Lamenting that boys prefer guns to glitter.
Writer & Columnist • Santa Barbara, CA
Writer & Columnist • Santa Barbara, CA
Charting the puzzles and peeves of kid-herding — from Huggies to homework, Pilates to pinatas.
Lamenting that boys prefer guns to glitter.
Parents aren’t supposed to say this out loud, but… we don’t always like our kids.
Fifty mothers bask in a kindness that has become all but foreign to them.
iPods and YouTube and Twitter, oh, my! An unnerving but enlightening teens-and-the-media summit.
“Mom, can I draw on my neck?”
It was spring and I was cleaning the kitchen — trying in vain to scrape the perpetual gick from the bottom of my toaster and scrub the perennial gunk from the base of the faucet — when I heard those words and glanced up, sponge in hand.
Indeed, my toddler’s palms, forearms, elbows, T-shirt and the tablecloth surrounding his untouched coloring book were lavishly scrawled with shamrock-green marker.
“And,” he was good enough to ask, “my hair, too?”
Starshine submits to a cafeteria lunch at a local elementary school and lives to tell the tale.
Starshine skipped college, avoided kids and shacked up with a woman, but — thank you, Milton Bradley! — she still wound up a millionaire.
Don’t flirt with hunky dads, and other playground rules by Starshine.
Kick the can: Starshine is happy to leave her youngest in diapers forever.
You over there. That’s right, you in the velour hoodie with the Venti Macchiato. I have to talk to you.
And you, too: The one dashing off to your car as fast as your pressed pencil skirt will let you run. Slow down for a second. You need to hear this.
It’s drop-off time at school and, like most mornings, little circles of stay-at-home moms are pooling by the gate, near the office, in the parking lot. In pony-tails and baseball caps, they make playdates, share stories about head lice and commiserate over soccer schedules.
A working mom skitters past in a tailored suit and gleaming pumps. She’s late for a meeting, but dials up a smile for the chatter-clatch moms, who wave at her. One of them — a petite brunette with no make-up and a dollop of crusted oatmeal on her yoga top — hollers over her shoulder in a tone that wasn’t intended to sound bitchy: “Wow. Don’t you look nice.”
But between those five seemingly innocuous words lies the ugly tension that exists between moms who punch a timecard and moms who don’t. And it’s really rather stupid.