I already packed one of these. So it's a "no" on buying lunch today.

Who’s afraid of saying “no” to their children?

Just this morning, literally five minutes after watching me pack his and his brother’s lunchboxes for school, my seven-year-old asked me, “Can I buy lunch today?”

Now, I could have looked at him, and realized in that split second that saying “No, honey, not today, Mommy already packed your lunch and you bought lunch yesterday” would elicit a moan and a whine and simply given in (the lunch in the box would keep until later; I could eat his turkey sandwich and he could have the grapes and the yogurt for an after-school snack).

But I’m not afraid of “no.”

In this case, the “no” came with some lessons. First of all, I’d already packed the lunch, and he needs to understand that my efforts and time have worth that he should respect. Second of all, school lunch, while not expensive (it just went up to $1.75 in his school, in fact) isn’t free, and as I’ve tried and will continue to try to get across to him, my wallet is not a magic dollar dispenser. Third of all, I have fresh and perfectly good food in the house, so I’m not going to buy lunch when I have already-paid-for food right here at home.

These are not always easy lessons for a second-grader, but they are no less valuable ones for him to take on.

But I think that the most valuable lesson of all is this:

I can (and will) say no; he can (and will) grumble about it; and he can (and always does) get over the temporary disappointment of the no.

That last part is what is often overlooked — the temporary disappointment. We’re afraid of meting out dispappoinments, of being the heavy, of saying no kindly, matter-of-fact-ly, and — here’s the kicker — without apology.

Perhaps counter-intutively, the holiday season is the perfect time to practice your “no.” When easy yeses are everywhere, try it out. No, honey. Not today. Not this week. Not this year.

No sounds awfully tough, but it’s actually one of the most tender things we can give our kids.

The lessons are valuable, they last — and (surprise!) they make the “yeses” so much sweeter.

(Oh, and by the way? Chapter 6 of my book, Mean Moms Rule, is all about the “no.”! May I humbly suggest you preorder your copy now?)

Try it!

[photo: Everystockphoto.com]

Sigh. Facebook is at it again. well, not Facebook itself, but the community of FBers. As I type, with a day and a half until Mother’s Day descends upon us again, one of those “copy and paste this and put it in your status line if you’re a Mom!” thingies is virusing its way around. (And yes, I just made virus into a gerund, sue me). Here’s the version I saw:

Mothers’ Day Declaration ~ I wanted you before you were born. I loved you when you were born. I saw your face and I knew that I was in love. Before you were an hour old, I knew I would die for you. To this day, I still will. This is the miracle of life. ~Put this on your status if you have children you love more than life, itself

Riiiiight. Like I’m going to join that particular party. Here’s what I detest about these status-line “declarations.”

1. I like to conjure my own sentiments, not borrow them from someone else. Okay, that might just be me, and it might be (no, wait, it is) the reason I mostly buy blank greeting cards.
2. I don’t like the not-so-subtle pressure to post this on your status, which comes with an implied, because if you don’t, it means you don’t love your child as insanely as I do.
3. And here’s the big reason: I don’t agree. Even if I took it and rewrote it so it didn’t stink of Hallmark flowers, I would still disagree.

Am I the only one?

Am I the only mom out there who didn’t fall in love with my baby the very minute he emerged into the world? (I wrote about this, my admission that it took weeks for me to fall in love with my firstborn, and my theory as to why we don’t tell each other this dirty little secret when it happens, but instead prefer to perpetuate the myth, in American Baby, years ago.)

So I created my own Mother’s Day Declaration, which I want to post on Facebook, but FB is telling me it’s too many characters:

I barely saw you when you were born. To be honest, at that point, after two days of labor and surgery, I felt like shit and you looked a little weird. Oh, I fell in love with you, sure, but it took like 6 weeks, and it wasn’t a miracle, it just was. I guess I’d die for you, but frankly that’s not something I think about every day; I’m just busy keeping our heads above water and packing your f-ing lunches every day. Love ya, kid!

Everyone who knows me knows I love my children. I’m a writer, and even I can’t manage to come up with the words that express those feelings. But I tell you, Mother’s Day or not, I refuse to rely on someone else’s words, on words that only graze the surface, or on words that — most dangerous of all — turn mother love into something false and a little bent out of shape. Mother love isn’t flowers in a field; it’s messy and angry and crazy (like me!).

There was another of these “declarations” going around a few weeks back, this time sending the (icky) message that we were supposed to be proud of the fact that we gave up on ourselves (from decent haircuts and jeans that fit, to showers and eyeliner) in order to give all to our kids. My friend and writer Meagan Francis wrote an excellent post on that topic on her blog, The Happiest Mom, and since she more or less took the words out of my mouth but used them better, I’ll leave her response as the record on that score.

