Dear A - A letter to a childhood playmate

If it isn't clear, my mom loved kids. She loved helping kids. There were always other kids around - whether it was ones she was keeping out of a broken foster care system or ones she was tutoring or whatever else. Mom was only able to have one biological child before a miscarriage and then cancer robbed her of her ability to have more . . . but she mothered countless children over the course of her life. I played with all kinds of kids, from my own friends to abuse victims to those living in complete poverty. This post is about one of the children she tutored, from an affluent family. I can't even remember his last name, and I don't think I could say this to him even if I did find him again, so I'm writing it here.

Dear A, 

It has been two decades since you were coming to my house for tutoring. I liked it when you came over because after you got done with your lessons, we could play until your dad picked you up. Usually we would play in the backyard or the barn or my dad would take us up to the back field to run around. And we'd talk. We'd talk about normal kid stuff . . . but sometimes, you would say not so normal stuff. 

You would talk about how much you loved sex. You talked about how you wanted to make a sex club where everybody had sex. You talked about your penis a lot. You never did anything inappropriate towards me, and you never said anything inappropriate about me. And I just said 'okay, then I'll build a club for people who don't want that next door and you can come visit me because I don't want to do that, it's for grownups.' And then we'd draw pictures of our clubhouses. You would draw your sex club and I would draw my no-sex club. The few times I mentioned you at school, a couple kids would talk about how you tried to get them to have sex with you or went to your house and saw you naked in bed with somebody. 

You were no older than five or six.

I didn't understand back then. I just thought you were weird. I thought maybe you walked in on your parents or something and it got stuck in your head or you didn't know what it really was. I was a little older than you and I knew the mechanics of how babies were made and I didn't see why anyone would want that or care about it. 

 I didn't understand that you were a walking red flag for childhood sexual abuse. I didn't know. I was only about eight years old or so. And I'm sorry. As an adult I both understand that there was no way I could have known what was going on. Yet still, I've carried the guilt for years. It was weird. I should have said something to somebody. Even saying as simply as 'All he talks about is how much he loves sex' and my mom would have been all over that situation. I didn't, though. And I'm sorry. I don't know what happened to you after you did well in tutoring and didn't need to come over anymore. I know your family still lived local. I don't know who was abusing you, and I don't know if it ever stopped. I'm just so, so sorry. 

Wherever you are, I hope that you've found help in dealing with whatever it was that happened to you. I hope you're living a happy life, and I hope you break the cycle of abuse going forward. 

Denise

As parents, we try to help our children understand body boundaries and what is or isn't appropriate for other people to do to them. We warn them about inappropriate touching and people acting badly and when to tell an adult. Looking back on this situation, what it's taught me is that perhaps I shouldn't only be teaching my children what is okay and not okay for other people to do to them. Maybe I should also be teaching them to tell an adult when other children act in a way that means they might be abused. Something as simple as 'If you know somebody who talks about sex a lot or says that somebody is touching them, you need to tell me/a teacher/guidance counselor/adult, in case somebody is hurting them.' 

Kids might not express any signs of abuse in front of adults, but they might in front of other kids. "A" loved my mom, but obviously never let on around her that something was going on - and if I'd known better, I or any of the other kids who saw this behavior could have told our parents and maybe helped him not be subjected to years of sexual abuse at the hands of god knows who. None of us should feel bad as adults because we simply didn't know better, of course - even though I know I do. I just hope that wherever he is, he's found help.

Thoughts? Have you talked with your children (or will talk to future children) about signs of abuse in other children? What did you/will you say?

If you need assistance in dealing with sexual abuse in your family or in your past, contact the RAINN network: http://www.rainn.org/

On parties and stacking up to my mother

Yesterday was my daughter's 4th birthday party. About a month ago, I asked her what kind of party she wanted to have. She said she wanted a rainbow party with a rainbow cake. So I spent the last month trying to assemble this rainbow-themed shindig. I'm lucky enough that I already do design stuff with Photoshop, so I made the invitations myself, along with favor tags and a banner thingy and custom stickers and all this other stuff. We put together colorful treat bags and a rainbow assortment of bottles of bubbles. I made rainbow jello (not the layered kind - the cups I got were too small) and ordered the absolute must for a rainbow party - a rainbow cake. Bought tableware in rainbow colors, found rainbow napkins, rainbow straws, rainbow snacks, had rainbow sand for sand art bottles . . . rainbow sidewalk chalk . . . yeah. Rainbow everything.

Don't lie, you're just here to look at rainbow cake. Credit to baker at bottom of post. 

