In which I fail at sex ed

My son is 12 and a half. I feel the half is important. When I was 12 and a half, one of my classmates turned up pregnant for the first time. I was reading Dean Koontz and Stephen King books. An old man at a bus stop politely asked me what my university major was. I had read Our Bodies, Ourselves. I had a job (ok, a paper route). I was being catcalled by assholes every time I walked to swim practice. Adult subjects weren't a mystery to me by 12, I am saying. 12 year olds are pretty savvy. And as a parent, I talk pretty frankly about subjects like internet harassment, sexism in media, violence, racism, slavery, and whatever else is on the news or in the books we are currently reading - the idea being, of course, that if you rain information on kids, they'll absorb it and grow. Like nega-bigots.

So last week, I brought home a big stack of new and cool-looking graphic novels. The boys immediately riffled through the pile and spent the weekend reading. Leif went for Nimona, and Gavin went for the Rat Queens. Cool, whatever, I've already explained my stance on books; read whatever blows your kilt up.

A few days later, Gavin is poking around on my phone and asked about the podcasts I sometimes listen to. "Oh, they're a bunch of comedians doing a live Dungeons and Dragons show. They blew up a sloth, and there was drunk ghost bear - you'd probably really like it, but it's got kind of a lot of swearing and dick jokes." "Mom, if I can handle Rat Queens, I can handle that."

Uh oh.

At home, I finally picked up the comic books and flipped through the Rat Queens.

"Well, damn. I fail at parenting. I guess we can go ahead and listen to the podcast." Because he's 12, right? And a half. Practically 13. Almost-13-year-olds can handle a few dick jokes. And maybe I'm actually doing pretty good, if my kid can casually read a comic about someone getting their eyeballs gouged out by a halfling high on hallucinogenic drugs and still go hang up kitten posters in his room. He's sitting there wearing a kitten t-shirt, with a rainbow kitten pin, holding a notebook full of plans to plant an herb garden based on the glossary of medicinal cat herbs in the Warriors. He seems to be psychologically undamaged, as per my reading hypothesis.

So we listened to the podcast, and someone made an erection joke, and he laughed and then turned to me and said, "What's an erection?"

I launched into a tender and tactful explanation about nature and sexuality.

Actually, I yelled, "BONER. STIFFIE. HARD-ON. I bought you a book on this! You are almost 13! I HAVE FAILED YOU."

"OHHH! Ok. Yeah, I forgot. That book was long."

So of course now I am bringing home a big stack of books on boners.

Coming up: my preteen ignores a stack of sex books, and I am reduced to drawing diagrams at the dinner table.

The skinwalker

When I tell this story aloud, I do it with a  lot less detail and lot more whispering and bulging eyes and hand gestures, but this is what happened.

- - - -  

When I was 8, we moved to the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, where my mother (28) was a kindergarten teacher at the small community school. We lived in one of the six teachers' trailers on the school grounds. Down the hill there was a hogan where the principal lived, and up the hill there was a small group of community housing for school staff members and their families. There was a dirt road that rattled off into the desert for hundreds of miles. The kids bussed in from hogans and trailers around the mesa. There was one phone in the school office. The police were an hour away, at the trading post. If things went wrong, you pretty much had to help yourself.

This was a few years after Nightmare on Elm Street had come out on VHS. With no television reception, the neighborhood relied on swapping tapes for entertainment. You got whatever people had, which is why I have seen every episode of Northern Exposure and can recite Lethal Weapon 2 by heart. So by the winter that I was 9, everyone had gotten a peek at Freddy Krueger, and when my classmates began whispering to me, "Frankie says he's gonna get you," I tried to play along and give a little pretend shiver of fright. I didn't want to correct them by saying, "It's Freddy, not Frankie".

It snows on the mesa. There was one lamp post to light the driveway, and on winter nights I would stand beneath it to stare up at the snow pouring down, imagining huge animals standing just out of view, watching me from the darkness. 

My mother and I shared a bed, since the trailer was small and it was just the two of us. I liked the outside of the bed, so my arm could dangle over the side. One night that winter I had a dream that there was something wrong with the bedroom window, and I had a long confusing moment where I was trying to wake up but couldn't, feeling like my eyes were open but my brain was asleep. A thought suddenly boomed, THERE'S SOMEONE AT THE WINDOW, and I sat straight up in bed, wide awake. The bedroom window was dark and empty. I was scared to look outside, so I shook my mother and whispered, "I don't know if I was dreaming or if someone was looking in the window." Some mothers might tell a kid to shush and go back to sleep, but that is not my mother. She wakes up quickly and takes things seriously. If there is a problem, she heads straight at it. So she listened quietly, then got up and walked through the trailer. I followed her, but I didn't want to walk past the back door, so I stood in the short hallway and watched her look out windows and check locks. When she came back to bed, I was relieved she hadn't seen anything, and went right back to sleep.

