since I was 12 when Richard Nixon was elected. I remember coming to school after lunch wearing my HHH button and one of my classmates telling me that I may as well take it off because Nixon had been elected. I was devastated. I thought the world would end. Now this was 1968, and we had already lost Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Surely Nixon's election was a sign of the Apocalypse.

Except it wasn't. I am a proud Democrat (although I have voted for Republicans before) who will be casting my vote for President Obama again. But if he doesn't get the second term, I know the world won't come to an end because of it. And it won't come to end if he does either, my friends on the other side of the aisle.

I will be disappointed if the votes don't go the way I want a week from today. But I will be happy to be free from all the commercials. For at least until the next midterm elections, and again four years from now, we will be free from the constant barrage of hatefulness and insults on television, radio, and the internet.

I've grown too cynical to believe we'll ever really come together as a nation. On Nov. 7, about half of the country will be incredibly unhappy.

I just want to be able to stop hiding my Republican friends' comments on Facebook. I want to be able to like them again. I'm tired of being a prisoner of these politics, yours, mine, and ours.

But don't forget to vote.

Measuring mental health

Apparently, we as a society have decided that the best way to help those of us with mental health "issues" is to publicize them. No, not give them a forum to speak, to help us better empathize and understand. We publicize them for our own entertainment. We give them a television show. And we call it reality.

Now this new way of  "helping" has gone on for awhile, but it seems that paying for dysfunction the rest of us can watch is our way of measuring our own mental health. If you're not crazy enough for primetime, then you must be OK.

We started with putting people in artificial situations, like in a house with other twentysomething strangers, or on a "deserted"  island with cameras, calling it Survivor, and watching gleefully as people scheme and dream their way to a million dollars. It's a game show, and the players have to make up the rules as they go along. If it's not interesting enough, throw a few challenges at them. Though I've never watched this particular "reality" show, others have drawn me in, the way an accident on the highway compels us to crane our necks, searching beyond the flashing lights.

But some of the ones now most popular celebrate people with either no discernible talent (hello, Jersey Shore and Kardashians), or real mental health problems (hello Hoarders, My Strange Addiction). In between are those people with amazing fecundity, those whose houses, or pets, are haunted, and of course, people who sexualize their preadolescent daughters (and some sons) by putting them in beauty pageants. And the only people not in on the joke are the stars themselves. Watch enough episodes of Toddlers and Tiaras and you know these frustrated moms, the former beauty queens and the ones who may have never been considered attractive in their youth, are living out their princess fantasies of crowns and gowns through their daughters (and a few sons). The joke's on them. Or is it?

I give you, Honey Boo Boo.

I have never watched this new "reality" show. And I won't. My daughter and I do watch Toddlers and Tiaras, and this is how this particular child was introduced to the world. I found her and her family sad and obnoxious, and who wants to waste time watching people more obnoxious than those you have to encounter every day not on purpose? Unfortunately, not watching doesn't mean escaping this train wreck. Everyone knows about this dysfunctional, and unattractive brood that is now raking in big bucks so the rest of the world can feel superior to them. Who's laughing now? A presidential candidate was asked who he preferred, Honey Boo Boo, or Snookie. That's like the old Three Stooges choice of being burned at the stake or facing the guillotine. Curley chose being burned alive because "a hot steak is always better than cold chop." To paraphrase Stooges actor Dudley Dickerson: This world has sho' gone crazy.

A few years ago, the antihero became the protaganist, in movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas and other genres of cops and robbers where you learned about the robbers, so you didn't root for the cops. It crossed over into television with The Sopranos, The Shield, The Sons of Anarchy. Who did you root for, and against. It made for shows and characters more three-dimensional and messed with our minds about good and bad, right and wrong, morality, immorality and amorality. Still at the end of The Sopranos, most got what they "deserved" or you were left wondering. At the end of The Shield, there was no sympathy left for these bad-hearted cops.

