Category Archives: opinions

The trouble with writing parenting articles

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The thing about writing serious parenting posts is that nobody really wants to read them. You might happen to catch someone just there at the point where they’re either pregnant and reading everything they can get their hands on, or going through exactly that problem and wanting to learn about it. But mostly people just want to read things that support what they’re already doing. Nobody wants to read an article slapping them on the wrist about the way they’re parenting badly. They’ll just click away. They want to be validated. They want to be told that the kid is like this because they’re a kid, that’s all. And that they’re doing the right thing. And possibly that they should trust their instincts, because that’s the same as saying “You were right all along.”

I know this is true because it’s how I approach articles. I read them if they appear, by the headline, to be confirming what I already believe. If they fall into the category of “other”, I might skim them in order to see if I can ridicule them, but I’m more likely to just ignore. I don’t want you to tell me all the things I’m doing wrong. I probably know about them already anyway, and I don’t surf the internet because I’m not feeling guilty enough already.

In fact, the longer I go on reading parenting articles the more likely I am not to bother reading any new ones at all, because I know what they’re going to say. Even if I write them myself (my favourite kind, of course, because I agree with every word), it’s all getting pretty boring and samey at this stage of the game. So unless you have genuinely come up with a new angle that I haven’t thought of yet – and can convey that to me before I decide not to bother reading your piece – I’m probably not going to bother.

If you’re funny, mind you, I might stick around. If you have nice pictures, you might reel me in. If you make pop culture references that I understand but are just niche enough for me to know not everyone will, you will make me feel smart, and I will listen more closely to what you have to say, because you think I’m smart.

So I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind with anything I write. My bubble of Internet is one big circle of self-validating parents, high-fiving each other for our good choices and making in-jokes about Republicans/Gina Ford/people who don’t watch Doctor Who.

Converting others, then, is a lost cause. We may as well all just flex our tolerance muscles and stick to entertaining each other as best we can.

Don’t call her cute

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Don’t call my daughter cute.

I don’t mind. I think she’s cute too, sometimes. But she’ll have your guts for garters if she hears you.

A particularly chatty (and somewhat clueless) fellow customer in the supermarket made that mistake a week or so ago.

“You’re just so cute,” she said, in a cutesy-wutesy voice.

The five-year-old was unimpressed. “I’m not cute,” she countered, with a steely gaze.

I asked her later why she doesn’t like it – not because I disagreed with her stance, but just because I was interested in her reasoning.

“Cute means small. I’m not small. Babies are cute. I’m not a baby.”

Fair enough. Much like Thumbelina, in her heart she’s six feet tall. It’s not her fault that grownups are all still bigger than her.

On Friday, the dentist’s assistant tried to call her cute. Mabel was nervous about the visit, but I could tell this was galling her, so I came gallantly to her defense:

“She doesn’t like to be called cute, actually.”

“Oh? Well, what would she prefer?”

I took the opportunity to put some words in her mouth, since she wasn’t feeling quite as perky as she had been in the supermarket, and I suggested, “How about, I don’t know, smart?”

The dental assistant took that on board, though it’s not as easy to believably tell a child you just met and who won’t meet your eye, never mind talk to you, that she’s very smart.

But you know what, you wouldn’t tell a stranger you’d never met that she was very pretty. (Unless you were in a bar and trying to score, and bolstered by alcohol, and even then she might not appreciate it.) So how about you stop making superficial remarks about children in front of them, and instead, wait for them to talk to you first? That way, if they want to tell you about their new shoes or the fact that you’re buying their favourite snack because it’s their birthday next week, or that their favourite animal is the proboscis monkey, then you can legitimately have a conversation, at the end of which you might just be able to remark with sincerity that they are, indeed, a smart kid.

And then I will try to help them learn to take a compliment graciously, with a smile and a Thank you.

The homework debate

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My second-grader is doing his homework. It’s quick and easy and it doesn’t take long. But I started reminding (/asking/exhorting) him to do it when he got home from school at 3.45. He finally began at 7.20pm, after some outside playtime, some TV time, dinner, dessert, some more outside time, and a glass of milk. I’ve come to accept that this is how it is with him, and for now it’s working. He knows that ultimately he is responsible for his homework being done. I worry about how things will go next year, when they say the homework load really ramps up, and when if he starts at 7.30 he won’t finish till long past bedtime. I suppose he’ll live and learn. He’s not one to stress over his homework; I’m lucky that he’s a relaxed kid who loves school for its social aspects and has not yet been turned off learning for its own sake.

