Question: Can an egg hunt be democratic?

Easter is teaching me and my children lots of things, and not the ones you might expect.

Yes, my children are indeed associating yet another holiday with sugar, which is what I swore I wouldn’t allow, but in a moment of weakness, (see 4/10 post) I allowed the idea of the Easter Bunny to enter my children’s realm. To be fair, I didn’t start it; the schools did. They didn’t hear about the damn Easter Bunny from me. Yes, I blame the schools.

But I did nothing to stop perpetuating the myth of the E.B., and in fact solidified it by buying baskets and small treats (mostly chocolate) for my two smallish children.

Then the kids got to do egg hunts and the real fun began. And by fun, I mean chaos, misery and the requirement of U.N. level negotiations to allocate eggs to the two children involved in a series of increasingly acrimonious disputes.

I ask you, how do you make an egg hunt democratic? When these are done at schools, the quick and the greedy always get the most. This leaves the slower and less agile at a serious disadvantage. It's totally and utterly unfair. Is this something we just have to accept? I think not.

At home, I tried to level the playing field; each child picked a color and was told only to find that one. But that was only effective in theory.

What ultimately happened, of course, was that one child found more eggs more quickly and battles ensued as to which color was originally “mine” versus “yours”, and “Don’t show me where mine is, I want to find it myself!” and “Don’t take my egg!” and “It’s not fair, he found all of his first!” There really is no way to win in this situation.

Eventually the color-coding got exhausting, time consuming and totally not fun, so I just put the kids’ initials on the eggs, hid them, and said, “Deal with it”. That worked better than anything else we tried. I don't think egg hunts can be democratic after all. Maybe they're a good preparation for life.

But hot damn, what a lot of rigamarole. Holidays truly are exhausting.

Complaint: OMG I’m like totally S.I. *

*Socially Inept


Okay they say it happens, but it’s really hitting home. I was just on the phone with an old friend from college. Haven’t spoken in over 20 years, but have emailed extensively over the past four or five months getting back in touch. We write, we blog, we try to comment on each other’s blogs, etc. Relationship re-established.

Then we talked on the phone. And I deteriorated into a gibbering idiot. We’re planning to meet each other’s families next week. But I feel like my verbal diarrhea is pretty explosive and I’m hoping I can reign it in before then.

See, I’ve spent so much time talking to my kids and other people’s kids and other people about kids that I fear I’ve become one of THOSE people.

You know, the ones who talk about their kids all the time. The ones who have no life because they’re living through their children. Saints preserve us, I’m one of the shameless gushers I used to mock.

But I must mock no more.

My old friend and I had a perfectly good conversation, but I just felt like I was babbling and incoherent. When we write to each other, we can edit, and I definitely come across as wittier and glibber in print. In person? Not so much. It’s all gush gush, giggle, giggle. It’s embarrassing.

Not that there’s anything wrong with enthusiasm. As we’ve discussed, (okay as I’ve proclaimed) in a previous post, I am an enthusiastic person. And I’m okay with that, exclamation point.

But talking to my friend made me remember that we knew each other in a different time and place and that so very much has changed, for me, and of course, for him. He is married now, as am I; he has a stepchild, I have two small children. He is gainfully and professionally employed; I have two small children.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

There was so much I wanted to do when I was young, and granted, I have done quite a bit of it (lots of it in my 20s) but I kind of put off most other things with this whole raising children gig. (Which, by the way, I very much wanted and continue to want to do. I just think the whole childcare/work balance issue needs to balance better soon.) This whole lack of identity as a stay at home parent is really, for lack of a better word, professionally and socially atrophying.

That’s what I was trying to get at when I said I’m socially inept. I remember going out in public for the first time after my first child was born, with another new friend/new mom. We went out to eat at one of those loud, over-stimulating, massive-portion-serving Texas Cheesecake Despository type of restaurants, and since it was Los Angeles, the waiter was a cute young actor who knew how to charm. The two of us were simply unequipped to deal with his saucy banter. We were drooling, sleep-deprived morons incapable of wit or substance. We barely knew what to order.

It was a little scary. Then I got really busy with my kids for the next six years. And now I’m coming up for air. My family’s situation is such that we may well be relocating, which is both exciting and exhausting.

Starting all over is a great chance to “start fresh,” whatever that means. And now that my kids are older and less needy, it is finally time for me to come out of professional and social hiding.

And that’s scary.

Because I’ve been under the tortoise shell of my children for six years.

I know meeting up with my old friend will be fun, because he is a person of substance, wit and kindness. I am sure he will forgive my babbling about my kids, and my myopic view of the world which I am only now just starting to expand.

I just hope I can keep up with the banter.

Question: What. Have. I. Done. Redux.

Okay, we all know I allowed Barbies into my household, much to my occasional chagrin. But now we’ve finally gotten to the age where my kids are really into holidays and their meanings, especially if said meanings involve chocolate in any form.

