Another parenting lesson

So. It's been the kind of day that leaves me mixing peanut butter and powdered sugar in a bowl and eating it straight up. Yeah, kids push me to do things I never thought possible. And not always in a good way.

Today is the day when all of my parenting ideas collided head-on, and in the resulting wreckage, people were hurt.

I have written about Sander before -- about how much I struggle with how to parent him, and about the rules I've had to make for myself to keep me sane and grounded while I'm on this journey.

And still, I have days where I'm just left on the floor at the end of the day, with no reserves of energy or brain power or kindness or cheeriness left, eating peanut butter "cookie dough" and shaking inside at what a disaster it was, and counting the ways I could have done it differently.

This move was hard on all of us, but it was hardest on Sander. He hates change the way cats hate baths. Last week I painted a kitchen stool a different color, to match the new kitchen. He refuses to use it until I paint it the color it was before. That's the way he is -- he likes what he likes. How the hell was I supposed to know that I wasn't allowed to paint a yellow step-stool red?

He hated our new violin teacher on sight. She was organized, together, strict, tidy, and a bit compulsive about obedience and rules.

"Shoes off when you enter the studio. Look at me when you talk, please. No yawning unless you cover your mouth. Oh, dear, tsk, tsk, even Mommy forgot to take her shoes off... That's the second time I've had to tell you about yawning. I know Scout's only two, but she has to learn to whisper when her brothers are having their lesson. That will be a quarter every time you yawn if I have to tell you again..."

Honestly, not a good fit for us at all. She intimidated even me, and I'm usually the overbearing scary one. However: She was a very, very good violin teacher, and after four months with no lessons, we needed to get back into it hard. 

My idea was that we'd work with her for one semester. I paid for the semester in advance (my first mistake,) and told her that Sander needed to be coaxed into trying new things.

"Pish-posh. He just needs structure and consistent discipline. He'll be fine with me. Sander has met his match."

After the first lesson, Sawyer was very happy, and Sander was in tears. Sawyer has issues with fine motor skills and needs a lot of help with violin. He's also cheerful, compliant, and sweet. The violin teacher loved him.

Sander? "I'm not going to listen to her, I'm not going to do another lesson, and I'm never going in there again, and you can't make me. And I'm selling my violin."

Fabulous. Now we've been set up for a showdown. This teacher says she knows what she's doing, and that if I let her work with Sander, she'll whip him into shape and he'll be fine. He says that he hates her guts and never wants to do another lesson with her.

My second mistake? I didn't follow my own rules. You know, the one where I say to listen to your kid?

I had this whole thing that if I just pushed him a little bit beyond his comfort zone, made him push his limits a bit beyond "I don't wanna," then maybe he'd be better off in the long run.

But at every lesson, it got worse instead of better. She wanted him to play using all four fingers. "But my old teacher said I only need three fingers."
"Sander, you need to play with four and I don't want to hear another word about it. That's the way we do it here."

Tears. Frustration. Refusal to practice. Bribes were used. A lot. Misery. And there was more of "I paid for the whole semester and it was a lot of money and your brother likes it so we're staying" than I'd ever like to admit.

And still, I insisted that he go to the last lesson today. Despite begging, pleading and tears, I asked him if he could just do one more lesson.

Fine, he said. As long as he didn't have to play with all four fingers.

Fine, says I. The teacher's a Suzuki teacher. We chose this because they're kind. They're easy-going. They're all about playing with love and joy. She's not going to be mean.

Wrong. It was doomed from the start -- he was hot. He was wearing the wrong pants and was itchy. He couldn't find his violin. He wanted a snack. And when we walked in, he had the look on his face that said, "Find a reason to make me hate you some more."

And when she said, "Play the first song, with all four fingers, please," he wouldn't do it. First, he pretended he couldn't. Then he just wouldn't. Then he just stood there and said, "Nooooooooo."

From there, it went downhill fast.

And that, people, is how my son got fired from violin.

By the end of the session, the teacher asked him to leave and told him not to come back. And she told me that after teaching for 40 years, she'd never had a more disrespectful, disobedient child.