The next night, it happened again. This time I woke up with my eyes already open, clamped on the window. In the dark grey of the window was a darker outline of a man's head and shoulders. I stared at the figure for a few seconds before whispering to my mother, "Can you see that?" I expected her to explain it away, like the way laundry can make a shadow look like a face, but instead she surprised me by vaulting over me and running right at the window. I had half a second to feel embarrassed about scaring her over nothing, but then the figure reacted and fled, and she ran out of the room to chase it. Time suddenly became very slow. I was alone on the bed, listening for the sounds of the door breaking or a fight, afraid she was about to be killed in the next room, and wondering if I could make it to the back door in time. I imagined the shadow circling back around and bursting through the window like a werewolf. After a few minutes, my mom walked back into the bedroom and got under the covers on the side closest to the window. "I couldn't see anybody outside. All the windows and doors are locked." She watched the window until morning.

It was Saturday, and folks woke up early if they needed to make the 3-hour trip to town for groceries; you had to hit the road while the mud was still frozen. We were already up and dressed when the teacher next door began banging around, loading a group of school kids for an excursion to town. My mother pulled on boots and went outside to talk to her, but hadn't even gotten down the steps before our neighbor spotted her and stomped over, yelling (not unkindly), "Braffet! You can't leave knives just laying around out here, kids will cut themselves!" "What knife?" "The big one. Under your window. I put it in the bed of your truck."

The truck was parked at the end of the trailer, beneath the bedroom window. In the bed of the truck there was a large, battered skinning knife. While the two women looked at the knife and talked quietly about the figure in the night, I considered the window. The trailer was up on blocks, and the window was about 7 feet above the ground; too tall for a man to just look into without standing on something. There were no footprints in the new snow. I looked at the truck, and found skidding muddy boot marks all along the driver's door where someone had propped themselves up.

That night, I slept on the inside of the bed again, and in the middle of the night I woke up to see my mother standing at the window, outlined in her night gown by the light of the lamp post. When she climbed back into the bed and said everything was ok now, I fell asleep again. I was young enough to believe that my mother could keep the monsters away.

On Sunday, our vice-principal came over with a small bag of cedar ashes. "You have a skinwalker," she said, "Put the ashes across all your windows and doors at night." I was pretty sure skinwalkers wouldn't need to prop themselves up on trucks or leave boot prints, but my mother sprinkled lines of ashes across our thresholds as instructed. "Can't hurt," she said.

We had no visitors that night, and went to school on Monday morning feeling pretty good. "Frankie's gonna get you," my classmates said. "Yeah, yeah, so I heard." "No, really, Frankie's telling everyone he's after your mom." I was tired of this joke. "Freddy, you mean. Freddy Krueger?" "No, Frankie, the crazy guy across the street. He's been telling everyone he's going to kill the new white teacher." The pieces clicked together and my arms went cold.

At just about that point, our principal ran into the room, "I NEED EVERYONE ON THE FLOOR NOW. DON'T GET UP UNTIL I COME BACK." She rattled the back door to make sure it was locked, told our teacher, "There's someone with a gun circling the parking lot," and ran out again, slapping off the lights. My seat was near the rear of the room, and I scootched on my belly to the floor-to-ceiling window by the back door and looked outside. "It's Frankie," my classmates whispered.

Across the school, my mother's kindergarten kids were lying on the floor and crying. A couple of them were sobbing, "Frankie's going to kill you!" My mother stood at the window, watching a pickup truck circling the school parking lot with a rifle pointed out the driver's side. Our school maintenance man, Edward, was standing at the back of the classroom when the principal came back. Edward was a quiet, kind-hearted man who had kids in a few of the classes, and he was standing in my mother's classroom because he knew who was in the truck outside; he was related to him by marriage. The principal said, "The guy's name is Frank, and he's just shot his brother-in-law. The police have been called, but they won't get here for 40 minutes." Edward turned and walked straight out the side door, toward the parking lot.

From where I was on the floor by the window, I saw the truck idling in the circular driveway. Suddenly it jerked into gear and roared away, and Edward was sprinting across the playground. He got into his truck and chased after him.

Around the bend at the base of the hill, the mid-morning melt had created a quagmire of mud and snow. Frankie's truck slid off the road and got stuck in the mud. Edward pulled up behind him. Frankie panicked, because he knew Edward, and he knew he was in trouble, so he completely forgot he had a rifle in his lap and instead ducked down in the cab of his truck to hide. Edward waited there until the police finally arrived. The brother-in-law who had been shot lost a chunk of liver, but survived. Our skinwalker never returned.

"What do you know?" said my mom, "The ashes really did work."

I still sleep on the inside of the bed, and cover all the bedroom windows.
- - - - -

Note: we still have the knife.

