Writer & Columnist | Santa Barbara, CA
Charting the puzzles and peeves of kid-herding — from Huggies to homework, Pilates to pinatas.
Published bi-weekly, twice a month
If you ever need a friend, introduce yourself to a kid. Unguarded, transparent, and loyal, kids collect pals like pennies.
You never see toddlers nix a friendship over political ideology, or renounce a terrific rapport just because their buddy has a nicer lunchbox and it makes them feel bad about themselves. Their only requirements for friendship: proximity and a grin. And a pile of goldfish crackers doesn’t hurt.
This is a remarkable character trait. Beautiful, really. Until the unchoosy little chums force it on their picky, prickly parents, and then it’s annoying as hell.
Have you ever been thrust unwillingly into crony-hood with other parents simply because your kids are friends? Forced to play nice with a mom you can’t stand — to meet for play dates, chat in schoolyards, attend awkward barbecues — because your children can’t bear to be apart?
It’s irksome. Adults are far more fastidious about investing in friendships. We’re lazier, less patient, more close-minded, but …
“It’s hard to give up valuable time to people who drive you nuts,” explains a mom I know who’s experiencing this now. “I have nothing in common with this woman other than our daughters being friends, and she is so irritating, it’s hard to tolerate more than five minutes of her.”
There are certain things you expect to see at a kids’ soccer game. Gatorade bottles and orange slices. Coaches’ clipboards and cans of spray sunscreen. Here’s what you don’t expect to see: A 9mm handgun.
Michigan dad James Sherrill was arrested recently after pulling a pistol on another player’s dad at a high-tension soccer match between — get this — 6- and 7-year-olds.
We’d like to gasp in horror. We’d like to grimace in shock. But anyone who’s ever schlepped a folding chair to a field knows adult tempers percolate vigorously at kids’ sporting events. All too often they boil over.
“Coaching seven years of Little League has left me believing that parents at all games should be muzzled,” says a dad I know. “I had a guy threaten to not only kick my ass but have his son kick my son’s ass. Over playing time! It was a sad sight to behold.”
He once saw a father spit on an umpire. “Parent ejected, kid embarrassed,” he says.
Another friend once saw a shoving-turned-punching match between two dads at a soccer game. “One of the wives joined in and took a swing,” he says. “The kids came running off the field, then the guys’ kids went to blows. A lovely lesson to teach your 10 year-old.”
I always thought kids hated to practice. It’s an easy assumption to make if you’ve ever plunked down payments for piano lessons, then had to beg, badger, and bribe your kids to crack the “Teaching Little Fingers” songbook just once a damn week.
I’ve recently realized, though, there are some things kids love to practice. In fact, they spend much of their childhoods willingly rehearsing for life as a grown-up. They practice parenting by caring for baby dolls. They practice working by donning plastic stethoscopes and lugging toy briefcases around the house.
And when they hit sixth grade, it turns out, they practice dating. My son has informed me that suddenly, and on an almost daily basis, girls are “asking him out.”
I try not to snicker, but the semantics alone amuse. Out … where? It’s a funny proposition for a child whose notion of “going out” still means hopping on his bike and cruising the cul-de-sac to spy on neighborhood cats.
“Where, um, do they want you to go?” I inquired the first time he told me.
“I don’t know,” he replied dubiously. “So I said, ‘No, thanks.'”
He has since informed me that “going out” simply means you like someone. “Not regular ‘like,’ but sixth-grade ‘like,'” he explained. “It means, ‘I’m attracted to you.'”
You know the best thing about being an only child? There’s no math involved. No fractions required to divvy up the last piece of cake. No pie chart needed to see who got the most TV time.
Sibling-free, I got it all. All the love. All the attention. I got praise for the academic subjects I mastered, like French, and even those I didn’t, like trig. When there’s no competition, you get kudos for succeeding at arithmetic as simple as this: Love divided by one is one.
It wasn’t until I was an adult — and pregnant — that it first occurred to me that love might have a numerator and denominator. My husband and I worried how our beloved dog would cope with having a cooing, pink love-hog in the house. Isn’t it a crime to lavish affection on something and then ask it to share that affection with someone new? I asked our vet.
“Love grows,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked with a seriousness that should be reserved for conversations about heartworm and distemper.
“The heart expands,” he purred cryptically. He was one of those hippie earth-father vets with tons of his own kids and a fluffy, wisdom-indicating beard. “Love multiplies.”
Damn it! There would be math.