And you know what? I don't care.

Because she broke every rule I had about parenting, and I should have stopped this in its tracks long ago. 

It's not disrespectful to say no. It's not defiant to say, "This is too much for me and it's new and I'm overwhelmed and I need you to guide me, not order me."

And if she couldn't hear that in a little boy's cries of "I can't do this and it's too hard," then she's the wrong teacher for my son.

I know there are parents who will say that I should have made him behave -- that this, in its essence, is the fault with homeschooling. That the entire point of education is to learn from difficult people, to learn to adapt to circumstances that are less than ideal, and to learn how to obey when asked.

I disagree completely. The entire point of an education is to learn about how to be a good human being who can find happiness and make the world a better place for other human beings.

Thus, violin lessons. Music, joy, self-expression, self-disclipline to help overcome the tyranny of our own wants and desires. There's nothing in this list about masochism, humiliation, or pain.

And it's my job to remember to have my kid's back. When he says something is wrong, it's my job to listen the first time.

There will be other times when he is faced with something that feels like too much, and I will still have to navigate the fine line between, "Yes, you can do this, go on, even if it's scary," and "I'm making you do something that's way out of your league, and we're all going over the cliff together."

But now, at age eight, I needed to support him, and I took the teacher's side instead of his, and I was wrong.

So, I apologized to the teacher, because she was upset, and because I feel like we did her a disservice. She's a good teacher for many kids, and I should have walked away weeks ago. I apologized to Sander, for not listening. And he apologized to me, for the meltdown.

I told him that I loved him, no matter what. And I asked him if he knew that.

He looked at me and said, "Why do you ask me that? I always feel loved. Well, except by violin teachers who fire me. But I don't need them to love me."

As always, Sander will be fine. That there is a kid who has no problems with self-esteem.

Me?

I'm going to go re-read my parenting rules, remember that it's more important to have a kid who's kind than a kid who can play the violin, I'm going to book lessons with a new teacher, and I'm going to eat a lot more sugar.

Maybe I'll go add chocolate chips to the peanut butter mix...

Mr. Voldemort's last horcrux

That's my dad in the picture above.

I've taken to calling him Mr. Voldemort in my blog posts because, well, it seems to fit.

He really is, despite his good looks, a rotten old bastard, and as much as I adored him to the point of worship when I was a kid, there's not much good in him. He is brilliant, funny, and astoundingly successful at talking women into bed, and on the face of it, you'd think he was a good guy.

You'd be wrong. He's not nice. He's not kind. He's not reliable, honest, sweet, dependable, trustworthy, good-natured, even-tempered, sober, cheerful or loyal.

In fact, of all of the Boy Scout traits of good character (trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent,) he gets two: Brave and clean. Well, and I'll give him courteous, because he has flawless, impeccable manners, as long as he's not mad at you. If he is, all bets are off.

He's 81 years old, and he's dying. He doesn't have much longer -- my mother says it's less than a month. Maybe it will be this week. Maybe it will be a few weeks. He should have been dead years ago. He's the kind of guy they made up the phrase "tough old bastard" about.

I joke that he's on his last horcrux -- in Harry Potter, Voldemort splits his soul into seven pieces, and can't be killed until they're all found -- because by all rights, this guy should have died when the mafia stabbed him in the kidneys, or when my mother tried to poison him, or when his first wife tried to kill him when she found he was leaving her for my mom, or when he had a heart attack and drove himself to the hospital, or when any one of a dozen men found him in bed with their wives.

And yet.

Yet, yet, yet.

This is my *Daddy* we're talking about. Who took me fishing when I was ten, and quoted MacBeth to me, and told me about the constellations. The man who taught me to sing "It ain't gonna rain no more," and who told me wild stories about wrestling alligators and riding his bike cross country and lumberjacking with the Indians in the '50s. The man who was roommates with Warren Beatty, who boasted that he could "out-think, out-play, out-smart, out-wit, out-last and out-fuck" every man in the room when a young punk talked smack about his game of pool.