People used to think that we should show children it’s a tough world from the outset. Some people still feel that way, on one matter or another. You shouldn’t pick up your crying baby. You shouldn’t tolerate tantrums. You shouldn’t let that five-year-old sleep with the light on. They need to learn that life’s hard, and people are mean, and they need to buckle down and do their work; and the sooner they figure that out the better.

I think we should be kind to our babies and love them while we can, because life is short – and childhood shorter – even more than it’s hard; and because they will find out the rest soon enough.

And so I’m thinking about homework again . I’m not saying that people who expect children to do homework are cruel, Dickensian types, or that making a kindergardener come home from six hours of school and asking them to sit down and do homework is like forcing a three-month-old baby to cry it out – but then again, maybe one day in the future it will be seen that way.

I’m not big on research. I like to read the headlines and let other people do the heavy lifting. But I can tell you a few things I’ve seen recently that have stuck in my mind:

Homeschooling is a wonderful option for many people, but I am not one of those people. I like our local public school and I want to be part of it. My son loves school. I enjoy sending him to school every day and picking him up at the end of it. I don’t enjoy bugging him to do his homework for an hour or more every day while he strings me along with promises of “Yes, yes, after this,” and finally sits down to do it right when it’s dinnertime, or maybe bedtime.

I really don’t like the conversations I’ve had with other parents who have more intense children who burst into tears crying “I just want to play” when it’s time for homework, or whose studious third- or fourth-graders won’t hear of stopping after 45 minutes even when their mom says they’ll write a note because that’s long enough.

And on the whole, I know that my household has it easy right now. So far, the amount of homework he has had has been very reasonable, his teachers have been undemanding, and he’s not the type to stress over schoolwork. Once he finally sits down to do it, it goes pretty quickly these nights. Additionally, our school has said that roughly ten minutes per grade is as much work as they should be doing – 25 minutes for my second-grader, then; under an hour for a fifth-grader. (Does that mean zero minutes for a kindergardener?)

Children are not miniature adults. They are not just university students in training. Their minds and bodies are still developing and they have more learning to do than can be taught in school. Childhood is not the time for them to learn how to buckle down and work for a further two hours (or even 45 minutes) when every fibre of their being tells them they should be running and jumping and climbing trees and playing soccer and organizing skipping games with the other kids on the street and finding out what it is they love to do. They’ve spent six hours clamping down on their wild sides – or having them clamped down for them – when they get home it’s time to do the other thing.

I want there to be no homework. Not just less, but none, for the sake of our quality of life four nights a week, and my children’s childhoods. And I’m almost fired up enough to do something about it.

Slippery slope (A grammar rant)

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You know what annoys me?

Well, okay, plenty of things. The sun is too sunny, mosquitoes bite, I have no cookies in the house and yet can’t bring myself to make any because then I’ll eat them all; but no, something else.

The plural of euro, that’s what.

I know, I just lost most of you. Never mind. Come back tomorow, I’ll talk about kids or something.

The euro is the currency of many countries of Europe, and has been for several years now. It was introduced in Ireland only a few months before I left the country, which is why I still have to hunt and peck in my purse to find the right coins whenever we’re back there. At the time I was fully and gainfully employed as an editor – in a whole department of editors, no less – so the issue of how to properly refer to the new currency was discussed in a professional capacity, as it were.

We looked into it. It was discovered and agreed upon that the official word was that the plural of euro (in English) was to be “euros.” Sensible and obvious, since to make a plural in English we pretty much always do just add an s , especially when the singular ends in a vowel.* 

So why is it that, since that time, the entire country of Ireland decided, en masse and seemingly of its own volition, with no editiorial consultation, that if you had ten of these new units of currency, you would not have ten euros? No, no, of course you wouldn’t. You would have ten euro.**

I’ve tried to be good. Lord knows, I’ve done my damndest to hold the line, even from this distance. I talk about euros whenever I can, even in Ireland. All it has done is to make me sound like one of those crazies who insists on saying “fort” instead of “fort ay ” because it’s a French word, not an Italian one. (This may be another argument for another day.)

Apparently, much as has recently – heinously – happened with the definition of literally – about which I am figuratively hopping mad – common usage has triumphed and what was wrong has become acknowledged as right just because it’s what most people do.

I hate that. Talk about a slippery slope. One minute it’s euros, the next minute people will be advertising banana’s and apple’s and how its over their in the lady’s department and nobody will know where they stand and they’ll have to abolish the apostrophe all together, as well as common decency and saying thank you and not farting audibly in public.

