Scream a Little Scream

I've always liked the quiet. I was the kid who preferred reading my endless pile of books and magazines to crowded parties. I spent afternoons running amidst the woods with only the call of birds and whoosh of the wind as my soundtrack. At shows, I was more likely to shoegaze than scream and sing. In short, I'm just not one to be loud.

This all apparently changed with parenthood, when a child's shrieking, screaming, growling, laughter, and crying became part of my house's background noise. Even the quietest of children go through toddlerhood, when screaming at the top of one's lungs is rigueur. After about a month of nonstop shrieking, the likes of which have probably alerted the local police department,  I grew used to my son's noise. What I formerly found peaceful -- stillness, quiet -- I now find worrisome. Silence signals that my little one is in danger, or at least into something he shouldn't be.

What I fail to understand is how rudely many parents react to the behavior of other people's children. Recently, at a local shopping mall that boasts a small playground, I saw a fellow parent work to wrangle her son during an all-out tantrum. It was a mess -- screaming, kicking, wailing, biting, all in a very public place. While I worked to avert my eyes and go on watching my own munchkin scale a scary, five-foot-high series of steps, the twenty or so other parents on the playground craned their necks to watch another mother work to drag her screaming two-year-old over to a bench. It was playground rubbernecking, only there was not a scratch of empathy or concern on anyone's face. Instead, the attitude was one of contempt -- for this mother, her "bratty" kid, the fact that their Sunday afternoon was interrupted with guttural screams of "no, don't" and "I don't want to." Their eyes and expressions said it all: they disapproved.

What's perhaps most unbelievable about this scenario is the fact that everyone giving this poor mom the stink-eye has been in this situation themselves. Everyone's kid screams, yells, throws down, and acts in a manner most uncouth at one point in time or another. Usually, this happens in public. Always, one's self-control and personal stamina are tested to the nth degree. It's so common, I question how any parent even bats an eye at the sound of a child mid-tantrum. But there we were, listening, watching, judging.

I shuddered at the thought of when my time will come, when I will be the subject of other mothers' tsks and head shakes. I hope that when it happens to me, I can block the angry stares and just carry on. Sure my face will be red, and my stomach will be in knots, but I hope I have the will courage to understand that stillness and quiet are for another time in life, and that noise and laughter and difficulty and even shrieking are part of my life now. Scream on.

I Believe I Can Fly

This spring, I'm charged with returning to one of my favorite cities on the planet -- New Orleans. I'm going to down the muffaletas, sip some chicory coffee, and waltz around the streets with a hurricane in hand for the entirety of my stay. The only problem? To get there, I'll be skipping the monotonous drive through southern Mississippi's wall-eyed I-10 corridor and flying straight into Louis B. Armstrong airport for a wedding. Did I mention I'll be locked in a plane for 4 1/2 hours. With a toddler. During nap time. Also, there will be an hour and a half layover in that cesspool of domestic air travel, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, ATL.


Now I've seen some things in my day. Frail hookers lined the streets of my commute through southeast DC. I had to interview people inches away from a hefty pool of blood after a Georgia shootout in the projects. When I was 8,  a woman whose brain was leaking out of her head was carted past me in a Central Florida ER. All told, these are not nice things to encounter in one's life. But flying with a toddler 25,000 feet off the ground in a steel bullet of strangers and weird air pressure? Whoa-ho-ho. We're in a whole new territory here.


This is not to say I'm scared of some crash-and-burn flight. I've been a regular flier since I first boarded an airplane to New York City at 17. Every flight I've had has been similar -- thunderous engines, stale air, those damn carts the stewardesses roll over your toes when they're trying to serve your neighbor a third of a Coke. I don't love flying. It's a necessary evil, and I don't view it as any different than a Greyhound bus ride, only on a plane you're looking at clouds instead of crack pipes and discarded McDonald's bags. 