He taught me to play pool, how to make a shrimp cocktail and a mean chocolate mousse, and how to appreciate a Matisse and a symphony. He explained why the Great Books matter, and he showed me a quick wit is sexier than a great body. And I really thought that perhaps he was super-human, and he'd live forever.

He was an actor, when that meant something besides movies. He never wanted to be a movie star. He just wanted to be adored. And now, because he's been mean and nasty to anyone who ever loved him, he is alone with my mother. Mrs. Voldemort. I wouldn't wish dying alone with her on anyone. Not even him.

This boy, in the picture below, is my boy. Sander.

He's eight years old, and so much like my father. He's stubborn as a mule, he wants what he wants when he wants it, and he believes that he should be the center of the universe.

The last time we saw my dad, he took one look at Sander, and my dad looked at me, and said, "Good-looking boy."

I said, "With any luck, he'll be as good-looking as you were."

My dad said, "NO ONE is as good-looking as I was."

And that, of course, was part of the problem. My mother said that women just about fell over themselves to get to my dad. The night she met him, she saw him get out of a limousine in a tuxedo, and she said to the friend she was with, "He's mine. Hands off."

Apparently, it didn't matter to either one of my parents that he was already married. Or that he had a son who was not quite three.

My father, at some point on our last visit, told Sander that he was going to grow up to be a *very* handsome man.

Sander has said to me, "Mom, you're going to have to help me let down all of the girls gently. I really can't handle more than one at a time."

But here's the thing: Every time my father mouthed off to his mother and step-father when he was a kid, he was beaten.

When Sander mouths off, we work through it and give him a hug.

When Sander refuses to work and lies on the ground and says he wants out of the family, I remember that when my dad did that, he was locked out for three days. And I hug Sander and tell him that he's stuck with us. 

When Sander can't quite get a grip on himself, I think of my father. And slowly, gently, quietly, inch by inch, I see the shining, beautiful, amazing things that are hidden deep in my father, and I see them coming through in Sander. The stubbornness turns to determination, as he tries to get things done.

The frustration that he wants it NOW turns into patience, as he learns that a baby sister takes precedence over non-essential needs. The trust that my father never had, and never deserved, grows every day with Sander, as he learns that really and truly, if he gives in, just a little, and trusts that we're all on the same team, it will come back to him in spades and he will have someone watch his back.

Sander's frustration lessens every day as he gets older. He's still tough. There are still days when I want to just say, "Goddamn it, kid, I'm going to ground you, punish you -- do what it takes so you will just LISTEN!"

And then I remember that my grandmother beat my father so badly that he left home at 14 and never went back.

And from the very few times when I have tried "discipline" rather than "massage" as tactics with Sander, I know what happened.

This child has an independent, wild streak that will never be broken. He will never "listen" to me. He will never "obey." It's not in his nature. I can coax him to be on my team, win him over so he's a loyal team player, and love him like crazy. But with a kid like this -- volatile, edgy, and determined -- one violent act would be the end of everything. He trusts me. He loves me. All of the beautiful "could have beens" that make up my father come out in my beloved, gorgeous, amazing boy. All it would take is "one good spanking to set him straight," and I'd lose that forever.

And so, while I will mourn my father, or what's left of him, I will celebrate the new. Sander doesn't have all of the Boys Scout traits: He's not thrifty or reverent, he's certainly not clean, and I don't know if he's ever going to be obedient. But he's trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, cheerful and brave.

I can be proud of that. I wish my dad were the kind of man who could be, too, instead of only seeing that he's good-looking.

But I can't save my dad. I can't go back and have a re-do with his childhood, and be kind to him, and tell him that it's all going to be OK. Because it wasn't. His childhood was hellish and violent and full of nastiness. To his credit, he was never violent or unkind to us as children, because he wanted better for us.

And so, when Mr. Voldemort finally gives up that last horcrux, whether it's a day from now, or a month from now, he will have taught me the most important lesson of all: How to raise his grandchildren into wonderful human beings, with all of his good traits, and none of his bad ones. And if I succeed, that will be one hell of an accomplishment.