*Collins still says this:
euro. (n.d.). Collins English Dictionary – Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition . Retrieved August 20, 2013, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/euro

** Dictionary.com is a flipping flip-flopper that refuses to have an opinion, so it says that the plural is either euro or euros.

Too old

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Lately, I’ve found myself saying to people that I’m too old for that.

It’s a good thing.

I’m not telling them I’m too old to dye my hair pink (should I so desire) or bungee jump off the Sydney Harbour Bridge (sure!) or wear a short skirt or exercise or eat dessert or read teen fiction or have lilac toenails. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I’m too old to spend time worrying about what other people think, because I trust my own judgement.

I’m too old to care about what other people are wearing, because I’ll wear what I feel good in.

I’m too old to bother with fake tan, because I’m finally learning to love my fair skin.

I’m too old to worry about what the bitchy girls are saying.

I’m too old to even take the time to figure out who the bitchy girls are.

You don’t have to wait till you reach the illustrious age of 40 to embrace this liberating mantra. You can be too old for all that at 20, or 30, or even 16, if you’re really ahead of the game. But I have to say it seems to come more easily as the years go on.

Chubby

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I would like to excise the words “fat” and “thin” from the English language.

Flashback: As we drove home with my tiny newborn daughter pinkly in the back seat, I allowed myself a few moments of fear about raising a girl: body image and self esteem were right there at the top of the list. But then I got over it and enjoyed my beautiful tiny snuggly baby.

Last night, my daughter – my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter – pulled me close to her and asked me in the whisper she uses when she’s being very serious, if she was a little bit too thin. She wanted to know if thin was good or fat was good.

My heart broke a tiny bit. Maybe more than a tiny bit.

“You are exactly perfect and beautiful,” I told her, perhaps a bit too fiercely. “Remember that always. Exactly perfect.”

And I told her that thin and fat are not bad and good things. Good is fresh air and exercise and being strong and healthy. Bad is, well, nothing, so long as you don’t overdo it. At least, I tried to tell her, but she probably went off at a tangent about something else entirely before I’d said even a quarter of all the important things I have to say – that it’s my duty as her mother and a woman who was a girl – to tell her.

I just have to keep telling her, don’t I?

Legitimately a little chubby, perhaps.

*She learned the word “chubby” from the movie Tangled . I wish she hadn’t.

Mind, body, baby

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Your head is connected to your body.

This is something that apparently didn’t occur to me when I had my first baby. I decided to try believing it for my second , and it turned out to be true. Stop the presses.

To be fair, we’re not used to thinking about things this way. When you fall off your bike and scrape your knee as a child, you can’t stop the bleeding with the power of your mind. When you slice into the top of your thumb cutting a bagel, no matter how hard you concentrate you’re still going to need a band-aid. And because we’re conditioned to think of giving birth as a medical situation – because, you know, it happens in hospital, attended by doctors – we assume that we can’t just think the baby out either.

Okay, so you can’t actually, necessarily, think the baby out. There are a lot of factors you have no control over in the great rollercoaster ride of giving birth, but there are also elements where your mind has more influence than you might understand. It’s just that birth has become so medicalized, so much treated as an illness – a great hurdle with which a woman’s body cannot cope unless aided by drugs, interventions, surgeons perhaps – that the fact that you do actually have some influence over your own body is often forgotten.

Worse than that, even, I had the vague impression that anyone who told me my mind could help me give birth was in league with the hippies. You know, the hippies. The crazy women who want to paint their feelings and eat placenta paté and wear their hair in a centre parting and probably give birth naked.

Well, I’m a civilised modern woman and there’s no reason not to use the drugs that the good Lord got the doctors to invent for us and I’ll certainly be keeping my clothes respectably on when I give bir…. oh.

You have to take your clothes off to have a baby. At least, the ones you’re most used to keeping on. You may as well divest yourself of all your other preconceptions, while you’re at it. Giving birth, as I have mentioned before , is an elemental, visceral, down deep and dirty business, and you have to get in touch with your inner cavewoman.*

Your inner cavewoman is a hippie. Of course.

So remember what the hippies say, and believe it with all your heart, because it’s true:

  • A woman’s body is designed to give birth. If this was not the case, the human race would never have made it this far.
  • Once labour has started, your state of mind has an effect on your cervix. It really does. 
  • Visualization and verbal affirmations do make a difference. Because your mind is connected to the rest of your body, and just as I can tell my fingers to type these words, I can control what’s happening inside. The problem is simply that we’re not used to telling our cervix what to do, and we can’t see the results in front of us, so we suspect that it’s all just crazy touchy-feely claptrap.

