I have a hard time with lying children. Don’t get me wrong, my children lie, but right now, thankfully, they lie badly. There is no question when a whopper is coming out of their mouths. Nicole will pause awkwardly between every other word, thinking up her tale as she goes along and then force a smile when the lie is complete. Natalie will lie with more finesse, but the guilt factor is too high for her. She breaks down almost immediately after the lie has flawlessly slipped her lips and tearfully confess to even the most harmless of tales – I really didn’t brush my teeth, I did take a bite out of the cookie. Then she’ll beg for forgiveness in a way that always makes me worry that I’ve been too hard on her.
My girls have a long way to go in perfecting the art of deception or even telling the little white lie. They will, however, question at every turn when mommy tells one. The other day they were with me when a man approached asking if we needed any home repairs. I waved him off, saying “we just remodeled recently…” granted, we remodeled 9 years ago when we moved in, but that’s still recently in some ‘hoods. The girls immediately pounced on me for telling a lie. I tried to explain to them the difference between why my lying was okay and theirs isn’t and found myself in an ethical debate with two people who’s ages combined barely make them old enough to vote. Explaining the difference between lying to spare someone’s feelings, to be diplomatic or to fend off unwanted advances and telling a lie for personal gain is a difficult distinction to make. It’s one of the eternal parenting challenges like trying to help your kids recognize the difference between good strangers and dangerous ones. They are still all strangers in the end, right?
So the other day, some kids were over playing and every time I asked them a question they had a direct, straight forward answer. Both kids said the same thing and there was no sign that a tale was being told. In fact, when they left, I remember thinking, “Wow, what nice polite kids they are…” That night a received an angry call from their mother, furious that I allowed them to do the things they told me they were allowed to do at home. My children are so poor at lying that I’ve grown sloppy at detecting dishonestly in other people’s children. That’s not good. Having kids who don’t lie well has left me at a disadvantage. I have to sharpen my internal mommy lie detector and remember that other kids might be better versed than mine at the art of deception. It is one of those parent survival tools that you have to have when dealing not only with your own children, but more importantly, with other people’s kids. If not, they’ll eat you alive.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
The One Who Lags Behind
My ten year old daughter Nicole can’t seem to keep up with the rest of us when we are walking. She is always about three to six feet behind us. Sometimes she’s just strolling, sometimes she’s dancing, but usually she’s just in her own world. She does this on the sidewalk, crossing the street, in parking lots. I worry that a car will come around the corner and clip her, not seeing her because she isn’t walking with the group. Or that once she starts hanging out with friends on her own, she might fall behind from the crowd and lose the safety that comes in numbers. I also just want her to keep up with us and stop strolling so much in a world where others are walking as if they have someplace to go.
Nicole has recently become interested in horror movies, even though the most horrific thing she’s seen is some Disney show about vampire babysitters. So, in order to get her to keep up with the group, I explained to her how in those horror movies, it’s always the one who strays from the group, ventures into the empty basement or lags behind who gets eaten by the monster. Natalie, my eight year old, finds that particularly amusing, so whenever Nicole is walking behind us, she warns her, “Remember, the one who lags behind…” In our family, it’s become a funny reminder about safety. Until it isn’t funny anymore. In a summer full of horrific happenings – the Caylee Anthony case, the case of the teen who killed his parents with a hammer then threw a party that night inviting his friends over via Facebook or the mother and daughter found beheaded in their home – the story of the murder and dismemberment of an eight year old boy from Brooklyn, Leiby Kletzky, moved me so that it caused me to rethink, as a parent, how I talk to my own children about being safe.
Leiby, like my girls, wanted to have more freedom to be on his own. Mine are constantly asking when I’ll let them walk home from school, visit a friend or go to the mall on their own. Leiby’s parents agreed to his request to walk home from his first day of camp on his own, and seemingly did all the right things to keep him safe. They did a practice run with him on the day before, walking the route home. But the next day, when he tried to walk home alone, he got lost, turned around in his own neighborhood, and asked the wrong person for help.
I joke with my girls about the horror movie stereotype of bad things happening to the one who lags behind. But after hearing about Leiby, even though I normally shield them from hearing those types of stories on the news, I decided to tell them about what happened to him – not in gruesome detail, but enough so that we could take our conversation about safety to a different level. I want them to know that sometimes the one that lags behind does get devoured by the monster. I want them to know that the monsters aren’t only in the movies and that most of the time they don’t even look like monsters. I want them to understand that the monsters can be very clever or very crazy or both. And I want them to have the mental, emotional and physical tools to avoid the monsters or do battle with them if they have to.