I know, I know -- flying is supposed to be of a different ilk. My mother-in-law likes to remind me and everyone within earshot about the days of aviation's golden years, when one actually cared about decorum and dressed in something other than a velour track suit and flip-flops. Back then flying was expensive and glamorous. I'm sure it was also a lot more pleasant, those years before passengers had to be corralled through a litany of checkpoints, baring callouses and corns at one station and having their saucy bits unloaded at others. In these modern, anything-goes times, I'm a bit freaked out about taking a baby through all of that. And exposing him to the inevitable pair of Tasmanian Devil print pajamas my seatmate will be donning.


Of course, I get what's really going on in el brain-o. This isn't about traveling with a kid, per se. Rather, it's the prospect of looking like an absolute dolt in front of hundreds, perhaps thousands of strangers. Scratch that. It's looking like an absolute dolt of a parent in front of all these strangers. And being unable to control the situation. I can't call off pat-downs, drag a gallon of milk on board, or avoid checking a carseat. I can't blast the child's favorite records and distract him with the prospect of going to a park or seeing a truck. Instead, I'll have to just sit there and take it. And while I would like to tell myself that I don't care what 250 glaring passengers are thinking, in truth, I don't want to come off as a class-A moron. I don't want to turn beet red, and offer excuses, and worst of all, put my kid in a situation where he is the focus of strangers' hatred. 


To try to cope with this new-found fear, I've entered a healthy stage therapists like to call denial. As in, I have yet to buy my plane tickets. As in, I've Google-mapped a trip from Chapel Hill to New Orleans at least 10 times, hoping the drive will go from 15 hours to five. As in I keep imagining I will magically land in New Orleans with kid, unscathed, well-rested, and ready for king cake and a pot of gumbo! As petty as it sounds, this denial thing has also led me to think about all of the other challenges I'd rather encounter to avoid this one. Bring on the skydiving. Whip out the snakes and scorpions and spiders. Throw me in a friggin closet with one of those hoarder people's 30-plus years of shit. I'll be cool! These are escapable horrors! Trapped in a steel bullet with cranky strangers and bitchy flight attendants and a screaming bambino? Lord, take me now.

The Feeble Weeble?

Growing up, I attended a Catholic K-8 school which, like many private schools, relied on a host of fundraisers to keep the lights on and the a/c cold. Each fall, my classmates and I were ushered into the parish hall to hear a charismatic presenter discuss how we students could sell, sell, sell our way to glory. Glory apparently meant earning a bunch of cheap crap by selling wrapping paper and canisters of popcorn to as many neighbors and family members as you could con into signing your gridded fundraising folder. Of course, as students we didn't have the ability to understand our school needed the extra support. To us, fundraisers were a means by which we could get stuff -- stuff our parents wouldn't buy for us. Our savvy salesmanship was the ticket to boomboxes, massive vats of candy, and small color televisions for our private use.

The biggest fundraiser of the year was a magazine drive. For those of you who don't remember life before the Internet, magazines were the source of information about fashion, food, and yes, news. Sure there was cable, but with an 8:30 p.m. bedtime, most of the shows I wanted to watch were out of reach. Magazines filled my informational needs. I was (and still am) all about mags. My family subscribed to a number of them, and I remember sitting in the fundraising presentation silently tallying how much I was going to rake in through sales to my parents, extended family, and neighbors. I would earn my own color TV, a Sony Walkman, and all the puppy posters I wanted without having to pander to dear old mom and dad.

I should note that I was likely about seven years old.

At the presentation, we were all given a glossy chart that explained the point totals needed for the light-up yo-yo and neon jelly bracelet prizes. However, the real way to track your status was through your Weebles. A Weeble was simply a colored cotton puff with googly eyes. It was attached to a white elastic band meant to go around your wrist. Each $20 in magazine sales equalled one Weeble. On Fridays, as you marched your envelope full of checks to the fundraising rep's corner of the cafeteria, so were you bestowed with your Weeble reward. The more you had on your arm, the more you had sold. It was a public declaration of your success, and an easy way to spark competition among students. Weeble-wearers could be called without notice to ice cream socials and dances during class time. Weeble-wearers were going to get stuff, and lots of it. Not surprisingly, the three-cent puffs became the campus status symbol du jour. 