But we've crossed over to nonfiction now. While we're not cheering amorality anymore, we're not empathizing with people who can't throw their garbage out either.

And we're measuring our own mental health by whether we would become good television fodder. I may be crazy, but not reality show crazy yet. It's a sad state of affairs when we measure dysfunction by Nielsen ratings. It's probably not a sign of the Apocalypse. But we might be getting close.

Secrets and lies

My daughter and I recently returned from our second eight-day vacation adventure, this time to my hometown and the home where I grew up.

Our visit, as always when one returns "home" was an eye-opening adventure. As we grow older, we learn more about our childhood than we ever knew as children. The stories that are revealed can answer those questions from decades ago. And while sometimes we look back fondly on our childhoods, as we age, we take a peek, or maybe a longer look, at those skeletons in our respective closets.

Earbaby and I made this journey without her dad this year. His obligations were at the recently ended Republican and Democratic conventions, and even though he loves my hometown, he is exasperated at times by my relatives, their chaos, their lateness, their drama and their stubborn unwillingness to stick to schedules. He brings a book and spends many an hour sitting in a rented car waiting.

So it's a little less stressful when EB and I go alone. We can stay with my mother, instead of in a hotel and we don't try to adhere to a strict schedule. Piling multiple people in the rental (my family notoriously has raggedy-car issues), and changing plans mid-course doesn't really upset me. It's a sigh, and OK let's adjust.

Plus EB gets a chance to spend time with her mother's side of the family and since we laugh a lot, play games a lot, and go to Target a lot, it's a lot of fun.

But again, we usually find out a little more about our families' skeletons, and as we learn, we grow a little more understanding, tolerant and forgiving. Or we just get ticked off.

In the past few years, I've had occasion to speak to the secrecy of my parents' generation. They don't reveal much, and it's only after death of one relative or another, the reason for longstanding resentments come to the surface. It's finding out after the fact the pain that my father endured when the money he sent home while serving overseas was not saved for his schooling, but spent so his siblings could further their education. And instead of their showing gratitude, he was looked down on for being uneducated, although he did have a couple of years of college, no small feat for a black man in the South, post World War II.

Learning about your family explains so much of your childhood. None more so than the secrets and lies that are finally confessed.

I don't know why I thought to ask what happened to the dogs. Yes, I do. It was one of those advice columnists, Dear Abby, or Dear Prudence, or maybe even it was Margo Howard. But the question of how to tell the truth to a child about a pet -- this one was given away, but the child was told it had died and was buried -- started me thinking about Peace and Aquarius.

See, our dog had puppies, eight of them in fact. But while six went to the shelter, my mother allowed us to keep two, so Duchess wouldn't "grieve herself to death." We had three dogs for awhile, at least a year or two, and then we didn't. First Peace disappeared, which devastated my younger sister who had claimed ownership. One of her friends told her she saw the dog in an animal control wagon (the dogs would get out of the fenced yard and back then dogs getting out and straying was common). My parents weren't concerned enough to follow up. Then, Aquarius was just gone. My father used to take all three dogs to the park and let them play while he studied for his work, but he also didn't seem too alarmed by this disappearance. Well, my mother said at the time, Duchess probably ran them off.

But this last trip something made me ask, and my mother confessed my father took Aquarius away to "be with some other dogs." Well, did that mean he left her out to wander and be a stray, or he gave her to a family or what? My mother was vague on the details. She claimed to really not know what happened to Peace.

It's a small secret in the grand scheme of things, but I felt betrayed and frustrated. My father's been gone 12 years, no way to get a real answer now. And all those dogs have been dead probably 40 years, but it still made me sad that they must have felt abandoned and lost, separated from the only family they knew.

I did decide right then that I wouldn't keep weird family secrets from EB. I'll try to tell her the truth, even if it pains, or embarrasses me. Does a 13-year-old need to know about every skeleton? No. But when I think about my friends, some of us growing up in houses with domestic abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling addiction, incest, and all other manner of dysfunction, it makes me wonder how many of those secrets and lies wouldn't be repeated if they had been brought to light.

