Orange County Moms Blog

The Trauma of Childhood Sports

We had a little crisis this week. My five-year-old son Jafta has been begging to attend a basketball camp for the past three months, and I signed him up for one through our city for preschool-aged kids. All summer, he's been asking about it and counting down to when it would start. It was supposed to start Monday. On Saturday, I got a call telling me it had been canceled.

I found myself with two options:
1) completely crush my son and have him mope about it endlessly until the next camp starts IN OCTOBER
2) lie omit information about his age and enroll him in a camp running this week for kids age 6-8

Which one do you think I did?

Growing up in a family that didn't really do sports, I am having a long and rocky learning curve as I navigate the role of "sports mom". I would like to pretend that it's just a new cultural experience for me, but the reality is that athletics have always brought up deep insecurities for me. And as any parent knows, having a child basically means watching your own fears and insecurities walk around outside your body.

Gun Control (the mom you want to be, and the mom you are)

I spend a lot of time pondering the disparity betweenthe mom I though I would be, and the mom I am. I was such a good mom before having kids. I had dreams of my children playing with quaint wooden toys, learning piano at a young age, and having picnics in meadows (eating only organic food, of course). Somehow my reality of motherhood involved a lot more plastic, McDonalds, and trips to Target than I ever imagined. That meadow picnic? Yeah, that's never happened.

Also in my dreams of motherhood, our home would be free of toys that represent weapons. My oldest was a boy - but I imagined that somehow, with careful guidance, I could free him from the gender expectations that give way to a desire for violent objects. Unfortunately, no one warned me that a predilection for destruction seems to be coded in the DNA. Despite providing my son Jafta with a playroom full of peaceful, docile toys, he seems to be drawn only to things that produce explosions, loud noises, or (best yet), wounds of the flesh. He was begging for a sword by the time he could talk. Once he got wind of this light-saber business, everything in the house (paper towel roll, umbrella, drumstick) was brandished as a light-saber. And now, despite the fact that he's never seen a movie much darker than Stuart Little, he is totally and utterly obsessed with guns. 

When the Earth Shakes

We had a minor earthquake in Orange County last week. It was a 2.7, but the epicenter was in Costa Mesa, so our house felt quite a jolt. But I don't think that thousands of Southern California residents who had to recover from swinging chandeliers and tilted artwork really warrants calling it major, in light of recent events. Nevertheless, we felt it, and I am glad it's over. There have been three earthquakes in Orange County since I survived the earthquake in Haiti, and each one has left me shaken up (no pun intended).

So many sweet friends emailed or texted on Monday night to make sure I was okay. And I do realize most people were worried about my mental state more than my physical safety - and many were worried about my son, who also survived the earthquake in Haiti. The good news is that all four of my kids were already asleep on Monday night (as they were during the one on Easter - aided by the sugar-induced diabetic coma they had slipped into after grazing off of their Easter baskets all morning).

Killing the Colorblind Dream: what I learned about prejudice from my own children (Part 1)

Over the years, my kids have shattered some of the fantasies I used to have about children and their racial attitudes. I held these ideas, as many parents do, in the optimism that our children will quiet the racial tensions our country has experienced. I’m hopeful that the next generation will be free of so many of the racial barriers still present in society today. I still have that hope, but I’ve also had to put to death the following two widely-held beliefs:

1. Children are colorblind

2. Children are only prejudiced if they are taught to be prejudiced In this post, 

I am going to talk about how my kids killed my colorblind dreams, and why I think it may have been a naive and even dangerous notion. Next week, I will share my mortified reaction to my own daughter’s racially biased behavior, at the ripe age of three. I used to subscribe to the idea that children are colorblind.

As a mom of children through birth and transracial adoption, I loved the idea of my kids growing up with each other blinded to their color differences. I love the vision of American being this great melting pot where kids of every race play together in perfect harmony. But the truth is, at the age that most children begin to notice gender differences, they also begin to notice race. I thoughts I had done a good job of exposing my kids to lots of cultural diversity, and as such I expected that I was raising them to be “colorblind”. But they let me know in subtle ways that they noticed. I was horrified when my son pointed to a Mexican man who was bagging our groceries and asked what that gardener was doing. And my daughter? At only 18 months old, she displayed her observation of racial differences. We attend a gospel choir rehearsal at an African American church, and my daughter begins enthusiastically singing one of the songs every time she sees a group of Black people.