By fundraiser's end I had an armful of Weebles, though that paled in comparison to the wealthiest members of my class -- kids whose parents owned sizable law firms and passed the envelope to hundreds if not thousands of people. I sold many magazines (without my parent passing the envelope around the workplace, thank you very much), but it never seemed like I had enough. One Friday, I watched a classmate receive a plastic grocery bag containing at least 300 of the stupid things. It didn't take long to feel inadequate and well, poor in comparison to my Weeble-laden peers. The dream of a private TV and lifetime supply of Milk Duds began to fade. At the fundraiser's conclusion, several winners paraded onto the stage and collected their Walkmans, remote-controlled Porsches, and yes, TVs. With $200 in sales, I received a cardboard bank filled with Tootsie Rolls from my homeroom teacher. There was no applause, no proud march across the stage, no TV. I threw my Weebles out that afternoon.

Of course, this sort of competition doesn't end with a handful of Weebles in a South Florida landfill. As I grew older, it morphed. It became the pool we didn't have, the cars we didn't drive, the vacations we didn't take. Though my family was solidly middle class, perhaps even upper middle class, I spent a lot of time comparing how my family "measured up" to others. And often those comparisons were unfair. Whereas those kids with the TVs and troughs of Snickers had stuff, I had both of my parents, a nice house, friends, and plenty of fine vacations. I had everything I wanted, and probably a little more than I needed.

Now, as a full-fledged adult, I find those pangs of competition and comparison welling up again. It just takes a minute to rationally talk yourself down from one-upping a friend or kicking yourself for not having x, y, and z.

As a kid, I thought adulthood meant total security. You get married, buy a house, maybe have some kids, a dog and -- boom -- suddenly, you've got it all. Forget the club, your weekends are now chockfull of trips to Home Depot for floodlights and organic compost! And you're so happy about that you could scream. Maybe it's that I notice these things more or maybe society has just changed that much in the past ten years, but it seems like a lot of people are trying really hard to outdo their peers. Somehow, in a down economy, I'm seeing brand new cars everywhere. The malls are full of people buying, buying, buying. It's difficult to go to a restaurant in my area without a reservation or at least a lengthy wait for a table.  And everyone on the planet is now toting a smartphone. All of this makes me question how much we all need this stuff in our lives? What are we all working so hard for? A bunch of crap we likely won't care about next week, much less next year?

In many ways, it feels like Weebledom has swept the land, only with higher stakes. Like it or not, most of us are never going to live the lifestyle that Beyonce does. My child will never own a 24-karat gold rocking horse or drive a Bugatti under my tutelage. And really, I'm totally happy about that. If I could have offered my parents any advice back in the day, it would have been to give me less and make me work more. Which is all the more reason I find the current obsession with having the latest and greatest -- the tablet/house/car that's better than anyone else's -- all the more puzzling.

In a stroke of serendipity, I recently saw a Weeble (or something like it). It had been years since I'd even thought about one, and yet there one was, basking in the glory of a black BMW's dashboard. My initial response was to feel my arm, to see if I was wearing one. When I caught myself doing this, it was easy to smile and move on with a happy nod and not a second glance.

Lies a Mother Told Me

Like many new parents, I spend a lot of time at big box discount stores. This is not something I'm proud of, but has become a necessity of sorts. The corner farmer's market doesn't regularly sell the jumbo, ultra-absorbent diapers that my little one requires to sleep through the night. And since I'm not willing to pay $79.99 for organic butt wipes, this finds me at mega marts.