Ghostbusters reference, but let me explain. Parents are working harder than ever to get their kids into college. They start saving when their children are born, help them choose college prep courses as early as middle school, and schlep them to transcript-dazzling extracurricular pursuits throughout high school. But from where I stand — at the front of a classroom of legal adults who show up at a writing class without a pen — I fret their efforts may be off the mark. In fact, some of my campus colleagues and I agree that while today’s parents get an “A” in Getting Their Kids Into College, they get an “F” in Teaching the Entitled Little Buggers What to Do Once They Get There.
We modern parents are so enlightened. Unlike our Dark Age ancestors, who whacked through the child-rearing jungles with dull old saws like “curiosity killed the cat” and “children should be seen and not heard,” we encourage kids’ inquisitiveness.
We quench their thirst for knowledge by reading them books about disgusting insects and having long talks about thunder: “I have no idea where it comes from. Good question, sweetie! Let’s look it up!” My son’s favorite PBS cartoon always seems to be explaining why mold grows on sandwiches.
Because our generation applauds children’s curiosity. We reward it. We even brag about it. Until the day it turns toward our underpants, and then we freak the flip out about it.
That happened to a friend of mine last week. Another parent in her son’s preschool brought a newborn baby into the classroom, and the tots began asking her questions. One piped up with the inevitable, “How did the baby get in you?”
While curiosity may not kill a cat, it can do serious damage to a postpartum female. Caught off guard and loathe to decide for other families when — and, dear god, how — this delicate topic should be broached, the new mom explained that she and her husband had engaged in strategic “hugging.”
They said it would come, but I didn’t believe them. They told me that one day my children would find me uncool. And worse than uncool: an utter, ego-shrinking embarrassment.
Me. The mom with the killer iPod song list. The mom who considers French fries a vegetable. Embarrassing? It didn’t seem likely.
Then we attended a school concert last week, and when I erupted in my trademark rock-show howl of “oowwwww!”, followed by a passionate shriek of “woo woo!”, I glanced over at my 11-year-old son. And there it was.
The Eye Roll.
It wasn’t a subtle eye roll, either. In fact, it was so exaggerated I thought he might tear an ocular tendon and have to spend the rest of his life staring at the back of his own skull. But then, perhaps this was his goal. At least he wouldn’t have to see his newly ridiculous mother rocking out.
Fortunately, he needn’t wallow solo in such shame. Seems the sentiment strikes all adolescents.
“My son’s greatest mortification comes from when I try out the latest teen speak,” a friend of mine confessed. “He once told me, ‘Moms who drive Volvos are not allowed to say, ‘Fo’ shizzle!'”
In this economy, our family is taking a less-is-more approach to money: We’re spending less — and talking about it more.
Scarce jobs and bountiful bills have caused a cash crunch and I’m addressing it the way I address most problems: by surrounding it with the sound of my voice. My plan is to squawk and blubber about it until it asphyxiates on the carbon dioxide spewing from my motormouth. So far it hasn’t helped.
But while I’ve been prattling about money — pointing out the high cost of cable TV (was it always this pricey?) and proposing fun new dining-out policies like “I know! Let’s all order water!” — I think I freaked out my kid.
“Mom,” my 11-year-old asked this week, “are we having money trouble?”
I was rattled by the question. Embarrassed even. Sure, we’ve “tightened our belts,” as Obama likes to say, but no more than any other family. No one’s coming for our house or anything. I don’t think. Yet.
“You talk about money all the time,” he said.
It’s always been a dirty word in my family.
Control.
As in “Don’t be so controlling.” “What is she, a control freak?” “Well, you know how she likes to control things.”
As a clan, we condemn such behavior — but we also embody it. I come from a matriarchal flock of females who … let’s just say, we’re all really comfortable with our hands on the tiller. In my family, you’re either calling the shots and being chided for it, or you’re resentfully carrying out someone else’s capricious edicts and making snarky comments about her intolerable bossiness.
Control-or-be-controlled! Steer-or-be-steered! It’s the way we Roshells roll, and I don’t much mind it. The truth is I’m happy sitting in the saddle and I can’t really help it if the world works better when I’ve got the reins, now can I?
When it unnerves me, though — when my admittedly despotic disposition seems more exacting than endearing — is when it flops over onto my parenting. Rather, ahem, when my kids call me on it.
I recently put the kibosh on a family outing because my progeny were behaving like orangutans on espresso. Warnings didn’t work. Pleadings didn’t work. So I nixed our plans and picked up a magazine instead, settling into the sofa for the night. I wasn’t trying to punish my adorable little barbarians; I just couldn’t conceive of strapping myself into a compact car with them for any duration whatsoever.