We all grew up learning not to "put our business in the streets." Dad out of work or fired because he came in drunk too many times? Cousin arrested for hijacking cars? Parents fighting all night so you didn't get any sleep? Brother on drugs? Half-siblings out there nobody is supposed to know about? Teenager who got pregnant out of wedlock for the second time? Mom an alcoholic? You kept it to yourself and didn't even tell your closest friends.

We look back on our childhoods as idyllic days of hopscotch and Double Dutch; riding bikes all over the neighborhood, hide and seek after dark and rock teacher on our front steps when it was too dark to be anywhere but at your own house.

And as I walked around my neighborhood, at the still well-kept lawns, swept sidewalks, paved alleys with trash cans neatly covered, I wondered how many other secrets and lies lay hidden, how much pain our friends were also in that they couldn't reveal.

No wonder reality shows like Hoarders and Intervention are so popular. We're not looking for entertainment at others' suffering. We're looking for kinship among other people who are harboring terrible secrets behind closed doors and well-manicured lawns.

It really wasn't just learning about the dogs. It was about learning that parents can lie and show callous disregard while thinking they're doing the right thing. And it's about us learning about how to understand the context of the times, moving on, forgiving, and vowing not to repeat those same mistakes.

It's about looking back, and growing up.

Where the buffalo roam

Eight days, four states, 1,700 miles in one car with three people. Vacationing with a sometimes sullen teenager is an adventure. Somewhere between uncontrollable giggles and vacationing with the Grinch.

We recently returned from our most interesting and unusual vacation thus far. Every year we try and plan one big trip, although some years we just can't get it done, with time constraints, and let's face it, going on vacation just ain't cheap.

But my darling husband, East Coast native that he is, had never visited the middle part of our country. Going for a convention in Denver when he was stuck inside for the better part of a week didn't count. And suffering through his obligational visits with his in-laws once a year in Chicago also wasn't like getting him in the great outdoors and big sky.

So with my blessings (not Earbaby's though, more about that later) he planned a trip to Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska. We flew in and out of Denver, and made our way by car through the other states in about a 1,700 square mile area.

It was fun, more for some of us than EB. My husband had never seen a real rodeo. So he was awed by the strength, courage and amazing athleticism of cowboys at the Frontier Days rodeo in Cheyenne. We stayed in Laramie, near the campus of the University of Wyoming and of course had to buy our souvenirs there on campus. And we drove through Curt Gowdy State Park, turned off the car and just listened.

Now for city folk, we don't know what nothing sounds like. We are so bombarded by noise every day, we just tune everything out, neighbors' music and shouting, horns blowing, cars speeding by, airplanes overhead. We are so used to hearing everything all the time, we think a din is actually silence.

So when you're out in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming, you can actually hear complete and utter nothing. We just couldn't believe how great that sounded.

Of course, EB wasn't nearly enthralled with this vacation as we were. But in her defense, it started out on a couple of sour notes for her. For one thing, she was missing her favorite two-day dance workshop, which fell during the week we were gone. It's a grueling two-day seven-hour one day, six hours the next, dance-a-thon. She looked forward to her favorite hip-hop teacher, who had noticed her and complimented her two years running, including the first year when she was way in the back. 

But that wasn't the only sour note. EB didn't want to go to where everything "sounded lame." The rodeo? Lame. Frontier Days? Lame. Mount Rushmore? Lame, lame, lame. As for going to Nebraska to visit mom's friends in the town where she started her journalism career, double ditto on the lame part. Especially when EB's friend was going to Bermuda and her cousins were going to Hawaii.

But we also wanted EB to see other parts of the country. My wish is that she visit all the states in the union before she gets too old to want to travel. I don't want her to be like most of the people in her hometown (her dad included) who never live, go to college, or work more than 40 miles from where they were born. I want her to experience new places, people and things. And then decide where her life will end up, by choice, not by default.

