Big Sean, Death Rolls, and A Parenting Tip for The Weary
Y’all.
This parenting thing is, for lack of a better word, WILD.
Now, before you get knee-deep in this post (or if you’re new to my work), I’m telling you now - I curse, I’m probably going to overshare a time or twenty, I’m raising a whip-smart fourteen-year-old girl-child with cerebral palsy, and I keep it very, very real. There. Now you know. Back to this torrid tale of parenting in the wild.
So yes, this parenting thing is a trip and absolutely not for the faint of heart. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I wonder if it’s even for me. But here I am, telling you about it while my daughter sleeps in her bed just down the hall, so clearly I’m still in it. Am I in it to win it? That remains to be seen. Ask my kid and she will promptly give you the thumbs down which is her way of telling you I couldn’t win it if I started 2 centimeters from the finish line. She’s got my sass, that kid.
But this past Thursday I realized that she has something I definitely didn’t have at her age: fearlessness. Aside from things on tv, I don’t think she’s afraid of anything in real life. Not big dogs, not snakes, not roller coasters, not even consequences. That last part might throw you. You may even mutter to yourself “ooohhh that’s not good”, and honestly, if I was reading this instead of writing it, I’d probably do that too. But stay with me here because this may be the one and only time in the history of one and only times that I’m kinda proud that she has this “devil may care” attitude (or however that saying goes).
Thursday morning was a shit show. Plain and simple. It was the kind of morning where your kid knows you overslept and knows that it would be in everyone’s best interest to cooperate, but decides that it would be in their best interest to praise dance all over your nerves - just for the fun of it. Everything I asked her to do she agreed to do - until the time came to do it. Then it was a loud, and emphatic “NO!”
“E, are you ready to put your socks on?”
“Yeah”
“Cool - come here and let’s get those socks on.”
“NO!”
“E, do you want cereal or oatmeal for breakfast?”
“Cereal”
“Cool, let me go get it ready.”
(five minutes later)
“E, breakfast is ready!”
“NO!”
“You asked me for cereal!”
“NO!”
“Now you don’t want it?”
“NO!”
And this went on for an entire hour. By the time we got in the car, I was well past “the end of my rope”. I was past the end, had rounded the corner, gone down the dirt path, and was staring the alligator in the face. 1 Did I go in for the kill, or did I do the wise thing, the smart thing, the thing good parents did on after-school specials of the late eighties and early nineties and back away from the rabid teen slowly?
A little death-roll never hurt anybody, right?
Y’all.
That alligator tore my ass up. ALL the way up.
I opened up its death trap of a mouth, or in this case, pulled out my cell phone, tapped open my Tidal Music app, cranked up the volume, and backed out of the garage with my kid sitting in her wheelchair behind me and Big Sean proudly proclaiming “I DON’T. FUCK WIT. YOU!”2
Yep. I did that.
Played the song for the whole six-minute ride to school. As in, when the four-and-a-half minute song ended, I doubled down on that shit and I pressed repeat.3 My daughter sat in her wheelchair, directly behind me, not saying a word. Not fist-pumping the air like she normally does when I play Big Sean. Not knocking the hard plastic of her leg brace against the metal of her wheelchair as she keeps rhythm with the bass. Not anything. Just silence. I briefly wondered if she understood how annoyed I was and why I’d put the song on, but quickly decided that I didn’t care if she got it, and kept right on matching Big Sean, lyric for lyric as we pulled into the school parking lot.
Apparently, my kid didn’t care either because as soon as she got out of the truck she queued up that death roll. She wheeled herself across the parking lot to the safety of her friends and her aids waiting for her, turned around, looked right at me, flipped me off, and then wheeled away. If she could verbalize her thoughts, I would have heard “Oh word? Bet. I see your Big Sean and raise you THE FINGER!” She never looked back. Never turned around so I could see her rubbing her tiny fist in a circle on her chest to sign “I’m sorry”. Just “Fuck you, bitch. I’m out.”
And here’s the plot twist: I’m not even mad about it.
It’s not that I let my daughter get away with anything she wants to because she’s disabled (if you know us you know that is absolutely and unequivocally NOT the case). It’s not even that I support and accept all forms of expression from my kid because nah - rude is rude and disrespectful is disrespectful and she knows I will always call her out on this behavior when it pops up (which thankfully is not that often). But in this particular instance, something a friend once told me about parenting rang out louder than the fight song of the morning: if your child says or does something mean to you, or something you deem disrespectful, they are doing it because they know that you are the one person they can do that with and still be safe…still be loved…still be accepted. Yes, you’ll want to strangle them, but you can also look at the situation and know that you’ve done an excellent job at providing a safe space for them to test those boundaries and still be met with love at the end of the day.
