On my first visit to the center, I was appalled. The place hardly
seemed the ideal environment for young children: a decaying two-story brick building with a concrete playground and a sandbox full of gritty dirt. There wasn’t even a patch of grass, for God’s sake. The school was on Fountain Avenue, a frantically busy street off Sunset near the eastern fringes of Hollywood. You had to
practically take your child’s life in your hands just to negotiate a
turn into the parking lot. I also wasn’t impressed by the neighborhood, with its liquor store, auto body shop, video rental place and odd mix of falling-down rental units with overgrown yards.

I was all for bohemian. In fact, we’d chosen our Silver Lake
neighborhood, with its mix of gays, Latinos, artists and young families like ourselves, precisely because of its liberal flavor. But I also wanted my son to be safe. This felt iffy.

In retrospect, these things all seem so silly, so typical of a first-time mother. They revealed absolutely nothing about the quality of the center or the incredible teachers who worked there. By the end of our first session, my misgivings had vanished. Over the next two years, the Jewish Community Center became a beloved place in our lives, a weekly ritual that my son and I looked forward to just as we did our weekly trips to Myrna’s Yogurt Shop or Hard Times Pizza. When we moved to just outside Pasadena two years later, I still took my daughter to classes at the JCC in our old neighborhood.

The Jewish Community Center embodied my ideas of education and faith: loving, inclusive, engaging. Even though I’d brought my son there because he was in part Jewish,
we’d have been just as welcome if we were Catholic. Most of the parents were of various faiths;
some didn’t go to church or temple at all. None of that mattered. At the end of the day, all that mattered was the vision we shared for our children: to have them learn and to play in a safe and loving place. What we got was that and more — a sense of community. This idea of connection and rootedness is precisely why so many parents who weren’t Jewish found the JCC appealing, particularly those of us who’d been shaped by the social movements of the ’70s.

I’m not sure who loved the place more, my son or I. Every Monday evening a few minutes before 4:30, I’d buckle my son into his car seat and down the hill we’d fly. He seemed to always know where we were going; the minute we’d pull into the parking lot, he’d be kicking his legs against the seat and tugging on his straps to escape. I remember the pleasure of walking up to the front gate, looking through the wrought-iron bars and waving at the other mothers and fathers.

We sang Jewish songs, recited Jewish prayers and learned the meaning of the High Holidays. We also did all the other things preschoolers do: finger-painted, played dress-up, drank “bug juice” at snack time. The JCC encouraged the children to grow and play, but in an atmosphere that also wrapped them in a subtle structure. My first career had been as a kindergarten teacher, and the JCC’s educational philosophy felt absolutely right to me. For my son, it was his first experience socializing with a group of children, his first lessons in tolerance. He learned the give and take of sharing. I learned to appreciate his boundless energy and fierce spirit, traits I often found exhausting if not frustrating.

One of his teachers, a chic woman with gray hair named Ruthie, had spent time on a commune in Israel. Ruthie was lively and opinionated and terribly smart. She also was great with my son, who seemed to get in frequent scraps with his little peers in the yard. Where I saw a little boy who was at times too aggressive and reckless, a child who shot down the long metal slide like a rocket, she saw a little boy who was determined and winning. “Look at him!” she’d say admiringly as my daring towhead raced around the playground on one of the metal tricycles or chased after one of the large red rubber balls. “I’ve never seen a kid with so much energy! Isn’t he something?” Ruthie made us see our bewildering children in an expanded, more generous light.

When I look back now, I realize that it was Ruthie’s ability to appreciate our children as individuals, to see their difficulties as a form of distinction, that embodies what I think the JCC was all about. It was a time of wonder and simplicity in my life as a mother, and in my son’s as a small child.

This is what we must keep, hold onto as we contemplate the horror of the shootings this week at the North Valley Jewish Community Center. “This is a wake-up call to kill Jews,” Buford Furrow told the FBI when the bureau took him into custody. We could allow ourselves to be frightened and intimidated by such rubbish and blatant evil. Or we could see it as our own wake-up call: to ban the sale of assault weapons in this country once and for all, for starters. But we also need to do a better job of teaching our children values like tolerance, respect and compassion. These were the lessons my children learned at the Jewish Community Center. They learned them well.

There was one thing about the center I didn’t like. To get into the
gate, you had to punch in a code. I was always forgetting the code, so I’d invariably have to yell through the bars for someone to
let us in. That used to annoy the hell out of me. Now I’m glad the code is there.

