Covert Mom: Not That I Want You Not To Say

By Mariah Mottley

In the car on the way back from the supermarket, my eldest daughter was reciting the plotline of an ad on YouTube, using the word ginormous repeatedly. No matter how hard I tried, I could not follow what she was saying. It didn’t matter. In a moment she’d be mad at me. She is in flux. Her hands are the same size as mine and we can’t keep her in pants the right length. She knows everything. She is in middle school.

On “This American Life,” Ira Glass once hosted Linda Perlstein, who wrote “Not Much, Just Chillin’,” a book about the brains of middle schoolers. That podcast really messed with my head. I knew middle-schoolers were train wrecks. They have big feet and weird voices. They are erratic in their abilities, moods and social skills. I was a shining example. Sporting red plastic glasses and a unibrow, I perpetually offered unsolicited spelling corrections to my peers. Perlstein pointed out this period is not all awkwardness and overused words – it is also one of the most critical for brain development, which I hadn’t known.
After breastfeeding my children per the World Health Organization’s recommendations and making the occasional flax oil smoothie, I’d figured I was off the hook in that department. Not so. According to Ms. Perlstein, being 12 years old is analogous to being 2. Your bones are growing faster than your muscles, and your brain has more brain cells than you will ever have again. Which ones do you get to keep? The answer made my chest tighten with horror.
“The ones you use,” she said.
The take home message: On your 11th birthday, God gives you a Sharpie marker for your brain.
We passed the gas station; my daughter was still talking. I thought back. I can decline a Latin noun, amo, amas, amat. I know my diagonal, on horseback. I can play a C scale with both hands. I know every line of the movie Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, and not just the one about cutting Kevin Costner’s heart out with a spoon. I can tread water with my hands over my head and sing the Greek alphabet, thanks to a particularly warped camp counselor. I know all the lyrics to More Than Words, by Extreme. These things are mine forever because I was in middle school when I learned them.
When the kids were babies and it felt like my life depended on them falling back asleep, I sang them that song, not because I liked it, but because it was the only one I could recall one second after being jolted awake. I could never remember what I was supposed to buy them after the mockingbird, but I had Extreme on lock.
Why was I allowed to let my Sharpie marker dry out with so much diet soda and Garfield? Why don’t I know more European History? Opera? Arabic?
Two words: Parental Failure. Let’s face it, the reason my parents didn’t fill me up with useful information wasn’t just their own laziness. It was my attitude. I was a 2-year-old turning into an adult, and the 2-year old was fighting back. That’s why I have so many Kevin Costner screenplays in there. No one could stand me.
The first rule of parenting is that you will fail. My husband and I will have three middle schoolers, one after another, and we will fail them. Three sets of overloaded frontal cortexes, unibrows and attitude. They will remember the wrong things, like how many times I used the F-word when I stepped in cat vomit, or our WiFi password. I want them to use their Sharpie markers wisely. Or at least, stop saying ginormous. Good Lord.
We are approaching the driveway, and she is still regaling me with the YouTube ad.
“Honey,” I said, interrupting her. “Kids who read at a 12th grade reading level don’t use the word ginormous all the time. It’s not even a real word – it’s a portmanteau, like smog.”
She rolled her eyes.
“What are some other words that mean ginormous?”
She rattled off the list of synonyms that Sean and I and our friends have been prompting her with since she’s been on this “ginormous” kick.
“Titanic, behemoth, immense, colossal, humongous, whopping, gigantic, mammoth, epic, gargantuan, walloping, jumbo. Immeasurable. Huge.” She delivered these with a rude face.
The second rule of parenting: You keep trying.
Note: I now sport purple plastic glasses.
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Originally from Manhattan, Mariah was educated in Massachusetts, Montana and Texas, often by failure. She lives with her husband and three children in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Mariah can be reached at mariah@mariahmottley.com.