Before we get to the part where I write about all the things you moms out there think but are too afraid to say, I thought I would take a moment to tell you a little bit about my childhood and the parenting style that gave birth to the genius that stands before you. [Read more →]
At first I thought this “Scared Shrimpless” video might be funny… the irrational fear of a kid. Because really, it’s not like the shrimp is alive; it’s just a little slimy. But the longer I listened to her screams the more I wanted to punch the mother. Lesson learned from this episode of Bad Parenting: First, intentionally scare kid with slimy shellfish, then try to calm her down with five seconds of gentle encouragement, and when that doesn’t work, call her a wuss and continue to torment her with said object. Because that’ll learn her. This mom is a bully.
Panicked by the possible legalization of gay marriage in New York State, the National Organization for Marriage went all out with a local TV spot. The load-bearing line in the spot is: “The rights of people who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman will no longer matter.”
What rights are these? [Read more →]
Earlier this year, when the pop signer Rihanna, was beaten, allegedly by her 19 year old boyfriend, the subject of teenage dating abuse was discussed in the mainstream media, perhaps for the first time. As brutal and shocking as the attack on the singer was, what horrified me even more was the reaction that young people — particularly girls — in this country had towards it. [Read more →]
Dear Ruby,
I’m graduating from college this spring. My dad has always said that he would buy me a car when I graduated from college and he’s really excited about it and wants to go looking at cars with me. The problem is that I plan to move to a non-car-friendly city after graduation and I’d much rather have the money than the car. But he’s talked about this for so long and he’s so excited about it that I can’t say no. I kind of brought it up with my mom and she just said to make sure it’s a car I like. Any advice?
Bad Daughter in Boston
We have woodchucks.
I see them everywhere lately, rootling around in the the grass. It must be some sort of seven-year cycle or something. On Tuesday, driving home down a busy stretch alongside a vast trainyard in our utterly urban part of town, I counted four groundhogs (one on his hindlegs looking like an upended meatloaf), as well as a coal-black squirrel, a bunny, and a dead mallard in the grassy boulevard (the only casualty). [Read more →]
Did you know that North Carolina schools teach an abstinence-only curriculum? For those of us slow on the uptake… that means no contraception is discussed at all! So they teach you how to have sex, and about the consequences of sex (pregnancy, STD’s), but not how to protect yourself from those consequences. And, as might be expected, they have the ninth highest teen-pregnancy rate in the country. Hello people of North Carolina, your kids are having sex, deal with it! [Read more →]
As my first post here, I thought I would address a theme which I regularly consider on GayPatriot where I first started blogging. In reviewing my past posts on the topic, I found a few common themes emerged. I regularly faulted those gay marriage advocates who prefer substituting name-calling to serious discussion and urged said advocates to follow the lead of Jonathan Rauch, author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, who has made careful arguments for the social change which state recognition of gay marriage represents. [Read more →]
I tweeted about this but I am so enraged I can’t just leave it at that. 140 characters isn’t enough. You never shake a baby. You never do anything that would encourage someone else to shake a baby. That is not how you get a kid quiet… unless, of course, you’re an idiot. So please, someone tell me how it is at all entertaining to play a game where the only way to quiet the baby down is to shake it? Seriously, what is wrong with people? [Read more →]
In general, don’t child actors end up messed up enough? How on earth do you get over knowing your father tried to sell you? I mean, what would Punky Brewster have done? I am sure she would have had a lot of takers — and her parents would have walked away with way more than $300K. [Read more →]
I met my kids at the park after work yesterday (they were with their babysitter) and my daughter was playing with her friend from school. I knew the little girl had just recently (a few days at most) become a big sister and asked her father how his wife was doing. He told me she was fine and recovering. I asked if labor was long and he told me they almost had the baby on the highway but managed to get to the hospital just in time. Then I leaned down to the little girl and asked her if she liked being a big sister and was it fun to have a baby in the house. That’s when the father told me her mom wasn’t home yet and wouldn’t be for a few months. Huh? [Read more →]
It’s very easy to be an overprotective parent. I remember walking with a friend of the family when I was only a teenager and criticizing (in my head) the mother we were with as she let her 4-year-old run ahead of her at a busy amusement park. Her kid is now 18 and doing just fine. Was I wrong? I think about how crazy some parents get, baby-proofing like mad, knee pads and elbow pads to get on any moving object, and don’t get me started on those kid-leashes! [Read more →]
My son is 2 1/2 and he started sleeping in a bed a few nights ago. I thought the first two nights went well… I had to threaten that I would shut his door and take away some of his favorite bedtime loveys, but after only a few attempts at escaping his room, he finally got into his bed and fell asleep. Last night he made up for those relatively good nights and almost broke me. [Read more →]
It is perhaps the most famous first line of all — the one that begins Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” [Read more →]
In July I posted “Making Time,” talking about how important it is for a writer to make time to write. My daughter was born a week later, and I didn’t write a new word for the next six months. At random points during that period, when my synapses were actually firing in a semi-functional capacity, I would occasionally think to myself what a sanctimonious ass I must have sounded like, lecturing people about whether or not they were writing.
