“WE JUST NEED OUR @#!@#!@# BADGES!!!”
In wide-eyed terror, the girls assemble our badges and peel and paste PRESS stickers to them, handing them over.
Mine importantly reads: “PRESS.” Official NPR byline: “FLABBRAMOM.”
And I can see, just beyond, magically, the line is now moving. Orange Manga Man and Starfish are being warmly welcomed into the front door. In this whole hostile lying cheating gambit, not only did I not save us time, my daughter thinks I’m an asshole.
SALLY IMMEDIATELY FINDS her fellow Homestuckers and, with palpable relief, disappears. So here Manhattan publishing’s very own “FlabbraMom” stands alone in her New Balances. With a purselike soft cooler of sweaty Costco salami.
Ahead of me is the Pokémon GO panel. I brighten. Enter the room. My people!
Okay, I don’t know what I thought other Pokémon GO players would look like. I guess I expected them to be like me, sort of intelligent and obsessive and on the spectrum, sure, and yet, somehow, wry. Or, at the very least, in the good sweatpants.
Are you addicted to Candy Crush? Online Boggle? Tetris? Do you ever wonder what other Tetris players look like?
If you do, please consider the Oscar Wilde quote: “The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet’s dream; it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.”
This was the Scared Straight of Middle-Aged Pokémon GO Players.
People here are old, young, thin, obese. The room is a sea of yellow Pikachu hats, Squirtle earmuffs, Pokémon stuffed animals hanging off Pokémon backpacks. One fortysomething guy in a blue Mystic (that’s my team) Bunny costume, with leotards and mask, is playing Pokémon GO the whole time, swiping away with his blue-gloved paw.
I need some air.
I leave the convention center and walk down to Long Beach’s lagoon, its sunny perimeter festooned with shops and restaurants. The boardwalk teems with hundreds of people . . . of which literally nine out of ten are swiping vigorously on their phones.
“A Lapras!” someone exclaims. “Where?” “There!” Three hundred people veer left like a fleet of birds.
A Lapras? In spite of myself, I open my Pokémon GO. Lapras are very rare! A sightseeing boat cruises into the lagoon. From the top deck, a white-uniformed captain shouts over the megaphone: “Dragonite! By the lighthouse! Dragonite!” With a cry of excitement, the entire mob charges up the hill . . . and then everyone stands around, looking down at their phones, as though standing around a giant beached whale.
And then I realize: the fishing boat captain was joking with us!
Never mind that a more successful parent would be driving her child to Kumon, a tristate robotics meet, or a fencing competition—something to enhance the college résumé! This is a whole new low.
Hungry, I sit on a rock and eat the disgusting salami. My iPhone jumps with a text from Hannah:
Mom, please pick up. I’m so scared and sad. They wouldn’t let me take the SAT this morning because I FORGOT MY ID. I thought I had it. It was in my denim bag. I’ve been just crying and crying and crying. ;(
“May” I Have a Couple of Ambien?
C-Plus Tiger Mom
ARGH!
Thus far, I’ve resisted being a Tiger Mom.
I can’t face the pressure of parenting really gifted children. Every time I watch the Olympics, I feel for the parents watching their gymnast daughters do the vault. The last time Michael Phelps swam, I was too nervous to watch—due to the narrative now that Phelps was “the oldest” in the pool at thirty-one. I was so anxious for him.
At the same time, I was thinking, He has twenty-three medals already! Who cares?
BUT NOW IT’S A different time. High noon.
My parenting is terrible. In my goddess pants, I have let everything drift. I’m on the phone with Tiger Aunt Kaitlin, complaining.
“Before grades actually counted, Hannah used to get easy straight As and now I’m seeing all kinds of letters, some I don’t even recognize. Is an ‘epsilon’ a grade? What does it mean that her AP biology grade is a ‘negative epsilon’? Why, next to AP history, is there an emoji of a little paper hat and a McDonald’s logo?”
“You may be overreacting,” Tiger Aunt K says, unconvincingly, because if there’s anyone who overreacts, it’s her.
