Parent Talk Today

"Happy Days Are Here Again"

I've been trying to put my thoughts into words after last night's election of Barack Obama, and I'm having trouble finding words that do justice to all that has transpired in the past 24 hours.

But 86-year-old Betty Liske has said it all so well, and she has given me permission to share her words with you in this guest post, below.

I realize our country, our world and our planet are in a mess right now. And I'm no Pollyanna when it comes to looking at these things. We have a steep climb ahead of us. But to see this election through the eyes of someone who has seen so much, over more than eight decades in this country, really gives me hope. Thank you, Betty!

It is truly "Happy Days Are Here Again." This is the song they sang when Franklin Roosevelt won the presidential office in 1940.

In my first job after graduating from high school in Orlando, Fl., a town, at that time, of 40,000, I worked at the Democratic headquarters downtown. I addressed envelopes, stood on the sidewalk and offered pins, signs and other information to the passersby.

It was also an historic event, as it was Roosevelt's third term. However, at that election, no blacks could vote and they had a $3 poll tax. ( I still don't think this was legal.)

This was during the Great Depression. (They must be referring to the size, as there was nothing "great" about it.) People had a very tough time scrapping together the $3 poll tax. But my Mom and Dad always managed, as it was so important to them.

So we have come a long way, but the right way, and the eight years of sub-prime politics are at last off our backs. I think President Obama will shine like an evening star. It's so wonderful to have an intelligent, articulate, calm, caring and wonderful president.  

September 11 — Through The Eyes of a Five-Year-Old

“Mom, what’s that?”

Seven years have passed since my five-year-old son asked me that question. Since my clock radio jolted me awake with news that could only have come, it seemed, from the mind of Orson Welles. This had to be a sick joke, another “War of the Worlds,” I remember thinking, as I rubbed my eyes and grabbed the T.V. remote.

Just as the image of the burning twin towers appeared on the screen, Matthew walked into the room.

“Mom, what’s that?”

We stared at the television for a few moments. Then, afraid of what else Matt might see, I turned off the T.V. I wrapped my arms around him and we sat on the bed and talked. About how a few bad people had hurt others in a horrible way. About how a great number of good people would be coming to help the people who got hurt.

“How many bad people, Mom?”

I held my thumb and forefinger close together. “About this many,
compared with all the good people, like the policemen, the firemen and everyone else in the world who’s trying to help.”

“How many good people?”

I spread my arms wide. He did too, and smiled. “Our arms aren’t long
enough to show all the good people. Right, Mom?”

He thought for a moment.

“But what if the bad guys win?”

“We won’t let them,” I told him — and myself. “All the good people just won’t let that happen.”

Over the next few days, all manner of things red, white and blue blanketed our southern-California beach town. Neighbors erected a large flag by the local pier that first Friday night, surrounding it with tiny white candles nestled in the sand. The stars and stripes fluttered from hundreds of car windows where, so recently, purple-and-gold Lakers flags had waved. Matthew made a construction-paper version, which we taped to our living-room window.

As the President talked of war, my husband and I struggled to find a balance between shielding our kindergartner from the reality of evil in the world and letting him take in more than we felt he could handle.

But despite our parental high-wire act, America changed on September 11, 2001 — even for little boys who live thousands of miles away from the flying ash and the screaming sirens. We kept the T.V. news turned off when Matt was nearby. But he couldn’t help but wonder why his Dad, whom he and I had so casually kissed goodbye at LAX just 14 hours before the first attack came, had driven home from his business trip instead of flying. He couldn’t miss the somber tones of people chatting with grocery checkers and postal clerks; the overheard conversations of adults who looked suddenly quite serious and who told each other, “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to our country.”

As the days and weeks passed, I asked my son if he had any worries. Was there anything he wanted to talk about?

“No, it’s OK, Mom,” he said as he pulled his red-white-and-blue t-shirt over his head and told me about the upcoming school assembly where the kids would “sing about America.”

“Everything’s fine.”

Then, one morning at breakfast, the dinosaurs arrived.

