A couple of years ago we signed the girls up for karate lessons. Friends of ours had enrolled their son in Tae Kwon Do classes specifically so he would be able to defend himself against a physical threat which they believed would more than likely present itself at some point in his life. I remember thinking that he’d have to be very unlucky to get attacked, and that they were perhaps being a little paranoid. And yet you hear these stories of young men getting themselves into fights by walking past the wrong nightclub at the wrong time and getting in the way of the wrong guy coming out of the club, and you can understand why they might want their son to be able to fend off that kind of attention. Still, he’s only a kid, surely that was years away?
We signed our two girls up for karate because we would like them to be able to defend themselves against an attack, but mostly because we wanted them to have the confidence that comes from knowing you could defend yourself. I don’t know if it’s an urban myth, but there was a young girl, about 11 years old, who was grabbed from behind by a man who then tried to get her into the back of his car. It happened in broad daylight at the local shopping centre. The girl had been practicing Tae Kwon Do since she was about five years old. Apparently, that’s long enough to learn how to escape a man’s clutches, spin around, and kick him square in the face and render him unconscious. Apparently he started to come round as the police were handcuffing him.
Great story.
Our neighbour’s TKD teacher instructs his students to run away at the first sign of trouble; if you feel threatened, then get out of there. If you can’t get away, then you must defend yourself, NOT attack the other person. A skilled TKD practitioner can actually block a punch so effectively that they can break the attacker’s arm. Apparently. According to the teacher, only if the situation disintegrates into a full-on fight should you actually strike the other person. And if you’re as good as your training has taught you to be, it should only take one hit. Which is why you should warn your foe three times that you want them to stop.
Our neighbour’s son - who is 11, and let’s call him Joe - was being bullied at school by a kid two years older. To cut a long story short (though I should add that Joe had already tried running away) Joe found himself in a corner with this kid who was threatening to beat him up. Joe told him three times that he didn’t want to get into a fight with him. The 13 year old took a step forward and aimed a punch at Joe’s head. Joe had steadied himself in a TKD stance, blocked the punch, then delivered a swift kick to the 13 year old’s sternum. The kid dropped straight to the floor, completely winded. Joe said something about not wanting to fight, and left.
When word got out about the first confrontation, everyone in Joe’s class thought he was a bit of a hero. That night, one of the girls in his class who has a 13 year old brother got onto MSN and sent messages to all 13 year old boys she could contact, letting them know that Joe could beat up anyone, and would happily fight every kid who wanted to have a go at him.
The next day, Joe was confronted by three 13 year old boys, including the kid from the day before who was no doubt feeling a bit bruised. Again, Joe warned them that he didn’t want to fight. The warning was ignored, and the kid with the bruised chest got another swift kick to the sternum. His two mates - who were no doubt there as much for moral support as to see if it was true that Joe could kick like that - were rendered speechless.
The school, to their credit, dealt with the situation extremely well. The three boys were given weekend detention, and the girl behind the MSN campaign was given a strongly-worded warning as well as weekend detention. There’s a zero-tolerance policy toward bullying, especially cyber-bullying. Her explanation? “I just wanted to see what would happen.”
And here’s where my thoughts turn back to my two daughters. We have them enrolled in karate classes but really, where is the biggest threat going to come from? They are more likely to be attacked by other girls than by boys, and the attacks wont be physical, they’ll be personal. How do you defend your daughters against that sort of thing?
The neighbours, my husband and I were talking about how boys and girls settle disputes; boys will confront one another in the locker room after lunch, girls will get online and send white-anting messages to everyone with a computer. I suspect the messages are repeated via their mobile (cell) phones.
One of my husband’s good friends is a Phys-Ed teacher at a local high school, and also the Year Coordinator, meaning he has some responsibility for the welfare of the kids in one year - in his case, it’s the Year Eight class (sophomore year). He says that there are a few troublesome boys in the year who get into regular fights, but the disagreements are over and done with pretty quickly, and it usually only takes a bit of a push-and-shove rather than an all-in brawl to settle the dispute. He says that he spends the vast majority of his time dealing with the Year Eight girls; they bitch and gossip and manipulate and verbally abuse and tease and bully and undermine each other and then the next week they’re all best friends again. The typical disagreement takes several days and countless emails and text-messages to resolve. Imagine the pain and suffering that can be inflicted over such a period of time.
