Today I'm writing at SheKnows.com!

#WhatDoITellMySon is something I've never had to ask myself, and I'm sorry

4 hours ago

Image: Rita Arens

I have no idea what it's like to raise a black son in America — this is what I can offer

Dear James, I can't and won't pretend to understand what it's like to raise a black son ever, let alone in our current 2015.

I'm not sure I can tell you what to tell your son. You're a strong, capable father, and I have faith you will guide him in the best way possible.

Here's what I know: I was once a white person raised almost solely among white people. This became problematic because even though my family and friends didn't talk about other races, their body language suggested that the other was different — perhaps to be feared. Since I grew up in a town of 5,000 people who were 99 percent white, I didn't have to think about race much until I went out into the world.

It might be important to say that many, many white people can live their whole lives without interacting with anyone but white people. There are enough pockets of the country that are mostly white for this to be true.

Read the rest at SheKnows.

My daughter is in between needing daycare and being able to get a job during the summer, and we are sort of flummoxed about it. She has alternated between staying with me as I work and attending a parks & rec summer camp that is unfulfilling but what we can afford. We can't afford a nanny. She doesn't need a babysitter.

She's at the age that I remember loving summer the most, when the little kid stuff -- like swingsets and trampolines and splash parks -- is still fun and nostalgic but she doesn't need me hovering around her to enjoy it. She's at the age of flashlight tag and being able to light fireworks and riding your bike to the pool and walking down to the creek to look for frogs alone.

This summer we've patched together help from my parents (bless them), the parks & rec camp, a week of horse camp and a parent or two working from home, but I need a real solution for next summer, the summer of twelve, and the summers afterward until she can get a job. I don't even know how old you have to be to get a job here. I think I had to be sixteen in Iowa, though there was that one sketchy restaurant in town that hired fourteen-year-olds.

What do you do with a summertime middle-schooler? Is camp really the only answer? She's not interested in the parks & rec, she doesn't play sports, and the really cool camps are either too far away to commute to and still get to work on time or cost way more than we can afford to pay.

I'm frustrated. Finding childcare has been really the only part of parenting that I loathe. My daughter is wonderful. I don't want her to dread summer because she hates where she has to spend her days while my husband and I work, but staying home all summer isn't really an option. Why is this so hard?

"Do you want the children's menu?" the hostess asked, flicking her eyes over my girl on her eleventh birthday. It seemed awfully small for The Cheesecake Factory, a place with a menu that sells advertising. We took it, anyway.

When we got to the booth, the little angel informed us she is no longer allowed to eat from that menu, as it is for children ten and under. We told her she probably wouldn't get arrested or anything, but she seemed proud of the fact that it was LEGALLY AGAINST THE LAW for her to order off that menu.

I sat there scarfing down the tiny bread that comes in the little basket and is just enough to kick your blood sugar into high gear but not enough to take the edge off your hunger if you ate a really little lunch because hello, you were going to The Cheesecake Factory, her birthday favorite and grandfather of America's portion-size issues, for dinner, and while I tried to make myself chew instead of just swallowing the doughy goodness whole, a sea of children's menus flashed before my eyes.

Hot dogs

Chicken fingers

Cheeseburger sliders

Cheese pizza

Macaroni & cheese

Applesauce

Fruit cup

French fries

Scoop of vanilla ice cream

It's not that I'm nostalgic for the children's menu. It's full of food that we all pretend is disgusting and then lick off our kids' plates after we finish our salad and they leave half a perfectly good chicken finger for which we paid hard-earned money, dammit. I don't miss the little kid days, actually. She was adorable, to be sure, but when I look back at the pictures we took of that time, I can see the exhaustion in my face and remember the feeling of OH MY GOD I CAN'T PLAY POLLY POCKETS ONE MORE TIME OR I WILL SCREAM AND I'M NOT SURE I WILL BE ABLE TO STOP SCREAMING PLEASE GOD SOMEONE PASS THE ATLANTIC.

It's just ... that at some places, at least, it's no longer an option. Another milestone, so to say. You hear everyone say it and you can't believe it's possible at the start of the journey, but eighteen years really isn't that long. I was a senior in high school more than eighteen years ago. I've been married for almost fourteen.

My marriage can't even eat off the kids' menu.

As my daughter would say, *poof*. Mind blown.

I look forward to the next chapter of her life, even though I'm a little afraid of the teen years that linger not that far on the horizon, and OMG, middle school even closer. Thank God she still can't finish a cheeseburger. Pass that plate, sweetheart. I got your back.

The little angel is on spring break this week. Yesterday, we packed up our laptops and headed over to the library for a change of scenery. She had to make an ABC book, which is a document with a fact about the American Revolution for every letter of the alphabet and an accompanying picture.