My daughter is supposed to be at the Teddy Bear Coloring Center. Instead, she is tugging on my skirt, tears sliding down her tiny freckled nose. She is the only child crying, as usual. I try to swallow my impatience.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Cameron won’t let me use the red crayon!” she sniffs. Cameron is short and funny, with a face and personality not unlike Dennis the Menace.

“Did you ask him nicely if you could borrow it?” I ask.

“Yes, and he wouldn’t give it to me!”

I can see she’s not going to let me off easily, so I walk her back to her table to investigate. Sure enough, Cameron is madly scribbling away with a red crayon and as soon as he sees me he begins puffing up his chest, mightily defending himself. He explains that he’s not yet done and that “she” tried to grab the crayon away from him, while she screams right back that she did not. The other children at the table look on, perplexed, their stubby crayons poised in mid-air. My head is spinning.

“Use another color,” I tell her. “Cameron will give you the red one when he’s done, won’t you, Cameron?”

Cameron is noncommittal. Then Davis, slight cute Davis with a face the shape of a full moon, looks at my daughter and giggles. That’s it. There’s no hope for recovery now. She puts her head down on the table and sobs, big heaving sobs.

Instead of feeling empathy for her, feeling angry at the blond in short pants who has driven her to tears, I feel irritated at her. Why is she so damned helpless and thin-skinned? I think harshly. So sensitive? A child who makes flower stews, plays with Polly Pockets and keeps rolly pollies from harm. Sometimes I wish she would just deck someone. Why can’t she be more tough, like me?

I was the last of four children. I was also the only girl. These two facts, I believe, shaped my destiny more than anything else. People often assume that because I was the only girl and the youngest, the baby as it were, I was hopelessly spoiled and protected. This always makes me laugh, it being so patently absurd as to make me wonder whether they’ve spent time around boys at all. Pummeled and ridiculed, yes. Spoiled, no.

Being a girl in our male-dominated household meant having the status of a slave. My brothers were the aggregate boss, a position of which they constantly reminded me. “Seniority rules!” my middle brother, Bill, the particularly mean one, would proclaim, shoving me out of whatever chair I was sitting in and planting himself there with an evil grin.

Females were, in a word, worthless. Giddy, foolish, obsessed with wimpy pursuits like books, cooking and dolls. They were especially dense when it came to appreciating the cosmic value of sports. No matter that this was in the bad old days before Title IX, when about the most strenuous activity girls were encouraged to engage in was paddle tennis, or at best traditional female sports like gymnastics. I was accused of being adopted several times because, among other obvious birth defects, I could not throw a football like my jock brothers.

Still, the worst crime in our middle-class, WASP family was to be sensitive. You could be lazy, you could be a jerk, you could even date a Jew, but if you showed a quivering lip, a tear, any sign of weakness, you were fair game. For a time my brothers could drive me to tears by looking at me. They could make me cry even harder by calling me the “s” word. “Mona iiii-ss sensitive!” they’d chime. Then I’d oblige them, of course, by behaving exactly as they intended. I’d flee to my room in tears, fling myself on the bed, my face burning with a terrible emotion I now recognize as shame.

I knew early on if I was going to fit in my family, feel a sense of belonging and power, I had one option. I was never going to be a boy, but I could act like one. So I did.

I built forts. I skateboarded. I wore shorts under my skirts and competed on the field ruthlessly. I grew tough. As it turned out, I was not half bad at being a boy; I was stocky and coordinated like my brothers, so athletics came naturally to me. In the sixth grade, when I took first place in the girls pentathlon competition for the entire school, I was happy because I won, of course. But the main reason I was happy was because I’d proved myself, shown that I was not just a girl in a training bra and pleated pastel skirts, but something superior.

The result of all this sex-role imitating is that I felt better, stronger and more competent, less vulnerable to my brothers’ taunts and insults. They could even criticize my muscular calves and I wouldn’t crack, wouldn’t break down like some sleep-deprived torture victim. I might scream that they were assholes, but that was acceptable — that was anger. My sensitive side still lurked underneath, but now it was more of a low-key hum than a deafening roar. My emotions were under control.

Having grown up with boys, when it came time for me to have a child, I wanted desperately to have a girl. Someone like me on the surface, but perhaps different under the skin. I never gave much thought as to what kind of girl she might be. Shy, outgoing, difficult, artistic, funny, smart — I honestly thought it didn’t matter. I would treasure her no matter who she was, I was certain, and give her the emotional support and validation I never had. It was hopelessly banal, but I saw having a daughter as a chance to redeem the past. I can see now that I was fooling myself. I not only cared about my daughter’s emotional make-up, I cared deeply about it.

When my daughter was born, I felt like the little girl on Christmas morning who tears open the pretty paper to at last find the present she’s always wanted. Blessed, thrilled, grateful beyond words. I loved her madly, instantly. “You finally got the girl you wanted,” my childhood friend Theresa said knowingly.

