Category: Parenting

Parents can be so smug. We think we have life’s puzzles solved, and that our kids are callow dimwits desperate for our guidance. Admit it: We think of them as dense, doughy biscuits requiring the heat of our unparalleled wisdom to rise to their fluffy full potential.

Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if we’re wrong. If, in fact, our car seat-bound offspring are the ones who have the answers and we grown-ups are too culturally programmed, too set-in-our-ways, to see it.

The notion strikes when I ask my three-year-old to put on his shoes. Or clean up his toys. Or turn off his video, come upstairs and take a bath. That’s when he looks at me with utter impunity and says, “I won’t.”

There’s no willfulness in his voice. No shame. No guilt. “I won’t.”

He’s simply stating a fact, letting me know we’re going to have a problem here if I insist on pursuing this ridiculous mandate.

There’s a look of — is that peace? — that crosses his peanut butter-smeared face when he says it, and I’ll admit the whole situation stymies me. My linear adult thought process goes like this: How do I get the child clean if he won’t get in the tub? How “clean” does a person really need to be? What will his preschool teachers whisper when they notice the same dirt smudge that was on his knee yesterday…and the day before?

It looked so much nicer in my head. The way I pictured it, we were going to spend a few days of bond-bolstering family togetherness at a Las Vegas resort that would cater to our every fickle whim. By day we would lounge poolside; by night we’d venture out to ooh and ahh over the city’s convenient cultural lessons: the Venetian’s canals, Luxor’s Sphinx, Caesar’s Trevi Fountain.

In my imagination — over-enterprising as it may be — we were going to find freedom in the clean light of the warm desert sun.

Instead, we got drenched in debauchery.

On reflection, yes. It was witless to seek a virtuous vacay in Sin City, the nation’s unapologetic adult playground. In the 1990s, Vegas’s tourism office made a marketing push to lure families there. But the campaign went bust and the tourism office did an about-face, adopting the decidedly grown-up (notice I didn’t say “mature”) motto, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

They no longer woo kids. In fact, the Bellagio hotel doesn’t even allow children inside unless they’re registered guests, and the new Encore and Wynn hotels have “no strollers” signs on their doors.

It’s not something I thought would ever come out of my mouth. Not something I’m proud of. But there it was: “Sweetheart, do you want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? I have one in my purse.”

Prior to their birth, I carried my kids in my uterus. Ever since, I’ve been schlepping their equivalent weight in snacks, tools, and toys in my handbag. I think of it as baby weight that I never lost.

Gum, sunscreen, Play-Doh.

Tissues, Tums, Chapstick.

Nail clippers, plastic fork, Matchbox helicopter.

I could survive a nuclear attack–or at least a blitz of playground injuries, restaurant meltdowns, and unforeseeable grooming emergencies–using only what’s rolling around at the bottom of my handbag.

Most of the junk in a mom’s purse falls into three categories: Things we can’t live without (Tide stain stick). Things we tossed in for a specific occasion but haven’t bothered to remove because they still might come in handy someday (foldable scissors). And things we plum forgot were in there (soy sauce packets).

“The weirdest thing I ever pulled out of my purse was an edible eyeball from Halloween,” confessed a friend. “And it was January.”

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.

There’s anticipant silence as the guitarist plugs in. The whine and screech of feedback. The crisp rapping of two drumsticks as a voice barks, “One! Two! Three! Four! …”

And the rocking, ladies and gentlemen, has begun.

Only it’s not a concert stage or even a smoky nightclub; it’s a garage. And it’s not a leather-clad band of groupie-dogged rock gods; it’s a dude and his dad. Or his cardigan-sporting, axe-shredding mom.

It happens secretly in homes across America — not in silence, mind you, but in seclusion. From the outside, these folks look like normal families, earnestly attempting to fill the age-appropriate roles expected of them: goof-off kid, incommunicative teen, sedate and sober parent.

But inside — perhaps during the unscheduled hour between homework and dinner or on an unscheduled Sunday afternoon — they’re gathering around pianos and bongos, picking up harmonicas and tambourines, pulling out the weathered old Stratocaster, and making music.

Sometimes it’s a symphony. Sometimes a cacophony. But the sound, I’m told, is the least important product of the Family Jam.