family life Articles

Or maybe it isn’t. Who the hell knows?

Sometime around last September there was a media query looking for parents whose teens had tried the cinnamon challenge. I responded that my kid had and a producer from the Dr. Oz show wanted to know if she had any bad experiences from it? I stated that she hadn’t and asked why they were looking for teens and the reply was: BECAUSE KIDS ARE DYING.

Well, no. They actually aren’t but that was a nice try.

Is the cinnamon challenge good for you? Probably not. Is it smart? Nothing that makes a mess on my kitchen counter is smart. Is every news outlet in America going to spend the week getting shrill with Oh My Gawd Collapsed Lung!? Yes. That will happen. We love to save the children, social media is bad for the children, memes are bad for the children, ingesting spices is bad for the children and while you’re at it stop saying The F Word so much the children have delicate ears.

This new breed of hysteria is obscene.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (the same folks who want your toddler to have zero screen time and think that you should engage your 0-2 year old every second of the day):

Videos of people attempting the Cinnamon Challenge have become an Internet sensation. Typically, a video reveals a group of adolescents watching as someone taking the challenge begins coughing and choking when the spice triggers a severe gag reflex in response to a caustic sensation in the mouth and throat. As of August 10, 2012, there were 51 100 YouTube clips depicting the Cinnamon Challenge. One video was viewed 19 million times, predominantly by 13- to 24- year-olds, ages similar to people taking the Cinnamon Challenge and associated with the greatest need for conformity. These videos have raised concerns of choking, aspiration, and pulmonary damage. In most cases, the effects are temporary, yet the Cinnamon Challenge has led to dozens of calls to poison centers, emergency department visits, and even hospitalizations for adolescents requiring ventilator support for collapsed lungs.

These “hospitalizations” are referenced in a footnote that links to this video which is hosted on the Akron Children’s Hospital website. Below the video it reads: Related to Conditions: Asthma

If you don’t feel like watching a local news channel (can’t really blame you) I’ll give you the highlights. People post the cinnamon challenge online, it’s funny, people do it at home, more than 100 people called poison control, 30 people sought medical attention one collapsed lung in an asthmatic child.

From the American Association of Pediatrics:

The temporary responses to cinnamon are common to several substances and probably do not increase the risk of long-term damage.

Thus, the Cinnamon Challenge may pose greater and unnecessary health risks for persons allergic to cinnamon or with bronchopulmonary diseases, including asthma.

I assure you that the three researchers who published this very preliminary study were careful in choosing their words. I was going to throw in some interesting statistics about how many kids break their arms on school yards or lose limbs crossing the street but then I remembered that some of y’all might completely lose it and wrap your precious kids in bubble wrap after hearing those numbers.

To be perfectly clear 100+ phone calls to poison control doesn’t matter and it’s important that smart people understand why it’s a meaningless number. What happens is that people call Poison Control and say that their child has done the cinnamon challenge and that they coughed. Then Poison Control tells them that their child will be fine. They hang up the phone and shortly thereafter the child is fine. That 100+ people called Poison Control only matters if there is actual poison involved.

If you read the whole study you’ll get this paragraph:

According to the Florida Poison Information Center–Miami, between July 2011 and June 2012, there were 26 calls regarding cinnamon exposure in individuals ranging from age 1.5 to 83 years. Most patients had only minor consequences that resolved after dilution, irrigation, and washing the affected area, and most did not require follow-up. Of the 5 cases that did involve follow-up, symptoms resolved in 1 to 2.5 hours. Of the overall 26 cases, 13 (all youths aged 8–18 years) involved the Cinnamon Challenge. Of these 13 cases, 2 had “potentially toxic” exposures. Common symptoms included coughing and burning of the mouth, nose, and throat. More serious symptoms included extensive coughing, vomiting, nosebleed, and chest tightness. With only 1 exception (emesis), possible aspiration and pulmonary symptoms were limited to adolescents, all of whom had ingested dry powder from the Cinnamon Challenge. Although the known health risks of the challenge are relatively low, they are unnecessary and avoidable.

Now I understand that if you’re a researcher your job is to recommend that children avoid anything painful or irritating but by their own words the health risks are low. I’d say they’re infinitesimal. We have one meaningful injury where an asthmatic child was injured and there are 763,000 results for cinnamon challenge on YouTube.

The moral of the story is that if your child has asthma the only thing that they should breathe in is air. Everyone else might have a sore throat or watery eyes, it’s dumb, but we have to let kids be a little dumb. If you tell your kid that the cinnamon challenge is going to kill them and 763 million videos show them that you’re wrong they will never believe you when you tell them about the things that really are dangerous. And I wouldn’t believe you either.