I’ll just add this: Give up good haircuts? Why? I would give those up if I couldn’t afford them, not because wearing my hair in a gray-streaked greasy ponytail makes me a better mom. If I don’t shower all day, it’s because I have work to do, not because I’m too busy teaching my five-year-old his times tables.

And if I admit that I don’t like pushing the kid on the swings, or playing with Play-Doh (which I loved as a kid but hate now, because let’s face it, it gets everywhere), or if I admit that I like Monday mornings because they mean the kids are back at school, or dread school holidays for the opposite reason, then I’m not a bad mom. I’m just an honest one.

This is all I ask, folks. This Mother’s Day, for once, can we tell the truth?

Hermey and Rudolph: Misfits with bad fathers

The other day, on impulse at the supermarket, I picked up the DVD of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” for the boys. They hadn’t seen it yet, even though it’s been on TV. Both of them are rehearsing holiday songs for their school concerts, so it’s been a nonstop chorus of Rudolph over here, and I figured it was better to own the dang thing than to sit through commercials.

So we watched. And while James tucked his head under a blanket whenever the Bumble came on the screen, and Daniel laughed over my favorite character, Yukon Cornelius, I was taken back in time to the 70s, remembering watching with my sister on the oval braided rug in the den (small time-travel aside here: did others of you raised in the 1970s do all your TV-watching on the floor/rug, rather than the couch? Did the couch in your house, as in mine, have an “adults only” vibe? Weird).

The story is full of you’d-never-see-that-on-TV-today oddities. And I’m not talking about laughable “special effects” or the way the characters’ mouth movements never match their dialog. I’m talking about a reindeer father who is awfully mean to his misfit, red-nosed son, entreating him to hide his differences and fit in. Then what does the dad do, when he realizes his shunned and ridiculed child has run off? He mans up and goes after him, telling his anxious wife to stay in the cave, not for the sensible reason that Rudolph might come back, but because going out in the storm to search is “man’s work.”

Then there’s poor Hermey, the misfit elf who wants to be a dentist. His stand-in father is the head elf, who rages at his “son” who wants to be anything other than what he’s supposed to be. He, too, apologizes in the end and lets Hermey set up a North Pole dental practice, but his original sin — fatherly non-acceptance — is one that you’d never see in kids’ fictional fare today.

Last night, I was on the phone with my sister, and we talked about the show. I said, “If that were made today, the message would be ‘celebrate your differences,’ not, ‘shun the misfits.’ ” And sure, that’s eventually the lesson that’s learned in Rudolph, but the key difference is that before Rudolph can realize his oddity makes him special, he first has to be disparaged and cast out, not just by his peers, but by his own father. In the end, forgiveness is instant. And you get the idea that no one needs therapy.

Did we just miss that part as kids? No, we really didn’t, as my sister pointed out.  “We knew the father, and even Santa, was mean to Rudolph,” she said. And we pretty much thought, ‘well, that’s the way it is.’ ” And then we got on with our day.

Today, however, that show wouldn’t be made because we couldn’t stand the idea of our kids being shown a less-than-ideal parent while they were watching a TV show or movie. Sure, we’ll allow them to be temporarily frightened when the Bumble roars or, King Kong-like, grasps a struggling doe in his giant paw. We can allow them the temporary anxiety of wondering if Yukon makes it out alive, or if Christmas will be canceled like a flight out of O’Hare. Scary is acceptable.

What’s not acceptable any longer are adults who get it wrong, then apologize in the end, as Donner does to Rudolph after he saves Christmas. TV and movie parents don’t screw up. They make cookies and laugh indulgently and otherwise remain more or less benignly in the background as their kids (whether they’re reindeer, pigs, turtles or little bears) mess up, make messes, and sometimes learn lessons. But they’d never, ever, ever call their child a misfit. Even if they said they were sorry.

Back in the 70s, on that braided rug, safe in the paneled walls of our den, with our parents behind us on the couch, my sister and I watched, got scared, then felt good again, and my folks didn’t give a second thought to the negative depiction of parenthood in this once-yearly bit of holiday fun. They just yawned and sent us to off to bed.

Why do we seem to believe, as my sister pointed out, that our kids can’t comprehend and mentally manage the fact that sometimes parents aren’t perfectly nice, that they mess up and apologize, sometimes over and over for the same crimes? Why don’t we give them that credit? Why, instead do we give them entertainment that whitewashes parents into mistake-free creations that the kids run roughshod over?

Back then, Donner could apologize with a manly clanking of his antlers. Today, he’d be getting a visit from the Department of Children’s Services. Or, more likely, he’d have started out being the kind of dad who gave his misfit son a sentimental lecture on how that red nose made Rudolph special.

Apparently, fictional parents are no longer allowed to bumble their way to the right thing. They have to be perfect from the get-go.

What do you think?