“I’m not!” I say. “At UC Irvine, where I teach, a ‘second-tier’ UC, the average GPA is a 3.9. I think Hannah’s lucky right now to be holding a 3.6. At this point, any UC would be amazing. Forget Berkeley or UCLA. UC Davis would be incredible, as would UC Santa Cruz, UC Riverside, UC Merced—” I wonder aloud: “Is there a UC below Merced?”
“Stop worrying!” Charlie says. “Your sister Kaitlin went to UCLA. That means Hannah will be a shoo-in. She’s a ‘legacy’!”
I snap at him: “ ‘Legacy’ means your dad donated $20 million to the cancer center, not that you were a Moderately Gifted Child in 1979.”
TROLLING THE INTERNET, I find a book: Start Late, Finish Rich. It’s for losers—I mean “people over fifty with no retirement savings.” The book is optimistic. It’s forgiving. You can “start late!”
I love this Pema Chödrön spirit. As a corollary, while thus far, I’ve been a lazy Panda Mom, maybe I still have time to get my daughters on track to go to college. Somewhere.
First item of business? Hannah. Taking up any kind of sport to enhance her college résumé, even an obscure and possibly less-than-competitive one like the luge (“Start late!”) is out of the question. Athletic activity is inimical to Hannah. I remember in second grade, when I took her to a free tennis lesson. There a merry line of children bobbed, exuberantly hitting yellow balls—pop, pop, pop—into the blue! Yonder, under a tree, my daughter lay, making artistic piles of leaves because “the sun makes her eyes hurt.” So #palacecat.
However, scared straight from forgetting her ID, Hannah has agreed to do an online SAT course with a company called Prep-Scholar, created by actual Harvard graduate Allen Cheng. Otherwise known as My Fourth Husband, Allen Cheng has complete faith in Hannah, and in everyone else who has paid four hundred dollars, sending us both constant cheerful e-mails applauding her progress at completing modules.
Then there is Sally. Her problem has long been . . . I’d like to say, perfectionism? But it’s really more like procrastination.
Example: in fifth grade, for her big “state” project? Sally got assigned Hawaii. We were all stunned. No one in two generations of our family had ever gotten a cool state. In our own childhoods, my sister, brother, and I had all gotten normal, boring states like Michigan, Rhode Island, Virginia. My sister thought Virginia was special because of all the presidents—that’s how little we had to work with.
Although she had a full twelve weeks, Sally jumped boldly out of the gate, brainstorming the exploding Mentos volcano, hula dancers, and a motorized shark leaping out of a game board!
When you are divorced, and the children go back and forth, you naturally assume schoolwork is being done at the other parent’s house. But no, Sunday morning before it’s due, Sally comes into my bedroom and says, coyly, “I’d like to invite you to be part of my motivation army.” She has done nothing.
At the eleventh hour, we slam together not a brilliant project. The centerpiece was a pencil drawing of the Hawaiian state bird. It is called “the nene.”
Meanwhile, I noticed, around the same time, our dad’s Filipino caregiver, Thomas, father of four children, was actually building, in the garage, his own fifth-grade son’s state project. New York. It was a large box featuring a full-on replica of the Statue of Liberty, holding her torch out over a harbor of actual water, which was slowly being patrolled by an actual motorized boat. Hardworking immigrants win it again.
First World question: Should I stay out of this? Let the chips fall where they may? Use this as a teaching moment to learn responsibility and consequences?
UPON SORTING PAPERS, I come across this report (from which grade? No clue).
OWLS
by Sally (age ten)
Some things that I know about owls are that they have large eyes, a large head, and that they are carnivores. Owls come in all different colors, shapes, sizes and they all have a different name. For example the Barn owl, the Elf owl, the Great Horned owl, and the Snowy owl, they all come from the same family, THE OWLS! Okay, that is pretty much all I know about OWLS.
OKAY, SO THE UPSIDE is that Sally has this narrow band of ability where she scores like a Korean on standardized math tests. This has landed her in the rigorous “gifted” LAUSD science academy of the bad Slenderman party. It is full of other bright and lazy children who also watch anime until 3 a.m. and have terrible study habits.
