Catch-19

Mia is in China and we were bored, so I took Rowen to see Whip-it today.

It’s not a new story: teenage girl floundering in life finds what she wants and has to defy parents to achieve it, and once they see her happiness they come around. But I like tried and true stories. There’s a reason they get told a hundred thousand times. This movie does justice to the story. it’s not the best version, and it wont be a classic, but it did the job.

What really makes it a good movie is the cast. I imagine every girl from about age 14 to 22 wants to be Ellen Page. I’m not gonna lie, I kinda want to be her too. She’s perfected the quirky undaunted plucky girl heroine roll. She’s like an chick from a webcomic. The rest of the cast is excellent, too. How far wrong can you go with hot chicks dressed up as roller-derby girls?

I was wondering if Rowen should see this. It’s rated PG-13. But after seeing it, I’m fine with it. The only problematic scene is a swimming/making out session that makes it to panty and bra for a short time. But so what? The two characters are in love, there’s no violence or coercion. It’s a cute little scene.

In my head, I believe that it’s better for her to see two people having sex than two people killing each other. In practice I don’t follow that much. But I’m trying. In truth, I don’t think either is particularly damaging.

So, take yer kids, especially girls to see this. It’s got a good message and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Rowen even said she wants to get the DVD. High praise from her.

Rowen, my daughter was born on Aug. 3rd, 1998. My wife went into labor and we eventually went to the hospital where things progressed normally. Until they didn’t. At some point, the fetal monitor indicated that my daughter was in fetal distress. Her heart was stopping during the contractions.

I’m not sure what I felt when our doctor said that. I was scared, but mostly confused. Clearly that was a bad thing, but how bad? I really didn’t know. And a big part of me wanted to think “Oh that probably happens all the time, I’m sure it’s a routine fix.” It wasn’t.

Once they found out that her heart was stopping, a whirlwind of activity occurred, none of which I was involved in. A well oiled team of doctors and nurses prepared her and rushed her out of the room, with me following behind. Until I got the operating room doors where I was left outside. That was the point when I really started panicking. I alternated between believing the worst, that both my wife and daughter were going to die, to desperately trying to believe everything was going to be alright.

It was the single scariest moment of my life. Incoming mortar fire in Iraq does not compare. Having a pistol pulled on me does not compare. Jail in Juarez Mexico does not compare. I was helpless and afraid.

They performed an emergency c-section. Rowen’s heart was beating but her platelet count was critically low. They immediately infused her with platelets. Over time she had to receive 5 or 6 more infusions.

She’s fine now. She just bruises easy, so I get to have a very special talk with all her teachers and nurse about how she might sometimes look like “Daddy got angry” but no no, it’s just a slightly low platelet count. She had something called ITP, Idiopathic Thrombocytopenia Purpura (though technically, she never had the Purpura part). She’s free of it now and her platelet count is in the normal range, the bottom of that rangte, but still normal.

Her life was saved because those platelets were available. They were available because someone spent the time to donate them. Someone, several someones actually, saved my daughters life. And who knows how many more lives.

So, if you read this, I’m asking you to make an appointment at the Red Cross for apheresis donation. Apheresis is the process by which platelets are collected. And it’s a pain in the butt. You have to hang out at the donation center for about 2 hours. The blood is removed, the platelets and plasma are removed, then the blood is returned to you. Most places have TVs set up playing movies. I’m asking you to do this at least once, because someone did this for us, and it made a difference.

I donated regularly in MA, but I’ve been lax since we moved. I just scheduled my first appointment here.

You can find some basic info about apheresis here: http://www.givelife2.org/donor/apheresis.asp . You will have to call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE (1-800-4483-5433) to schedule an appointment.

I was just feeling sorry for myself a few minutes ago. The usual stuff: fat, unattractive, unemployed, etc. But for some reason my thought took a sharp right turn to Rowen, my 10 year old daughter.

I realised that in 10 years I have never once let her go to bed without hearing me say “I love you”. Even those times when she was busy screaming that she hated me, I made sure she heard me say that. And even those times when I had my doubts about whether it was true (usually those same nights she was screaming that she hated me) I said it and made sure she heard it.

It’s a fairly small thing in the great scope of life. She wont cure cancer because of it. And not hearing it wouldn’t have turned her into a psychotic serial killer who targets middle aged men with children and murders them with princess music boxes while wearing frilly dresses.

But maybe when she’s older and having a bad day — the kind where the whole world has turned to shit and you are certain that nothing and no one has ever loved anything, let alone you — the memory of those “I love you”s, or even just the unconscious knowledge of them, will help her get through it.

There have been a lot of stories recently about letting kids have more freedom. There was this TED talk about letting kids do dangerous things, The Daring Book for Girls and this news story about a nine-year-old going on NYC public transit by himself.

So I’ve decided it is time to loosen the reigns a bit. And I have to admit that I’ve been holding the reigns pretty damn tightly. Rowen has never gone anywhere without some sort of supervision. I’m not as neurotic as some parents-Rowen has been to sleepovers and we have a babysitter come about every other week so Mia and I can have a date. But she doesn’t play outside without me there to watch. She doesn’t ride her bike around the neighborhood unless we’re riding together. And while I’m fine with her being at a friends house without me, I don’t let her walk there alone.

So starting this week I’m letting her out of the house without my overbearing presence. We have a small park just down the street, not even 1000 feet away, and with line of sight from the house. I let her ride her bike to the park and even go to a friends house to see if said friend could come to the park. And I didn’t watch her the entire time with the telescope. Honest. I got laundry done.

I don’t expect this to have any sort of immediate effect on my little girl. but I think it’s probably more healthy than keeping her under my thumb.