Author: Starshine Roshell

I’m an only child. But I was rarely a lonely child.

My folks would drive half an hour each way to shuttle my school chums to and from our house so I’d have someone to goof around with on weekends. I always thought their jaunts were generous, but now that I’m a parent I realize it was for their benefit as much as mine: An hour of driving is well worth four hours of not having to help me inventory my Hello Kitty pencils and choreograph a dance routine to an entire Go-Go’s album.

When friends weren’t around, I played jacks or skated around the block solo. I dressed Barbie, undressed her and dressed her again, maybe with a winter muff this time. I sat alone in my room transcribing lyrics from my Walkman or playing solitaire. (It sounds sadder than it was.)

I remember once playing Twister by myself. I set up the colorful plastic mat in the living room, where my mother was trying desperately to lose herself in a novel, and I asked if she would mind simply kicking the spinner with her foot as she read, so that I might know where next to plop my left hand, or right foot.

Okay, maybe that one was a little sad.

Dirty needles. Cross dressers. Pole dancing. Just another day in the high-school auditorium.

After 12 years of rocking and shocking Broadway, the hit musical Rent is exploding onto high-school stages across America. The New York Times reports that more than 40 schools plan to stage the rock opera this spring. But some parents and principals are squeamish over the show’s racy content, and productions in California, Texas, and West Virginia have been canceled.

The play is actually Rent: School Edition, a somewhat milder version of the original. The profanity has been cut — but the provocative plot remains in tact.

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and three Tony Awards, Rent is Jonathan Larson’s turn-of-the-21st-Century take on the classic opera La Bohème. It tracks a year in the life of a loose-knit clan of starving artists grappling with poverty, disease, and romance in New York’s East Village.

In La Bohème, the heroine is a frail seamstress suffering from consumption; in Rent, she’s a smack-addicted go-go dancer with HIV. If that’s not enough to get a parent’s trousers in a twist, there are (gasp) gay, bisexual, and transvestite characters.

It’s the great irony of having children: The very act that launches you into parenthood is difficult to achieve — ever again — once your kid is born.

It’s like nature looks at you and says, “What? You got what you came for. Find another way to jazz up your evenings.”

And it happens to everyone: No matter how much your boudoir tends to bounce before Baby comes along, it slows to a sort of sad, silent stillness (sigh) once the diapers start flying.

“I can’t think of a single couple I know who hasn’t been affected by this issue,” says sex therapist Ian Kerner, a New York husband and father of two.

But he swears there’s hope. In his new book Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents’ Guide to Getting It On Again, Kerner and co-author Heidi Raykeil say there’s no reason to throw your libido out with the baby’s bath water. “It really is possible,” they write, “to do the hokey pokey and keep up the hanky panky.”

What causes the sexual fizzle between new parents? Exhaustion. Stress. Mom’s hormones, and her tendency to devote every amp of energy and inkling of empathy to the helpless, gurgling humanoid in the bassinet, leaving none for poor, pent-up Dad.

Freeze! This is the parent police. Drop your Windex and come out with your rubber-gloved hands up.

For years you sponge-happy, spore-hunting moms have shamed the rest of us with your spotless counters and sparkling floors. We don’t know how you did it, you fiendish scrub nuts, but your houses — your very children, even — were always cleaner than ours, ever implying (silently, so silently) that our families were destined to be dingy.

But you can put down your Pledge cans, ladies. Game’s over. Those of us who define “cleaning” as “aiming a Dustbuster” refuse to feel inferior anymore. Science is on our side, baby. SCIENCE!

Researchers are saying that a little dirt in the home, on the hands, or even — gasp! — in your kids’ mouths won’t hurt them. In fact, it’s good for them. It turns out that ingesting the bacteria, viruses, and even (just go with me on this one) intestinal worms found in everyday dirt actually strengthens children’s immune systems, giving them “practice” for more serious germs.

Scientists call this the “hygiene hypothesis.” I call it the “Hallelujah-I’m-not-a-failure finding.” It’s already changed my life.