“Mom, look at this,” Matt said, handing me the Dinosaur Babies book that had languished on a shelf for months, untouched. Now he studied it intently. One illustration showed how, when threatened by a predator, the adult dinosaurs formed a circle, with the baby dinosaurs in the center, to protect the youngsters from harm.

“It’s the grown-ups’ job to protect the kid dinosaurs from the enemy. Right, Mom?”

“Yep,” I answered. “The grown-up dinosaurs protect the babies until they’re old enough to go out on their own.”

“But the baby dinosaurs grow up and have their own babies to protect,” he argued. “So they stick together. No dinosaur is ever really alone.”

As he finished his milk, Matt kept the book close by, staring at the picture of the big, ever-watchful dinosaur moms and dads who kept the circle unbroken and secure. And I worried: What kind of circle can I promise my child — when I’m afraid, too?

Then I thought of the candles carried by neighbors on our sidewalk that first Friday night. The small ritual that pulled us away from CNN and out of our homes — out of ourselves — and brought us together.

I thought of the hastily organized potluck dinners with friends that
followed, with children laughing in the next room while parents shared their stories, their fears, around a kitchen table.

I thought of the teachers at Matthew’s school who brushed away  tears as they stood at the foot of a huge flagpole and joined several hundred small voices in singing “America The Beautiful.”

And I realized that in the uncertain months and years ahead, the strength of the circle around my child — around all our children — will come not just from a parent’s arms, but from our common strength: All of us working and praying, loving and guiding our families through these days. Each of us grasping a hand and doing our part to keep the circle strong.

A Little League Mom Rounds Third

It wasn’t all that long ago that my son, Matt, was thrilled to be wearing his first baseball glove (carefully broken in by Dad in a weeks-long ritual involving special oil, rubber bands and voo-doo, I think). Matt was beyond excited to help carry the team banner in his first Little League parade, and he couldn’t wait to get up to bat in his first t-ball game.

That little guy with the baggy baseball pants is now 12 years old,  5'7", a pretty good pitcher and running full-tilt toward his next baseball league. Time, it seems, is rushing by faster than a line drive to left field.

So it was especially poignant to open my e-mail recently and to read a note from the president of our local Little League:

"On a personal note, our fourth child will leave Little League for high school baseball next fall. For the first time in 15 years, we will not have a child playing Little League,” he wrote. “The time slipped by very quickly and our children have few memories of championships or All Star teams. Instead, they just have a love of the game, an appreciation for sportsmanship and competition, and fond memories of time spent with Dad."

He ended his letter to the parents with some advice: "Please relax and enjoy this time in your child’s life. It will pass quickly..."

That’s something I've tried to keep in mind every season as Team Sena scurries around the house, grabbing cleats, equipment and water bottles, and then heading off to yet another game, yelling to each other “Did someone feed the dog?” “Do you have your baseball cap?” “Are the stadium seats in the trunk?” as we rush out the door.

Between practice and games (on top of homework and all the regular stuff that keeps a mom churning until 11:00 most nights), my time certainly isn't my own during baseball season. But I'm acutely aware that that’s not a permanent state of affairs. So I'm trying to appreciate each crack of the bat just a bit more than I probably did when the end wasn’t so clearly in sight (or, let’s face it, when my turn for snack-stand duty rolled around).

Because in the not-too-distant future, I'll have to be satisfied with flipping through scrapbooks and watching home videos showing a bunch of wound-up, grass-stained, sunflower-seed-filled boys in a dugout, yelling "LET'S GO SEN-A!"

I hope Matt has wonderful memories of these years. I know his dad and I will. The knowledge that nothing lasts forever — in Little League or in life — sometimes makes my heart ache as a parent. But it also makes every snack-stand hot dog, every scramble to first base, every glance up at the stands to grin at Mom and Dad after a good play, just that much more delicious.

Mommy, Where Did I Come From?

