I live in a factory town. The product here is television, don’t get me started on how all the movie productions have left Los Angeles.
I grew up with kids who were working actors. As an adult I became friends with more than a few folks who had spent their childhoods auditioning and sometimes working. I watch the kids in the neighborhood go off to casting calls, and spend summers on set.
I’m not enchanted by Hollywood, and I haven’t made a secret of believing that children shouldn’t be on the big (or little) screen. This week when we taped Momversation I was asked to lead a discussion about kids and Hollywood with Jen and Trish. I knew all about Trish and her daughter’s less than wonderful experience with modeling, but I had NO IDEA that Jen had not one but two kids on a TV show.
This week on Momversation be sure to watch as a firmly wedge my foot in my mouth…. because really, that’s why y’all watch, right?
And then if have another six minutes to give to the web today, Tom Hanks nails it with Toddlers and Tiaras. Incidentally when Mr. G. caught me watching Toddlers and Tiaras his lecture included the phrase, “by watching this you are culpable.”
Alexander cried himself to sleep tonight. He doesn’t feel like he has any friends.
I know the feeling.I want to crawl in bed with him and wait for the little death that is sleep.
I’ve never in my life felt a pain so sharp and so dull all at once. A full body thud that sends you numb combined with a sharp searing twisting coldness that starts in your throat and moves to your belly. Every time Alexander cried and said, “I’m a idiot and no one likes me.” I wanted to sob and scream and explain to him that they do all like him, but they’re nine. They like themselves better. I tried to remind him that he’d played with six great kids this weekend, four of them today.
And he started on about not being respected, and that they don’t want to play his games. He cried about not having friends at school. It’s a small school. He has friends there, but to be fair his closer friendships come from sports.
My son’s anguish made me want to promise myself that I’d never send him to his room again, that I’d never take away Playstation, and that I’d never yell at him for dawdling before bedtime or even starting a fire. I wanted to wrap myself around him as a protective blanket and promise him that the world will see him for who he is one day. They’ll spot the sweetness and the generosity without exploiting it. They’ll see that he’s a team player and that’s a good thing. The intelligence will cease to disarm them, and enchant them as it should.
The goofiness, they’ll all be goofy together.
I’d like to see my son happy, radiantly happy, but he’s so tight lipped that I’m not sure if the tears were brought on by an event or a lifestyle.
This is a pain so deep and so terrifying that I don’t know that it can be named.
Wednesday afternoon I had to pick Jane up from a friend’s house and Alexander begged me to let him stay home alone. We talked about what to do, how to answer the phone, when to open the gate (never), and no media. I never mentioned don’t set any fires.
Wednesday night I was supposed to be at a Pre-Oscar party, it was a good one too. My friends at Chevy won Green Car of the Year and used a fleet of Volts to drive celebrities to the Global Green Party.
I was dressed and ready to head out for the evening. I said goodnight to my daughter and went to tuck my son into bed. His bedroom stank and I couldn’t quite place the smell. “Did you fart Alexander?” I gently teased him, and when he gave me a guilty look (as opposed to a chuckle because everyone knows farts are funny) I knew something was going on.
A quick scan of the room revealed a wad of toilet tissue on his desk with holes burnt into it. Burned, as in fire.
Upon closer examination I realized that he’d used his desk lamp to burn holes in the toilet tissue. Now, you may find this odd, but about a year ago we thought we had chemical disaster when we smelled something awful coming from Alexander’s bedroom. Apparently he’d discovered the joy of melting his rubber tipped erasers onto the same desk lamp. Like the toilet tissue it was dangerous, but also to be expected from a curious nine year old boy. Right? We talked to him about the safety issue, he cried, we thought it was all done.
Wrong.
I asked him when he was playing with the lamp and the toilet tissue and his eyes turned into saucers. He just stared at me.
“Was it when you were home alone?” My voice was cracking
He slowly nodded, and I felt like the world was slipping out from under me. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head: Little kids little problems. Big kids big problems.
If we ever have a problem bigger than this I think I’ll require a trip to the emergency room.
I stood in my son’s bedroom, burnt tissue in my hand and mascara running down my cheeks, “Mis-ter GEE!” I yelled downstairs, “You need to come talk to your son.”
My husband muttered a few things, Alexander nodded. I stood crying like an idiot in my cocktail dress and Mr. G. wrapped the whole thing up with, “Just don’t be stupid.”
I’ve written about my kids having lice before. My daughter had extraordinarily thick long hair, and I’ve spent upwards of 16 hours in two days picking nits from her head. I NEVER filled the prescription for Qwell, it’s Malathion and I’m not about to dump Malathion on my kids’ heads.
My Aunt was a school nurse and she told me about the Robi Comb. The Robi Comb is the best $30 that a parent can spend.
Not only is it a chemical free, quick (relatively) way to get the lice out of your child’s hair, it’s also incredibly satisfying. Let me explain.
First you brush your child’s clean dry hair so it’s as tangle free as possible. Next, divide the hair up into sections and then start with a very small section of hair. You turn the Robi Comb on (it’s battery operated) and start with it against your child’s scalp, and comb each small section a few times from root to tip. The comb makes a high pitched noise until it hits lice, then it goes silent because it’s doing something wonderful.
It electrocutes the little beasts.
That’s right, you’ll hear the high pitched noise stop, and you’ll have the intense satisfaction of seeing a fried lice (because I’m an adult I’m not going to make the obvious Engrish joke). It’s like an electric chair for lice… you bite my kid, I electrocute you. HAH.