If you’re pregnant, read Ina May Gaskin’s . Disregard the 80′s-esque photos and let the words sink in. Read the birth stories and remember that these are real stories of real women who simply chose to believe in their own bodies. Look into something like Birthing from Within or HypnoBirthing or (if you’re in Ireland) GentleBirth . They are not as kooky as you might think. In fact, they might not be kooky at all.

Read happy birth stories and stop watching all those TV shows where women give birth lying on their backs strapped to monitors in hospital beds, screaming in agony and finally, probably, being wheeled off for an emergency c-section.

Giving birth for the first time is a totally alien experience for most of us in the modern world, where birth tends to be hidden away from all but those immediately involved. It’s scary and weird and like nothing you’ve ever experienced before: a new human is about to burst forth from your nether regions, after all. Hire a doula, if you possibly can. No matter how well prepared you are, having someone who knows what’s going on – with your body, with the environment, with the medical professionals – who’s there solely for your benefit, is like having a GPS where previously you had only a candle.

 Trust your body. It’s trying to bring this baby into the world. Work with it, not against it.

Baby Dash, just born or thereabouts

PS: No, I’m not contemplating another birth of my own. A friend had a baby and it made me think, again, that’s all.

PPS: Of course, you can do all these things and believe in your body and be the biggest hippie on the block and still need intervention, and then isn’t it wonderful that modern medicine exists for just these times? I’m not advocating that you run off to the backwoods to have your baby beyond ken of mortal midwife, because that’s not terribly sensible. I’m just airing some thoughts and discoveries that I wish someone had stuffed down my own gullet the first time I was pregnant.

* I don’t think I came up with the inner cavewoman thing, but I can’t remember where I read it. If you know, and especially if it was you, please tell me and I’ll put in an appropriate link.

Pope-ular

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Yesterday I had to leave the house at 3.00 to get Dash from school, as usual. The new pope was due to be announced and I had the tv on, but even though I waited – “Come on, it’s two minutes past, where is he?” – I had to leave without finding out who it was.

Not that I even knew who the contenders were. wasn’t one of them, neither was Grumpy Cat, and they were the only possibilities my Facebook feed had informed me of in the past weeks; but suspense is suspense and the Vatican knows how to play up a theatrical moment. I asked my friend-and-neighbour, as we bumped into her on the way up the road, if she knew, and we reminisced about past popes, as you do.

“When Ratzinger was elected I was teaching middle school…” she started to tell me.

Hang on. What? But she was a teacher a lifetime ago, and Ratzinger is almost new. I know it’s a lifetime ago because her kids are the same age as mine, and she taught before they were born. I was … wait, I was in southmost Texas, so it was my kids’ lifetimes ago too, but I feel like the election of the last pope is still a pretty recent event because I blogged about it .

Which just goes to show that I’ve been blathering on here for a long time. For more than a whole pope, you could say, using the ancient and irregular unit of measurement.

Everyone’s saying – where “everyone” is the people I know who might discuss these things – that they hope this pope is more open to change and more forward-looking and more willing to let in tiny things like, say contraception or women priests to the Catholic church. I said it myself yesterday.

But I’ve changed my mind.

The thing is, if the Catholic church did all those things that I and many other Catholics and ex-Catholics want it to, things like accepting contraception, and considering married clergy or even women priests, and acknowledging that it’s okay to be gay (not even touching on the more controversial topics like abortion and euthanasia), it wouldn’t be the Catholic church any more. So I think I actually agree with what Benedict said about wanting a “smaller, purer church.”

If all the people who genuinely disagree with the church’s teachings but still wish to participate in organized religion voted with their feet and left, heading instead for some more inclusive and accepting place (Anglicanism is not a huge stretch), the church would be much smaller – and perhaps have fewer resources and therefore less influence.

So many people stay in the church for the sake of tradition: because they were raised that way and it’s what they know, and they like the warm familiarity of the hymns and the responses and doing what they always did at Christmas and Easter. Maybe because your mother would be devastated if you didn’t, because you’ve never heard of anyone moving church – sure one’s as good as another, even because your in-laws wanted to know when the party was when you had the first baby, so you had a christening even though you hadn’t been to mass in years, and things just snowballed from there.

