Because competitive parenting is not a real sport.
My daughter spent seven years in a kids’ theater program in our neighborhood, starting as the baker/spoon/villager-with-pitchfork in Beauty and the Beast and working her way up to Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. After the final show in the spring of their eighth-grade year, the director shared anecdotes about each of the kids graduating... Continue Reading →
Here is the full text of the letter my daughter left on the dining room table after I forgot to pick her up at ballet lessons for the third time: Mommy and Daddy, It is the second time I’ve cried after ballet. It is the 8th time you’ve been late. It is the 83rd time... Continue Reading →
Scene: 7:17am, in the car, one block from school. Jack: Sh$t. I forgot shoes. Me: <long pause as I process (1) that my son is old enough to curse without blushing but still forgets something as basic as *shoes* and (2) the tension between my natural-consequences, you-forgot-so-deal model of parenting and the fact that it's... Continue Reading →
There's nothing like bathing suit shopping with one's teenage daughter to foster a more nuanced and perhaps sympathetic perspective on Snow White's stepmother.
This week's high school carpool conversation featured BDSM because the term had been heard and a definition was requested. My answer, which skimmed lightly over any meaningful definition to focus on its consensual nature and sharp contrast to relationship violence, segued into a question about how I define healthy relationships. So yeah, at 7:07am as... Continue Reading →
Most of the time, I feel like I'm a perfectly adequate parent, but then my son insists that an label-less plate-of-spaghetti line graph is an appropriate visual display of scientific data and I wonder where I went so terribly wrong.
My daughter, when she was seven, ambushed me in the kitchen while I was chopping vegetables. “Mommy,” she asked, blue eyes blinking up at me, a little crease of confusion between her brows, “how does the baby get inside the mommy?” This was a delicate moment. I knew that how I handled these first few... Continue Reading →
Because of my profound lack of interest in entertaining an unenthusiastic 13-year-old at the Getty (mom-ing at a museum is all "What do you think the artist wanted us to feel?" and "What does this make you think about?" until I want to scratch my *own* eyes out) I hooked him up with a self-guided... Continue Reading →
Me: Okay, family, while the ornaments are technically on the tree, there are some weird gaps and places where they're all bunched up, so maybe if we just moved this one or... 13yo son: I'm just going to sit back on the couch and watch a Becca in her natural habitat.
The World's Okayest Mom 