Do we really need the every major news outlet to pick up on this as a dramatic story?

Push back. Tell the media that you aren’t buying the mindless fear they’re selling.

And none of this would be complete without showing you my daughter’s cinnamon challenge video which is so 2012….

I didn’t play softball as a child. I’m not even sure that Manhattan Beach had softball but I think that when we were tiny some of the girls played Little League. If you didn’t play soccer and volleyball you didn’t have a social life so I’m pretty sure those girls didn’t last long and joined us at the beach or on the fields.

I like baseball. I love going to a Dodgers game though I much prefer the cleanliness of Angels Stadium. This should surprise no one who knows me well.

My son plays Little League. I bring him to practice and check out everyone else’s pants. This year they are grey so I can’t compare laundry skills as well as I could when the pants were white. I decide who is good at laundry and that’s pretty much where the competition ends for me.

This afternoon (evening maybe? The games last until 7pm) I was watching Alexander play and listening to Howard Stern on Sirius when Mr. G called. He wanted to know how the game was going. I explained to him that Alexander had only one play in the field and it was at first base where he dropped the ball. Mr. G went back to work and was probably a little bummed about his son not playing great ball. I just clapped when the other moms clapped, turned in my raffle tickets and tried to catch the last rays of sun. I managed to catch up with a friend at the snack bar (and really they shouldn’t call that shack a bar unless they’re willing to put some booze in it) and marvel at her kids who are tall and beautiful and in my mind will always be one year olds in diapers.

So after the game I drove the kids home and talked to Alexander about the game. He was like, “They didn’t win that game, we lost it.” So I tentatively brought up the missed ball at first base which was when I got a chorus of “Mo-om, you’re the worst baseball mom EVER.”

Apparently the kid who dropped the ball at first base wasn’t my son. He was some other kid (kudos on the laundry mom… I totally thought those were the grey pants I got very clean) and in addition to being not-my-son the ball wasn’t missed so much as it was thrown wrong. So you see I know nothing. Which is actually preferable to him having screwed up a play that may or may not have existed.

But I do know for a fact that he was walked once and hit it to second base another time and if there was a third at bat I might have missed it because I was chatting with the mom at the snack not-a-bar.

Worst baseball mom ever. But the uniform is absolutely glistening clean. So I win.

Friday night was a bit of a disaster. We all hopped in the car to go to Sugarfish and as we were almost there Jane yelled at one of us for something. I lost it and yelled something at her to further escalate the issue. I should have known better. I’m allegedly the adult.

We turned around and went home because I spent eight long years working in diners, bars and steak houses and I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to be the person who goes to a restaurant to fight. Those are the worst tippers and the most horrible patrons. If you’re having a bad day stay home until you can pretend to be happy.

We had dinner, Jane was sullen and Alexander was trying to cheer her up. When we’d finished she looked at me and asked if I’d take her to Hugo’s for hot cocoa. Not only did we go but we had a lovely time. She was chatty and happy and back to being the kid I’ve raised for 14 years. Things were normal again.

Until Saturday morning. There was door slamming and yelling at 8.30 in the morning. Again, this is my sweet and even tempered child. I don’t have experience with mood swings, tantrums or doors slamming. We didn’t even have a terrible twos. Nothing. We just had Friday night and Saturday morning. Mercifully at about 9am an email came through with a link to a video. It was this.

Ever since traveling with the folks from Project Aether I’ve been looking at single sex schools differently and Archer is a great match for my kid. I love everything about that school and hoped that it would be her first choice. It wasn’t and I’m pretty sure she’ll be going somewhere else but I’m wise enough to know that until we put the envelope in the mail things can change.

Jane was incredibly relieved because Archer was higher on her list than Notre Dame but not as high up as Viewpoint or Oakwood. Shortly after 9 she’d showered and we looked outside and saw two magical objects parked on the street. Mail Delivery Trucks.

Jane and I did the same thing as many mothers and daughters around Los Angeles on Saturday morning. We hovered on steps at the front door and sort of stared longingly at the trucks. I sort of nudged Jane and said, “Go ask the mail carrier if you can have your mail first.” And she declined. Too shy.

So I sort of wandered to the mail box and my mail carrier came to talk to me. He has a 15 year old daughter and wondered if we were waiting for a package, he didn’t want to disappoint Jane but we had no packages. I explained to him that we were waiting for high school acceptance letters and he gave a finger wag and a, “Why didn’t you say so?” talk. He explained that he was training a new carrier and he was slow but getting faster and was just around the corner. We talked about his daughter’s high school and then he just disappeared.