But unless you’re particularly attached to the other things that only come with Catholicism – transubstantiation and venerating Mary and the saints are all I can think of right now – maybe it’s time to move on. My mother was never a big fan of “a la carte” Catholics who take what they like and ignore the rest, and I’m starting to come around to her opinion, albeit from the opposite direction.

I know many people talk about working for change from within, which is laudable indeed. But the Church doesn’t want to be changed. The Church would rather you left, actually, if you want things like equality and contraception. God is God, and I’m firmly convinced that he/she/it doesn’t care what religion you adhere to and whose rules you follow so long as they’re not hurting anyone else.

Then again, I’m an atheist 85% of the time, so you can feel free to disregard my opinions on God altogether.


 Disclaimer: As always when I talk about religion, I don’t wish to offend anyone and absolutely acknowledge your right to believe whatever you want so long as you respect everyone else’s point of view too. The flying spaghetti monster endorses this post.


Labels, schmabels

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When Dash was born, before we left the hospital they brought us one last paper to sign. It went something like this:

DECLARATION OF INTENT: PARENTING STYLE

Please accept or decline the following.

We hereby declare that we will raise this child entirely according to the principles of Attachment Parenting, never deviating from the laws set out by Dr Bill Sears in his canonical volumes, including but not limited to the following basic tenets:

  • always wearing the baby and/or child, never pushing them in any type of wheeled conveyance 
  • breastfeeding on demand, at every peep, day and night, for the entirety of the first two years and thereafter as long as you possibly can
  • sleeping like a big happy pile of puppies in a family bed until the day the child decides they want to sleep alone
  • never, ever, allowing the baby to cry. At all.

On receipt of this signed declaration, you will be issued with an Attachment Parenting card. The Attachment Parenting Police may stop by your house unannounced at any point and your card may be revoked if such things as a stroller, a crib, or an open tin of formula are found in your possession.

Sign here: ____________________

Then there was a note:

Alternatively, you may wish to join the Evil Parenting movement. In this case, you will need form 666B, wherein you will avow to eschew slings, wraps, and carriers of all types; to wean the day your baby turns six months old or starts solids, whichever happens first – or to use formula from the get-go; to leave your baby in a crib in a dark room down the hall from your bedroom from day one and never ever nurse him/her to sleep; and to generally follow faithfully the principles laid out by either Ezzo or Gina Ford to the letter.

In big letters along the bottom, it said: THERE IS NO MIDDLE WAY.

Oh, wait. No, they didn’t.

We left the hospital with a new baby and a few ideas about how we wanted to look after him. When one thing didn’t work, we tried another. We ended up doing what worked, until it stopped, and then we looked at our options, read a variety of books, and tried again. After a while, the baby got bigger and those things were easier and different things were important. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Parenting is a journey, not a label.

Now can everyone please just go back to whatever they were doing last week?

Wherein I confess how ill-informed I really am

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If we didn’t have children, I’d be a lot better informed. Or, perhaps, if B and I went on more dates – but not ones to see a movie.

Backing up to explain my point. (Beep beep beep.) I’m not good at politics. My brain tends to curl up in a little ball (even more, I mean) and sing “la la laaaa” when people talk about politics. I don’t know why, but it’s always been this way. When I read the newspaper, in hard copy or online, I scan the headlines and look at the pictures, and then skip to the Style section. I am much more likely to retain a quote I saw in passing about Christian Louboutin’s red-soled high heels than who has dropped out of the Republican race and who’s still in the running.

(Partly, and I have to parenthesise even more here in a whole paragraph of its own, this is because they all have stupid pretend names that I can’t distinguish from one another. I mean: Mitt (short for Mitten?), Newt (short for Lizard?) – what’s the difference? I only discovered this morning that Rush Limbaugh is not actually another candidate – he sounds like a candidate, doesn’t he? And I know Rick Santorum because of the Dan Savage thing years ago, but I still have no clear idea of how their policies stand or what they’re like as people. Admittedly, this is because I don’t read the articles, but it’s also because even if I did I’d forget whether I was reading about Mitt or Newt or some other guy. As far as I’m concerned they’re all crazy right-wing Republicans, and that’s all I need to know. Surely none of them will ever actually get into power.)

The average member of the Irish general public knows a lot more about the American political situation than I do right now. This was made painfully clear when B’s uncle asked me while we were in Ireland what I thought of the candidates, and I really had nothing to say. I mean, I still have nothing to say. What is there to think, other than that no reasonable person would vote for any of them? Do I really have to waste time finding out more? I tried to fall back on a joke, saying that I look to my husband for guidance in such matters, but unfortunately I was seated on the side of the uncle’s deaf ear, and by the time I’d repeated it clearly, it made me sound like just the sort of wife these candidates seem to want me to be, which I promise was not my intention.