There was a lot of typing and formatting and then I crashed her buzz by explaining image copyright as she pulled willy-nilly from Google Images. This led to some frustration and a discussion of Wikimedia Commons and then she started down the tedious path of formatting everything again.

After about two hours, she looked over at me. "This is boring," she said. "I think I'm getting a taste of what it's like to have a job."

WELCOME TO THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, GRASSHOPPER.

I've been writing a bit on BlogHer when I haven't been here:

• When Should You Let a Girl Start Shaving Her Legs?

• How to Fight Your Running Jealousy

• Have You Had These Running Injuries?

• When the Holidays Are Over and He Didn't Propose

• 3 Approaches for Organizing Your Closet

I drove her to school yesterday, because it was cold.

She hoisted her backpack and saxophone out of the trunk that she didn't used to be able to open by herself. It is a heavy trunk door and the struts to keep it open don't work anymore.

I see her every day, but something about the way she flipped her hair back and blew me a kiss reminded me of the way she looked when I dropped her off in first grade. But this isn't first grade, it's fifth grade, and she's told me next year she will rule the school.

Something about the way she flipped her hair and blew me a kiss nailed my gut to the back of my seat, and I actually couldn't move for a breath.

My mother told me about this love, but I didn't understand it.

Every night she says she loves me more. And I say no, that's impossible. I don't even make a game out of it. I know now it is impossible to love your mother more than she loves you, at least in my family.

She saw a while back that I was serious, and she stopped trying to win the argument. I wrap her in blankets and the promise that there is no way that I could not love her the most.

She clomps off toward the school in her winter boots, the backpack and the saxophone trying to drag her down but her long hair promising to catch the wind so she can fly.

It's a normal school day, but it's not.

Just like every day.

---

I like to write about young people. Enter a Goodreads giveaway now to win a copy of my young adult novel, THE OBVIOUS GAME!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Obvious Game

by Rita Arens

Giveaway ends February 20, 2015.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

 

Enter to win

Respite.

I stepped outside tonight to feel the wind upon my feet. Today, January 28, it was 73 degrees in Kansas City. Winter will return in a few days, with cold and snow, but tonight, tonight! I heard a barn owl amidst the wind rustling through the branches in my backyard. Something small and furry lives under my deck. I heard it turning in its bed.

I remember sitting on my best friend's graduate school balcony in February 1997. It was a miraculous 70 degrees. I was living in Chicago at the time. I thought Kansas City must surely be a magic place, so close to my parents but yet so mysteriously warm.

I moved here in 1998.

I'm not sure I could live somewhere completely without seasons. I'm not sure I could appreciate the wonder of a 70-degree January day if my skin weren't acclimated to zero degrees.

Everywhere I went today, I saw people baring winter skin in shorts: jogging, popping into the grocery store, playing in yards. We all smiled at each other, because we know what is coming. That this is a respite from a normal Midwestern January. We got a gift we weren't supposed to have.

Fifteen minutes ago, I cradled my daughter's head in my arms as she drifted off to sleep.

"Never leave," she said.

"No," I said. I didn't promise, because I can't promise. The only thing assured of all of us is that we will eventually leave.

"Not yet," I thought, instead, to myself.

I thought about the pictures I saw online recently of children climbing across broken bridges and up precarious ladders to get to school. I thought about the conversation I had with the woman who cuts my hair about how when I was a girl they didn't even have seat belts in the back of cars, let alone five-point harnesses and rules about snowsuits and car seats. And yet, even then, parents were promising their children they would never leave.

That we persist, that we survive, is a gift of chance and in my mind, God.

As I felt my daughter's head grow heavier, I said thank you.

As I felt the wind on my feet to the background of the owl's rough song, I said thank you.

Heart beats fast, colors and promises.

How to be brave
How can I love when I'm afraid
To fall
But watching you stand alone
All of my doubt
Suddenly goes away somehow.

"Never leave," she said.

And from the scary parts of life, from the boring parts, from the hard parts ...

being her mother is a reprieve. She is a 70-degree January day. She is my heart on the outside of my body.

She is my life's work.

The text came at 7 am, but I didn't see it until right before my girl and my husband were about to leave. 

"Dear parents," it began, and I knew what it was going to say. The rain outside poured down so hard it sounded angry: field trip cancelled.

Just a normal Monday. Nothing to look forward to. I met her eyes. She crumpled before me. 

As I listened to the frustration, disappointment and rage pour out of her, I thought how much I've wanted to do that in the past few weeks. Nothing in particular has happened, just the culmination of  several mountains that won't move no matter how hard I hurl myself against them. 

