In this economy, our family is taking a less-is-more approach to money: We’re spending less — and talking about it more.

Scarce jobs and bountiful bills have caused a cash crunch and I’m addressing it the way I address most problems: by surrounding it with the sound of my voice. My plan is to squawk and blubber about it until it asphyxiates on the carbon dioxide spewing from my motormouth. So far it hasn’t helped.

But while I’ve been prattling about money — pointing out the high cost of cable TV (was it always this pricey?) and proposing fun new dining-out policies like “I know! Let’s all order water!” — I think I freaked out my kid.

“Mom,” my 11-year-old asked this week, “are we having money trouble?”

I was rattled by the question. Embarrassed even. Sure, we’ve “tightened our belts,” as Obama likes to say, but no more than any other family. No one’s coming for our house or anything. I don’t think. Yet.

“You talk about money all the time,” he said.

Continue reading Trickle-Down Trepidation

It’s always been a dirty word in my family.

Control.

As in “Don’t be so controlling.” “What is she, a control freak?” “Well, you know how she likes to control things.”

As a clan, we condemn such behavior — but we also embody it. I come from a matriarchal flock of females who … let’s just say, we’re all really comfortable with our hands on the tiller. In my family, you’re either calling the shots and being chided for it, or you’re resentfully carrying out someone else’s capricious edicts and making snarky comments about her intolerable bossiness.

Control-or-be-controlled! Steer-or-be-steered! It’s the way we Roshells roll, and I don’t much mind it. The truth is I’m happy sitting in the saddle and I can’t really help it if the world works better when I’ve got the reins, now can I?

When it unnerves me, though — when my admittedly despotic disposition seems more exacting than endearing — is when it flops over onto my parenting. Rather, ahem, when my kids call me on it.

I recently put the kibosh on a family outing because my progeny were behaving like orangutans on espresso. Warnings didn’t work. Pleadings didn’t work. So I nixed our plans and picked up a magazine instead, settling into the sofa for the night. I wasn’t trying to punish my adorable little barbarians; I just couldn’t conceive of strapping myself into a compact car with them for any duration whatsoever.

Continue reading View from the Control Tower

It’s the same absurd episode every year. About a week into their winter break, my children take on the properties of common pond leeches.

Lazing around in their pajamas day after day, they suck down eggnog and cookies ’til the gifts come, then invariably whine about what they don’t have: the proper batteries, the money to buy what they really want, the opportunity to see that dreadful chipmunk movie …

That’s when I lose it. That’s when I go into self-righteous harpy mode, decrying their ingratitude and asking if they know what “entitlement” means and how profoundly unattractive it is. The lecture ends when I get to: “Why are you so spoiled?” Because the answer is a neon billboard-sized arrow pointing directly to their spoiling, entitled mother.

I admit it. I’m not the very model of magnanimousness, not the emblem of altruism. Sure, I leave pantry booty at the mailbox for canned food drives. I lower my window at off-ramps to toss a Washington to the fella with the pleading eyes. But I ain’t what you’d call a giver.

I’m well apprised of society’s ills; I’m just not accustomed to asking, “What can I do to help?” And much as I want the world to be a better place, I’ve never felt capable of making it so.

Continue reading The Getting from Giving

I’m what they call a word person, preferring “viridian” to dreary green and never uttering “confused” when “flummoxed” is within reach.

An English major whose motif-musing and allusion-hunting skills have proved all but useless in the real world, I take admittedly odd delight in the careful craft of sentence-smithing.

One of my prized possessions is a tome titled “The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate,” and I fling myself from bed each morning to savor my Word of the Day e-mail from dictionary.com — a wellspring of toothsome terms like numinous, doff and foofaraw.

I challenge myself to use each new word in conversation before the week is over, and just never you mind whether I’m successful or not. The point is I want to.

That is why I find parenting to be a bit of a bore. As a mother, I estimate 87 percent of the sentences that spring from my mouth are vapid. Artless. In fact, they border on asinine. And most of them should go without saying:

“Stop hitting yourself.” “Get your jacket out of the peanut butter.” “No spitting in Mommy’s bed.” There’s the perennial, “You must use a tissue for that” and the all-too-frequent, “Well, would you like it if I called YOU an oogie bananahead?” I recently heard myself say, “We never ever lick the bottoms of our shoes.” And I wondered what the devil had become of my dexterity for discourse — let alone my children’s common sense.

Continue reading Parents' wise words seldom build vocabularies

There are things good parents don’t say to their children. We don’t, for example, say, “Somewhere in the high desert, there are gnomes building you a Wii” or “Did you know that antelope have invisibility powers?” We never tell them that a kindly old woman is likely to emerge from our tub drains in a blue suit at some point this month. And that we should leave her a dish of tiramisu.

Why, then, will we swear up and down that if our kids behave and eat their vegetables, a fat man in a red get-up will flit through the sky pulled by wingless horned mammals and squeeze down our filthy chimneys to bring us coveted baubles shrouded in Costco wrapping paper?

What the elf are we doing to our kids??

I make a big stink at home about honesty and how it’s our family’s highest value blah blah blah. Yet I’ve dragged my old Doc Martens through the fireplace and stomped them across the living room to leave convincing ash footprints on the carpet. I’ve nibbled from countless cookie platters intended for Santa, leaving big, obvious bite marks and telltale crumbs. I’ve affixed postage to “Dear Santa” letters that were ultimately mailed to no one, nowhere.

Was I wrong to do it?

Continue reading Scarred by Santa?

There are things I do well. The Pony, for instance. I can dance a Pony to make white go-go boots blush. Also: Whistle. I’m a sick whistler. Crazy. I can’t think of anything else just now but there are definitely — surely — things I’m really, really good at.

