When your kids' jam is not your jam

Our girl has been singing Dynamite all day. When she is not singing that Taio Cruz song using all the wrong lyrics except for a strong repetition of Dynamite/AY-O/Let Go, she is humming it. Or whistling it. There is only one person who enjoys whistling and it is the person whistling. Everyone else is:

Pow-pow with that Dynamite. It was really proud-making, hauling my kids en route to Vacation Bible School this morning where they would spend the morning with throngs of children named Josiah and Jedediah and Jeremiah, all rocking their VBS camp shirts, eating little campfire-themed snacks and doing mini-campsite lantern crafts, singing around the proverbial campfire at the top of their lungs, "God's love is like an ocean!", while, in preparation, my kids were belting out:

We gon' rock this club, We gon’ go all night, We gon’ light it up, Like it’s dynamite!

I think it set just the right tone.

By dinner, Baby Girl was still doing her best rendering of Dynamite and, oddly, I was experiencing a similar set of explosives igniting in my frontal lobe. I usually have no problem in asking my children to cease doing the annoying thing, but the girl was just beyond. She didn't even realize she was singing it on loop, muttering unconsciously. Finally, as I stared across the table, I was trying to piece together a diversion from her club-thumping rhythms, when Little Man had just the right words.

He said, "Sis, do you have another jam?"

I wanted to smother-hug him and cover him with thousands of kisses. How sweet and polite is he? And also, how hip, to just ask little miss pop songstress if she had another track in her rotation.

Then, I realized. He was wondering if she literally had another jam.

Transcript from an Essential Oils Addiction Recovery Meeting

Meeting called to order at 7:01 p.m. FACILITATOR: So when did we know our habit had reached the point of no return? Marvin? Did you feel like sharing?

MARVIN: Sure. I guess I knew it when I found myself hoarding essential oils, just buying large vats of eucalyptus oil, worried that the world’s supply might run out and then I wouldn’t have a remedy for a stuffy nose. And then what? You know?

FACILITATOR: Sure. Aubrey?

AUBREY: For me, my rock bottom was realizing I couldn’t cover the world in essential oils the way I wanted to. I would dream about pumping coriander onto my kids’ slip n’ slide. I seriously considered power-washing my house with dill. And after awhile, thyme was curing my husband’s sleep apnea so well that I considered getting a water bed but filling it with essential oils. I mean--who does that? Do they even make waterbeds anymore?

GABE: I hear you, Aubrey. I loved the Thanksgiving blend so much I put it in an enema, and...yeah.

JAN: Enema! Ha! That’s child’s play. By the end I was sniffing, snorting, and shooting melaleuca any way I could get it. I’d go really hard at my spin class and eventually the teacher would ask if anyone else smelled tree sap in the room. I was so embarrassed but I couldn’t stop.

SUSAN: Uh-huh, well for me it was when I just couldn’t stop commenting on every Facebook thread about how oils were the answer. I started to see every status message as a cry for help, like, Please give me some essential lavender!

[knowing laughter ensues]

FACILITATOR: And then what happened, Susan?

SUSAN: Well after accusing so many of my friends of having Munchausen syndrome by proxy for using cough syrup when their kids got sick, most of my Facebook friends blocked me. And no one would come to my oils parties anymore. So I would just spend hours on Pinterest learning more about oils and staring at other people’s oils parties. Which, I know is sad, but it’s not like I was mixing up meth in a trailer in the desert….

FACILITATOR: Remember, though, Susan, qualifying our addictions as not as bad as others’ may inhibit the healing process.

SUSAN: Oh, I know all about the healing process. Do you have any thieves oil at home? You just start with a few drops of thieves oil in a diffuser. I personally like the generic one they sell on Amazon. You diffuse that for 24 hours and rub 2 drops of lemon along with a carrier oil on your big toe and --

FACILITATOR: Um, Susan, yeah, what I’m hearing from you right now is a real attachment to your oils, which we are trying to break free from. Because for so many of us, the pursuit of essential oils has ruined our lives.

SUSAN: I’m sorry. [starts crying.]

AUBREY: Here’s a tissue, Susan.

FACILITATOR: Wait, Aubrey--

SUSAN: Aubrey? [sniffling] Is this tissue infused with eucalyptus?