My husband told her about two field trips when he was a kid that were cancelled due to inclement weather. I told her about "All Summer in a Day," one of the first Ray Bradbury short stories I ever loved because of the moment the children realize what they've done to Margot, even though they really didn't mean to. I read it around my daughter's age. It was the beginning of my awareness that people can do awful things without meaning to, and they don't get a pass because they didn't mean to. You can mean to do all the good things and still screw up. And if you do, it's still your fault. And if it's your fault, but you're trying to be a good person, then maybe that means you have to cut everyone some slack.

And the world gets way more complicated.

She rested her head on my shoulder and I patted her silky red hair, wishing I could take away the rain and give her the gift of a school-free, field-trippy day, but I am not God. I don't control the rain. I couldn't even control her expectations. 

I saw the text too late to give her time to adjust. That's why the outburst came so fast and so hard.

Left to my own devices, I would've let her ride the day out on the couch, ease into the week in more of the manner her expectations expected. My husband, the more practical and old-school of the two of us, was having none of it. I retreated to my office and left him to deal with the crying child, grateful for once in his crazy traveling job he was actually here to dry the tears. 

Sometimes I need a break from drying the tears. I cry too easily myself.

My girl came home a little bit ago, wet and tired. 

It's still raining. I don't expect it will stop until tomorrow.

The noise was incessant. I mentioned it to my husband, who was working from home. "What is up with that BIRD?" 

We noticed Kizzy staring intently at something just outside the window. 

It was a baby bird. A fledgling goldfinch, fat as a tennis ball with tiny little legs.

And it was cheeping its heart out.

At first I laughed at Kizzy's interest, knowing he couldn't reach the bird.

Then I worried. 

I called the nature center. They said no biggie, the parents are feeding it. It's just learning to fly.

I googled some things. The Internet said leave it alone.

I had lunch. I took some calls. I worked.

The cheeping continued.

My maternal instincts said something was wrong.

I moved outside to see if any parent birds were coming.

They were not.

I wondered how many hours the fledgling had been alone without food.

The baby bird tried to hop. He fell over.

I called the nature center again. I said, "There are no parents."

She said, "Are you sure he's a fledgling? It's late for that."

I said, "Yes. I'm positive."

She said, "Bring him in."

I went and got a shoe box and lined it with an old tshirt. I put on a garden glove and picked up the baby bird, who cheeped at me. I put him in the box. 

I drove to the nature center.

I talked to the baby bird the whole way there. I told him it would be okay.

When I got there, I opened the box. 

The first thing I saw were his hooked little feet. Hooked in a way they should not be hooked. His eyes were closed.

"Oh, no!" I gasped.

The nature center worker took the box, barely glancing at it. She patted my arm. "I'm so sorry," she said.

I gave her the box as the tears started streaming down my face. I did not want the dead bird's coffin anymore. 

"I'm sorry," she repeated again as I turned to go.

As I drove home, tears streaming down my face, I thought about ISIS and ebola and genocide and war.

But I did not care.

That baby bird was in my backyard. On my deck. And if I had acted faster, I could've saved him.

I felt like we got to know each other a little.

He was my baby bird, and I failed him. 

Her hair flies back in the wind because the motor's almost shot in Vicki the convertible so the top stays down now. It has to be helped up like an old man out of a chair, and most of the time, we don't feel like dealing with it. We leave ourselves exposed to sun and sky and wind because the sun feels good when it's not raining.

We are talking about growing up, and I tell her the thing my dad told me about SEEs, Significant Emotional Experiences, the thing I put in THE OBVIOUS GAME, how you have to have two SEEs before you can really contribute to society, how some people go their whole lives without having two. You need two to understand other people's anger.

"You've had your two already," I say. "When Grandpa died and when Bella and Petunia and Buttonsworth died."

"Did you have two when you were a kid?"

"Yeah. When Grandma got cancer. And then when it came back. And then when my gran died. All that happened before I left for college."

"I've had more than that," she says, and her hair whips again around her face, her eyes shaded with sunglasses.

"What was the other one?"

"When Ka'Vyea got shot."

Oh. Yes.

I've been wondering how that affected her. We haven't talked about it. I've been waiting. She was such a trooper every visit to the hospital, and I have never been so proud of my daughter as when she walked into a room to see her friend with a feeding tube in his nose unable to sit up in bed and act completely natural, to play Connect Four instead of staring in shock at the machines surrounding him.

"Yes. That was really scary, wasn't it?"

She nods. There's more to say, but neither of us knows how to say it now. He's back at school part-time. He didn't die. We're very glad about that. But it's still not fair he can't walk. None of this is fair, and we are both gobsmacked every time we start to talk about it. So we stop.

I keep driving. Her hair streams out behind her.