It didn’t take long to figure out the person my daughter was. Wise, inquisitive, nurturing and feminine. A girly girl who loved jewelry, dresses, Barbies and all things pink. A child who would break her cookie in two, then hold out the bigger piece to you in her small hand. Perhaps the quality that struck me most was how self-reliant and independent she was. By the time she was crawling, pulling herself up on the bookshelves in the family room, you could leave her with some blocks, a few squeaky toys and board books, and she’d play by herself for hours. By the time she was 2, she could speak only a handful of words, but she would pick out her clothes and try to wiggle them on. And not stripes mixed with prints, mind you, or clashing colors, but outfits that actually matched! After producing an earlier male child who showed no interest in personal hygiene, much less fashion, this was a revelation.

But I was also observing something else about my daughter. She was as delicate as a baby bird. She not only cried, but she cried easily and a lot. If you spoke with the slightest edge in your voice, she cried. If she fell down or got a scratch, she cried. If she woke up in the middle of the night and found herself alone, which she invariably was since we declined to invite our kids to sleep in our bed, she cried until you picked her up and even then she was often inconsolable. I spent the early morning hours of my 40th birthday driving her around on the Glendale and Ventura freeways because she was sobbing, keeping everyone awake. Thank God she had a brother who adored her and was sweet with her, or she might not have lived to see preschool.

Needless to say, all this crying was a bit wearying. At first I assumed it bothered me simply because of the noise, or the need to so often bandage her fragile spirit. But gradually I realized my irritation was due to something deeper and more upsetting: a reluctance to accept that she was like me, the little girl who once got so easily hurt. When I realized this my eyes filled with tears.

Almost 6, she is most prone now to being wounded by her peers. A few weeks ago, she attended her first slumber party. When I arrived to pick her up, she was playing a board game with three other girls and broke down in frustration when her friend Lucia unwittingly went ahead of her. “It was my turn! It was my turn!” she wailed, hitting her knees with her fists. “Not again!” muttered one little girl — in an all-too-familiar tone — as she glanced at my daughter.

The truth is I can’t bear to see my daughter going through childhood as I did, suffering from too gentle and loving a heart. The world has precious little space for people like her, and I worry I will not be able to be the patient, wise mother she needs. “Kate loves to be responsible and to be helpful,” wrote my daughter’s insightful kindergarten teacher in her report card. “I’ve enjoyed watching her grow and mature. Keep encouraging her to keep her head up high.”

But my daughter has no choice about who she is. And thankfully, neither do I. One afternoon a few months back we were over at her grandparents’ house. My quiet father-in-law, who’s 78, was sitting on the couch watching an NBA playoff game between the Bulls and the Jazz. He has diabetes, and my husband made a remark that his father wasn’t feeling particularly well that day. The next minute my daughter got up from her chair and snuggled up next to him, placing her hand protectively on his knee. “Who do you want to win, Papa?” she asked. I have rarely seen a grown man look happier.

I know I still have a long way to go. But she has softened me too, broken through my hard outer shell. Over time, we’ve evolved a bedtime ritual that goes something like this. After bath and a story, we talk for a few moments, then she takes my face in her hands. “I always wanted to have a mother like you,” she says, her large blue eyes gazing into mine. Then it’s my turn.

“I always wanted to have a daughter like you,” I say.

What I was not prepared for, what caught me totally off-guard, was my son’s romantic feelings for me. A few mornings ago I was standing in the bathroom, looking like a mean raccoon. My hair was piled loosely on my head, mascara ringed my eyes from the night before. “You look like hell,” I said to the mirror. Suddenly, there was this little voice. It was so quiet and small, so unlike my son’s normal full-throttle roar, I almost didn’t hear it. “No, you don’t, Mom.” I looked down. My son was staring up at me, his huge gray eyes full of longing, his heart banging furiously in his little bony chest. “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.” The scary thing was he meant it. What guy ever said that to me with such purity of motive and heart?

This intent pining for me began, normally enough, when he was 4. I’d go to sit down on the couch or a chair and he’d slide his hand under me, grinning madly. I’d go to hug him and he’d burrow his little head into my breasts, lingering there a minute too long. I’d be taking a shower and suddenly the curtain would be flung aside by a pint-sized blond in Ninja Turtle briefs. “Mommy’s in the shower,” I’d say. “Oh,” he’d say, holding his ground.