So I told them about what happened to Leiby and explained that I was telling them because I wanted to make sure that they understood that things do happen and the need to be careful. We used it as an opportunity, another “teachable moment” to talk about what you do when you’re out on your own, how you ask for help, how you protect yourselves. Yes, we’ve had all these conversations before, but in a much more theoretical way. But this was something real that happened and in that same situation, with the stakes at life and death, I wanted them to think about what they would do and how they would react. We talked a lot, and cried a little, thinking about the young boy from Brooklyn, his family and his community. Wishing that no child, no parent, no family would ever have to deal with such unimaginable pain again. But knowing that more than likely, tomorrow’s news would bring another story and that the best we can do as parents is try again and again to remind our children what to do to be safe and how not to be the one who lags behind.
Nicole has recently become interested in horror movies, even though the most horrific thing she’s seen is some Disney show about vampire babysitters. So, in order to get her to keep up with the group, I explained to her how in those horror movies, it’s always the one who strays from the group, ventures into the empty basement or lags behind who gets eaten by the monster. Natalie, my eight year old, finds that particularly amusing, so whenever Nicole is walking behind us, she warns her, “Remember, the one who lags behind…” In our family, it’s become a funny reminder about safety. Until it isn’t funny anymore. In a summer full of horrific happenings – the Caylee Anthony case, the case of the teen who killed his parents with a hammer then threw a party that night inviting his friends over via Facebook or the mother and daughter found beheaded in their home – the story of the murder and dismemberment of an eight year old boy from Brooklyn, Leiby Kletzky, moved me so that it caused me to rethink, as a parent, how I talk to my own children about being safe.
Leiby, like my girls, wanted to have more freedom to be on his own. Mine are constantly asking when I’ll let them walk home from school, visit a friend or go to the mall on their own. Leiby’s parents agreed to his request to walk home from his first day of camp on his own, and seemingly did all the right things to keep him safe. They did a practice run with him on the day before, walking the route home. But the next day, when he tried to walk home alone, he got lost, turned around in his own neighborhood, and asked the wrong person for help.
I joke with my girls about the horror movie stereotype of bad things happening to the one who lags behind. But after hearing about Leiby, even though I normally shield them from hearing those types of stories on the news, I decided to tell them about what happened to him – not in gruesome detail, but enough so that we could take our conversation about safety to a different level. I want them to know that sometimes the one that lags behind does get devoured by the monster. I want them to know that the monsters aren’t only in the movies and that most of the time they don’t even look like monsters. I want them to understand that the monsters can be very clever or very crazy or both. And I want them to have the mental, emotional and physical tools to avoid the monsters or do battle with them if they have to.
So I told them about what happened to Leiby and explained that I was telling them because I wanted to make sure that they understood that things do happen and the need to be careful. We used it as an opportunity, another “teachable moment” to talk about what you do when you’re out on your own, how you ask for help, how you protect yourselves. Yes, we’ve had all these conversations before, but in a much more theoretical way. But this was something real that happened and in that same situation, with the stakes at life and death, I wanted them to think about what they would do and how they would react. We talked a lot, and cried a little, thinking about the young boy from Brooklyn, his family and his community. Wishing that no child, no parent, no family would ever have to deal with such unimaginable pain again. But knowing that more than likely, tomorrow’s news would bring another story and that the best we can do as parents is try again and again to remind our children what to do to be safe and how not to be the one who lags behind.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Instant Family…Just Add Water
My daughters and I went to a family reunion in Indiana last weekend. It was my mother’s side of the family and she grew up in a small, rural town called Crawfordsville, less than an hour from Indianapolis. We flew into Chicago and drove several hours to get there. As we passed cows, corn, and rivers cutting through forests of lush trees, Nicole and Natalie questioned me about everything. They are L.A. girls and their journeys from home have been limited mostly to cities, Cape Cod, or tropical resorts. The Midwest was a whole other world to them. I very much wanted them to come home with me and meet my mom’s family, especially since they never knew my mother, who died from breast cancer at the age of 59, long before I was married and had kids. I spent vacations in Indiana when I was young, in both Crawfordsville and East Chicago, and I remember fondly visiting grandparents, playing with cousins, setting off fireworks (which are legal there) and chasing fireflies on humid summer evenings when everyone would sit on the porch late into the night waiting for the house inside to cool. I wanted my kids to have those same experiences, if only for a weekend.