So this year is the first Easter we as a family have to actually acknowledge. And I can see that things could get out of hand very quickly.

Just today, the last day of school before Spring Break. (Woo.Party.) The kids both had Easter egg hunts that resulted in the acquisition of scads of plastic eggs in a variety of Eastery pastel hues. Why is Easter a pastel holiday? Christmas is a vibrant, primary and secondary-colored holiday. Shouldn’t Easter be even more vibrant, given what it’s celebrating?

I don’t know. I’m just a secular humanist who has allowed her kids to believe in the Easter Bunny, which of course has way more to do with Pagan fertility rites than it does with Christianity. Not an issue at my house either way.

But I can see that the frenzy of chocolate foil-wrapped treats, small plastic crap and that annoying, shedding “basket grass” are only going to increase over time.

But how can I not let my kids enjoy the holiday? We believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa and the Tooth Fairy for only so long. Why not let the kids enjoy it while they have their innocence? That’s my thinking. I don’t particularly like the idea of every holiday being equated with candy in my children’s minds, though. That’s, as the kids like to say, messed up.

So what’s the balance between celebrating a holiday for the kids and celebrating it for the personal meaning of the actual holiday? How much sugar and plastic is too much?

Comment: Odd Numbers

Why are numbers called “odd” because they don’t divide by two? Shouldn’t they just be called “uneven” numbers? And why is the adjective "odd", when used to designate a person, a negative thing? What’s the etymology?

If I weren’t so damn tired, I’d look it up. But I’m solo parenting for a couple of days and it never fails to exhaust me. If you were asked questions all day for twelve hours, you’d be exhausted too. It’s amazing the questions my kids come up with. Frankly, it’s amazing the questions ALL kids come up with. All kids are trying to figure life out and each one has their own take on things.

I mean, there are so many things we need to teach our children that we don’t even realize need to be taught. Take the above example. I’ve known about odd and even numbers for so long that I’d forgotten the concept has to be taught. But it does.

Sure, there are things like crossing the street safely or wiping one’s butt that truly and obviously need to be taught. They're not always easy, but they're pretty simple.

But there are so many more things. For most of us, the concept of left and right is pretty solid. We don’t have to think about it, we just know. The same goes for right and wrong. This is even more difficult to teach. How do you teach children what is good and bad, especially if you’re more of a secular person and aren’t relying on a large religious tome to guide you?

There are laws, and rules. Those help define right and wrong. But it’s not that simple. Right and wrong are subjective, and that’s where you run into the ambiguities that make it so hard to teach.

Makes potty training look like a walk in the park, doesn’t it?

And there are physical things we take for granted, like nose-blowing. It took me years to learn to blow my nose and the main reason I learned was that at age four I got a plastic Fisher-Price horse's ear up my nose and couldn't get it out. (I have no idea what possessed me to put a toy horse's ear anywhere near my nose. Must have been part of a very complex plot in my storytelling.) Anyway, I kept sniffing, sobbing, and saying, "It's not coming out! (giant sniff) It's not coming out!" Finally, my mom had to force me to learn to blow OUT, and thus expel the little plastic nugget from my nostril. It was sweet relief, but what an ordeal. Do you think my mom ever imagined she'd have to teach me to blow my nose? (especially under these circumstances)


And swallowing pills is another. Maybe it's just me (it's probably just me) but swallowing pills took me even more years to master than blowing my nose. (You're probably amazed I got through school. ) I remember at one point it was thought to be a brilliant and urgent idea for me to take cod liver oil pills. My health-food conscious (obsessed) mother insisted I needed to take it. If you've ever tasted cod liver oil, you know the only option is to take it in capsule form, even if it means you'll be fish-burping for the rest of the day. Gnarly.

Anyway, I remember that I couldn't swallow the pills, and it was making everyone crazy. So my stepsister decided to try to teach me. I ended up repeatedly putting a capsule in my mouth, swishing water around, and spitting it all out in the sink. She, on the other hand, kept demonstrating, and probably swallowed dangerously high levels of vitamin A that day. I'm surprised she didn't grow fins. She fish-burped for a week and I still couldn't swallow a damn pill.

But eventually, I learned.

Maybe that's part of what we have to keep in mind as parents. Even with (or in spite of) our meticulous efforts, our children will learn most things. Isn't that odd?

Complaint: Playdate Purgatory

I am so sick of playdates.

I’m not sick of any specific person. It’s much more generalized than that.

I’m just sick of getting everyone gussied up and snacked and bathroomed and heading over to the house of someone I barely know so we can watch our children socialize for two hours while we wait for mayhem to erupt (or not).

It really is like dating. And as Tracy Morgan on 30 Rock said (on his defunct TV show “Cruise Ship”) “I’m getting too old for this ship.”

I’ve painted a pretty bleak image of playdates, I suppose. They’re not all like that. Some of them are fun for the grown-ups too. But many aren’t. They’re just….tedious. Because your kids may get along, but that doesn’t mean you and the mom are going to be BFFs. It’s statistically unlikely that your child or children AND you will mesh perfectly with said playdate children and THEIR mom. So there’s always an imbalance.