Other note: Frankie is dead. He got drunk and crashed his truck after getting out of jail.

Pictures from internet sources:

Aerial views from google maps, panning out (mind you, these are recent, and I lived there 25 years ago. In all that time, they have only added a couple of teacher houses):

The front of the school - my classroom on the far right, kindergarten class (and door facing the parking lot) to the far left.

sandbox of sadness

Woke up to the news that a friend's wife had died suddenly. Wept in car on the way to work. Arrived at work to find co-workers staring into my plastic traps at two dead mice, which had gotten stuck in them over the weekend. A wave of 55 summer school pre-teens hit the library, wanting to sign up for summer reading program and hear stories -  I yanked Half Minute Horrors off the shelf and read to them about rotting flesh and monsters. When the kids asked for scarier stuff, I told them my skinwalker story* and they screamed in a very gratifying manner. Got back into my office, flushed and happy and wondering if I'd get a parental complaint letter, then remembered my friend's words about her kids screaming over the phone after finding her wife's body a few hours earlier.

"How can all these things be happening alongside each other?!" I lamented.
"You are sandboxing," Mike said.
"Is that a therapy term?"
"That's a computer term. Like how apps can't cross over into each other unless you give them permission."
"Wouldn't that work the same way with regular boxes?"
"Sandboxes are more fun."
"Not if there's a cat in them. Cats are more fun in regular boxes."
"I guess they could call it cat boxing."
"But cats would sit in multiple boxes at the same time. They would collapse the system. SHIT I'M STILL DOING IT. I'M DOING IT RIGHT NOW."
"That's what I was saying."

My biggest box contains sadness today.



* have I told this one here? When I was 8, we had a knife-wielding stalker staring into our windows at night and trying to kill my mom.  I'll tell it sometime.

Very important and anticlimactic announcement

Re: librarian disguise.

I tried out all the options on my patrons, and this was the winning combination:

BLACK SHIRTS AND HUGE NECKLACES.

People like shiny jewelry better than clothes. Which is why I call them "hobo entrancers" in the first place.

Ta da.

Kamehameha Day

Kamehameha. The unifier of islands. The shover of people off of high cliffs. The caver of skulls of slaves who looked upon his countenance. The guy who gave us a state holiday in the middle of the week, creating a confusing mini-Monday the following morning.

On this holiday, my mother and I pretended to be ladies. We got haircuts, which isn't my favorite activity because it involves having a stranger's hands in my hair, and then my mother forced me into a pedicure chair, and a stranger rubbed her hands all over my feet. Horror and dismay. And I was embarrassed by my toe hair, but then we read the menu on the wall and decided that the pedicure ladies were probably pretty happy we hadn't asked them to wax our butts. They agreed.

Achievement: desk and video card. Almost ready to get arting again.

Still a bit sick. Starting to believe this is just how I am now; tired and hoarse and covered in used tissues.

Shopping list

Still sick. Going to store. Pretty sure the cold meds have worn off enough to safely operate vehicle. They helped with my shopping list, though.

Retraction

Apologies for posting a thing and deleting it, rssfeeders. I have taken kind of a lot of cold medicine.

Here are some things that happened this week while I've been sick:

Tried on a policeman's Kevlar vest. Without the policeman in it. I did not look as great as I imagined. Then Mike put it on and even the cop stepped back and said, "wow, that's perfect on you." Slap that man and his stupid chest-to-waist ratio.

Made a cake, stuck my fingers in the frosting, and then blamed the little holes on "dick elves". 

Listened to a lot of Knights of the Arcade podcasts, which I blame for the above.

Made a pair of toddler knickerbockers from my Japanese sewing book, to which zenny said,"NO" and Mike said, "They look like Mickey Mouse pants." I made her wear them anyway. 

The Internet is out, there are probably-non-coincidental electrical trucks with jackhammers across the street which the Internet guys claim no knowledge of, a service visit has been scheduled for 3 DAYS FROM NOW, and I am making it my personal mission to burn through our data with cat gifs, pandora, and YouTube videos. 

Kids are out of school, which means summer reading has started - which is my PRIMARY FUNCTION at the library - and I'm sick on the opening week. Of course.

My publisher wants me to illustrate another book! Maybe two. Which is fantastic, but has caused a mouse/cookie cascade of events; the computer is broken and we have no desk, so we will need to rent a truck to haul a desk, and if we have a rented truck we need to clear out the junk pile in the yard, but if we are clearing junk we need to finish the bathroom renovation, and to finish the bathroom we need to buy a shower kit for the clawfoot tub, and on and on and I really just want a used desk and a video card.

I received a book of doily patterns in the mail, which I forgot I ordered. And now I am knitting a doily. My 10 year old self is deeply disappointed. Whatever, 10 year old self, you spend your allowance on Piers Anthony books and wear side ponytails.