At the reunion, we’d all come together and I was both excited and concerned about how my kids would fit in. They didn’t know their cousins – 1st through 4th generation were there – and most of them were from the area and many knew each other already. We arrived at the hotel and checked in. When the girls met their cousins in the conference room set up for the reunion, they were shy at first. My Aunt suggested we go swimming in the hotel’s indoor pool. She asked me to chaperone because she and my older cousins didn’t know how to swim.
We hit the pool with five kids and a couple of teens – some kids were in floaties, some splashed about and a few of the older cousins dared to take the impromptu swimming lessons I decided to offer. With my daughters serving as assistant instructors, we taught back floats and dog paddles, how to fall in and swim to the edge, how to tread water. In no time, all the cousins who had been strangers were more than friends, they were family. They did canon balls into the pool, lounged in the hot tub, played Marco Polo in the shallow end of the pool as if they'd known each other for a lifetime.
The rest of the weekend my girls carried around their little cousins, ran between rooms with their cousins playing games, fussed with each other about who would hold the baby of the family. The boy cousins teased the girl cousins and the girl cousins pranked them back. From strangers to friends to cousins…All it took was a little water.
At the reunion, we’d all come together and I was both excited and concerned about how my kids would fit in. They didn’t know their cousins – 1st through 4th generation were there – and most of them were from the area and many knew each other already. We arrived at the hotel and checked in. When the girls met their cousins in the conference room set up for the reunion, they were shy at first. My Aunt suggested we go swimming in the hotel’s indoor pool. She asked me to chaperone because she and my older cousins didn’t know how to swim.
We hit the pool with five kids and a couple of teens – some kids were in floaties, some splashed about and a few of the older cousins dared to take the impromptu swimming lessons I decided to offer. With my daughters serving as assistant instructors, we taught back floats and dog paddles, how to fall in and swim to the edge, how to tread water. In no time, all the cousins who had been strangers were more than friends, they were family. They did canon balls into the pool, lounged in the hot tub, played Marco Polo in the shallow end of the pool as if they'd known each other for a lifetime.
The rest of the weekend my girls carried around their little cousins, ran between rooms with their cousins playing games, fussed with each other about who would hold the baby of the family. The boy cousins teased the girl cousins and the girl cousins pranked them back. From strangers to friends to cousins…All it took was a little water.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Small Town in the Big City
I live in a neighborhood full of delusional people. I am one of them. We like to believe that our four block radius is actually a small town, even though we are in the middle of a big city. Kids run in and out of each other’s homes as if all the homes on are street are one big house that all the kids share. People watch out for each other’s children and pets and property as if it were their own. We pass down outgrown clothes to the next youngest child on the block, do dinner trains when someone is sick or there has been a death in a family. We have group trips to the beach, picnics in the park, and potlucks throughout the year.
The way our neighborhood celebrates the Fourth of July reminds me most of our small town longings. There is a big, neighborhood-wide block party with hot dogs and sack races and pie contests. An antique fire truck leads a parade up and down the street. Mini flags are placed on lawns, children decorate their bikes or scooters and themselves in anything red, white and blue. Last year, a mom on the block used her artistry, face painting our children’s faces with stars and fireworks and flags.
After the block party, we gather at someone’s house for a potluck and the musicians in the neighborhood bring out their guitars and drums and even a violin and play as the rest of us sing Beatles songs off key and the kids splash around in the pool, completely ignoring any warning not to swim until 30 minutes after eating.
As evening falls, a group of us from our street will walk together carrying folding chairs, pulling little red wagons full of children or juice boxes or jug wine, and we will go down to the wash where the street dead ends and set up an area to view the fireworks. We’ll sit there until it is dark and then marvel at the streaks of color lighting the sky. I glance over at our children, thrilled, happy, safe, and try to keep our small town delusion going a little bit longer.
The way our neighborhood celebrates the Fourth of July reminds me most of our small town longings. There is a big, neighborhood-wide block party with hot dogs and sack races and pie contests. An antique fire truck leads a parade up and down the street. Mini flags are placed on lawns, children decorate their bikes or scooters and themselves in anything red, white and blue. Last year, a mom on the block used her artistry, face painting our children’s faces with stars and fireworks and flags.
