The Dodgeball Dilema

In our family, the game of dodgeball has become a kind of moral and ethical template by which we judge people’s character.

It all started with my nephew Collin at a family dinner. We were grilling him about a kid his age, someone we vaguely knew. “He’ s an OK guy,” answered my nephew, thoughtfully chewing his burger. “But he cheats at dodgeball.”

We got it. We all got it. Dodgeball, a game we all played in the summer, had become the arbiter of whether or not someone was a decent human being at their core, honest and ethical.

For those of you who don’t know, the game of dodgeball has made a comeback. There are even college teams. It’s kindler and gentler now and much more PC than when I was in middle school. You don’t try to nail the chubby girl in the back row who eats paste or the kid with duct tape on his glasses who picks his nose.

Dodgeball is a process of elimination; a survival of the fittest. It begins with organized chaos as two teams square off with dozens of balls being hurled in the air. Unlike baseball or basketball, where all eyes are on the person who has the ball, dodgeball has dozens of balls all flying around at the same time with the goal of nicking any body part below the neck. If you get hit, you are out. Pure and simple. In the craziness of the first few minutes, it is often one person’s word over another’s. This means it is largely up to the individuals to police themselves.

There are those that get hit and try to get away with it. There are some who fight the call when challenged. Others give in and slyly slink off when called on the carpet. And then there are those who immediately come clean when they’ve been hit. Even when no one is watching, they pull themselves out of the game and onto the sidelines.

As a parent, I aspire to raise one of those kids. Oh, I’m well aware that cheating at dodgeball doesn’t mean a kid is destined to a life of robbing banks, kiting checks or pulling the legs off flies. But I found it interesting that my own nephew had arrived at the dodgeball test on his own. I like the fact that one teen could identify a kind of touchstone to determine the stuff of which his peers were made.

I recently watched an R-rated movie with my daughter and two of her friends. It was mostly inappropriate humor but I made sure to ask both kids if this was OK with their parents. I was impressed when each girl wanted to call their mothers to double check.

When I commented to my daughter about how wonderful it was that her friends did this, she immediately jumped on me. “Mom, I have never seen an R rated movie ever. And I would always ask you first,” she huffed defensively. OK, she passed the dodgeball test on that one.

The dodgeball test may be one little marker, one silly way we can look at an element of a person’s character. But cheating at dodgeball is just one of many small but critical transgressions I see today that we need to remain vigilant about when it comes to our kids. So many of life’s little lessons are being lost in our haste to be “friends” with our kids, or unnaturally force our lives to be completely “kid-centric” (a term that makes the hairs on my forearm stand up).

By being afraid of drawing too many boundaries, we are letting slide a lot of opportunities to teach good old-fashioned citizenship and manners. Like the dodgeball test, we can all be judged by an aggregate of the little things; respect for the elderly, giving up your seat on the train, looking people in the eye, delivering a firm handshake. As parents, we get sick of nagging about these things, but in the end, their presence or absence tells us something about an individual. I have a warm spot in my heart for a young man who calls me Ma’am, even though it makes me sound like an ancient crone.

I want my children to understand that there are consequences for actions. That means we need to follow through with our threats, not make the hollow remarks I hear screamed at kids in the grocery store aisles.

There is a famous parenting story about a family traveling to Disney World. Maybe you know this one, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it is an urban myth. Exasperated by the dreaded “when will we be there” question, the parents told the kids if they asked one more time, they wouldn’t be able to go to Disney World. Legend has it when little Johnny broke the rule, they stuck to their guns. They had to. The miserable parents went to the park by themselves all day, hiring a sitter for the kids in the hotel room.

I know I sound just like the grandmas of a generation before, cluck-clucking at that hip-swivelin’ rock’n’roll music. Or, heaven forbid, I sound like Tipper Gore sounded to me in the 80s about record lyrics, until I had my own kids and listened to some of the misogynist bondage rap stuff on the radio one day. I began to channel Tipper Gore that day, taking back everything I had ever muttered about her and freedom of speech.

When we lived in Phoenix in 1995, in the span of two weeks I left my wallet on top of my station wagon twice and drove away. Those were really exhausting days with two kids under four and a full-time home business. The second time it happened, I set the wallet on top of the car as I wrestled both kids into their car seats and then drove away. When I got home, I realized immediately what I had done and burst into tears.