But the thing is that B is one of the few people (as well as all of you, now, but you don’t exist in real life, do you?) to whom I’ll admit the depths of my ignorance on subjects like this, and let inform me of all the things most people know already. He’s very good at explaining things from first principles, which usually leads to more information than one needed, but in this case is exactly what I want. I mean, I know the basics of Democrats v Republicans, and which one Obama is and which one the Bushes were, but beyond that whatever you can tell me is probably good information. And I respect B’s principles and we have pretty much the same views on things, so to be honest, if he told me how to vote I’d probably find after doing some research that I came to the same conclusions.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that as non-citizens, neither of us do have a vote of any type in this country. As non-residents, we don’t have a vote in our home country either, as Ireland does not do postal votes. But there’s an unofficial online voting campaign that has happened for the last two elections, and I have researched the candidates running in my home constituency and decided who I would vote for there. Exercising my right to vote has always been important to me, even if all I could do for sure was to help try to keep the obviously crazy candidates out of power.

So when I see headlines like this one (pulled from my Facebook feed just now): “Alabama State Senator Proposes Legislation to Prohibit ‘Women and Non-Whites’ From Voting,” I go, “Oh, come on,” and don’t click it because I don’t even want to validate its existence by reading about it. And, I suppose, as a married woman for whom another pregnancy would not be a wholesale disaster, I’m in the happy position of not feeling too immediately personally affected by all the utter bullshit that the old white men are trying to come up with right now. But I have a daughter, and if the US turns out to be more backward about women’s reproductive rights than even my home country,* I’m going to have to start paying attention.  

(*Did you know that abortion of any kind is still illegal in Ireland? ( Read this. It’s an eye-opener.) Before 1985 you needed a prescription to buy a condom there. Divorce came in in 1996. Most of the schools are run by the Catholic Church… all this I’m used to, this I can deal with, though it’s far from ideal.) 

Which brings me to today. Today I put on what I believe are called “dress trousers” – that is, the sort of thing I used to wear to my semi-casual workplace, and a necklace (and also a top and a cardigan, and a bra too, but I’m just not mentioning that because I do usually wear a bra and also a top, as opposed to the other things which are less frequently disported these days) and boots with a bit of a heel, and tried to look like a responsible adult, because B and I went to talk to a lawyer about doing that ultimate responsible adult thing of making a will. (Finally. After meaning to do it for six years or so now. I know, I know.) I suppose I could have gone in my jeans and my sneakers just like any other day, but I felt the need to be in my “professional” guise. It’s funny, it had been so long since I’d dressed that way that the word that came to mind when I looked in the mirror was “mannish”. I changed my cardigan for a lighter colour, put on the jewellery and some lipstick, and hoped for the best. I think it was just the unfamiliar silhouette that wierded me out.

Anyway, we dropped the children to their respective schools and went to meet the nice man, who turned out to be the perfect conjunction of older enough to make us feel like he knows what he’s talking about, and not so old that we felt he’d be better engaged polishing up the codicils of his own will rather than ours. As we left, he congratulated us on doing the responsible adult thing. I felt like wailing, “But we’re nearly 40!” At what point do we actually become responsible adults in the eyes of the older generation?

And then, since we still had half an hour to kill, we went and had a coffee date at Starbucks and pretended to be having a business meeting like the other businessly-dressed people there. I have no idea when the last time I sat and had a coffee in public with my husband without fielding constant demands for chocolate milk and lemon pound cake was, and it was very nice. It also enabled him to give me a quick overview of the Republican candidates, and a quick update on the fact that Rush Limbaugh isn’t actually one of them.

As soon as we got Mabel from school though, the discussion was peppered with “Mummy!” and “Stop talking!” and “When I was in the sandbox I looked for Anne but I couldn’t find her…” and “Nobody is allowed talk!” and other such imperious demands. Which is why we don’t usually get to have conversations.

Now, where’s that babysitter’s e-mail again?
___

Note: I hope I haven’t offended anyone with my offhand dismissal of all Republican politicians as crazies. Your views are your own, and mine, as I am pointing out, are all but non-existent. I’m trying to remedy this, so that I have actual opinions the better with which to offend you. I mean, other people who aren’t reading this.