The Emu Egg story

 

Originally published April 9, 2009 

Sander was asking me about the emus today. He wanted to go see if there were any eggs left. I thought it was time to trot out the Emu Egg Story. Because some things never get old.

So. Put these words together into a story: Four-year-old boy. Two-year-old, fragile, rancid Emu egg. Hardwood floors.

You know where this is going. You can see it. You can prevent it in your mind.

So why, oh why, for the love of my nostrils and the love of being able to stand in my kitchen without throwing up, why couldn’t I see it coming???

When we moved here three years ago, my very, very, very old neighbor, named Eloi the Emu guy, had emus. He also had a very, very, ancient mother whom he carted around town in his ancient car and they went to What-a-burger for their weekly treat. He’s grumpy and mean and the only time we grunted at each other was when he rode his lawnmower past our fence. Occasionally we’d leave him some stale pecans to feed his emus (I have no idea if emus eat pecans, but something in his yard will eat them!)

He lives on six acres next door to us, with only a barbed-wire fence between us and the emus. He also has a goat and an animal that’s either a long-haired sheep or a very strange goat.

He also has, thankfully, a disgusting house, with so much trash and garbage and weird piles of stuff all over the front of his house that no one will ever complain about us not mowing the lawn.

Also, I figure if he has emus, a goat and a sheep-type creature in the city limits, we’re safe with chickens.

Unfortunately, his mother died recently, and the emus went away. So did the goat and the sheep, and someone came and cleaned up all the stuff.

It had been so bad on his porch that when my sister went by one day, after stepping though the piles of old bicycle baskets and coffee cans and weird piles of newspaper, she picked up a notepad on his porch to leave him a note and put her hand in a wasp’s nest (and you really want to leave him a note and not talk to him, because he answers the door in his underwear with no shirt on. Good look for Brad Pitt. Not-so-good look for Eloi.)

I’m really kind of bummed they picked it all up. It made my house look SO much nicer when it was a mess over there.

So, the emus. Scary. Mean. BIG. And there were three of them. One day a couple of years ago, Mark and the boys went for a walk and decided to cut through the neighbor’s yard.

Yah. Right through the emus. After the running and screaming and dodging the huge birds while Mark threw both boys like a javelin over the barbed wire fence to escape the HUGE claws of the giant raptors, Sander showed me their trophy: One pure white, giant, beautiful egg.

This was his treasure and his prize and the thing he loved the most in the world.

It was, of course, a time bomb waiting for the right moment.

Last week, Sander cleaned out his closet. Meaning that he dumped everything on to the floor so he could see all the “cool stuff” on the top shelf. Meaning stuff that I’d hidden because I didn’t want him getting into it.

Out comes the stinking time bomb of death.

“I LOVE my emu egg! It’s my favorite thing! I LOVE it so, so much!!”

And that was it. We tried to hide it again for three days. No good. He couldn’t sleep without it. Couldn’t live without it. 

So, yesterday, as someone is ON THEIR WAY to videotape my house and my boys for a documentary on how cool homeschooling is, Sander walks in the kitchen with the egg and a new plan: He’s going to keep it safe from bad guys. Something this valuable, this special, this amazing, will obviously be stolen. All he has to do is very carefully wrap it in this BANG

Silence. For a moment, a big breath to start tears. And then, forget about crying. Forget about anything else except getting the hell away from that kitchen.

Go outside and puke and hope to God you never, ever smell anything like that, ever again. It smelled like dead puppies left in the sun, wrapped in diapers of cholera victims. Rotten egg doesn’t even begin to describe it. And it wasn’t a smell -- it was a force field or a thick wall of nausea from which there was no escape.

This sucker didn’t break. It exploded with full force, leaving shrapnel from the pits of sulphuric hell embedded into my walls.

And we had guests on the way. And Sander was not having any comforting. He wanted me to fix the damned egg.

Everything in my house smells like rot and death and corpse. By the time the woman arrived an hour later, she said she couldn’t smell it. Probably because the chlorine gas from all the bleach I used while I was vomiting and cleaning destroyed her olfactory nerves in her brain. I can only hope to be so lucky.

Sander and his dad went to the now-abandoned emu yard last night on a hunt for another egg. They only found fragments of old ones.