The next thing I know my mail carrier is running down the middle of the street holding envelopes up over his head and yelling, “They’re here, they’re here!” and the neighbors are looking and one of the envelopes is very very big while two of them are small. Jane runs to meet him and starts screaming Viewpoint after grabbing the large envelope from his happy hands. Our neighbors and their kids are yelling congratulations and all is right in the world.

I’m looking at who the mom bloggers are and, well, let’s face it, those of us who have been in the space a while are sort of fading away. I almost never write about my kids (which isn’t really much of a change) but I’m writing less and less about motherhood, which is a change.

When the kids were little there were universal experiences we mothers were having. We all have pregnancies or adoption stories, we all lost sleep, gained weight, got peed on, taught kids where to pee, worried about what they ate or didn’t eat, had first words and there were two ways parent at home or at work.

Now the kids are in school and I work but I’m not killing myself over here. I play tennis a few days a week, I have lunches with girlfriends, I hike and I’m branching out into blogger outreach. It’s really fun and fulfilling. This is a space that I understand well from both sides and I know what good work looks like. I get to reward those of you who excel with something other than a link. I like that.

My kids are on Instagram, my daughter insists Facebook is irrelevant (please don’t tell her that they own the ‘gram), twitter is where you follow celebrities and old people talk and when you say MySpace to them they snicker like you just said Leave it to Beaver.

I get pitches every day that offer me interviews with experts who will “Teach you how to keep your children safe from social media.” Sometimes I laugh before I hit delete, other times I want to scream at them and say stop selling fear. These people also sell books which is where the laughter comes in gales because in the 300 years it takes to get a book to press the information is obsolete.

When the kids are in middle school there are huge changes and many of these changes occur in the family too. Kids are going through puberty. After the first day back to school in 8th grade Jane marveled that all the boys’ voices had changed over the summer. I won’t be writing about my own son’s voice changing… I’ll just let y’all know that I suspect it’ll be sometime around 8th grade.

Middle school mothers start feeling like the victims of planned obsolescence.

I wrote briefly about Jane’s search for a high school and how she’s made great decisions and I’ve been left out of a lot of the process. I still make many of Alexander’s weekend plans but I don’t think I’ve arranged a weekend playdate for Jane in years. The kids choose their own summer camps.

When they were infants they were literally and figuratively attached to me. We weaned ourselves off of each other for some toddler years and now that elementary school is in the rear view mirror I’ve been relegated to the role of support staff. I’m here to help out, listen endlessly and to take over if there’s a crisis. Most of my time is spent listening and helping in increasingly small ways.

So the Mom Business changes quite a bit as they grow. There are very few women left who haven’t pursued part time employment, careers or all encompassing hobbies. We’re less of a homogenous group at this point. The kids have varied interests, everyone knows how to tie their owns shoes and no matter how many times I tell Jane that Coca Cola will make her fat, weaken her bones and rot her teeth I know she’s drinking gallons of it when she’s with her friends on weekends.

I could write about my tennis elbow or my recent need to nap and my overriding fear that the Simponi which gave me my life back is less and less effective but then I’d have to face the fact that it’s probably time to look at a different treatment. I could write about my husband’s new job and how our family will be missing him for the next six months but I find that ignoring a really difficult family situation that we all agreed we would take on is really for the best. I’m two for two on denial and that wonderful man deserves a wife who isn’t bogged down with self pity.

Us mothers of tweens and teens run out of universal experiences because the whys, the ways and the whens that the kids need us are so varied. Maybe the only common thread is that they still need us and we can’t wander too far even when they’re pushing us away. 

I’m a little lonely today. After having almost three weeks of kids, ten straight days of my husband bookended by two short work weeks I’m missing them all. There’s work to do. This house is a disaster as we all embraced a little vacation laziness. There is end of year billing that needs to be tied up and a dog that needs to be bathed. I have a stack of unedited videos to deal with and three, count them three, half finished car reviews.

But I’m not doing much today. Yesterday I spent the bulk of the day in the car running around town to pick up this that or the other and today I’m staring my four walls wishing my kids and my husband were home. I was thinking about getting up and out but then I decided that a day of wallowing never hurt anyone.

Tomorrow I might see a movie at noon.

Last week I had breakfast with a girlfriend who was explaining her back and forth issues with a boyfriend of six years. She wasn’t sure if they belonged together because they were so different.

When Mr. G and I had been together six years we celebrated our fourth anniversary and if I’m doing the math correctly I’d have been about 9 months pregnant with Alexander (our second). Mr. G and I are very different but I think we were often too busy to notice.

For a time, a very short time, having kids will hold a marriage together. I’ve rarely seen parents splitting up when kids are in diapers, but in second grade they dropped like flies. Maybe it’s because things get easier with the kids and they finally have time to address their broken marriages?