In any event, I see a lot of parents agonizing about headlice this week. I’ve been there, done that, and I can help with this one. Go buy the Robi Comb even if it’s not your turn, yet.
Saturday morning Jane and I hopped into the car to go to her first soccer tournament with her new team. The park Jane plays at has a big soccer program, about 2,000 kids between 4 and 18 play. Girls under 12 (basically 10-12 year old girls) sends out five full teams in the tournament season. There’s an all star team, there’s a B team, and then there are three more teams. We don’t like to call them C teams, we like to call them “fun teams”.
Jane used to be really good at soccer. Jane used to be the fastest kid on the field. Jane used to score a goal or two each and every game. Jane no longer seems to give a shit. Sometimes she’ll stop twirling her hair long enough to notice the ball whizzing past her, other times she’ll swagger towards the play, but mostly Jane is looking for camaraderie and a bitch session. Jane has discovered boys and music and friends, we are working hard to keep Jane interested in sports.
Those girls shoved us. That one girl was always off sides and the ref never called it. Mom did you see? I punched her and the ref didn’t call it. Yes, darling I did see, you made me proud.
Knowing that Jane just doesn’t care much about the game made me even less excited to haul us out to Riverside for a weekend of soccer. There is an adorable downtown in Riverside, and the Mission Inn is there, but of course it was sold out. We stayed at a hotel that was apologetic about their $70 a night rate. They wanted to offer me a lower rate, but it was just impossible.
This is not how I like to travel. I am a difficult woman to please, there is very little chance of a $70 a night hotel pleasing me.
We filled up a cooler with fresh fruits and pre made salads fromTrader Joes and on my way out I grabbed a bottle of Côtes du Rhône which is absolutely the best cheap wine I’ve ever tasted. After driving for almost two hours (apparently they close down three lanes of a four lane highway to fill potholes) we arrived in Riverside. The area immediately surrounding the park was large lots of dilapidated and abandoned homes, the nicer ones were surrounded by chain link fencing and aggressive looking dogs. I found a fabulous parking spot near the fields, got out of the car, walked around to the trunk and discovered the rotting corpse of a 40 pound dog.
I moved the car, and tried to not consider it an omen.
We got to the fields and I brought a chair, a blanket, some snacks and an umbrella. The skies were ominous.
The girls played like a new team. It’s been flu season and they hadn’t had a scrimmage yet where all the kids were there. They didn’t pass well, they didn’t move together well, they surely didn’t score any points, but they did a decent job of defending the goal. It was 2-0 when the hail started, and the referees called the game after a minute or two of the hail storm. I was bugged that they played for two minutes in the hail, some of the dads were bugged that they didn’t just wait it out.
I am a big sissy. This is not news.
There was a two and half hour break between games and it was freezing so I thought that Jane and I would check into our room and I’d put her in dry clothes for the second game of the day. We drove to our hotel, which was absolutely everything I’d expected it to be, and attempted to check in.
The lady at the desk gave us room keys, we went to the room and it was filthy. The bed linens were piled high on the beds and nothing appeared to have been cleaned. Shivering, we returned to the front desk and explained that the room wasn’t clean, the exasperated clerk told us the computer said it was. A discussion ensued and we settled for blow drying Jane’s shoes in the lobby bathroom.
I should point out that Jane’s shoes are three seasons old. After shaking most of the mud off of the outside of them, I took my blowdryer to the inside and heated them up in a very tiny bathroom. I’m fairly certain that bathroom smells like feet even all these days later.
The second game wasn’t a whole lot better than the first. I think the girls lost 4-0 or something equally awful. They tried their best, but they were up against a team that had clearly played together a long time and it was a group of girls that knew how to foul without getting caught. Three of the girls on Jane’s team went down with injuries from being tripped, pushed or punched, and finally our girls started giving it back. They didn’t score, but they stopped getting beat up. That is good. Right?
After the second game Jane’s lips were blue. I begged her to skip the hotel and drive back to LA, but she wasn’t going for it. I might have said, “What do you want? I’ll buy you anything Kitson sells.” Or I might not have, because only a really crappy really defeated mother would say that, right?
Speaking of crappy mothers….
We went back to the hotel so that Jane could stand in a hot shower for a half hour and warm up. We turned on Netflix and popped open some snacks. As I snuggled my freshly showered daughter I thought this isn’t so bad. As 6pm rolled around I thought I’d like a glass of wine before dinner, so I called the front desk to ask them to send a corkscrew.
ME: Hi I’m in room 329, I’d like a corkscrew please.
CLERK: I would too. Can you believe someone stole it last week?
ME: You have one corkscrew for the entire hotel?
CLERK: And someone just up and stole it. Walked away with it. Can you believe some people?
ME: And you didn’t buy a new one because…..?
And then the conversation devolved into messiness, and I remembered that I was in a $70 a night hotel.
I did what any reasonable mom blogger does, and I sent out a virtual flare on twitter.
And my followers (because they are awesome) sent me links to videos where they show you how to open a bottle of wine with a shoe and a wall. Unfortunately I was in the swamplands of California and all I had were two pair of wellies, some stinky cleats and flip flops so I had to try to open the wine without a shoe, but with a washcloth instead.
In an obvious attempt to scar my daughter as I have previously with my son I handed her my iPhone and said, “Record this so Mommy can share it with YouTube”.
