Wednesday it "snowed," which is to say that there was something in the air, but what landed is not even enough to bother scraping from my car's windshield. This is why a car is equipped with a windshield wiper. Whatever. While it snowed, Fillette and Garçon crowed and wished and hoped for "real snow," which has entered their lexicon as our children. Whenever they complain about the "cold" or exclaim over the "snow," I vow to take them to Siberia. They used to be afraid of it, but lately they get excited. The thing is, Mari does not want to go to Siberia. "It's cold there," he says.
The funny difference between he and I is that he does not miss the weather back home. He scoffs at the simulacrum of winter here, but at the same time he is grateful that he does not have to haul out his cojones and face weather well below 0 for a quarter of the year. This is why every winter I am wracked by a tubercular homesickness and he just steps around me where I am prostrate with longing so he can cheerfully get into the car and enjoy the driving off without scraping. He cannot fathom that I would want it to be 5 degrees below 0 just for old times sake. Not to mention -40 just for a lark -- just in case we go soft.
We just straightened this out, he and I, because Fillette was expressing a wish to learn ice skating. I told her that it was not possible. Mari interrupted and pointed out the indoor ice rink on campus. I stared, speechless. Surely I have driven past it a million times and never once equated the Indoor Ice Rink Building with, uh, ice skating. Because, I explained to him, that is for hockey and also, Olympians, obviously. He laughed at me, while I sat there, stubbornly trying to reconcile "indoor" with "ice skating." It seemed pitiful to me. Much as an indoor swimming pool must seem to people from Southern California.
I explained to my deprived child my life on ice skates. When I was a girl, growing up not so far away from where her father was a boy, I went ice skating nearly every short afternoon all winter long with an assortment of cousins and neighbors and pals. The park near my house then, very much like the park near her house now, had a large depression in its landscape. The fabulous Chicago Park District filled it with water every year and we skated, all the time. This was in the late 1970s, when even young children in big cities were allowed to go outside and play without the smothering of constant caregiving.
I was as old then as Garçon is now, and he is barely allowed to play in front of the house with his sister. Not because I think it is unsafe, because I do not. They live here. It is perfectly appropriate. They are not the heir and heiress to a vast ketchup fortune or anything. The problem is that the culture says that children must be smothered by my constant vigilance every minute of every day. So, it is a good thing that the ice skating is indoors where one needs to pay admission, for her father can take her. Indoor ice skating would certainly break my heart. Plus, I still think it is pathetic.
In the area of burden of constant supervision, there was a heinie-showing incident last week at Fillette's afterschool program. I sure do long for the days when age-appropriate developmental sex play used to mean a box of condoms, a latex dress, an innocent affect, & a fifth of Wild Turkey. Life was so simple then. Now there has to be handwringing. Parenting is so difficult, not for the snap decisions I have to make. I handled that fine, even though she made her confession while I was trying to read the Sunday magazine section (unfair! so unfair!) and have a cup of tea. I could not have been less prepared, unless it had been Garçon, really. In her words:
Mama, last week? When I was in the bathroom at [Coyote Ugly]? My friend [Exhibitionist], showed me her butt.
[I do not hit the ceiling, but instead have spurious reaction of raising one eyebrow while not looking up from newspaper, so she goes on, gathering steam.]
Then she said I had to show me her butt back, I mean show her my butt back. I told her it was bad behavior, but she said, uh, she told me that no one would find out and I wouldn't get into trouble, so I did.
Then I had to say something. That is my least favorite part of parenting, the part where the child is waiting and I have to say something. No staging area! Also, I was minding my own business, reading the newspaper. Go talk to your father! I mean! I settled for saying her name in that way that mothers have, that Garçon imitates so excellently when she is on her last chance with him, all the syllables clipped off and the last long vowel taking a whole breath to get out. She tucked her head down, "I know, I know! I am sorry!!"
God. Anyhow, she got a calm chatter from me about how she already knows that the least she can do to keep safe is to keep her self to herself. Plus, "no one will find out" is the biggest flag that waves to warn of big trouble ahead. Also, that she is at the start of a very long road of telling her friends "no" to things that she knows are bad behavior. Last, that I know it is hard to say no to friends, that it takes great courage, but if she is brave enough to confess bad behavior to her newspaper-reading (!!) mother, that she is way brave enough to say no to her friends, for god's sake.
Her consequence was simple and direct: she could not attend her program for a week. It was the same consequence -- albeit a longer sentence -- with the same explanation -- children who cannot take care of themselves do not get to be by themselves -- she had for the clothes-on offense of sunburning herself with delinquent sunscreen application at camp last summer. I did not feel like I was overreacting. My whole thing about this was to keep it simple. Upbeat! Sex-positive! Which was not my midwestern nor catholic childhood experience at all.
This is why although things are good in my own home, I may be a little rolly inside. I feel all feeling-y because yesterday, while picking up Garçon, I mentioned to the program director that there was a little heinie-showing incident. She asked me with who and I said, obliquely, waving it away, "Just girls. In the bathroom." But when she asked me who a second time, I caved and gave up the name. I have no experience in this arena of dealing with administrator types, I tell myself, I told myself. But a cursory glance at any of my behavior with other "administrators" and "experts" even in the recent past reveals that to be a pretty fat lie. I ratted the kid out.
After we left last night, I heard the program director calling the girl's name across the hallway. I felt so bad. Because I really want to believe -- I really do believe -- that this incident is not a big deal. I think that the issue with Fillette is not about heinies, but about her being able to resist the considerable lure of peers. The complementarity of my children is thus: Garçon wants to please no one, at the expense of himself, and Fillette wants to please everyone, at the expense of herself. I am much more worried about her long-term resistance to peer pressure than any kind of showing her butt. This incident was hardly made about bodies at all, except for the larger issues around safety and secretkeeping.
I have a terrible feeling that this child's mother is not going to see this in the same way. I am trying so hard to keep my upbringing out of my children's life, but I think I just served it up to someone else's. This is one of the great misgivings of parenting I think that people without children have -- this idea that one raises their own children, in a deeply-personalized fashion, and no one else's children are any of their concern. Which is complete bullshit. Parenting operates within a culture, just like all the rest. Mari and I have opted out of so much -- institutional schooling, television programming, toys that get on my nerves -- and still, we get hamstrung and caught up by ballet and ten hours a week in a recreational afterschool program. I can no sooner say that no one else's children affect my parenting choices or my children or my life than I can walk down the street sneezing on people and not expect it to influence my lifetime rate of contusions received.
But whatever. Judging from the reactions we get on the regular, Mari and I are at the far reaches of still-civilized parenting, verging on the feral. We let our children call us by our first names. !!! So, I guess Ratted-Out Child will have to bloom where she is planted. I did, once. I do wish the weather were cold enough to be purgative. Then I wouldn't even need snow, no. Just a nice dry day's high in the low teens would suffice. But! I am still less homesick than I typically am in these conditions, inside and out. It might be time to go to the gym, anyhow. Finally.
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