Parenting on the Verge

I was in the midst of the final fifteen minutes of my morning countdown until the time I needed to drive my youngest daughter to the bus-stop. As I was brushing through her night-time tangles, my dimple-cheeked cherub looked up at me in wide-eyed innocence and asked, “Mom, what’s a ‘har’?” Barely breaking with my rhythmic brush-strokes, I responded, “Har? Well, that’s one of the words I use when I meditate during yoga.”

I could see the frustration flash across her face. In addition to her dyslexia, she also has some central auditory processing issues that prevent her brain from catching the subtle differences of sounds within a word. Squinting her eyes and wrinkling her nose, she vigorously shook her head. “No, no, not ‘har’… I mean ‘whore’.”

Rule #1 of parenting: Never let them see you sweat.

My mind raced as I quickly took a moment to catch my breath. “Where’d you hear that?” I casually asked.

She rushed to assure me, “It’s not a swear word, mom”.

I assured her that while I understood it didn’t strictly fall within the category of a swear word, it still wasn’t a particularly nice word to use either.

Apparently, a third grade boy at her school had felt it necessary to announce that “whores are bad”. My daughter’s voracious appetite for information compelled her to ask one of the other students what precisely a whore was. The child she chose was a veritable fount of information. She shared with my daughter that “a whore is someone who wears really short skirts, shirts that show their belly-button, and they always wear their hair up”.

Still mindful of the minutes ticking by, it was at this moment that I innocently asked if she’d like her hair in a French braid. The rolled eyes, and the fact that her working definition of the word “whore” would include a high percentage of the female population during the summer months clued me in that I’d need to quickly come up with a definition I deemed appropriate, and that she would feel was acceptable.

My eye on the clock, I explained that a whore was someone who typically didn’t feel very good about herself and, as a result, would engage in negative behaviors to try to attract male attention. I knew I was giving a very broad definition, but it was 6:45 in the morning and how explicit do you really want to get with a precocious nine year old?

I was relieved to see an expression of understanding dawn on her face as she began to slowly nod her head. “Oh, I get it… you mean like a stripper?”

Rule #2 of parenting: When in doubt…PASS!!

I did the only thing I could…I said, “We’ve got to go… you can ask your dad later…”

E