God help Mark if he’d actually come home with another one...

Watching whales

This is the face of a seven-year-old boy who has fulfilled a dream.

We went on a whale watch off the coast of California this week. The day was glorious, the weather amazing, and off we went, 40 miles out to sea, with a group of people who had, apparently, lived in caves their entire lives.

They had never heard of being seasick. They had no idea that perhaps, before you spent more than seven hours out on the open water, you should, just maybe, stock up on Dramamine. That if you get a little queasy on a roller coaster, maybe a whale watch isn't where you want to be.

That taking little girls who vomit at the idea of vomit out onto a boat where every third person is heaving over the side might not be a picnic. And that if you're actually eating a picnic and there are people barfing onto the table next to you and it splashes onto your lunch, you might lose your lunch, so to speak.

So, despite the trauma of being on a boat surrounded by people who threw up, copiously, conspicuously, loudly and profusely, as well as, shall we say, closely, violently and often, the lucky few of us who were NOT part of the "barf boat brigade" managed to have a very good time.

Sander was a little green, but some Dramamine helped. Sawyer has my stomach, apparently made of steel wool and impervious to any movement. And Scout was rocked to sleep the entire time by the motion of the waves and so missed the entire technicolor experience.

When we could look away from the human drama inside the boat, what we saw outside was astounding.

The whales are migrating this time of year, and we were hoping we'd get lucky enough to see a humpback or two.

We saw 35 or 40. Plus a blue whale, 1,500 saddleback dolphins, six or eight bottlenose dolphins and enough sea lions to start our own Sea World show.

For a boy whose dream was to "see a whale in the wild," this was the trip of his life.

He still wants to see an Orca, and they weren't in this part of the world, and of course the platypus is still highest on his list.

The whales were amazing, and though I know that's an overused word, it's still a good description of it. To think that people went out in tiny rowboats to go and try to kill one, and that they succeeded! I was scared at the size of them while on a huge boat made of steel, with a motor to take me safely away. The thought of being on a wooden ship, with sails, or in a rowboat armed with harpoons is beyond my grasp. And how desperate you would have to be to even attempt it!

Plus, of course, the seasickness. We were able to laugh about it, but spending months and months like that, in the hold of a ship coming from England, or worse, from Africa?

And yet people survived it, and worse.

That's why we go on whale watches, I think. Because it reminds us of how we got here, how small we really are, and how little we know about the world around us.

And because the human dramas played out on the barf boat were every bit as interesting as the dramas played out in the water. 

Parenting rules

Sawyer, my oldest son, was born 12 years ago this week.

And when Sawyer was one, my nephew Matthew, who was 11, moved in and became our adopted kid until he left for the Navy at 17. So, though I only have 12 years of motherhood under my bra, I have raised kids from birth through 17. Nice trick, huh?

And a fact that I realized tonight that stopped me cold: In one year, Sawyer turns 13. And I will then have a teenager in the house until June 6, 2030. Clearly, this was not well-planned...

I have no more insight on parenthood than anyone else who's gone before me, and don't have any answers as to how to do it right.

However, there are certain things I wish I'd been warned about, and there are rules I've come up with to make sure I'm on the right path. I'm sure in ten years, when I have another twelve year old, this will seem quaint, and I'll have a new list of rules.

But for now, this is what I know and what I've learned, half-way through this parenting gig:

The bodily fluids. Oh, God, the sheer volume of it all! Who knew? I knew there were diapers. I knew there was potty training. But oh, the amount of things I was't ready for!

There will be poop. Yours, when you're pushing the kids out, just to get you used to the concept of public defecation. And then, of course, the baby starts in on it. But after the first baby, the poop won't even make you blink. Not most of the time, anyway. 

There will be pee, and this is the least of your problems. You don't even notice pee by baby number two. It's not nearly gross enough, compared to everything else.

There will be boogers. More than you ever thought about. And you'll clean them up with your hands when you're desperate. Even if you swear you never will. You will.

There will be vomit, and just when you've cleaned up and changed the sheets and you're sound asleep again, there will be more vomit.