That my son was intense didn’t help matters. He was, as the books charitably call it, a “spirited child” — which is to say volatile and active and completely unlike my friends’ babies. Fervor extended to everything he did.
For a time when he was 2 and 3, he was obsessed with his father. My husband would do something fairly nonthreatening — leave the room, say — and our child would go insane, flinging his skinny toddler self on the floor, or worse, hurling himself after my husband out the door.

I remember in particular one long, miserable weekend in Solana Beach. We’d driven down from Los Angeles to relax, have a good time, which only goes to show you how delusional as parents we still were. Every time my husband wanted to head out to go bodysurfing or for a swim in the pool he’d have to sneak out of our hotel room or frantic screaming would ensue. It mattered not that I, the mother, the one who had spent 30 hours in mind-altering labor, was readily available for fun and games, a romp in the pool. No, my son wanted his father. And how dare I presume to be a worthy substitute? Nothing like the rejection of a 3-year-old to make you feel really small. But by then I had another baby so I didn’t have much time to brood about it.

So when my son latched on to me again it came as somewhat of a shock. He wanted me, but now he wanted me like Lyle Lovett crooning about unrequited love. He pouted if I didn’t hug him tightly enough or cuddle with him on the couch. He cried if I wouldn’t lay down next to him after I read him a story at night. “All right, leave!” he’d say angrily, turning his back to me in bed, as though we’d just had a lover’s quarrel. Then, of course, he’d protest loudly when I did.

I tried not to let all this bother me. I knew that little boys did this, developed erotic feelings for their mothers around the time they turned 4. It said so right there in the updated edition of Dr. Spock, and that eventually these feelings would abate. Some of my friends’ sons were also behaving this way, acting like drunken high-school boys on a date trying to cop a feel. I was damned if I was going to be uptight about it, do something that would make my son feel bad about himself or, God forbid, cause him to grow up sexually repressed. A child of the liberated ’70s I was going to handle this right.

We had talks. Frank, straightforward talks. About how mommies and daddies touch each other. About how mommies and children touch each other. Whenever his hand would stray into the no-touching zone again, I’d remove it and gently remind him to keep his little mitts to himself. I bought a children’s book that discussed boys’ bodies and girls’ bodies, with cartoonlike illustrations of vital parts. We said the words “penis” and “vagina” with devil-may-care abandon.

Every so often, my husband would happen in on one of these conversations, roll his eyes and accuse me of hopelessly confusing our son, perhaps even warping him for life. “He’s too young. He doesn’t understand,” he’d say. “Of course he does,” I’d snap back. I had no idea whether he did understand everything I was telling him, of course. It’s not like you can give a 5-year-old a sexual comprehension test. But I was doing what I felt was right. I answered questions when he asked them. I kept the explanations simple. We rented “Look Who’s Talking,” and in the opening scene when the talking sperm are frantically trying to penetrate the egg and my son turned to me and asked, “What are those little wiggly things?” I didn’t flinch, didn’t turn off the set. I said they were sperm and that they came from the daddy’s penis and that they went into the mommy’s body. “That’s how babies are made,” I said. “Eeeeuuu!” my son squealed with a mixture of wonder and disgust. I knew then I’d done my job.

Then gradually, mercifully, the sex problem went away. My son grew older, got distracted from his passion for me, lost interest. There was another girl in his life, Sarah — Sarah with the long blond braid and big gray eyes, who raced him every morning on the school blacktop. I was relieved.

Then a few months ago, something happened that jolted me back awake. It began with my son and his best friend, James, who lives next door. I adore James. He’s as round, mellow and dark as my son is wiry, incendiary and pale. If there were a movie made about the two of them it would be called “Buddha and the Little Beast.” Another reason I adore James is because he finds it impossible not to tell the truth. This is bad for my son, but good for me.

On this occasion James was over at our house playing basketball in the patio. He and my son were talking about James’ teenage brother. I was in the kitchen when I heard them giggling wildly and in the next split second the uncommon phrase, “He sexed her.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

I came out to the patio. I stood on the steps. I looked at
them. They looked at me. More giggling. I smiled. As Joan Didion once wrote of a scene involving Nancy Reagan plucking a rose for a cameraman, the moment was evolving its own choreography. James held his hand over his mouth and giggled again. I could see I was going to have to deal with this.

“What do you think that means, ‘he sexed her’?” I asked in my most neutral voice.

“He put his tongue in her mouth,” James giggled.

“He rubbed on her with his shirt off,” my son added, even more hysterical.

I was tempted to say, “Boy, are you guys misinformed,” but held my sarcasm in check. I’m not exactly sure what I said. I think I told James he might want to have a talk with his parents. I think I also said something to the effect that sex is not a verb but a noun, turning this potential sex education moment into a grammar lesson. But it was clear I was not off the hook.