So off we went into the wild, blue yonder on her dad's dream trip. Of course his dream was that we would go along with him.

The first half of the week was rough. Not only was EB determined not to have a good time, she had a bad chest cold that zapped her energy and stole her appetite. She was miserable physically as well as mentally. We tried different cold medicines to try and assuage her discomfort, but she more or less checked out in the back seat, either listening to her music, sleeping, or texting her friends to let them know the horrors she was being subjected to. Like I said, vacationing with the Grinch.

She didn't like the smell of the rodeo, lots of cows and horses (city slicker!) and worried that the calves being wrestled to the ground and roped were being hurt. I had seen my share of rodeos and I have to say, I admire anyone who can drop from a horse that is in full gallop, bulldog a calf, ride a bucking bronco, hold on to an ornery bull's back, and rope anything that is also moving at a full gallop. I joked to my husband that I don't want to do any sport that has me walking off limping.

EB did come away with her share of souvenirs despite the hardship of vacationing with two lame parents. She got a nice bag she'll use for school (until it falls apart, I already have to replace the zipper) and a rabbit fur cap with a coonskin tail, that she promises to wear to school. Other than the dog, it's the only real fur in the house. Hope there won't be many PETA protests.

From Wyoming we traveled to South Dakota to visit the presidents. We stayed in Keystone, about two miles from the monument, which we saw on our way to the hotel we were staying in. Both my husband and I thought it was smaller than we had imagined. I noticed there's room for President Obama right there by Lincoln (hey I can dream, can't I?). We went through Custer State Park in search of buffalo the next day. We also drove through the badlands, a beautiful, desolate area of rock and sand and emptiness. And as EB's health improved, she got her sense of humor back.

Maybe it was the prairie dogs that first got her back to herself. These chubby little creatures live in cities and squeak out warnings to each other as they burrow into holes. We imagined Cocoa would have a field day chasing these little things that sounded just like her squeaky toys. And just as we were headed back to Custer State Park, we saw our first buffalo. He was on a ridge overlooking the highway and I spotted him to my right just before we were ready to turn left.

This was my husband's wish, to see wild buffalo (mine is to see a moose, hopefully before it comes crashing through our windshield). Custer State Park has 1,300 head, but we had gone all day in search of one with no luck. So this was wonderful. We watched it head back over the ridge after taking a few pictures then turned back through the park.

And we became great buffalo hunters. A huge, majestic male sauntered in front of our car, not 10 feet in front of us. We stopped, gawked, snapped pictures and got extremely excited. EB couldn't stop laughing and making fun of us. And later, as we looked and found even more, she admitted that this was kind of fun, even if most of it came from her laughing at us!

After a couple of days when we saw more buffalo than you can shake a stick at, we were off to Nebraska, to a little town called Broken Bow. We visited my friend, whose husband coaxed all three of us on a gentle horse (it was also my husband's first horse ride and he even got to wear a cowboy hat) and we toured the area and met new friends as well as an old one from my days back there more than 20 years ago.

This part was tougher on EB, who enjoyed the horse ride, ate well finally, and was polite but quiet. She was the only kid there, so she buried herself in the computer playing games. Finally, it was the long ride back to Colorado, which was mostly a rest day before we turned back home. EB had a good time, and a bad time. She was bored, she was stimulated. One thing I had to give her credit for, even when she was exasperated at having to sit through hours and hours of driving and visiting with people she didn't know, she was unfailingly polite to everyone.

I told her next year she gets to pick the vacation spot since this year was for her dad. She said we're going to Bermuda. I say thanks for giving me a whole year to get into bathing suit shape.

We hope in time EB will appreciate this last trip. Eight days, four states, three people in one car. In years to come, she'll either reminisce with fondness or cry about it on a therapist's couch. But I'll bet she'll never forget about going out to where the buffalo roam.