I invited my daughter's entire preschool camp class to the party, along with two of her cousins and a little boy she has playdates with from time to time. So, take all that stuff above and multiply it by 25 - because that's how many people were invited. Three people RSVP'd, five if you count her cousins who ended up not being able to come anyway. I was told, though, that people will just show up anyway, so I prepared for everyone as there was no real way to know. I should have only prepared for the RSVPs though, as only those three children ended up showing up. In the end, it doesn't really matter as the three children who showed were the ones that Claire really cared about, and they all had a lot of fun and got to do the little craft activities and were amazed by the cake and played in the splashy sprinkler thing at the park.

Now, if you think that this post is just going to be some sort of self-congratulating, look-at-me-I'm-Supermom post, I assure you, it's not. It's actually another post about my own mom. Maybe this is a parenting blog after all, only it's more about trying to relate to my mother as an adult when I only knew her as a child before she passed. It feels lately like I'm trying to figure out who I am as a parent in relation to both her and to my own life. I had no parenting role model when I became a mother; I've had to cut my own path through the jungle and figure everything out on my own without her - but I do still try to look to my memories of her for guidance - be it how to act or how NOT to act.

Today, I learned a valuable lesson: Mary Giffin I am not. 

My mom LOVED throwing parties. She threw parties for everything. Easter parties (egg hunts for dozens of kids) and Christmas parties and Thanksgiving dinners - and my birthday. Mom always invited all the family AND all the kids in my grade in school. She didn't think anybody should be excluded, so everyone was invited no matter what, and gifts were strictly verboten because she didn't want lower income students not being able to come just because they couldn't bring a gift. She'd spend a lot of time making activities by hand and cooking food and getting this huge event going. We weren't rich by any means, and I was raised by people who lived through the Depression, so Mom knew how to make a few bucks stretch a looonnnnngggg way when it came to party prep - and always did a stellar job of it. People I grew up with still talk about the parties I had as a kid that they remember and how much fun they had. (The most popular one was a 'mining party' where my folks brought back dozens of buckets of dirt from a gem mine in North Carolina after a vacation and then built mining troughs and little trays where all the kids could mine for gems and keep what they found. Pretty epic.)

Me, on the other hand - I'm a scatterbrained, disorganized mess most of the time. This party appeared fine to outside eyes, but to me, it didn't go off so well. We got there to set up late - and the parking lot was packed, aside from being blocked from moving forward by an H2 right in the middle of traffic because they had to have a conversation with someone RIGHT THEN. We rushed to get everything out (guests were already there at this point) and it looked sloppy. It was horribly hot - it is South Carolina in August, after all - so hot that the jello actually melted after being out for an hour. The kids seemed to like the sand art and bubbles and sidewalk chalk, and obviously didn't care that the tablecloths were flipping up in the wind and the banner fell down and the jello turned to liquid. Or that I put on too much eyeliner and couldn't get it off and looked like a streetwalker. Or that I was sweating like a hog and probably smelled about as delightful. Or that I didn't get the rainbow streamers up or set out the things to make necklaces and bracelets.

Rainbow of jello, pre-liquification.

I need to cut myself a little slack, I know. When I was a kid, it was me, my retired parents, and my uncle all living together. So that made three people who could work on party stuff or keep me out of the way - as opposed to our more typical situation where my husband works a regular full time job and I'm wrangling two kids - a highly needy baby and an extremely spirited now-4-year-old. I got everything done with either both of them in tow or while they were sleeping. I probably shouldn't expect to do as awesome as my mom did - or like anything you'll see on Pinterest. (Except the cake. DID YOU SEE THE CAKE?)

The stress wasn't really in having a BIG party, it was in trying to have this unique party like my mom would have had. And for being so trendy, a rainbow party - an AFFORDABLE rainbow party and not some thousand dollar Etsy-sponsored affair - is definitely stressful to put together. When I went into Party City I just stood in front of the Phineas & Ferb stuff going 'Why? Why couldn't she have just wanted a simple theme instead?' Then I had to move on because I think somebody caught me wistfully caressing a pair of Perry the Platypus binoculars.

So, when it comes to parties, I'm definitely not my mom. I'm glad I did this - especially because Claire told me it was 'best party ever.' I might have more parties in the future where I invite a ton of kids because I don't want anyone feeling left out, and I'll definitely keep my mom's rule - no gifts whatsoever, thankyouverymuch. That said, I'll be encouraging the kids to pick easy themes from now on. No more scouring the internet for a month trying to find a combo pack of rainbow tableware that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I don't care if it's not super unique, I want to be able to walk into one store and come out with everything - plates, cups, napkins, favors, whatever. I might come up with one neat craft activity each time, but nothing very complicated. I'm not staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning putting everything together and I'm not ever making jello to sit out in the Southern summer heat ever again.



One final thought: Whether you're going to something or not, don't be an asshole. RSVP, for the love of all that is good in the world.

Cake by Ramia's Creations of Goose Creek, SC: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ramias-Creations

More pictures:

Rainbow of tooth-rotting goodness

Party favors

Sand art setup