After James went home I got my son a popsicle and sat with him on the porch steps while he ate it. I thought about what to say. On the one hand, I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, insist that James’ brother had absolutely not been having sex and how could you think that? and launching into a detailed explanation of sexual intercourse. That seemed a bit neurotic. On the other hand, I wanted to be sure he had a handle on the basics, that he understood sex was not just an act, but caught up in all sorts of complicated and lovely emotions.

“Do you remember what I told you about sex?” I said.

“You mean about the penis going into the vagina?” my son said with a silly grin.

“Yes,” I said. “But sex is not just how people make babies. It’s the way mommies and daddies show how much they love each other.”

This perked my son’s interest, so I went on. I babbled on about how sex was the most beautiful thing in the world that two people who loved each other could share. I talked about the magic feelings surrounding being in love. Then suddenly I noticed my son looking at me in a strange sort of horrified way, as if I’d just blithely informed him his pet goldfish had died.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“You love Daddy more than me because you two have sex!” he said, beginning to cry. “I don’t ever want to ever hear about sex again!”

Well, I just about fell over, I was so stunned. Here, I’d given my 7-year-old what I thought was an inspiring lecture on sex and love, and he’d managed to twist it into some bizarre Freudian conspiracy pitting parents against their children.

I tried to repair the damage. I told him that’s not what I meant at all, but that mommies and daddies feel a different love for each other than they do for their children, which only made him howl more. I told him I loved him more than anything and that he was being silly, which only made him madder. I tried hugging him, and he pushed me bitterly away. No matter what I said, he refused to calm down. Unfortunately, sometime in here my husband showed up, demanding to know what the hysteria was all about. I don’t think I explained the situation very well because his immediate response was, “What did you tell him that for?”

Over the next few weeks, my son showed distinct signs of regressing. He trailed me wherever I went, refusing to let me out of his sight. He was like cat hair on a wool skirt, I couldn’t get him off of me. Whenever his father went to hug me, he threw himself between us in a preemptive jealous fit. But he wasn’t mad at my husband, it was me he was furious with. No matter how much affection I gave him, he accused me of giving his sister and his father more. I felt terrible, guilty. After all, wasn’t I the one who’d screwed him up, made him hopelessly insecure?

“What should I do?” I asked my friend Maura on the phone one day. “He won’t leave me alone.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Have you tried seeing if anything’s been written about it?”

The next day, I went to a bookstore near my office in Westwood. I sat down on the floor in front of the Parenting section and scanned the titles until my eyes felt bloody. There were books on infancy, books on potty training, books on “growing girls,” books celebrating motherhood, books exposing motherhood. There was also, to my great relief, an entire shelf of books on adolescence and, to my general annoyance, a slew of books on the “new father.” But nothing vaguely titled “How to Deal with Your 7-Year-Old Son’s Sexual Interest in You.” Sitting there, I suddenly felt this lump in my throat, which I recognized as a perverse nostalgia for the days when I could flip open Penelope Leach or T. Berry Brazelton and find exactly the advice I needed on tantrums or separation anxiety or when to introduce solid foods. I looked so hard that when I finally stood up I felt disoriented, like I do when I’ve been at the Glendale Galleria too long with the kids and if I don’t get out of there in the next 10 seconds I’m going to start screaming in Hindi.

Time passed. I was quiet. I did not open my big mouth about sex. When my son was overly demanding of my attention, I tried to give it to him without being overly indulgent. I told him I loved him often, as I had done from the moment he was born. “You have no idea how much I love you,” he said to me at night when I tucked him in bed. “Oh, yes, I do,” I said.

Then one Saturday afternoon, he was playing out on the patio and he said, “I’m not going to worry about sex anymore.” Just like that. I wanted desperately to ask him what had brought him to this newfound state of inner peace, but I controlled myself. I smiled. He smiled back. I was happy he felt OK again.

Things have calmed down considerably since then. I wish I could tell you why. I wish I could say it’s because of some incredibly wise thing I did or said. Or some marvelous chapter in a book I’d read. But the truth is, I think my son’s attraction to me was like every phase of childhood, only a matter of his growing out of it, of the vagaries of character. Of a little boy who will always be passionate about everything in his life. Especially me.

The other morning it was Sunday, and we were sitting on the living room couch together. My son had his head in my lap and was looking up at me in a certain bemused way — a way that means he’s either going to tickle me or do something wonderfully silly. Then he began speaking, like he sometimes does, in mock French.

“Oh, my cherie, you are ze most buuteeful voman in ze world,” he said.
“Oh, no,” I said, laughing.
“Oh, oui oui!”