Lo and behold, the phone rang a few hours later. A man had found the wallet and he lived 20 minutes away in what I knew to be a somewhat shady neighborhood. I was making bets that the money was gone and I was furious with myself because I had just been to the cash machine and withdrawn my bi-weekly budget. Planning on giving him some of the money in my wallet as a reward, I also stopped and bought a 12-pack of beer. I figured in his hood they could all have a little party.

When I rang his bell, clutching my two kids to me in the dark, the man who answered the door was in flowing robes, with a top knot of hair. I quickly reached into my limited knowledge of Eastern religions and dimly recognized that he was a Sikh. As I thrust the beer at him in gratitude, he practically jumped back in disgust. “We don’t drink in our religion,” he said. And my humiliation at my sanctimonious neighborhood profiling was complete. The wallet was intact, with every dollar accounted for.

One thing I knew for sure. If that man, the one who found my wallet on the asphalt of the grocery store parking lot, had been tagged out in dodgeball and nobody saw him? He would have quietly taken himself out to the sidelines. Can you say the same?

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Throwing Out My Bra

It was time. Past time. I stood with one hand poised over the trash can holding my bra. The elastic on the straps was shot, the material puckered around the back where it meets the hooks and eyes. There is no longer any support offered, but yet the cups now seem woefully big for me - or is it that with the advancement of time, my boobs have shrunk yet again.

Standing over the trash with the bra, I hesitate. My conviction wavers. What if I just keep the bra as a back up, some emergency moment when all the other bras fail me or are in the wash? The truth is this — this bra has been good to me.

This bra has supported me through the last three years. It has taken me through parent teacher conferences, been there for medical pronouncements, supported me when the doctor called to tell me the lump was benign. It has exercised with me, walked and hiked. It had held me together while my husband recovered from injury and I tried to buck up my children’s fears. It has grocery shopped and gone on girls’ weekends. It’s been to concerts and gotten sweaty in raspberry fields and while doing yard work. This bra has seen me at my very best and most joyous and put up with me through the headaches, the petty and snippy moments, the nagging.

I’d bought the bra in a group of three—one black and two nude, skin color they called it, although I have yet to meet someone with that truly pinkish color of flesh. But one of the fleshy ones was defective, one strap kept coming unhooked, and so it found its way to the back of my drawer. This one, the one I held now, had become, by default, my go-to bra. How many hundred times had I washed it by hand with Woolite?

But the support was gone. And now, with the passage of time, there seemed to be a chasm between the lip of the bra cup and the flesh of my breast. Its like the space between two glaciers. There is no longer any contact. You could lay an entire banana between the gap between my breasts and my bra now. Sigh.

I hate bra shopping. Hate it. Perhaps if I had perfect, perky boobs or a boob job where they sat like mounds of dewy perfection I’d enjoy this exercise. But bra shopping to me is an exercise in facing my flaws in a fluorescent mirror. It’s a little bit like whipping a cat-o-nine-tails over your back.

So as I held the bra over the trash, a sort of simple bra-prayer played over my mind; the kind of thing one mentally mumbles when a hamster or gold fish dies. You have a flash of remorse for the thing that was, even though it didn’t live on the grand emotional scale afforded a cat, dog or human being.

Here was the thing. I had already replaced that bra. I’d gone to Victoria’s Secret with my teenaged daughter, determined to walk out of there with something appropriate and well fitting. We’d chosen three again, one black and two that pinkishy nude of a band-aid, nothing racy, lacey or with demi-cups. Once again I’d ended up with something sensibly supportive.

With one last look and a sigh, I dropped the bra unceremoniously into the garbage trash. Covered with coffee grounds and rotten broccoli and the leavings of the previous meal, it seemed an inglorious end to something that had been so intimate.

I imagine it now, in some kind of land-fill heaven. I envision sea gulls dive bombing the area for food scraps as the bra stands, cups outstretched to the sky, silently holding together its little patch of hill.

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The Haircut

It was a summer of interruption. “Summerus Interruptus,” I called it and I can’t remember another summer like it. Maybe its because there are four kids and two dogs and every time someone walks by our lawn the dogs bark, as if to defend their turf.

Maybe it's because my Dad’s dementia has progressed and so the three of us daughters shuttle him back and forth between our summer cottages to give my Mom a break. We want to spend some quality time with him before we all fade in his mind, and because this is what family does.