Thirteen years ago, when I found out I was pregnant with my first child, my thoughts hopscotched from thankfulness to relief to my friends’ less-than-comforting episiotomy tales — finally resting, one night at 2 a.m., on the prospect of a little boy coming home from school with a superhero lunch box and a question: “Where do babies come from?”
 
Today that little boy, Matthew, who was conceived through in vitro fertilization, is a seventh grader and taller than me. He knows where babies come from. He even knows the basics of IVF and acknowledges the fact that his very existence is a miracle of modern medicine with the same less-than-gee-whiz attitude he has about the fact that he can search Google to access the world. To a 12-year-old living in 2008, all this amazing (to his parents, anyway) technology isn’t that, well, amazing.

So it might be time to share more than just “the facts” of my son’s conception with him. Because even though thousands of IVF babies are now born in the U.S. every year, for each family, it’s a different story, each one filled with hope, fear, faith and even (believe me, it’s necessary!) a sense of the ridiculous.

I could describe to Matthew how, upon seeing the blue dot on the cardboard ovulation-prediction card, I danced around the bathroom, surrounded by little cups of urine and bottles of “activator,” celebrating that first tiny step toward motherhood.
 
How, when I told my pharmacist (who had assisted us in our “science project,” ordering ovulation-predictor kits, ovulation-suppression drugs to control my cycle, ovulation-stimulation drugs and more syringes that I care to remember), “I'm pregnant. Thanks for your help!” the other customers in the store snickered just a bit.
 
I could tell him how, even though I appreciated having the option of IVF, a part of me yearned to create a baby the way my parents, grandparents and every other generation in my family had always made babies: the old-fashioned way.
 
How his daddy practiced sticking needles into an orange — said to resemble the flesh on my backside, thank you very much — to learn how to give me hormone injections that would stimulate egg production.
 
I could describe how his father mapped out, ahead of time, our entire route home from the medical center, noting every bump and pot hole. And how Randy filled our car's passenger seat with pillows so that we could gingerly make our way home after the embryo transfer without disturbing what we hoped was a miracle happening inside of me.
 
And I could explain how, through the process of making a baby with the help of strangers, his daddy and I developed a sense of humor that got us through experiences such as Randy's trip to the “donation room” and my hour spent on the “tilt table,” my feet higher than my head, after the fertilized eggs were placed in my uterus.
 
What I most want Matthew to know is that he was wanted as much as any child has ever been wanted. That while his conception was far from a private act, it was filled with great reverence and love. I want to tell him that lying in bed at home and holding hands with his daddy the night after my eggs were retrieved — while praying that a strong, healthy embryo was forming eight miles away in that petri dish — was one of the most moving experiences of my life.
 
I want him to be able to picture his father experiencing something that most dads will never get to do: Standing in a quiet, darkened room while looking through a microscope and seeing the six fat cells that would become his son, just before the doctor placed those cells inside me.
 
And I want him to know that my heart nearly burst as I watched him sing “One Small Child, One Tiny Child” with the children’s choir at Christmas when he was only five years old. Because I couldn't help but remember that bringing our own small child home from the hospital, on Christmas Day 1995, was the most incredible gift his daddy and I will ever receive.
 
Yes, Matthew has outgrown superhero lunch boxes. And he’s got even the high-tech birds-and-bees stuff figured out. But his dad and I want him to know more than just “the facts.” We want him to understand his family’s own special story of how he came into our lives — everything from his mom doin’ the happy dance in the bathroom to his dad lovingly placing all those pillows just so. Most of all, we want Matthew to know that while he came to us with more than a little help from modern medicine — he also came straight from our hearts. And that’s something he just won’t find on Google.

Spilling the Beans: These Moms Dish About What Motherhood is REALLY Like

What do you know now that you wish you knew before becoming a parent? Thirty one moms (and one dad) tell all in a wonderful new book, The Mothering Heights Manual for Motherhood.

This collection of essays is edited by Christine Fugate, who began writing her syndicated column, "Mothering Heights," after marrying and having two kids within a 20-month period. (Just reading that sentence makes me want to take a nap. How does she do all that AND write a column AND edit a book?)