After the block party, we gather at someone’s house for a potluck and the musicians in the neighborhood bring out their guitars and drums and even a violin and play as the rest of us sing Beatles songs off key and the kids splash around in the pool, completely ignoring any warning not to swim until 30 minutes after eating.
As evening falls, a group of us from our street will walk together carrying folding chairs, pulling little red wagons full of children or juice boxes or jug wine, and we will go down to the wash where the street dead ends and set up an area to view the fireworks. We’ll sit there until it is dark and then marvel at the streaks of color lighting the sky. I glance over at our children, thrilled, happy, safe, and try to keep our small town delusion going a little bit longer.
Friday, June 24, 2011
A Three Pack Tissue Day
I got emotional in the car yesterday. I was driving home from the doctor's office and it hit me - my baby is going into middle school. She isn't a baby anymore (hasn't been for some time). I felt surprisingly sad, didn't think it would hit me that way at all. I spent the rest of the day trying not to tear up over even the most mundane of things - pile of laundry on the floor, school picture hanging on the refrigerator. I didn't think I was going to get all melancholy about this - elementary school culmination. Heck, even if Nicole is moving on to middle school, I still have several more years of taking my soon to be third grader, Natalie, up to that elementary school every morning.
When I arrived to pick Nicole up from school, she and her fifth grade friends had just returned from a culmination party held on the backlot of CBS studios. They had hot dogs and popcorn and snow cones with ice cream underneath the ice (talk about indulgence), a DJ and a photo booth. They danced in 90 degree heat under the blazing sun and came home exhausted, happy and slightly dehydrated. But most of all, ready to move on. As much as Nicole will miss her friends, teachers, and school, I felt like yesterday, she realized that she would okay leaving. As sad as it would be, she was excited about the future. She was ready to go to middle school.
I tucked three packs of tissues in my purse for this morning's culmination. One for me, one for her, one for everyone else who vowed they weren't going to get emotional over an elementary school ceremony. I don't believe them. I'm bringing the extra pack of tissues just in case.
When I arrived to pick Nicole up from school, she and her fifth grade friends had just returned from a culmination party held on the backlot of CBS studios. They had hot dogs and popcorn and snow cones with ice cream underneath the ice (talk about indulgence), a DJ and a photo booth. They danced in 90 degree heat under the blazing sun and came home exhausted, happy and slightly dehydrated. But most of all, ready to move on. As much as Nicole will miss her friends, teachers, and school, I felt like yesterday, she realized that she would okay leaving. As sad as it would be, she was excited about the future. She was ready to go to middle school.
I tucked three packs of tissues in my purse for this morning's culmination. One for me, one for her, one for everyone else who vowed they weren't going to get emotional over an elementary school ceremony. I don't believe them. I'm bringing the extra pack of tissues just in case.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Tears
There has been a lot of crying around here lately. I’ve been having health issues for the last six weeks and sometimes the pain is so intense that my eyes will tear up and I don’t even realize it. Natalie has been dropping things. A soda into her father’s favorite slippers, a full orange juice container in the back of my newly detailed car, and a nightly tipping over of whatever beverage she has for dinner. She gets so frustrated when it happens that she cries.
The other night, I heard loud cries coming from the living room and rushed from my bed to see what had happened. As I approached, David said, “You don’t want to go in there.” But I never listen. Fearing the worst, I looked around the corner and saw Natalie on the floor in tears, the table in front of her covered in red liquid. My first thought was that she’d struck her mouth on the glass table and that blood was everywhere. On closer examination, the “blood” was fruit punch and Natalie had had yet another spill, this time on the living room carpet, which prompted her crying fit. She was terrified I’d be upset that she had spilled again and ruined the rug. Actually, finding out that it was only fruit punch instead of blood, I was so relieved that I didn’t care about the rug. I was just glad she wasn’t hurt. It didn’t matter. She cried uncontrollably for ten minutes.
As I was calming Natalie down, Nicole came into the room and curled up on the bed next to me and she started crying. She’d been fine earlier and I couldn’t imagine what had sparked this emotional downpour. Natalie was still whimpering in my lap, and now this! In between crying jags, Nicole told me that she’d been thinking about fifth grade graduation and realized how much she was going to miss her friends. She said she didn’t want to grow up, go to middle school and that she wanted to stay in elementary school the rest of her life. I tried to comfort her and assure her that she would see many of her current friends in her new school. I reminded her how often she had talked about and made plans for middle school and how much she would enjoy it when she actually got there. (I should have seen this coming because she’s been listening to some song called, “Never Grow Up” endlessly for the last week or so.)