Rescued a bird that had smacked a window. Nursed it back to health and set it free. Did not actually put it in a padded envelope and mail it to Pittsburgh, as I claimed.

Back under my couch pillows now.

wall-eyed chicken and a FO

I refused to by another ball of this yarn, so I bound off the Malgven and called it done. 

DONE.

It's a lap blanket/shawl/cat entrancer. Which has taken most of a year to plod through.

Inaction shot.

The same day, I finished the book I was reading. And neither of these things were part of a series, which means the pleasure of finishing them dropped immediately into despondency, like a balloon thbbting into a flaccid wrinkled mess.

So maybe I was a little depressed when I found a derpy Japanese chicken tea set and brought it home furtively, like someone smuggling actual chickens into the house. Mike picked up the tea pot and stared at it. "It's... a chicken. Oh - oh my. It's a set. Of course it's a set." 

I took out my phone and showed him what was parked next to us at the store. "See? At least I didn't flock the car."

I'm holding out for a cartoon-car paint job, anyway.

How to know if a book is appropriate for your child

Every other day or so, a parent drags their child up to me and makes them show me the book they are holding, wanting to know if that book is really appropriate for their child. So here are my thoughts on that, as a children's librarian.

If your child reads the whole book, it is appropriate for your child. 

It's really that simple. I promise. I am not saying all books are appropriate for all people at all points in their life - I am saying the reader sorts this out for themselves. A kid with low reading comprehension will not be interested in a book that is difficult to get through. A child with no knowledge of history or politics will not be interested in a book with a heavy social message. Lots of kids grab the Hunger Games because they want to be a part of the teenage craze, but after a couple of pages they put it down and go back to Katie the Kitten Fairy. Lots of kids read below their reading level because it's comfortable; don't worry if they're not reading "hard" enough books, just read aloud at bedtime and listen to audio books, and they'll pick it up on their own when they're ready. Once they've gotten engrossed in a story, you might find that the book itself might not be appropriate to read at school or to read aloud to their baby sister or to read instead of doing homework, but for their own brains in their own time - they'll be fine. They can handle it.

What about sex and violence? Your child is going to learn about sex and violence. Books are the safest way to navigate those issues. Your child is not going to be harmed by reading a book. I want to repeat that: your child is not going to be harmed by reading a book. 

Information is exactly what you want to give them. If they are not ready for something that comes up in one of their books, they will lose interest in that book and toss it aside and find something easier/fluffier/sillier/fartier. All on their own. Really.

If your child is curious about racism or sexuality or abuse or guns or drugs or cannibalism, get them to a book. If your child seems to be bothered by something they have read, go ahead and read the book and start a conversation.

I obviously wouldn't recommend Fifty Shades of Grey to an 11 year old, but if I had gotten hold of that book at that age I can guarantee I would have read it, and laughed, and been squicked out, and been fine. If I caught my kid reading Fifty Shades of Grey, we would be having a nice chat about shitty writing and bad relationships. I used to peruse the steamy scenes in battered romance novels lying around offices, and decided by the age of 12 never to date a man who called any part of me a "love mound" with a straight face. I was not harmed. Recently, I tossed a graphic novel with nice art to my 12 year-old son, and then read it later to discover that it was full of teen drug use, pregnancy, suicide, and miscarriage. He was already reading his next Warriors book, unperturbed. We talked about the story and the art, I answered a few questions, and it was a good conversation. Kids bring their personalities and personal beliefs and family backgrounds with them when they read a book, and that's where parents get to weigh in and lend some guidance.

So, is the book appropriate? Yes, I would argue so. Is it good quality? Maybe not - discuss that with them. Is it sexist and containing violent imagery? Comics in particular can be pretty horrible to women - discuss that with them. Is it going to inspire your child to attempt murder? Mental illness, personality disorders, developmental issues, or abuse may cause your child to act out things that inspire them, but it is not the fault of the book/art/music/whathaveyou itself.

Read books. Discuss books. Let your kid follow their interests. It'll be ok - and if it's not ok, it's not because of the books. Good luck.

KCBW DAY 7: Your time, your place

Where and how do you take time out to knit and/or crochet? Whether social or solitary, tell readers about your crafting time and space.

I am losing momentum with this thing. Early morning coffee pictures of my couch - which is where I knit, if I'm not at work having lunch on a stool in the break room.

I am one of those people who doesn't look like they're smiling unless they're laughing maniacally.

My knitting space is usually crowded with legs and cats. Which is good, since I knit to have something to keep my hands busy when I'm hanging out with the family. If they're not full of coffee, which they are at 6:30am.

I impulsively bought a pretty chair to knit in, but it just sits there being aesthetic because it isn't actually very comfortable.

And it's full of cats. Bad planning.

This song is on heavy rotation while I'm working.