Rare, though, is the moment I feel proficient at parenting. It’s not false modesty when I say the task just doesn’t come naturally to me; sometimes I have to fight my most basic instincts to keep from earning the Abominable Mommy of the Year award (and if you feel this way, too, I’d love to hear from you; if you don’t, please keep it to yourself).

So when my 11-year-old got mad at the television remote last weekend and flung it across the living room, accidentally assassinating his dad’s new flatscreen TV — the only TV in our house, during (oh god) football season — I wasn’t sure what to do.

We didn’t witness the crime; he did it right before leaving for a friend’s house. His little brother ratted him out. The good news was we had time to thoughtfully plot a response rather than reacting to the emotions flooding our guts and skittering across our faces: shock, disappointment, and a frustration that teetered on rage — the same feeling that had cracked the darn screen to begin with and thus proven an ineffective problem-solver.

Continue reading Parenting by Committee

Whenever I think I’m doing a decent job of raising my kids, something happens to convince me that I am, in fact, profoundly inept at the job.

Most recently it was the news that the Baby Einstein company is offering refunds to anyone who bought its DVDs in the last five years. Here’s why: Turns out the show doesn’t actually make kids any smarter.

I know. It’s shocking. Next they’ll tell us that Froot Loops are NOT actually part of a nutritious breakfast, and that sparing the rod does NOT in fact spoil the child. Where will the madness end?

The Einstein videos — and the Baby Beethovens, da Vincis, and Wordsworths that make up the whole lofty-tot series — have long been promoted as educational, said to stimulate babies’ brains. But a child advocacy group called the claims untrue and threatened Disney with a class-action lawsuit, citing studies that prove such shows actually delay language development.

In other words, the more they see, the less they know. Which is sort of how I feel about my parenting skills.

Confession: I’m one of the lousy moms who strapped her infants into their no-escape high-chairs, pushed them in front of the television and popped in a Baby Mozart video. I did it with frequency and I did it with confidence, believing for no good reason that the images of low-budget puppets nodding to sonatas would spark synapses in my boys’ burgeoning, Harvard-bound brains.

Because it was either that or my well-worn copy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Continue reading Baby Einstein Refunds

I’m a big fan of the Cheap Trick: the itty bitty effort that packs an impressive punch. The trifling gesture that draws the sort of “ooh”s and “ahh”s you never have, and never will, deserve.

But I’ve mastered so few of them. I can’t make a three-ingredient crowd-wowing cake, or sweep my hair into a head-turning up-do with the flick of a wrist. I’ve never even figured out how to rock those cool ribbon embellishments atop a wrapped present.

I have one great trick, though. And to make up for the undue kudos it nets me, I’m going to share it with you.

The next time a friend complains of being overtired, overwhelmed, and over-worked, put your hand on her shoulder and say, “Why don’t you drop your kids at my house this afternoon for a play date, and take a few hours for yourself?”

And say it like you mean it. Like the idea doesn’t terrify you. Because here’s the crazy thing, the dirty little secret about having other children over to your house: It’s actually easier than not having them.

Continue reading The Playdate Secret

The women who guide my son through preschool are more evolved human beings than I am. They have unlimited capacity for appreciating his every tiny accomplishment, every endearing utterance, every minor scribbling, and random stroke of a glue stick.

They send home stick sculptures and pudding paintings, stencil sketches, and piles of scraps that he spent the morning snipping with safety scissors.

I make the requisite fuss at pick-up: “Wow! Look what you did! You’ve been busy! What a cool … submarine-dog?” But stumbling to the car, arms full, I begin to panic. Where is all this delightful-evidence-of-self-expression supposed to GO?

I resent the mountain of masterpieces that amasses on my kitchen counter daily; there, I said it. Since sentimentality breeds clutter, I’ve tried approaching the problem with pure pragmatism, but it taught me this: The saddest eight words in the English language are “Mommy, why is my drawing in the trash?”

It’s true. I’m going to hell. But I won’t be alone.

“We have a daughter who is prolific,” Northern California mom Kat McDonald told me. “Anything left behind in the car I throw away. I usually have to shred it because our daughter will cull the trash.”

Some moms toss the stuff when the kids are on vacation. Jennifer Untermeyer of Colorado does it after they’ve gone to bed. “I feel a tiny bit guilty,” she said, “but it passes after a glass of wine.”

Continue reading Infernal Artwork

I’m not a spiritual person. But now and again I go down on my knees to thank the Almighty Creator of Y Chromosomes for not giving me a daughter.

I do this when Miley Cyrus performs a concert 100 miles away for $70 per ticket. And when I drive past the perpetual line of impatient preteens at Pinkberry yogurt after school. And when I see a 12-year-old peeking out from beneath makeup so thick it would make Katy Perry blush. Even if you couldn’t tell.

With teen idols like Demi Lovato and Avril Lavigne rockin’ blackout raccoon eyes, how can a tween resist the call to paint her peepers and lacquer her lips? And how do moms decide when it’s okay to wear makeup?

“My daughter thinks we’re cruel for not letting her wear eyeliner,” says one mother of a 12-year-old. “She says, ‘Mom, all the 8th graders wear it!’ It’s hard. You don’t want them to feel left out, but you still want to stand your ground. I’m not walking around with some mod-looking makeup-caked girl.”

It seems there’s an unspoken but widely accepted cosmetics continuum.

“You start slow — clear lip gloss in early junior high — then maybe some neutral eyeshadow by eighth grade,” says a mother of two grown girls. “The idea is to make them THINK they are wearing makeup when really, you can’t tell.”

Continue reading Gloss of Innocence