There will be blood. Hopefully, not much, but more than, say, your husband or your best friend bleeds.

Remember the thing about pee not being a big deal? It becomes a big deal again. When they're ten, or twelve, and they pee on the front lawn. Or off the back porch. Or anywhere, really, all the time. In fact, it's possible that ten-year-old boys pee everywhere except into the toilet. They're very, very good about hitting around the toilet, behind the seat in the little cracks that are impossible to clean, and in the screws under the toilet that will fester and stink. But never, ever, actually in the toilet.

There will also, of course, be laundry, tears, spilled drinks and messes, but we're talking about parenthood here -- that's just part of the deal.

There will be pain. Parenthood will hurt more than you ever thought possible.

Remember the first time you fell in love and you thought you'd never get over the feeling that you were flying and how amazing it was? Someone wanted you and loved you! And then, the first time you were dumped and nothing has ever hurt that much? Yeah, parenthood's like that.

Only about ten million times more intense, and you can't dump them no matter how much of an ass they are. Even if they do the equivalent of cheat on you and humiliate you and insult you and tell you that "you're a bitch and they don't have to take that shit from you" in public.
And they will. 

And it gets worse: You have all of the pain of loving someone desperately and not having control over how they behave -- and that, of course, is incredibly painful -- but they will be in pain, and it will hurt you. They will cry when a friend says they're annoying, and you hurt worse than they do, because you can see that it was true, even as you swear to them that they're not annoying.

Someone will break their heart, and yours in the process. How fair is that? It used to be that you had a say in having your heart broken -- you could choose "not to play the game, to be cool."

Nope. That's all gone. You're in the game for good, now.

Nature vs. Nurture? That's gone, too. It's all nature. All nurture does is protect the good stuff and keep the bad from taking over. Your family's the garden. Your kids are seeds. You can help the plants thrive, and you can provide it with moisture and food and keep it from turning into one giant weed bed, but if you end up with turnips and you wanted tomatoes? Too bad. You're probably a turnip yourself, you know. Or your husband is. Why did you expect tomatoes in the first place, if you're from a family of turnips? And it's a sad day when a banana is grown up in a watermelon family, so to speak. Because that banana knows he's not what they expected. The sooner he goes off to find other bananas, the better.

Your funny little introvert who loves to read and play computer games and who hates sports? He's not going to play football for UT. He just isn't.  Move along, now. And my little kid who wants to be a veterinarian so badly he can taste it, and he always has, and he has his whole life planned out? He's probably never going to be into history and art. I'll make sure he learns the basics, but I'm fooling myself if I expect him to change what his passions are.

Stick to the rules. They're a clear path through the minefields. When you can't find your car keys, you're covered in maple syrup and you needed to leave the house 14 minutes ago and someone can't find their shoes, remember the rules -- they'll help keep you sane.

Rule number one: Never, ever, ever share a drink with your kids. I know I said boogers don't bother me and I can do poop and vomit with no issues. But drinking after a two-year-old is like French-kissing someone with a mouthful of peanut butter, half-chewed paper and cold cereal. Their backwash is legendary. Don't do it.

Rule number two: Don't do something once unless you want to do it at least a thousand times. This includes everything from singing "Old MacDonald" at bedtime,  letting your kids eat cereal in the playroom "just this once," riding without a car seat while you move the car "just this once", and letting them play Angry Birds on your iPhone when you're desperate for quiet and you're on the phone. The next thing you know, they're experts at Angry Birds, they have a right to ride unbuckled if you're in the driveway and they set the table in front of the TV for breakfast. And you're so sick of singing Old MacDonald that his farm now has robots, caterpillars, scorpions and dinosaurs.

Rule number three: Video games are junk food for the brain. You know it. They know it. Anyone who tries to tell you they improve coordination or that they're good for social skills is rationalizing. Video games are a cheap, easy way to get an endorphin rush without actually working for it. They're bad for kids in anything but tiny amounts. Sure, you can binge once in a while and play a lot. But a steady diet of video games and you'll end up with the brain's equivalent of eating Cheetos and Coke. Every hour spent playing video games is an hour not reading a book, playing a board game or learning how to be bored and working through it. Don't buy into it.