Maybe it's because even though I am supposed to be writing, and answering emails, I find myself drifting out to my beloved garden, the dahlias of all shapes, sizes and colors, the pesky crabgrass poking through the mulch. These are easy solutions to easy problems; pluck and they are gone. The chapter I’m writing? Not so easy. On day two of creation, I’ve already deleted most of it.

The problem of the dementia, the slow erasing of my Dad has no easy solution. We will watch, and help, repeat and explain and there is nothing at all to make it better. We are voyeurs to the demise of a man we love and the heartbreaking burden on my mother, who has raised the three of us and now, in her golden years, is caring for a toddler-like person again.

When the phone rang on my last full day of summer camp for the kids, I was deep in my emails, deep in crossing things off lists. I almost didn’t answer it.

“Lee,” my mother said, and I could hear the strain in her voice. “I’d like to ask you a favor.” My mother is a woman who doesn’t like to ask anyone for anything if she can help it. She is, by nature, a giver.

“Sure, Mom,” I kept my voice even but I rolled my eyes. Another interruption. All of these emails blinking at me, the people waiting for answers to questions, the fundraiser for the wounded soldiers, the plane reservations for vacation I had to untangle. “This is your mother,” I told myself. “Calm down, slow down, it will all get done.”

“Dad was going to trim my hair, like he always does. But he is feeling dizzy, he bent over in the yard and now he is lying down. I’ve got my scissors here and wet hair. Can I come over?”

“Of course,” I said. And it wasn’t until later that I realized the right thing to do would have been to go to her. I was too entangled in my own work and needs.

“Do you have some coffee for Dad?” she asked. And I realized that she would be bringing him, like a child, in tow.

“Come on over,” I said enthusiastically. “But I can’t guarantee I’m a great haircutter.”

In college I had a brisk business cutting men’s hair. I set up shop in the bathroom that connected the boy’s dorm to the girls, a feature that was a constant source of amusement for us young coeds.

Something about cutting my own mother’s hair, however, made me feel slightly nervous. I suppose that I wanted to do it perfectly.

A few moments later I heard her car on the gravel and her small, slight figure shuffled in. She had a makeshift cape of dry cleaning bag on her shoulders, an old comb, missing some teeth and a pair of hair cutting scissors.

I settled my Dad down, trying not to feel the pain in the look of defeat on his face. I gave him water and urged him to drink, fed him the leftover French toast, now cold, from my daughters’ pre-camp breakfast.

Then I went outside where my mother was patiently waiting for me to cut her hair.

‘I don’t know, Mom,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m going to be very good.

“Oh, its just a straight edge,” she waved my concerns away. The scissors were dull and I went upstairs to get my own haircutting scissors. She held a hand mirror out in front of her to watch.

There was something so heartbreakingly intimate about that act. I touched my mother’s hair, barely gray at 76. I was doing for her what she had done for me and my sisters for all those years when we were really young. I suppose she’d cut our hair at home as she is doing it now, out of frugality and ease.

“Its just a simple, straight across cut,” she said. My mother has never been one for vanity. I love her for that.

“I can take you to get it cut in town,” I said. “It was only $17.00 for me.

She smiled with her lips closed and shook her head. “Your father has been doing this for years,” she said. “It’s just fine.”

I thought about the act of my father cutting my mother’s hair. I wondered if, with his shaking hands, he would be able to do it going forward. I thought about my mother, who had once been told that the future was secure. Now I knew that she worried about the cost of this long, slow slide with dementia, the agonizing lingering of a partial person, the vast cost of health care and nursing homes.

I did a decent job. And then I looked her square in the face to make sure the sides were even and gently sloped the way she had requested. What had started as a dutiful task had become an act of love, a care giving of the ultimate caregiver.

No child is ever prepared when the roles reverse, sometimes, gently, like a beautiful slow dance, other times in an instant, the aftermath of an accident or illness. My sisters and I have learned to be the parents at times, to ease the fears the way my mother and father once snuck into our rooms to banish the monsters under the bed.

I am taking care now. I am noticing these small moments, trying to slow time down. I see these experiences as gifts of grace rather than inconveniences, interruptions in my busy day.

“It looks great,” she says enthusiastically, positioning the plastic hand mirror to see the back of her head. My Dad finishes the last of his coffee, rises from the stool steadily and beams at me. It seems the earlier events have been forgotten.

“You just come back if you see any strays,” I said. And they both bent to hug me.

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