Category: Parenting

Crybaby. Tattletale. Mama’s boy. Kids can be nasty little name-callers, can’t they?

It’s easy to deflect some schoolyard slurs — the ones we know for sure aren’t true. Scaredy-cat? In your dreams. Goody Two-shoes? Puh-leeze. But other labels — shorty, for instance, or carrot-top —are so obviously, undeniably true, there’s no point in even ducking their well-aimed wallop.

For me, bossy was one of those labels. The no-denying kind. The kind you can only answer with an “Oh, yeah? Well, so what!” and go on about your life.

I’m bossy. It’s not an endearing quality, nothing to brag about. But my classmates and I can attest that it’s absolutely accurate. It’s also the reason I’m about to put Sheryl Sandberg in her place.

Sandberg, Facebook’s COO and the author of Lean In, has joined forces with the Girl Scouts in a campaign to retire the word “bossy” from public lexicon. Their argument: It quashes girls’ leadership instincts.

“We know that by middle school, more boys than girls want to lead,” Sandberg told ABC News, “and if you ask girls why they don’t want to lead, whether it’s the school project all the way on to running for office, they don’t want to be called bossy, and they don’t want to be disliked.”

Five hundred dollars. For wet chocolate. When sobriety surfaced, I literally wept with panic. What had I done?! I had a young kid, a new mortgage, a mediocre salary, and, like, six friends — none of whom were likely to pay $83 each to lap gurgling goo from a humming appliance atop my hand-me-down kitchen table. No, you know how this ends. I took a bath on that chocolate fountain. And possibly … also … in it, but that’s my business. A dozen years and as many auctions later — at Cabarets and Carnivals, through the Enchanted Forest, and aboard the Orient Express — I’ve learned to sip my wine and hide my bid number. But I can’t say I’ve learned to love the annual campus clusterfund that is the school auction.

Monsters, Inc.? A variety of furry, fanged, tentacled beasts are enjoying a civilized evening at a fancy restaurant, the kind where you have to pull strings to get a reservation. And the sudden appearance of a wide-eyed, pig-tailed human toddler — believed to be toxic — sends them all shrieking into the streets, summoning hazmat teams and inciting mass panic. A five-eyed blob tells a news camera, “I tried to run from it, but it picked me up with its mind powers and shook me like a dog!” An eerily similar scene recently played out in a super swank Chicago restaurant, sending foodies shrieking into the blogosphere for days on end. It seems a party of four dared to bring an infant into Alinea, a sort of culinary art gallery, where the morsels of sculpted monkfish and squab resemble flowers more than food. Once named the best restaurant in the U.S., Alinea sells tickets in advance to its nightly tasting-menu-palooza at about $250 per person sans tax, tip, or wine — and believe me, when your dishes include fiddlehead fern, something called “mastic,” and, I kid you not, helium — you’re going to need a lot of wine.

First smile. First steps. First day of school.

Certain moments in the parenting canon are aggrandized as monumental milestones that justify all the emotional trials of ushering infants into childhood and children into adulthood. You know the ones:

Learning to read. Hitting the home run. Passing the driver’s test.

And they’re all great; don’t get me wrong. But there’s another transcendent moment that no one ever talks about — and it’s so good that if you don’t have kids, you should consider getting some just so you can experience it.

It’s the moment when you discover that your kids dig your music. Not just recognize it or tolerate it, but genuinely love some of your favorite songs. When you happen upon them listening to the Isley Brothers while doing their homework, or singing Amy Winehouse as they unload the dishwasher, or blasting Bowie from the family iPod during a road trip — and not groaning and saying that they meant to click Bowling for Soup.

Those moments flood me with joy like a garden hose filling up a plastic backyard wading pool. Only much, much faster because those things take freaking forever. Why should it matter so much to me that we hanker for the same harmonies, throb to the same rhythms?