Mr. G and I have had some challenges. Nothing Earth shattering, certainly nothing that would make me expert on healing your troubled marriage. I guess I’d recommend keeping out of harms way. Maybe I’d even recommend not overthinking things.

My friend said that she and her beau were just too different. He likes to stay in, she likes to go out. “Oh, that sounds just like Mr. G and me!” I declared. She looked confused and I got excited. “It’s the perfect marriage. You can’t spend ALL your time together. Someone has to be on terra firma. It’s so good because he’s showed me how to enjoy different parts of my life.” And then she asked me what I did when he wanted to stay home. “I go out. I go out with my girlfriends and my gays. You have gays don’t you?” I started to worry that she didn’t have a man to date. One simply cannot be happily married to straight man without another man to “date”.

We chatted for a while about it and I thought that if they’d have been married this would be easier. Not because marriage is so grand (my brother’s been with his girlfriend for almost 20 years and they’ll never want to marry), but because when you give up everything that makes you single you work out solutions to these things without separating because you can’t. I mean you can… but do you really want to figure out who gets the sofa and who has to take the fucking cat just because you don’t want to have dinner together every night of the week?

My marriage isn’t about having the same life as my husband. It’s about having the same home base and staying on the same highway. If there was a roadmap to our marriage we’d have started out on the same interstate but we veer off, each of us, to explore different roadside attractions. He plays poker, I go out with the girls, he wants to be home every night, sometimes I fling dinner at them and run out the door. We always end up together and the joys we have on our journey are mostly shared experiences but the ones that aren’t don’t have less value. I love that he has relationships and projects that don’t involve me, I love hearing about them and it brings flavor to our lives.

If we’d have dated and maintained separate homes for four, six or ten years I’m quite certain we’d never have married.  Had we waited for things to be perfect, whatever perfect may be, we’d have missed growing together and enjoying the imperfect years. We’d both have missed the security of marriage, the shared highway if you will.

So basically darlin’. Just marry him. Don’t expect your husband to be your girlfriend and enjoy the journey with a great guy.

Also, for the final word on Chick-Fil-A and gay marriage read this. It’s the best post you’ll read all week.

Last night at dinner Mr. G made a face. Not a face you’d recognize, not even a face the rest of his family would recognize. He has a peculiar way of pushing food around while mini-sneering and then taking smaller than necessary bites. Only 15 years of marriage and a few extra for dating would make that face a recognizable one.

He didn’t like my dinner.

Mr. G then failed every IQ test ever administered and said, “I don’t really like this cut of meat. Maybe next time you can get something else.”

So I calmly explained to him that it wasn’t the cut of beef he didn’t like it was the marinade. It was missing an ingredient. Then he persisted and said that it was the cut of beef and he didn’t like skirt steak and I had to explain to him that loves skirt steak, that it’s marbled and flavorful and perfect for the grill because the fat just sizzles out and the cut is thin enough to hold all the marinade. He didn’t relent and I think I tried to smile but it may have appeared as more of a snarl.

Then in a positively suicidal moment he said, “Is it time for the red tide?” And I didn’t even try to smile at that point, because he was like, “First there was all that assembly and then there was the window washing, is there any chance that I don’t like this cut of meat and you’re just having that time?”

So I bought the biggest fucking soy sauce I could find. Mr. G will get his skirt steak with the marinade done properly and he’ll find out that he (like every red blooded American) does like skirt steak and then he’ll recognize that none of this has anything to do with time of the month.

Or maybe he’ll just learn to not say anything and to keep his own damn chart and then he would have known with certainty that it is indeed a very dangerous time of the month.

Today is our fifteenth anniversary. Minutes ago I submitted my first article to Parenting Magazine. It’s a short essay about how I actually love my Mother In Law. Marrying him was so much more than just the two of us.

Now there are four of us and anyone who wants to marry our kids will also get us, though that’s all very far off.

I wish I was home but I’m still with the girls here in Arizona. They’re having the time of their lives playing volleyball, hanging out at the waterpark and seeing Taylor Lautner poolside and Robert Pattinson at dinner. We simply cannot escape Hollywood.

I’ve spent most of this week wishing I was home and all of today grateful that our family is so complete. I love that Mr. G and I miss each other every day and not just on June 29th. I love that he made me his wife and then someone’s mother and then once more. I love that everything we’ve built we’ve built together and that for fifteen years I’ve had a best friend that I get to see almost every day. When our son talks about our dinner table he says, “We just laugh and laugh for hours.” And I know then that this marriage, these fifteen years are perfect in every way.

