My son Stone, 15, wrote my column again this week.
Hey again. It’s me, Stone. You may remember me from last summer, when I ranted about parental oppression. Well, I’m back, with something else I need to get off my chest. This time it’s about the surprising, brand-new world of driving.
When I passed the driver’s test and got my permit back in April, the training taught me to be a very nice, friendly, rule-abiding driver (always walk around the car and inspect it before driving, signal 100 feet before the turn, etc.). But when I backed out of my driveway and entered into the real world of driving, I was like a small, fluffy bunny in a pit of angry, rabid Rottweilers. The polite world of driver’s ed was ripped away to reveal a world of people cutting off other people and not using their turn signals — and full of, ahem, parental help: “STONE, ACCELERATE, YOU NEED TO ACCELERATE!”
Of course, I haven’t let all this affect my driving. I still drive slowly and carefully, and the incessant honking around me from those Porsche SUVs driven by soccer moms who need to get to their jewelry-making class is drowned out by the song “Let It Go,” which is on indefinite repeat (Yes, I am the only male on the planet who insanely loves Frozen). I am determined not to stoop to the level of other Santa Barbara drivers. As Queen Elsa says, “Don’t let them in, don’t let them see. Be the good girl you always have to be.”
Continue reading Stone Starts Driving

I don’t love baseball. And I feel bad about that. Some of the finest people I know — people who are undeniably more advanced human beings than I am — are wild for the game. They love that it’s not timed, but rather over when it’s over; that it lets players of every shape and size be superstars; and that the object is more complicated than just putting a ball into a net, over a line, or through a hoop.

The closest I ever come to loving baseball was a brief tenderness I had for its distinctive snacks. It was 1981, and Fernando Valenzuela was pitching for Los Angeles, Steve Garvey was playing first base, and I was mowing Dodger Dogs, Cracker Jacks, and ice cream on the blistering Loge level.

Back then, I was a kid watching grown-ups play baseball. Recently I’ve revisited the sport as a grown-up watching kids play it, in Little League. But the new perspective hasn’t deepened my appreciation for our national pastime. In fact, it’s made me dread it.

Each time a kid gets up to bat and strikes out — my son or someone else’s, on our team or the opposing one, doesn’t matter — it positively guts me. Hollows out my stomach like an inverted baseball cap or a stadium peanut being popped from its salty shell.

Swing, miss! … Adjust stance. … Swing, miss! … Adjust grip. … Swing, miss! … Adjust self-image.

Continue reading The Sting of the Strikeout

Crybaby. Tattletale. Mama’s boy. Kids can be nasty little name-callers, can’t they?

It’s easy to deflect some schoolyard slurs — the ones we know for sure aren’t true. Scaredy-cat? In your dreams. Goody Two-shoes? Puh-leeze. But other labels — shorty, for instance, or carrot-top —are so obviously, undeniably true, there’s no point in even ducking their well-aimed wallop.

For me, bossy was one of those labels. The no-denying kind. The kind you can only answer with an “Oh, yeah? Well, so what!” and go on about your life.

I’m bossy. It’s not an endearing quality, nothing to brag about. But my classmates and I can attest that it’s absolutely accurate. It’s also the reason I’m about to put Sheryl Sandberg in her place.

Sandberg, Facebook’s COO and the author of Lean In, has joined forces with the Girl Scouts in a campaign to retire the word “bossy” from public lexicon. Their argument: It quashes girls’ leadership instincts.

“We know that by middle school, more boys than girls want to lead,” Sandberg told ABC News, “and if you ask girls why they don’t want to lead, whether it’s the school project all the way on to running for office, they don’t want to be called bossy, and they don’t want to be disliked.”

Continue reading Ban 'Bossy'? Over My Bossy Body

I have a rule against drunk shopping. But I didn’t always. The policy sprang from necessity after attending my first-ever school fundraising auction. Poured into an oxygen-inhibiting costume, plied with signature cocktails, and woozy from watching wealthy parents race to the bottom of bid sheets, I lost my shizz and wound up owing \$500 for a one-night chocolate fountain rental.

Five hundred dollars. For wet chocolate.

When sobriety surfaced, I literally wept with panic. What had I done?! I had a young kid, a new mortgage, a mediocre salary, and, like, six friends — none of whom were likely to pay $83 each to lap gurgling goo from a humming appliance atop my hand-me-down kitchen table. No, you know how this ends. I took a bath on that chocolate fountain. And possibly … also … in it, but that’s my business.

A dozen years and as many auctions later — at Cabarets and Carnivals, through the Enchanted Forest, and aboard the Orient Express — I’ve learned to sip my wine and hide my bid number. But I can’t say I’ve learned to love the annual campus clusterfund that is the school auction.

Continue reading Drunk Shopping: It's for the Kids!

Remember the Harryhausen’s scene from the Pixar flick Monsters, Inc.? A variety of furry, fanged, tentacled beasts are enjoying a civilized evening at a fancy restaurant, the kind where you have to pull strings to get a reservation. And the sudden appearance of a wide-eyed, pig-tailed human toddler — believed to be toxic — sends them all shrieking into the streets, summoning hazmat teams and inciting mass panic.

A five-eyed blob tells a news camera, “I tried to run from it, but it picked me up with its mind powers and shook me like a dog!”

An eerily similar scene recently played out in a super swank Chicago restaurant, sending foodies shrieking into the blogosphere for days on end.

It seems a party of four dared to bring an infant into Alinea, a sort of culinary art gallery, where the morsels of sculpted monkfish and squab resemble flowers more than food. Once named the best restaurant in the U.S., Alinea sells tickets in advance to its nightly tasting-menu-palooza at about $250 per person sans tax, tip, or wine — and believe me, when your dishes include fiddlehead fern, something called “mastic,” and, I kid you not, helium — you’re going to need a lot of wine.

Continue reading Foodies and Babies

First smile. First steps. First day of school.

Certain moments in the parenting canon are aggrandized as monumental milestones that justify all the emotional trials of ushering infants into childhood and children into adulthood. You know the ones:

Learning to read. Hitting the home run. Passing the driver’s test.

And they’re all great; don’t get me wrong. But there’s another transcendent moment that no one ever talks about — and it’s so good that if you don’t have kids, you should consider getting some just so you can experience it.

It’s the moment when you discover that your kids dig your music. Not just recognize it or tolerate it, but genuinely love some of your favorite songs. When you happen upon them listening to the Isley Brothers while doing their homework, or singing Amy Winehouse as they unload the dishwasher, or blasting Bowie from the family iPod during a road trip — and not groaning and saying that they meant to click Bowling for Soup.

Those moments flood me with joy like a garden hose filling up a plastic backyard wading pool. Only much, much faster because those things take freaking forever. Why should it matter so much to me that we hanker for the same harmonies, throb to the same rhythms?

Continue reading Best Part of Parenting: The Music