The essays are honest, and many are a hoot. My favorite is a piece by Cynthia Jenkins (AKA "Sugar Mama") called "Fertilizer." (Named for the description someone gave for the taste of her her meatloaf, thank you very much.) She talks about how she had assumed she'd tackle motherhood just like her own mom did, right down to wearing big earrings and jingly bracelets. (The bracelets drove her crazy almost immediately. Who can chase kids wearing those things? OK, other than Cynthia's mom.)

Turns out each mom has to find her own image, her own meatloaf recipe — and her own recipe for happy mothering. Reading these essays (a bit at a time before passing out each night after long days of working, running to baseball games, supervising homework and watching "Mary Poppins" play rehearsals), I realized that we moms really are all in this together. And reading about other moms' experiences can not only give us a good chuckle — it lets us know we're not alone when the meatloaf's awful, the baby's screaming and the disposal just started spewing something funny-smelling.  

Need a Little Gossip? Just Go to the Grocery Store

It's official. We no longer need soap operas on TV. Want juicy tales of marital cheating, embarrassing (or so you'd think) medical problems, and local gossip? Just walk the aisles of your neighborhood grocery store.

Lately I've overheard — from women talking on cell phones loudly enough to be heard all the way from the granola bars to the Raisin Bran —  all the details about how one mom hates her kid's baseball coach, how another's husband is cheating on her, and how a third is trying to find the right vaginal-itch cream.

Please, people! I'm just trying to buy some bananas. Do I need to hear all the intimate details of your life? (And forget about me. What if your kid's coach or your child's teacher is shopping just one aisle over?)

Of course, the worst part is that many of these people (and, sadly, the vast majority of these yackers seem to be women) have young children in the shopping cart, hearing every word they say. Don't they realize these little people are sponges? That they have ears?

It's so tempting to go up to these women and say something, but what would you say? "Have you talked with a therapist?" "Can I recommend a good gynecologist?" "Was that your coach's wife I just saw in the produce section?"

Check Out My Guest Post at The Simple Marriage Project

I'm excited to be invited to share a guest post over at The Simple Marriage Project today. This blog offers so many inspirational ideas for making marriage better — and a lot more fun.

I haven't yet tried the "21-Day Complaint-Free Marriage Experiment," because, really now, how long would I last? I'm guessing I'd catch myself in a whine of some sort by mid-afternoon on day one.

But maybe that's the point of the experiment: To make myself more mindful of my attitudes and my words. If I give it a shot, I'll let you know. And if you try the experiment yourself, let us know over here how it's going.

And please drop by and check out my guest post, too! Thanks, Corey, for the kind invitation.

Sneaking Off For a Date...

It's Sunday, and Randy and I needed to run to Home Depot and other exciting spots to do some shopping that would bore Matt (age 12) to tears.

So Matt volunteered to stay home and work on homework and household chores(!) while Randy and I went to buy towel bars and toilet plungers. (Yeah, marriage doesn't get any sexier than that...)

In the middle of running errands, with my stomach growling, I spotted our favorite burger joint, In 'N Out. I didn't have to work too hard to convince Randy to stop for lunch. We had so much fun! (Especially since our usual at-home meals consist of healthy chicken, pasta, fish, chicken, pasta, fish, chicken, pasta, fish...)

Can't remember the last time the two of us had just gone out for a burger, alone, on the spur of the moment. "Don't tell Matt!" we laughed, knowing he'd be mighty jealous.

As marital secrets go, this isn't a barn-burner, I know. But Randy and I must have looked pretty funny, sneaking out of the car when we got back home and tossing our In 'N Out soda cups in the recycling bin out by the street before we entered the house.

Shhh! Don't tell Matt.

Please Pass Down the Manners!

The three children vied for their mother’s attention and sipped from plastic juice bottles as their mom and grandmother unloaded the cart in the Target checkout line ahead of me. Of course, it was just a matter of time until the inevitable happened and someone’s juice hit the floor. No biggie, I thought. I’m a parent. I know how Mom and Grandma feel. Been there, cleaned that up. 