I told you this shit was wild.
Parenting should not be an episode of Fear Factor
I thought about this notion my entire six-minute drive home, this time not blasting Big Sean. I compared the morning to my own experiences with my mom growing up. By no means was my mom a bad mom. She loved me deeply, but that love was forged, honed, and expressed in survival - her making sure I survived the day and life if she wasn’t here one day. There wasn’t really a “safe space” to test boundaries because testing some boundaries could get you killed out on the street, or thrown out of school. The safe space was more like a fear corridor - I was too afraid to talk back, to say no, to make it very clear that I vehemently disagreed with whatever the consequence was and stand ten toes down in that disagreeing because OH MY GOD THE CONSEQUENCES. There was none of that happening in my mother’s house, and let me make it very clear, again, I am in no way saying that my mother was a bad mother. She did the best she could with what she had and parented me in the best way she knew how. And honestly, do any of us actually know what the fuck we’re doing with these kids we birthed? I don’t know about y’all but half the time I’m more lost and confused than Doja Cat tryin’ to figure out wtf to do with her eyebrows. Are they on, are they off? Are they zig-zags or squiggly lines? Am I a human or am I a human-sized cat? WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW??? But on the real, I was more afraid of the consequences from my mom if I did bad thing #1, than I was of the natural consequence of doing bad thing #1.
To be fair, I also think that in addition to her parenting style being a survival technique, I think it was also a generational parenting style - especially among Black and Latin parents. For a litany of reasons, all of them socio-political, parents of color have often felt the need to be harder on our kids than the average parent because if we had to learn the lessons by way of the world, it could literally (and/or figuratively) cost us our life. So in that sense, I get it. I understand the desperate need for parents of a certain era to feel like the only way they could save us was to (in some cases) break us or overly shelter us. I get it. I really do.
But that style of parenting also came with a lot of trauma and fear. The trauma and fear of saying no to an authoritative figure. The fear of violence if we did or said something wrong or bad, and the trauma of violence if/when we did. The fear of “talking back” and for some kids, the fear of telling others. I know of some adults who as children threatened to call CPS after they received a whoopin’, and their parents response was “Go ahead. I’ll dial the number for you. But you better hope your new parents don’t beat you or molest you. You better hope they’re nicer to you than I am”. In the parenting playbook of back in the day, that was “calling your bluff”, meant to scare you into acting right. I think we can all agree that in today’s day and age it’s emotional and mental abuse and wholly rooted in trauma.
When my daughter gave me the finger it made me realize that somehow, even though I had just royally fucked up on the parenting wheel of fortune, I was also actively ending generational trauma around parenting. My kid knew she could give me the finger, even if it was from across the street, and I would still smother her in kisses and hugs later that night. She knew she could run her wheelchair all over that damn boundary and we’d talk about it later, both owning our shit and promising to do better. I set out a few years ago to actively parent my daughter differently than how I was parented. My parenting is not 100% gentle parenting because nah - we don’t give passes ‘round these parts. But it is gentle parenting mixed with fitting consequences and lots of conversation AND apologies. That is also not something I ever encountered growing up - but again, it was not (and some might say still is not) in that generations parenting toolbox. Our parents didn’t apologize for yelling at us or whoopin’ us, or losing their cool with us.
But I do.
That afternoon when my daughter came home we had a long talk about the shit show morning we had, and we both apologized. Her for being intentionally difficult and giving me the finger (which I’ll admit, I rightfully earned), and me for losing my cool and doing something pretty shitty and inappropriate. And then we talked about ways we can make mornings work better when we’re running late. Her first suggestion: maybe don’t oversleep, mom.
Yeah ok, kid. Ok.
If you haven’t read my book, “Ain’t That A Mother”, the alligator at the end of the road is the bad decision you knew was waiting for you and you could have opted not to go down the road but you went down it anyway and now your one bad decision from death-spiraling your entire life.
I have never, nor will I ever, play Kidz Bop or some scrubbed-up version of music for my kid. If it bothers you that I let her hear curse words in music, you should definitely never come over to my house for dinner.
Look - I was in my feelings. Am I proud of this moment, absolutely not. I’m embarrassed to tell y’all I did this. It’s not cool IN THE SLIGHTEST. But tell me you haven’t said or done something you know you had no business saying or doing to your child? Judge me if ya wanna - I may be the only one wild enough to admit it. Call me human.