Now all we have to do is get ourselves to the same state.

At 7pm we realize that we are hungry and there’s no way in the world I’m cooking dinner. In other households this might not be a 7pm revelation but in ours we are constantly surprised by our hunger at the dinner hour.

Noting that it’s both Good Friday and the first night of Passover we think Benihana! because it’s impossible to go there last minute on any other night and planning for Benihana would be downright depressing. If I’m going to plan a steak and lobster dinner it’s going to be BOA not a cheezy but oddly delicious chain.

It takes me until almost 7.20 to get my act together and logon to their website but we have success and score an 8pm table for four. Alexander’s little buddy is spending the night and we walk into the most goyisha night ever.

The boys are chatting and Mr. G and I have a few minutes for adult conversation. It’s interesting because even in a noisy place we’re able to tune the rest of the world out and just be us. Half a lifetime later and I still can’t get enough of him.

We’ve got some big decisions to make as a couple and Mr. G is asking my advice and I realize that I don’t really have any to give. I’m in this bizarre situation of being married and being half of a household with no actual ability to keep said household afloat with anything but family dinners and purchasing decisions. I mean technically I have a career but it’s just not the one that could support the life we are living.

So I sip a second or perhaps a third glass of wine and tell him that I’m not sure that what I’ve done is smart. I say, “We’ve spent a small fortune on private schools for Jane and it’s only going to get more expensive and what if she goes to college and then to grad school and then she decides that she’s just going to stay home and support her husband’s career and be totally out of control of what comes in?”

And Mr. G looks at me and says, “What if Alexander finds some rich girl and decides not to work.”

“That’s not what men do.” I say while emptying that uncounted glass of wine.

“You’re a chauvinist.” He smirks.

And I am. And I realize that I’ve beaten the odds with almost 15 years of marriage in a very unequal household. It’s dumb, on paper I’d never recommend that either of my children commit their lives to this. I’d be horrified if my son decided against a career but only worried if my daughter did. In reality I can’t imagine my life any other way.

Seder tomorrow. Benihana tonight.

This weekend we snuck out of town for some family time. Since we’d unplugged Jane from her friends it seemed only fair to take the family funishment to the next level and make her spend quality time with us. We had a blast.

What was interesting about this trip is that we stayed in a hotel I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t one I’d recommend. It wasn’t budget friendly, and no matter how much I lowered my expectations they simply couldn’t be met by the hotel staff. They were a friendly staff, adorable even, but they weren’t particularly competent.

We told the kids we were heading to San Diego and my son packed for the beach. I don’t know how we didn’t double check his clothing choices, but we didn’t and he ended up with shorts and tee shirts and not enough socks. Although San Diego is, in fact, the beach, it was February in San Diego and it was quite cool at night. Jane’s hair wasn’t behaving as she thought it should (though I maintain that she has the most incredible hair I’ve ever seen).

With all this, with not very interesting food, cold and windy nights, waiting until 9pm for a bed to be made (and by “made” I mean it had no sheets) and Mr. G’s back hurting him it sounds like a horrible weekend away. Don’t worry, it’s only a sound.

Jane finished book seven in Pretty Little Liars and we had to beg the bookstore owner to please let us in, “we don’t need to browse.” I explained, my foot wedged into the closing door. We just want to grab a book and go. A toddler was in the back pooping in her diaper under a table, her father thought it was adorable. We got a book and Jane had a dose of birth control all at once.

During this weekend I was reading, obsessively reading, The Man Who Quit Money. It’s about Daniel Suelo who quit money in the beginning of the millennium. It’s a fabulous book and it touched me because it was written by a man with whom who I grew up. I still make his mother’s pancakes from the Co-Op nursery school cookbook. Obviously I wanted to like this book, but somewhere midway I realized it was me. He was writing about me (and so many of you) when he talked about the dilemma of reusing a Ziploc bag. Is it worth the water to rinse it? Am I adding to the plastic in the landfill? Why the fuck did I buy this bag in the first place? To hold apple slices? Next time I’m sending the kids to school with an apple and a knife (braces make it impossible to bite into one whole).

The book might have made me nicer over the weekend. There was only one moment where I lost my cool with the hotel manager (who was approximately 15 years old). I looked at things a little differently. It didn’t matter how I wanted to see the world. It didn’t matter what I expected a resort to look like, it mattered that I was with my family and I was gifted time and attention.

In fact Monday morning Alexander looked up at me and said that even though it’s a bay and not a beach and even though and even though… this was the best weekend of his entire life.

I’m not sure why our family is having such a nice time just being together. I’ll never really know how a crappy hotel and terrible food gave us all such pleasure, but it did.