But when the youthful-looking grandmother surveyed the mess, she simply said “pick up your bottle” to the preschooler — and continued on as if there was nothing wrong with leaving a puddle of juice for the rest of us to trudge through. When the little boy started skating through the juice, spreading it further with each glide of his tennis shoes, I thought surely Grandma would realize this was not just a sticky mess but a potential hazard for the shoppers in line behind her.

Watching the boy, Grandma continued putting items on the conveyer belt. Okay, now I was getting cranky.

Thinking I might demonstrate a more-appropriate response, I leaned close to Grandma and said to the check-out clerk, “Excuse me. Do you have a paper towel? There’s juice on the floor, and I’m afraid someone might slip.”

“Sorry, I don’t have anything,” she replied. Okay then. It was clearly time to go straight to the source. I’d simply embarrass the woman into cleaning up the mess. “Ma’am, do you have any wet wipes in your purse; anything like that so we can clean up this juice?” I asked Grandma.

She rooted around in her purse and came up with… a man’s white athletic sock. “OK, that’s a bit odd, but I guess she could use it,” I thought to myself — right before she handed the sock to me.

“Here you go!” she said brightly. “It’s clean.”

I was too stunned to reply. With visions of an unsuspecting elderly shopper breaking a hip at checkstand 9, I knelt down and mopped up the juice with the sock while the woman watched.

By then I was more than a bit cranky, not to mention a bit overdue to receive an embarrassed “Why, thank you!” at least, if Grandma and Grandson weren’t going to do the job themselves.

She said nothing. Not a peep. “You know, you could thank me for wiping up your grandson’s juice,” I finally blurted out, looking her in the eye and holding up the juice-filled sock.

“Oh, just drop that anywhere,” she said, pointing toward the sock. “That’s disgusting.” And with that, the five of them were on their way, leaving me to find a trash can for the drippy sock.

Yes, it certainly was disgusting. But unfortunately, it’s becoming less and less surprising. Life’s little niceties, like holding the door open for the person behind us, saying please and thank you and even just having basic respect for those we encounter every day, seem to be disappearing faster than we can say “It’s all about me.”

Grocery clerks will be the first to tell you how much common courtesy has vanished. Ask them how it feels to ring up $100 worth of groceries for a shopper who continues a cell-phone conversation, hands over a grocery-store club card, runs the debit card through the machine and then leaves without ever making eye contact, much less saying “thanks.”

It’s easy to encounter the “it’s all about me” folks on the road, too. As our once-wide-enough residential streets become virtual one-way passages, narrowed by parked SUVs on both sides, there’s often room for only one vehicle at a time to go by. When I pull my car to the side of the road to let someone else pass, is it too much to ask for a friendly “thank you” wave or a smile? When someone responds with that simple gesture, it brightens the rest of my day. I’m guessing it perks up their day, too. But if it happens one time out of eight, it’s a good day. Most folks just drive on by as if to say “Of course, you should pull over for me.”

Not long ago, our local parks-and-rec department offered an “Etiquette and Social Skills” class for kids ages 7 to 12. Parents ponied up 70 bucks per kid for two 3-hour classes so that someone else would teach their children why manners are important, how to behave in a restaurant and how to be polite.

The trouble is, such a class may teach a kid the difference between a salad fork and a dinner fork, but it can’t create a thoughtful child. It can’t instill basic kindness or the desire to consider others’ feelings. That’s a parent’s job, and it takes years. And you can be sure our children are checking out our moves, noting how we behave.

At first I was incredulous that the mother of that preschooler, who continued to unloaded her cart and watch while the “juice incident” took place, didn’t step in to show her young son the right thing to do. But then I realized the sad truth: Her mother had never taught her the importance of common courtesy. And now Grandma and Mom were passing on that same lack of concern for others to a third generation.

Our children want so much to be like us. So they watch closely how we treat cashiers and waiters and crossing guards and fellow shoppers and fellow drivers and all the other people whose paths we cross each day. They also see whom and what we ignore — the people and things that don’t make a blip on our radar screen as we go about our business.