I almost wish, if my girls were ever in a situation where another girl came at them with a fully loaded cell phone, that they would hit back with a well-aimed foot to the sternum, and be done with it. I almost wish.
I hardly watch the news on television anymore. I don’t like the tabloid-spin most news networks are putting on their stories, and I don’t like being surprised by stories about children who have been abducted or women who have been violated or any of those other happenings that I can’t forget about for days afterwards. I prefer to just read the headlines and make a decision about whether or not I need to know all the horrid details. I also don’t like being fed this notion that I need to be afraid that any of this bad stuff is going to happen to my family, and that I should be super-vigilant any time I leave the safety of my fortified house. And that I should have a fortified house. And know karate. In some countries, I might be encouraged to carry a gun, to protect myself from the madness that I see on the news every night.
I don’t like being scared and worried. And as a parent you give birth to worry. The list of things you can add to your list of things to worry about doubles when you have kids. What am I saying? Doubles? How about increases by a factor of a zillion. I try very hard not to think about the things that can happen to them but I have an active imagination and I’m usually pretty quick to jump to the worst possible conclusion. I’m 37 in a couple of weeks and my head is covered in grey hair. You can’t tell unless you look at the roots, but it’s there. Very, very grey. Grey like Bill O’Reilly’s hair. OK, grey like Anderson Cooper’s.
The problem is that the kids, my two otherwise perfectly innocent little girls, occasionally do things that give me reason to worry. And although they may see their little adventures as just that - an adventure - I see it as the story on the evening news, complete with graphic images and adjectives in bright scary-red capitals. I don’t want to be one of those parents who wont let their kids out of their sight, but I also don’t want to be one of those parents who wish they had been more vigilant. Where or how do we draw the line?
Remember the post about the conversation I recently had with my mother in law? It ended with the promise of another story from the Prescott family archives. I am a woman of my word (unless I forget which happens quite often.) The following story is not for the weak of constitutions. It is a real life account of what can happen when one has an overactive uterus and a long overdue second honeymoon in progress. Brace yourself…
After twenty three years of marriage, ten children and several thousand trips to the doctor, church and the school pick up line, Dean and Julie desperately needed some alone time. Being a one income family of twelve, did not allow for the luxury of a vacation, much less one without kids. So, when the opportunity for a business trip presented itself, it was a dream come true for the frazzled couple. Even though their destination was only a few hours away, by plane, Julie was a tad reluctant to leave her children. Sure, the older ones were more than capable of tending to the brood. Sure, they had wonderful neighbors who promised to help keep an eye on the house. However, leaving a house full of kids unattended was a little unsettling. Despite her worries, Dean and Julie took the trip to Utah.
Julie had given birth to eight feisty boys and two girls, at this point in life. The boys were notorious for performing dangerous stunts and getting into all kids of mischief. Julie had visited the emergency room so many times, that they practically knew the Prescott family by name. It was no surprise when one of the boys, fell out of a tall palm tree in the front yard, and suffered a broken arm and concussion. In fact, this particular child was such a jokester, that Julie playfully kicked him and laughed as he lay on the sidewalk. She was so used to falling prey to his tricks, that she never imagined that he was actually hurt. It was this type of thing that lay in the back of Julie’s mind as she unpacked her suitcase at the hotel. Thoughts of worst case scenarios flooded the unsettled mother’s mind. Finally, after much persuading from Dean, she breathed a sigh of relief and allowed herself to relax. As all of you parents know, those words written in a parenting story, always mean trouble…
There are three boys in my ten year old daughter’s year who are known as Those Boys Who Get Into Trouble All The Time. There’s one in my seven year old’s class. Every school has them. For a few years when he was young, my brother was one of Those Boys. I can remember my parents’ anguish at having to go down the road to school to see the Principal, yet again, because of some mischief my brother had gotten himself into. But I didn’t really appreciate how difficult it must have been for them until today.
I was standing in the playground this afternoon, chatting with a couple of other mothers as we swapped kids for afternoon play-dates, when I was struck in the back of the head with something sharp and hard. The force was enough to knock my teeth together and send my sunglasses right off my face and onto the ground. I clutched the back of my head and spun around to see what it was and where it had come from. One of the other mothers picked up a small rock as three boys turned away from me with their hands in their pockets and their eyes cast upwards. Wasn’t us.