I'm there so often, I actually recognize many of the store clerks, which leads to an awkward rapport of sorts between us. Rapport in the South usually means you engage in a bit of small talk about the weather, work, or a certain item you're purchasing. Topics can range from exchanging jokes about how crowded the store is to the escalating price of hummus to commenting on the brightness of said mega-mart's new rainbow-hued walls. As I'm towing Max along with me most days, this leads to a lot of questions about my little mister. A lot of people tell me he's cute (yep), or remark he must look like his father (it's the eyes). But most of all, people tend to ask me questions, which they then like to follow up with an anecdote about their own child and unsolicited advice about aforementioned eating/sleeping/crying tendencies.

This is not anything new. For whatever reason, I've spent a lot of my time here on earth talking shop about religion, cash registers, sunscreen, you name it to baristas, mechanics, and everyone in between. Perhaps my face says, "Talk to me. I want to know your story," or maybe I just look really bored. This trait always helped me interview people as a journalist and I've been fortunate to hear some awesome stories from the people I encounter each day. But as the parent of a 15-month-old, I've entered a new territory, one that involves other parents grossly exaggerating their children's capabilities.

I know, I know. We all exaggerate, especially when we feel there's a chance that our minor fibbing can gain us a competitive edge over someone else. This seems to be really prevalent when it comes to dogs, pet birds, and children. (Sorry cats, no one thinks you can do anything but lay around and be selfish.) I've heard of dogs who can bark the alphabet backward, and birds who can sing their owner's favorite TV theme song. Impressive, no? But the ante seems to be upped a bit when it comes to children. As a teacher, I saw this all of the time. Some parent would purport their child the next Joan Didion when the kid was doing little more than churning out blase essays about how awesome vampire love must be. (The reach of "Twilight" is unreal, people.) Yet somehow exaggerating your child's temperament, sleeping abilities, and eating habits to another parent -- particularly, a sleep-deprived, desperate for-a-scream-free-day parent -- is just downright icky.  Lately, I've been hearing tales of infant wunderkinds who sleep like 15-year-olds, love to eat organic kale, and selflessly donate their rattles to Make-a-Wish Foundation fundraisers. Okay, that last one I made up. But I've got to say, there is little in life that is more disheartening than thinking your sweet little child is perhaps behind the curve. And if you listen to and believe much of this puffery, you're going to feel that way. 

For the most part, I don't believe people's exaggerations are malicious. I'm not even sure most people are aware they're telling a half-truth. As each month passes you do sort of forget what developmental milestones your kid has blown past. It's when these exaggerations are told with an air of superiority that things get wonky. Last spring, when my infant was waking up three or four times a night to eat -- something nearly all five-month-olds do -- an acquaintance of mine shrugged that all three of her children arrived home from the hospital sleeping ten hours uninterrupted. As in, they never woke up during the night for their entire infancy. I took that information hard, because I felt like it meant I was doing something wrong. Coupled with a well-timed article about infant sleep habits and eventual IQ, I freaked out that something must be wrong with me or the kid or the crib mattress I spent three hours picking out because, dang it, that lady's kids were on another planet for the entire night. 

Of course, I eventually came around to understand this tale was perhaps a bit embellished. As several of my close friends have had children recently, I saw that my own child's habits were pretty normal in comparison to theirs. In conversations with people I know, or barely know, I've heard more truth stretchin'. Sometimes, I recognize it right away, such as the time a Wally World cashier boasted her daughter could hold her own bottle at two months old, or when a mother I met at a playground told me her kid seemed more "cognitively aware" when dressed in organic cotton clothing. At other times, I'm not so sure. It is then that these little parenting fibs begin to sow the seeds of self-doubt. At this point, that's not exactly something I want to reap.

While I would love to declare I'll never be guilty of stretching the truth a bit in relation to my own child, I know all too well the slippery fibbing slope one can proceed down when pride and egos are at stake. Already, I've found myself engaged in some sort of mindless banter about my little one's first words (for the record, "tree," "this," "tub," "yeah," and "dog") and compared notes about the date at which he began to walk unassisted (12 months, two days). I can't help but silently tally his important milestones in relation to his peers. What I can hope to do is not brag about my own kid's abilities to some weary mother who is just trying to buy socks and formula at 5 a.m. No, really.