But the tears continued. So the three of us sat on the bed and had a good cry – Nicole, longing to never grow up, Natalie wishing she were more grown and not always spilling things like a little kid, and me wishing that my body weren’t growing older and betraying me in ways I never imagined. Sometimes you need a good cry and sometimes it’s just hormones. The trick is knowing the difference.
The other night, I heard loud cries coming from the living room and rushed from my bed to see what had happened. As I approached, David said, “You don’t want to go in there.” But I never listen. Fearing the worst, I looked around the corner and saw Natalie on the floor in tears, the table in front of her covered in red liquid. My first thought was that she’d struck her mouth on the glass table and that blood was everywhere. On closer examination, the “blood” was fruit punch and Natalie had had yet another spill, this time on the living room carpet, which prompted her crying fit. She was terrified I’d be upset that she had spilled again and ruined the rug. Actually, finding out that it was only fruit punch instead of blood, I was so relieved that I didn’t care about the rug. I was just glad she wasn’t hurt. It didn’t matter. She cried uncontrollably for ten minutes.
As I was calming Natalie down, Nicole came into the room and curled up on the bed next to me and she started crying. She’d been fine earlier and I couldn’t imagine what had sparked this emotional downpour. Natalie was still whimpering in my lap, and now this! In between crying jags, Nicole told me that she’d been thinking about fifth grade graduation and realized how much she was going to miss her friends. She said she didn’t want to grow up, go to middle school and that she wanted to stay in elementary school the rest of her life. I tried to comfort her and assure her that she would see many of her current friends in her new school. I reminded her how often she had talked about and made plans for middle school and how much she would enjoy it when she actually got there. (I should have seen this coming because she’s been listening to some song called, “Never Grow Up” endlessly for the last week or so.)
But the tears continued. So the three of us sat on the bed and had a good cry – Nicole, longing to never grow up, Natalie wishing she were more grown and not always spilling things like a little kid, and me wishing that my body weren’t growing older and betraying me in ways I never imagined. Sometimes you need a good cry and sometimes it’s just hormones. The trick is knowing the difference.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Whatever We Do
When David and I were taking prenatal classes at the hospital before Nicole was born, the nurse said something I’ll always remember. She said, “Babies are irritated by everything, and everything you do to make it better irritates them more.” I thought of those sage words the other day as I was trying to coax Nicole out of a stinky, I’m-ten-not-a-teen-but-I’m-going-to-act-like-one mood, but everything I did made her more cranky. It was then that I realized that the nurse’s advice applies to every stage of parenting.
Babies are irritated by everything and everything you do to make it better irritates them more.
Tweens are embarrassed by everything and everything you do to make it better embarrasses them more. (Note to self, do not sing Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive” out loud in public with your children nearby.)
Teenagers are angered by everything and everything you do to make it better angers them more. (In other words, don’t try asking them about anything without expecting a surly response, in fact growling and hissing may even be involved.)
College students are always in need of money and the more money you give them always makes them need more. (Second note to self, change phone number, email and mailing address as soon as they head off to college. They can’t get money from you if they can’t find you.)
So if we irritate them, embarrass them, anger and enable them, why do we subject ourselves to this parenting process in the first place? It seems like it would be a win-win for kids and parents. But no one said parenting was easy. In fact, they said just the opposite. My friend Miriam once said that the divine plan was to make babies so cute so that you would forget about all the other crap you have to put up with. And they are cute, even if it can be tough going sometimes.
Babies are irritated by everything and everything you do to make it better irritates them more.
Tweens are embarrassed by everything and everything you do to make it better embarrasses them more. (Note to self, do not sing Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive” out loud in public with your children nearby.)
Teenagers are angered by everything and everything you do to make it better angers them more. (In other words, don’t try asking them about anything without expecting a surly response, in fact growling and hissing may even be involved.)
College students are always in need of money and the more money you give them always makes them need more. (Second note to self, change phone number, email and mailing address as soon as they head off to college. They can’t get money from you if they can’t find you.)
So if we irritate them, embarrass them, anger and enable them, why do we subject ourselves to this parenting process in the first place? It seems like it would be a win-win for kids and parents. But no one said parenting was easy. In fact, they said just the opposite. My friend Miriam once said that the divine plan was to make babies so cute so that you would forget about all the other crap you have to put up with. And they are cute, even if it can be tough going sometimes.
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