It doesn’t take a fancy etiquette class to teach our kids how to treat others with kindness. Sometimes all it takes is the willingness to clean up a little spilled juice.

Guest Post: Let Them Be Girls!

Today I'm jazzed to share with you a guest post from Juliana LeRoy, an award-winning writer and editor at Family-Life magazine in northern California. LeRoy also blogs over at at www.mamabear.pnn.com. I love what she has to say about shopping for clothes for young girls.

It seems to me there is a massive disconnect between what people want and what we have to choose from in the marketplace. Like the ridiculous clothing choices available for girls, when everyone is so against the objectifying of them.

In 2005 Abercrombie & Fitch put out tee shirts with phrases across the front that were demeaning to girls, including, “Who needs brains when you’ve got these?” A group of girls in Pittsburgh decided to take the company to task by “girlcotting” the stores — their version of boycotting — and they made their voices heard. Abercrombie & Fitch removed the offending shirts.

Mothers Acting Up is a group that has taken “girlcotting” to another level and made it an active way to support companies that are aligned with their values. They promote companies that have fair trade
agreements, or commitments to offering a living wage. The idea is to draw attention to good things and make them more visible.

My daughter, Megan, is eight, and she is tall and slim. Her sense of style is emerging, but she mostly wears clothes that you can move in: leggings because she’s too skinny for most pants, and she’s too busy for
skirts. She doesn’t wear tees with slogans on them, unless they say something about one of the Girl Scout camps she’s gone to, or have a school mascot on them. She’s active, and she’s feminine, and loves to feel extra pretty when the occasion calls for it.

When Megan needed a dress for a father-daughter dance, I was sure I’d be able to find something cute and fun and suitable for a third grader in no time at all. We wanted it to be fancy enough for her to feel really dressed up and special, but not too fancy. You know, something girly and pretty and sweet. Not smocking and pinafores, but not Christina Aguilera, either.

I looked online for a girl’s size 7 for Megan, and in some local department stores. It was too late for the holiday dresses, and the Easter dresses weren’t in yet. What I found was slinky materials, skimpy necklines and arms, high hemlines. The dresses were miniatures of the adult sizes, with bold prints and bright colors. They were cute, but not for the ages the sizes were for. I was puzzled and frustrated. What nine year old needs to dress like Britney out on the town? What seven year old needs to show off cleavage?

The dress we finally chose was a pretty blue shiny material, which Megan loved, and it was very simple, which I loved. It was more adult than I originally wanted, but it wasn’t a complete sell-out.

Other moms I’ve talked to have run into the same trouble looking for sixth-grade or eighth-grade graduation dresses. “We had to look all over for a dress that didn’t have spaghetti straps, or no straps at all,” one mom said. “The school has a dress code, and finding something that was dressy enough without being ridiculous was hard.”

“Last year my daughter graduated from 6th grade,” says one mom. “We went to every department and dress store, Mervyns, Macy’s JC Penney, Gottschalks, Sears, Target, Wal-Mart, second-hand stores  and bridal stores. Everything was sheer, strapless, super short, tight fitting, plunging necklines and/or backless — for a 12 year old?! I don’t think I’d let my daughter wear most of these styles to prom. I think they make girls look hookers. We finally found a dress at a bridal shop, paid too much, and had to sew on straps besides. Isn’t there anybody out there that has decent dresses?”

Today’s girls and teenagers want to feel cute, and want to be fashionable. Why can’t the clothing choices be appropriate and cute? Why does everything have to be low-cut, tight, revealing or provocative? To answer that it doesn’t, two major department stores have recently introduced more modest clothing lines, aiming at the vast market of girls, teens and women who believe confidence and intelligence is sexier than any amount of skin showing: Macy’s Shade line and Nordstrom’s Modern and Modest line.

What do you think? Are the choices out there in keeping with your values and sensibilities? Are you comfortable with the styles and examples we are being sold? Why or why not? Where’s the best place to find cute dresses for young ladies?