Am I a sanctimonious ass? Maybe. Please allow me some retrospective. [Read more →]
I took my kids to visit their great grandmother and in the two minutes I left them alone in the living room, so I could kiss grandma hello, my daughter (age four and a half) managed to rip out of her brother’s hands the singing monkey he’d just found on the window ledge. He is two and a half. She is bigger and quite often just takes what she wants from him. We tell her that he is going to catch-up — and when he does she won’t be able to get away with stuff like that. Well, since he can’t match her physically yet he’s found a way to deter her.
After he tried unsuccessfully to take back the monkey with force, he bit her. And I mean, he really bit her. By the time I heard my daughter screaming and ran into the living room (which was all of three steps) he’d already moved away, with monkey in hand, victorious.
Being the youngest of three kids I can understand where he is coming from. In fact, part of me thought my daughter deserved the bite, but I couldn’t condone the behavior, by either of them. Plus, there is an anger that kind of takes over when you see your kid hurting, even if maybe they had it coming (a little).
So my son got a time-out and seemed to really feel bad that his sister had a full set of his teeth marks on her bicep (which, by the way, was just short of breaking skin.) They hugged and made-up and there were promises from both sides that there would be no more “taking” and no more biting. All was good in the world — and they were once again best friends. That is, they were best friends until the next night when my daughter wanted to ride the rocking horse my son was on… she got her way and ended up on the horse and then he stood up for himself the only way he knew how. At least this time the teeth marks weren’t so bad.
My husband flew in from Tampa last night and thankfully beat the massive snow storm hitting the east coast. As is normal routine when he travels, as soon as he is on the ground in his destination city and allowed to put on his cell phone, he sends me a text message. Ever since the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight I await these a little more eagerly. Last night the text read, “Just landed. There is a medical emergency on board… We need to remain on the plane until the paramedics remove the passenger.” Five minutes later I got another text from him saying “They just brought in paddles. Feel like I’m on ER.”
He called about 15 minutes later to say he was off the plane and really shaken up; the passenger, seated about 20 rows behind him, didn’t make it. He told me he was going to take it real slow coming home and all he wanted to do was hug the kids.
Apparently what really got him, aside from seeing a body bag being rolled off the plane, was the fact that there were a number of children seated right near the soon-to-be deceased passenger. He said the children ranged in age from about three to twelve and they watched the whole scene, start to finish. Watching those children walk off the plane with their parents, hysterical crying by what they just witnessed, tore my husband up. Not to mention being given a reason to think about his own mortality.
Death happens all around us but we try to shield our children (and sometimes ourselves) by its reality. I wonder if those kids were able to get to sleep last night and I wonder about the lasting images they will have of this passenger dying in front of them. I am guessing things like this don’t happen that often on planes — or maybe it’s just that we don’t hear about them.
This is my first post by Blackberry, so bear with me. I’m waiting for an award ceremony to begin. My daughter Alice, 18 next month, is about to receive several Scholastics awards for her artwork. She takes in stride what has me about to burst, as though it’s up to me to enjoy the moment on her behalf. That’s what parents do, right? Well, there’s a lot more to it and this poem (written years ago) says it better.
During the same week that America’s caramel colored First Family made its debut before a delighted nation and a fascinated world, I saw two new TV commercials for national brand-name products featuring biracial married couples. In one, the husband was black and the wife was white. In the other, the husband was white and the wife was black. In both commercials the wives did the talking. I don’t remember ever seeing a biracial couple in a commercial before, so seeing two in one week caught my eye. Could this be a sign of the new Obama nation? Or is it merely commerce imitating reality?
I’m old enough to remember when a biracial couple in Philadelphia meant an Italian boy dating an Irish girl. I remember when Protestants were forbidden friends and Jews were exotics, people mentioned in the Bible by the nuns who taught us not to hate them, which was easy because I never met one. I remember when blacks were Negroes and whites were Caucasians and Jews were something else altogether. Muslims were nonexistent, except in stories about the Crusades, and even then they were called either Arabs or Mohammadeans. As for Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans or Scientologists. . . fuhgeddaboudit.
I grew up a Catholic school Philadelphian back in the day. I didn’t have a black or Jewish classmate, let alone friend, until junior high school, when I became a Public. In grade school I had one Protestant friend named Elliott Jones, who lived on my street, and I kept trying to convert him to Catholicism. He was an Episcopalian, which to me meant he was something like a Communist. I was naive and shameless and comfortable in my prejudice. That was how I grew up. Those were my values.
I get annoyed and impatient with people who explain their wrong thinking, if not behavior, with the words “that was how I was raised” as if everything there is to learn in life stops at the age of ten. As if not doing to their own children what their parents did to them is a betrayal of mom and dad. My father used to beat me and my brothers with a belt he would snap like a lion tamer before he whacked us. This was considered normal when I was growing up.
Somehow what I learned from this experience was never to hit my children. And I never have. In a single generation what was once common in my family had become unthinkable. And in America, what was unthinkable a generation ago has become our face to the world.
Scott Stein and I have known each other via internet for some time, but it was only this past November that I had an opportunity to see him in person. We met up for lunch and a beer. We had an excellent time (at least from my point of view), discussing a wide range of topics ranging from serious to not. But there was one uncomfortable moment which I feel I must address, one comment I made that seemed to wound Scott very deeply.
You see, I have placed more than a thousand of my books in a storage locker.