Rule number four: Kids are inherently good. They just don't know what you want. And they're desperate to know that they're needed and that what they do in the family is important. And they don't see the big picture, so no matter how many times you tell them the details, they don't get it. 

You can tell them to put forks on the table every night for three years. They still won't understand that this means that they're supposed to set the table every night, and every night they will be surprised that you're asking them to do it. They're still surprised when they're hungry because you they don't realize that they have to eat every night! But it's critical to them to know they have an important role in the family. Even if they forget every night, make them set the table anyway. Don't do it yourself, just because it's easier.

Rule number five: Choose your battles. Only fight the ones you're really, really willing to sacrifice in order to win. Everything else is just negotiation. I'm not going to fight over food, clothes or haircuts. If they don't eat, so what? If they like weird clothes, so what? I'm willing to go toe-to-toe over schoolwork, character traits and video-game time. Other families might want to fight to the death over bed time, curfews or homework. But don't fight over everything. Life's way too short.

Rule number six: This should be a no-brainer, but in too many families, it isn't. If you don't want someone to treat you that way, don't do it to your kids. If you're at a restaurant and you spill a glass of water, imagine your husband yelling, "That's IT! I told you the last time you spilled that you're not allowed to have a drink unless you're more careful! Waitress, she can't have any more drinks!"

Yeah. Or, when you know annoys him, but you do it anyway, imagine him trying to ground you and keep you home. Or punishing you. I don't think so.

If I wouldn't want Mark to do it to me, I don't do it to my kids. Really, there aren't many exceptions. I don't want someone to tell me to finish my dinner or I don't get dessert. That's just obnoxious. And I can't imagine anyone ever telling me that they really love me, but I broke the rules, so they're going to have to hit me now to show me what I've done wrong. This is a simple one: Don't hit your kids. Don't humiliate them. Don't yell at them, or make fun of them, or embarrass them. It's just mean. 

Rule number seven: Be kind. Always. The world is a hard place. There are people who are mean. There are bullies. There are doors that are too hard to open, math problems that are too hard, girls who don't like them back, machines that steal their money, scary dogs and scarier stories that friends tell them. Kids need a safe place where they know that no one will ever make fun of them.

They need to know that they can go home and tell someone how awful their day was. And honestly, if you don't have your kid's back, who does? If you don't put them first, in front of everything else, who ever will? If they say their teacher was mean, believe them.

Take their side, always. No matter how trivial. Be their biggest cheerleader. Stand up for them when they succeed, yell the loudest in the grandstand, and don't be ashamed of it. You only get one go-round of this. That's your kid, dammit! Yell loudly, cheer proudly, and let everyone know that if they mess with your kid, they're messing with you! Kids need backup. They need to know that there's a safety net.

And the last rule, which seems to contradict rule seven, but doesn't: Be hard on your kids. Expect a lot from them. To those whom much is given, much is expected -- let that be their motto. If you're reading this on a computer screen in a first-world country, your kids are in the category of "to those whom much is given." Don't let them forget that.

Heinlein said, "Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy." They're capable of amazing, wondrous things, if you ask it of them. 

 Don't accept anything less. My favorite saying, one I have on my desk, and the one I use to make decisions about my kids: "Don't prepare the path for the child -- prepare the child for the path."

Other truths: Don't label your kids too early. Easy kids turn into hard kids. Your hard kids become your easy ones. Problems that you thought were huge disappear. Others show up later. Things will change as soon as you've got it under control. Roll with it.

ADD is real. So are peanut allergies. Even if you don't believe it. Until you've lived it, don't judge it.

Sleep when the baby sleeps. It's the only sane thing to do.

Snuggle. Enjoy them. But don't feel like you have to enjoy every minute of it. Sometimes, the minute you're having really sucks. Who wants to enjoy being kicked in the guts by a screaming toddler simply because you were trying to keep her from getting run over? There's enough guilt about parenting.

Enjoy what you can. Do the best you can. And know that your kids will love you, no matter what.