Gluing this ecosystem together are us parents, both bloated with vanity about our superkids and baffled as to why they’re bringing home Ds and Fs. To explain why, the teachers now send home a take-home biology test that “parents and children can work on together.” Why? Because apparently, as parents of teens, our blood pressure is too low. But newly Tiger Mom-ing it (paging Amy Chua! Ding, ding, ding!), I embrace the opportunity. After all, I am half Asian, a (okay, adjunct) professor of science communication, and, before I failed my own Shanghainese Tiger Father and switched to the liberal arts (which, as I like to say, “to a Chinese father is like pole dancing”), I actually earned a degree in physics from Caltech. I even drive over to my alma mater to check out a copy of the actual Campbell biology text the class is using! Booyah, suckahs!
Very well! Question one! Pencils out!
“The structural integrity of bacteria is to peptidoglycan as the structural integrity of plant spores is to lignin, cellulose, secondary compounds or sporopollenin.”
That’s question one out of seventy-six.
No problem. I will dive in, become one with sporopollenin.
I yellow highlight away, feeding Sally healthful snacks to keep her awake. We are eating pita chips in hummus like Grand Uncle Wang would, two-by-two.
Sally slumps against her stuffed animals, reading in her weird anime cartoon voice:
“Diatoms are encased in Petri-platelike cases (valves) made of translucent hydrated silica whose thickness can be varied. At certain times, diatoms store excess calories in the form of the liquid polysaccharide, laminarin, and at other times as oil.”
I answer in a cartoon voice. Also, of course, we argue about stuff neither of us really understands.
“Maybe if the messenger RNA dudes are all up in the cytosol, maybe they don’t NEED ATP? Because of the hydrogen gradient? In the binary fission S-phase?”
Never mind that we spend fifteen hours of our weekend on this. It’s worth it! By Sunday night, we have seventy-six answers we feel really great about.
Until our score comes back. Seventy-nine percent.
WTF!? I’m a C-plus Tiger Mom.
BUT NEXT WEEK, because we end up studying the wrong chapter, it’s even worse. On her Monday quiz, Sally gets an F.
With her semiphotographic memory, though, Sally is able to recall all 32 questions. So she cheers herself up by giving me the test, and I also get an F. Although at 16 out of 32, I consider it a fairly high F.
“We are winning,” I say sagely. “If very, very slowly.”
USING FLORAL FOAM, pipe cleaners, and, literally, buttons from Michael’s, I make Sally a model of the cell that looks less like the cell in the book than some kind of woolly exploding craft virus.
My friend Wendy, a lawyer, commiserates: “When Noah was in school, my husband and I couldn’t win either way. You know what Chet and I got on our Navajo village? A D-plus. That smarts when you’re forty-seven. Noah was having trouble on a big eighth-grade essay, so I rewrote it and gave it a snappy new title: ‘Strawberry Fields Forever: The Plight of the Migrant Worker in the Central Valley.’ ”
“So clever!” I erupt.
“Yes,” Wendy agrees. “The ‘Beatles colon’ title thing is a construction Chet invented in college, with his infamous ‘It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night: Prostitution in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago.’ But ‘Strawberry Fields’ backfired. To his horror, Noah won a trophy for the essay I wrote at his middle school assembly. He cried all the way home.”
Sure, but Noah is currently attending Northwestern. Strawberry Fields Forever indeed! In fact, I see a way in. Like Wendy, I can stick to my strengths.
This weekend, Sally’s homework includes rereading the Story of Islam, reviewing the hydrophilic system, and also, “Write eight poems for the eight parts of speech.” In rhyming couplets.
This strikes Sally as impossible.
Lying on her bed, capsized under a Sponge Bob pillow, she declares: “I’m not even going to try.”
“Honey, if you don’t even try, you’ll get an F!”
“Fine!”
“I can help you, honey! Maybe you and mommy can write them together!”
“Hashtag Living Nightmare.”
