TISH: No. Not at all.
We drove home, and Tish disappeared into her room. Fifteen minutes later, she opened her door and yelled down the stairs, “MOM! HOW DO YOU SPELL PETITION?”
I googled it. Hard word.
A little while later, she came downstairs to the kitchen holding a handmade poster. She cleared her throat and began to read: HELP SAVE HUMANITY
Dear world, this is a petition to show that I, Tish Melton, strongly feel that magazines should not show beauty is most important on the outside. It is not. I think magazines should show girls who are strong, kind, brave, thoughtful, unique, and show women of all different types of hair and bodies. ALL women should be treated EQUALLY.
I liked her idea so much. It wasn’t enough for women to have equality with men; they needed equality with each other.
I cannot rid my children’s air of all the lies they’ll be told about what it means to become a real woman or man. But I can teach them how to be critics of the culture instead of blind consumers of it. I can train my children to detect those lies and get angry instead of swallowing them and getting sick.
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD ME: That’s the truth about women. I will match it.
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: That’s a lie about women. I will challenge it.
TISH: Chase wants me to join the same club he joined in middle school. I don’t want to.
ME: So don’t.
TISH: But I don’t want to disappoint him.
ME: Listen. Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.
TISH: Even you?
ME: Especially me.
EIGHT-YEAR-OLD TISH: Keri doesn’t like me.
THIRTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ME: Why not? What happened? What can we do to make it better?
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: Sara doesn’t like me.
FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD ME: Okay. Just a fact, not a problem.
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: Totally.
My friend Mimi told me that she was concerned because her middle school son was spending hours on his phone behind his locked bedroom door.
“Do you think he’s watching porn?” I asked her.
“No!” Mimi said. “He can’t be. He’s so young!”
“I just read that the average age kids discover porn is eleven.”
“Jesus.” Mimi shook her head. “I just feel bad spying on him. I mean, it’s his phone.”
“Nah. You pay the bill. It’s your phone, he’s borrowing it.”
“I’m afraid of what I’ll find,” Mimi said.
“I know. Me too, every time,” I admitted. “But what if he’s already found porn? What if he’s lost in that world by now? Don’t you want to go in and find him?”
“I just have no idea what I’d say.”
“Listen, I know plenty of adults who find certain kinds of porn to be liberating, but the porn kids come across on the internet is misogynistic poison. We have to explain that to them so they don’t learn that sex is about violence. I just think that saying anything at all—even if we say it awkward and stumbling and afraid while our kids roll their eyes—is better than saying nothing at all.
“What if you said:
“Sex is an exciting and wonderful thing about being human. It is natural to be curious about sex, and when we are curious about things, we turn to the internet for information.
“But here’s the problem with using the internet to learn about sex: You cannot know who is doing the teaching. There are people who have taken sex and sucked all the life out of it to package it and sell it on the internet. What they’re selling is not real sex. It lacks connection, respect, and vulnerability, which is what makes sex sexy.
“This kind of porn is sold by people who are like drug dealers. They sell a product that fills people with a rush that feels like joy for a short while but then becomes a killer of real joy. Over time people prefer the rush of drugs to the real joy of life. Many who start watching porn very young will get hooked on the rush. Eventually they will find it hard to enjoy real sex with real human beings.
“Trying to learn about sex from porn is like trying to learn about the mountains by sniffing one of those air fresheners they sell at the gas station. When you finally get to the real mountains and breathe in that pure, wild air—you might be confused. You might wish it smelled like that fake, manufactured air-freshener version.
“We don’t want you to stay away from porn while you’re young because sex is bad. We want you to stay away from porn because real sex—with humanity and vulnerability and love—is indescribably good. We don’t want fake sex ruining real sex for you.
“What if you said something like that?” I asked Mimi. “Do not leave that sweet boy alone in the woods because you are too afraid to go get him.”
We don’t have to have answers for our children; we just have to be brave enough to trek into the woods and ask tough questions with them.
We can do hard things.
One afternoon I opened my inbox and saw an email with the subject line “Mom, You’re Up!”
The email was meant to inform me that it was my turn to provide breakfast for my kid’s school athletic team after their early-morning practice. Each morning, a parent delivers a full spread of bagels, cream cheese, juices, and bananas to school. She sets up the buffet while the children practice so that after they finish, they can dine.
The night before I was to deliver the goods, I received another email from the mother of one of the athletes. She had a concern she wanted to share with me. She was worried that the other parents had not been providing sufficient cream cheese choices for the children. For example, last Friday there had been only two options, and several of the children hadn’t liked either one of them and had been forced to eat their bagels cream cheese–less. She had a solution: “There’s a bagel store close to the school that makes five different flavors of cream cheese. Might you be able to provide all of them?”
All of them. Five flavors of cream cheese.
Five flavors of cream cheese is not how to make a child feel loved.
Five flavors of cream cheese is how to make a child an asshole.
And yet I am a cream cheese parent. All of my friends are cream cheese parents. Cream cheese parenting is the result of following our memo: Successful parenting is giving your children the best of everything. We are cream cheese parents because we haven’t stopped to ask: Does having the best of everything make the best people?
What if we revised our memo? What if we decided that successful parenting includes working to make sure that all kids have enough, not just that the particular kids assigned to us have everything? What if we used our mothering love less like a laser, burning holes into the children assigned to us, and more like the sun, making sure all kids are warm?