And you’re always playing against the odds, as you try to keep the younger or older sibling entertained while the featured “players” of said “date” amuse themselves by taking out every single toy in the freaking house.

And I’m not even talking about drop-off playdates, which, while simplifying the equation of players and odds, leaves one sibling feeling irritable, left out and desirous of shopping for small plastic princess dolls and dresses that said sibling’s parent has to keep putting on the damn doll over and over, and no, I’m fine, just hand me a mocha and all will be well.

Seriously, caffeine plays a huge part in mothers’ lives. I’m sure you already know that. It plays a huge role in most adults’ lives. But now research is showing that some particularly heavy dose of caffeine is helpful in some biochemical/mental conditions, some of which I actuallyhave. Hey, are you telling me coffee is an approved drug? Bring it on.

I think a playdate is improved significantly by the addition of caffeine. I was at a perfectly good but but slightly chaotic playdate the other day when my hosts offered me some authentic Indian Chai tea. I don’t normally go for tea, but it was gooood. When I mentioned this to my hosts, they said, basically, look, what you Americans call Chai isn’t Chai, it’s utter shite, so here’s the real deal, freshly home brewed. The things you learn on a playdate.

But isn’t playdate an annoying term? Say it a few times. See what I mean? Someone somewhere decided to get cute with the whole dating concept and decided that no, it wasn’t enough that we had to date in our earlier years, but that even with the hopeful stability and maturity that marriage and family bring, we’d still have to go through the agony of more fucking dates.

So here we are on playdates. The same cool family who made me the Chai also talked to me about how in India, there are no playdates. They said, the kids just hang out outside together and play. You don’t have to arrange anything or get all formal in between the enrichment classes and Kindergarten homework packets and Gymboree. To which I responded, “Hey, just like when I was growing up!”

Why have things gotten SO ridiculous and scripted, that every social interaction in our children’s lives needs to be planned/penciled in and micro-supervised to within an inch of its life?

Can we please do something about this?

Question: How are you?

When people ask, “Are you okay?” do they really want to hear the answer? I mean, honestly, we are often not okay, and when people ask, are they really saying, “You need to be okay,” or “Please tell me you are okay even though it’s obvious that you are not,” or “Please tell me what’s troubling you?”

There are so many possible subtexts to a mere “Are you okay?” it’s hard to know how to answer this seemingly simple question.

Most people don’t really have a lot of bandwidth for your problems. They’re immersed in their own, which is natural. We are all self-centered. That’s part of being human, like it or not.

So when someone asks if we’re okay, are they asking because they care, because they're nosy, because they need us to be okay, out of habit, or is it something else altogether? There’s a prurient interest we have, a sort of schadenfreude, which isn’t intentional, but has us heaving a sigh of relief when we hear that the naughty child at school wasn’t ours, or the person hit by the car wasn’t our relative, or the job loss wasn’t our spouse’s. It’s not that we’re happy that someone else is in pain; we’re just so damn relieved that whatever is not okay is not happening to us.

It’s a curious thing. Keith Johnstone, the brilliant improv theatre specialist, said that every time you tell someone that something is going well for you, it’s like you're kicking them. So does the converse apply? When we tell someone that something is shitty on our end, is that like giving our friend a hug?

In a word, yes. Not that it’s our intention to make someone feel better or worse based on our woes, but that’s the effect. “Boy, I though I had it bad!” we think, as we watch our poor friend suffer; we feel badly for them, but we also feel relief that it isn’t happening to us. It’s not callous; it’s human nature.

But let’s at least be honest about it. Life is not really that difficult and shitty for most people, though it truly is for some. Shouldn’t we consider doing something to help people who have it shitty rather than just be thankful that we’re not the shittees?

Something to think about.

Comment: Maybe it's actually a complaint, but it wasn't intended to be

The idea of starting over, although it has merit, just exhausts me. My family and I have been living in one place for just about fifteen months, which is just enough time to get settled into the environment and start really making friends and connections.

And soon it may be time to move again.

How does one reinvent oneself over and over? I’m not saying it’s going to happen for sure, but it’s certainly possible, likely, even, that my family and I will be moving again within the next six months.

In today’s economic climate, we’re going to go where the jobs are. It’s simple, really. But far from easy.

I’ve always enjoyed the idea of being able to reinvent myself in new places, but frankly these days the whole idea of moving tires me out. It takes so much energy to move to a new place and forge a new life, especially when you are doing it for your whole family.

I’m not trying to complain, because opportunities are usually a good thing, and one can always find the silver lining, etc. etc. BUT I just want to say, I’m freakin’ exhausted and I’m going to go to bed now and read Michael Chabon at the advice of my dear friend and fellow blogger, The Solipsist. Check him out.

I will be away from my desk for a few days, exploring new possibilities for reinvention. Stay tuned.