AUBREY: Oh--

MARVIN: Here, let me check. If anybody here can spot the smell of eucalyptus…

FACILITATOR: Oh no!

AUBREY: [starts crying] I’m sorry. I thought eucalyptus was like methadone and would help me with the withdrawals.

MARVIN: HAHA! Give me that tissue.

FACILITATOR: Hey, everybody, let’s go have some punch and popcorn.

AUBREY: [sobbing] I spiked the punch with peppermint.

JAN: Yeah, sorry, I sprinkled oregano on the popcorn.

FACILITATOR: This is ridiculous! None of you are actually taking steps toward your recovery! You should all be ashamed of yourselves!

SUSAN: Well I don’t know. It’s kind of like old times. It’s like you all showed up to my oils party. And just like every other time, nobody bought anything because they already had it all at home.

Meeting adjourned at 7:14 p.m.

The Gym Shorts I Borrowed - Part II

(cont. from Part I) The Lost and Found box in the school dispensary is a moldy mountain of polyester uniform pieces and orphaned mittens. The mother superior of the dispensary, Mrs. Whittaker, doles out Ritalin, reads thermometers, and is the gatekeeper of the Lost and Found.

“Do those shorts have your name on them?”

"No."

I was honest.

“Frost*,” is permanent markered onto the waistband of the shorts in question. Frost as in Tim Frost, then in the 6th grade and also our community newspaper delivery boy.

“Okay, then you have to bring them back after class,” said Mrs. Whittaker.

So I do. I arrive to school on gym day and scavenge through the moldy abyss for the Frost pair. They are kind of blousy but at least they cannot be mistaken for a bandana. I rock them for an hour of dodgeball and then return them to being lost. Why I don’t just cross out “Frost” and write my own name on them, I cannot say. Just a rule-follower I guess.

And then there was the matter of how I had stapled my hand to a bulletin board in 4th grade and Mrs. Whittaker rode in like a hero, extracting the staple from my hand using her long sculpted fingernails. I just imagine those fingernails every time I think about claiming the borrowed shorts as my own.

Week after week I do the dumpster dive for the shorts and then I put them back. The shorts never get washed the whole year. I see Tim Frost on the school bus everyday; monthly he rides his mountain bike to our house to collect the $2.25 for his paper route. I fumble around our change drawer, searching for the quarters, feeling equal parts shame and kinship toward him. I am finding and using the clothes that he probably has no idea he has lost.

For all I know, there are others who were, too. The lost and found box is equal opportunity, after all. Gross.

In the usual end-of-year mayhem, I muster up the moxie to just not return the shorts. I keep them for all of 8th grade. To spite my mother, I never change the name on the shorts. With each load of uniform laundry, I hope that the jock itch will be washed out of the shorts and a sense of guilt will wash over my mother. (Mom, I am so sorry you had to raise satan's spawn.)

Several years later, I will ask Tim Frost to a school dance. My mom tells me to go vacuum out the mini-van before I pick him up as my date. We have already shared gym shorts, I think. I don't think he's going to be scandalized by a leftover juicebox in our van.

Every day is a holy day of obligation in my family: obligations to help, to not complain, to eat everything on one’s plate. The gym shorts, I know, were an opportunity for me to suffer in silence. Just like my mom did when she was my age and her mother gave her a bad home perm. Just like my dad did when his own father died and his mother couldn’t afford anything but an ill-fitting blazer for school. I know the consequences of complaining: I will be met by these stories of my parents’ woeful adolescences. There are penances for every misdeed and an accompanying sense of guilt over which one will stew for a long shameful season.

In this way, I feel as though my upbringing well prepared me to be the daughter-in-law of Korean immigrants. Korean culture, like many cultures infused with Confucian values, deals in a currency of honor, indebtedness and strength. My parents never coddled us and rarely indulged us. They provided for us, but we were forever in a position to be more grateful and to show a stronger sense of duty. The stories of the people my parents served in their workplaces were sobering: families ripped apart by drugs, Social Security benefits extorted from the mentally retarded, children abused and neglected and handed over to the state foster system. Someone always had things way worse. So be grateful. Buck up. Go put on your gym shorts and come back when you have a real problem.

*names changed to protect the innocent