I looked down at my hand, fully expecting to see blood, but there was none. My head was aching immediately and now, about an hour later and despite a couple of pills, I’ve got a dull ache behind my left eye. So, not a serious injury, but it was all I could do to hold myself together as I turned to look at these boys and try to figure out why on earth they might have decided throwing rocks was a good idea.
“I have hives! I have hives!” I ran screaming from the bathroom, on the first morning of shooting. My husband gave me the signature “So what’s the big deal?” look from the kitchen, where he was making waffles. The kids were all decked out in logo free, plain colored outfits that had been painstakingly selected the night before. Do you know how hard it is to find nine logo free, plain colored, wardrobes…without holes? That is 63 outfits, all meeting the guidelines laid out by the production company. No wonder thousands of itchy, red bumps had taken up residence on my face and neck. The hunt for appropriate wardrobes, alone, had been a royal pain in the ass. I knew that our wardrobe quest was just the beginning of a very long and stressful two weeks. I slumped over on the bathroom floor, hives covering my skin, wondering if I was even going to make it to the point where Jo Frost knocked on our door. I kept repeating, “It’s for the kids, it’s for the kids,” every mother’s mantra.
Sure, everything we mothers do is for our kids. We live for our kids. We sacrifice without with little complaint, so that they will have a better childhood than we had. I have always tried to make choices that reflected the best interest of my children, since the day my first daughter was born. This experience, however, was testing the limits of my will to be the best parent I could. I was knowingly throwing myself and my spouse into the lion’s den. We were about to allow the nation to see every flaw, every mistake and every moment of our lives, edited at the discretion of a television production company. I had survived some extreme situations, all in the name of motherhood. Deciding to film an episode for Supernanny, trumped every other parenting trial I had encountered. If I survived the whole two weeks, I would feel an indescribable sense of accomplishment and pride. That “If” was heavily loaded.
Ever wish you could freeze time, when you’re amid the screaming of children and general chaos that is life, to take a moment for the sake of regaining your sanity? Yeah, me too. Trust me, I’ve tried that remote trick that Adam Sandler did on “Click” and, much to my chagrin, it didn’t work. Hey…it was worth a try! I am well aware that the chaos and ear splitting shrieking that sometimes plague a parent’s day, are the norm. I understand that the high pitched decibels of toddlers mean that our children are healthy and that the chaos is the result of not doubling up on my birth control methods. That doesn’t make it any easier to navigate through the moments that make me want to call CPS and turn myself in for a made up infraction, just to get a day of peace.
Writer James Lileks has come up with an interesting way of dealing with his daughter’s broken Nintendo:
(G)Nat dropped her Nintendo and it broke. This is a teachable moment, in which she learned an important lesson: don’t drop your Nintendo, or it will break. Also, a replacement is not immediately forthcoming. The world doesn’t work that way. Well, her world doesn’t work that way. I will not let her use savings to ut a new one, because she has no concept of money; I have told her she can wait three months, which is a mean cruel ETERNITY, but: she can hasten the day by spending Nintendo time on other things, such as reading and art. The more she does that, the faster Replacement Day comes.
I’ll admit, I may talk a good game but often I’m a total pushover. I have — on more than one occasion — immediately replaced a lost or broken toy (provided, of course, it was an accident and not due to carelessness). Even went so far that when a beloved stuffed animal went missing, I went on eBay and got into a bidding war to purchase a new one.
How do you handle such situations? Do you — finances permitting — buy a new one or do you turn it into a life lesson?
Allow me to introduce myself, I am the woman you glare at in the grocery aisle, because her children are running amok. I am the woman with the two cart fulls of groceries, who you always get stuck behind in the check out line. I am the one you do not want at your Mom’s Club gatherings, because we are always late and usually forget snack when it is our turn. I am the owner of that dirty, fifteen passenger van in the school pick up line, who takes forever to load up her spawn. I am the maternity ward patient who all the nurses know by name. I’m the mom with a baby permanently attached to her hip and boogers crusted on her shoulder. I am the lady who makes women glad that they have only one child. I am the parent who does it all, but masters nothing. I am an imperfect parent of seven children. Around these parts, I go by the name of “Mooooooom, make him stop!” But you can call me “Kadi.”
I decided to join the ranks of the Imperfect Parent crew for a few reasons:
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Posted
July 19, 2008 at
11:43 pm by
Trish 
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