So I write them myself and I think they came out rather well! Of course, I’ve had no sleep because I worked on them for fourteen hours and at one point fell into a trance where Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat was coming after me with a bowling shoe. My humble hope, however, is that they will become minor classics, or at least will earn a higher grade than the C we just got in biology.
I give you:
PARTS OF SPEECH Poems
by Sandra (age fifty-six)
VERB (a spinster English teacher, way too excited about grammar!)
Is there a noun you might disturb?
Pair it with an action VERB!
Nouns just sit there fat and slow
They have nowhere else to go
Nouns wait still like birds on wire
Don’t blame them, they’re just plain tired
But here come verbs like gusts of wind
These fat noun birds?
No longer pinned!
Running, jumping, skipping, hopping
Verbs make nouns start rising, dropping
When it’s done, after all that flap
Verbs will let you SLEEP and NAP.
NOUN (a Mafia teamster taking an English class in prison)
Who is Bud or Beth or Bea?
“What strange mortals we all be!”
Dogs and cats and mules and goats
Planes and trains and ships and boats
Cakes and toast and steak and soup
Dirt and sand and pee and poop
Some are mighty, some are small
Some like air aren’t there at all
NOUNS are things that own and do
They’re parts of speech like me and you
Makes no difference which you like
We are NOUNS so take a hike!
ADJECTIVE (a C student trying for a B, can’t close the deal)
Sunny, oily, round, and curled
ADJECTIVES describe our world
Without them we’d just have a name
And look and sound and smell the same
An adjective can help a meal
Transform itself from drab to veal—
Oh no, not veal, but veal that’s tasty
Dang, that rhyme was much too hasty
That former rhyme, that sloppy rhyme
That sapped pure wit and precious time
This sleepy day, when dull thoughts roam
Makes a middling effort, shaky poem.
ADVERB (Devil Wears Prada, a snobby—maybe female—film exec)
To make a film of Jack and Jill
Requires more than one brown hill
The hill you need, but it’s not thrilling
Noun on film won’t make a killing
The kids went up, but slowly, quickly?
Jill went gaily, Jack went slickly?
Is that the reason Jack fell down?
He ran too fast, and broke his crown?
ADVERBS tell us how they acted
How they tumbled, hill impacted
Movement coaching, voice inflection
Cast two kids who take direction.
PRONOUN (salty n
inety-four-year-old country grandma)
He and she and we and me
Are simpler names for folks we see
Like at Thanksgiving, round the table
Baby Frederick? Grandpa Mabel?
Uncle Todd and Aunty Kim?
Who’s she or it or her or him?
I’m ninety-four, don’t give a darn
I went to school inside a barn
From May to June to late November
Who you are I can’t remember
PRONOUNS help me round the horn
Of table talk— You! Pass the corn!
PREPOSITION (to be performed to/with a stuffed animal)
My cat is on me, lucky me
Oh please get off me, off my knee!
Cat or self, the boundaries blur
You weigh so much, it’s not just “fur”
You feed so much at dinner call
Your shape veers toward a basketball
And gassy is your air behind
So snuggling from afar is fine
But no— You’re hurt, complain with meows
You won’t accept more thens than nows
Cat on, cat off—these two conditions
Differ just by prepositions.
CONJUNCTION (omg—Valley Girl! could also be one of RuPaul’s drag queens!)
Oh my gawd, girl, have you heard?!?!
The latest dirt from period third?!?!?
So Pat and Kelly had a fight
That Brittany Olsen tried to right
But, bffs with Clare and Ann
And Beth and Lynn and Jane and Nan?
A catfight started in the yard!
And Brittany lost her Starbucks card!
The drama, in words I won’t mince
Because, although, unless and since
Nouns connect with just conjunctions
And without her lattes, she can’t function.
INTERJECTION (rebel school boy: Max in Where the Wild Things Are)
Yes! Great! Rad! Cool!
We’re done with poems, assigned for school!
Ouch! Crikey! Fiddlesticks! Darn!
The Madwoman and the Roomba Page 11