When I was in middle school, all the 7th graders were required to take a semester-long class called Current Life Issues. What is Current Life Issues? It’s a bogus name, brilliantly conceived. Sounding vaguely interesting, but no so much that one, as a parent, might be compelled to dig into its description in the course catalog or the syllabus on the school’s website, it hides in plain sight. It is pitch-perfect when you consider that the name of the class was concocted to disguise the school’s Sex Ed program from the disapproving eyes of the handful of conservative families who were too cheap or too poor to do what every other like-minded family in our town had already done: put their kids in parochial school.
The substance of Current Life Issues, as best I remember, broke down something like this:
Week 1: Alcohol
Week 2: Drugs
Week 3: Sex
Week 4-15: CONSEQUENCES
The CONSEQUENCES phase had two parts. The first was a fear-mongering recitation of the ways in which any combination of the topics from Weeks 1-3 could ruin your life. Alcohol and Drugs? Death by DUI. Drugs and Sex? Death by AIDS. Alcohol and Sex? Rape. Alcohol and Drugs and Sex? Death by Rape. If you were one of the lucky few to dabble in one or the other and escape your dance with death, you graduated to the second part and had a baby.
The last half of the semester was consumed by babies. Five pound babies. Made of flour. You were put into pairs with a member of the opposite sex, given a 5lb bag of flour, assigned a gender for your baby, and told that you had to “dress” and name him or her in a fashion appropriate to their gender. One or both of you were required to have your flour baby with you AT ALL TIMES.
Like any group project at any middle school, the burden each person in the group carried was inversely proportional to their popularity. Couples whose individual popularity sat at relative equilibrium shared the responsibility equally. Or neglected it equally. For pairs in significant popularity imbalance, one person did the majority of the work. Being Oakland in the late 80s/early 90s, this meant lots of Chinese flour babies named after New Kids on the Block and members of various Bay Area sports teams.
My baby mama and I were in the same general popularity strata, so we put in roughly the same amount of minimal effort to get a good grade. The only aspect of the project we spent a lot of time on was naming our baby girl. My partner wanted to name our baby ‘Kelly’ because she LOVED that new show Beverly Hills 90210 and her last name was Taylor. I strenuously objected on two grounds: 1) I’ll be goddamned if any child of mine gets named after some girly soap-drama, and 2) I’ll be goddamned if any child of mine doesn’t have my last name. I told her to pick another name. She chose Brenda. I told her to stop being a retard and she told me to pick a better name then! I chose Moonbeam.
Moonbeam!? Let me explain. Right around this time, I woke up to the world around me. World events, irony, politics, sarcasm. They came alive to me around the time I had to take this class. I’ve been called an “old soul” my whole life, so I want to ascribe this early awakening to that aspect of my personality. In reality, though, I think it had more to do with cable television and that Cher video on the deck of an aircraft carrier where she straddles a 105-mm gun in a fishnet body suit. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for why I was so amused by the fact that our fake baby was a “flour child.”
Get it, FLOUR child! Yeah, I know, gayer than a George Michael concert. But when you’re 12 and your adolescent brain has made that connection, there’s not a chance in hell you’re going to let go of it. Hence, Moonbeam.
My partner wanted no part of it. All her arguments were valid. It was “stupid.” We would get “made fun of.” No one would “get what the hell I was talking about.” So we compromised and, after much negotiation, became the proud fake-parents of little Moonfrye Parker Taylor. She got the surname, I got Moonfrye. It was totally worth it, too. Who doesn’t love Punky Brewster?
Of course no one ever learned anything from the Flour Baby assignment. Who in their right mind is going to internalize the lessons of alcohol-soaked unprotected sex when they come in the guise of a 5lb bag of baking goods? Babies have immediate needs. They emote. They respond to negative and positive energy. Unlike their “all-purpose” substitutes, babies do not thrive at the bottom of a backpack, or stuffed haphazardly into a locker. When you bring your baby home for the first time, you are supposed to bond with it, not resist the urge to toss it up in the air and hit it with an aluminum baseball bat.
It’s no wonder so many people–no matter how otherwise mature they seem in the rest of their lives–have children before “they are ready.” They’ve done nothing to prepare for it. I would have included myself in that group if I’d had a kid before yesterday, when my mother finally got home from the hospital.
TO BE CONTINUED…
