And now for something a little lighter: ice cream.

Ben & Jerry: Out to offend?

Specifically, how a new flavor of ice cream is creating a bit of a firestorm among the sort of moms who would like to keep their (and, presumably, our) children’s worlds completely free of anything offensive (their definition of, I guess), immoral (ditto), scary (says who?) and … whatever. Fill in the blank. The world our children live in should be BPA-free plastic bubbles surrounded by rainbows and, I don’t know, Bible verses (the non-violent ones. Presumably).

Ben & Jerry, those godless liberal Vermonters (need I say more?) unveiled a new flavor recently, called Schweddy Balls. For those who missed the current controversy, it actually goes back to an old Saturday Night Live skit, featuring another godless liberal, this time from Hollywood: Alec Baldwin. The skit featured Baldwin as a guest on an NPR-like (liberals! Godless!) radio program called “The Delicious Dish,” hosted by Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer (let’s assume that, as New York-based sketch comics, they’re pretty godless, too). Playing a Christmas-sweater-wearing guy named Pete Schweddy, owner of a holiday bakery called “Season’s Eatings,” Baldwin talks about some favorite holiday cookies he makes, chief among them a certain type of rum ball. The punch line is, of course, that these are “Schweddy balls” and that “No one can resist my Schweddy balls.”

Is the skit offensive? Sure, probably, depending on who you are. But it was late-night comedy; if that’s not offensive at least to some people, no one would bother staying up late for it, and the world would be duller for it. Plus, it stands up over time! And it’s flat-out hilarious, if you are (a) over 21; (b) have even a modicum of irony drifitng around your consciousness; and (c) have ever listened to one of those public-radio shows that seem designed to treat insomniacs without drugs.

All these balls have gotten the knickers of One Million Moms, a project of the conservative American Family Association, in a twist. They already didn’t like a Ben & Jerry’s flavor called Hubby Hubby (a play on their popular Chubby Hubby), because, as they say, somehow buying a pint of Hubby Hubby “celebrates gay marriage.” (Someone needs to explain that one to me, for serious.) And now they feel, these self-righteous fear-mongerers, that an ice cream called Schweddy Balls has turned “…something as innocent as ice cream into something repulsive.” I’m sorry: Ice cream? Innocent? And repulsive how? Hey, moms: You don’t like the ice cream for any reason — it’s fattening, it’s too expensive, you don’t like Alec Baldwin or his balls? You don’t get the joke? Don’t buy it!

Kids are in dire straits all over this great country of ours. Twenty-one percent of them live in poverty, according to ChildStats.gov, to use just one example. Are we really going to try to drum up a cease-and-desist campaign over a limited-edition ice cream that won’t even be available in every grocery store in the country anyway? Is that really what we’re worried about?

And what, exactly, are these self-appointed morals-police moms concerned will happen? That hordes of 8-year-old ice cream lovers, on a trip to the grocery store or the local Ben & Jerry’s shop, will see the Balls ice cream and begin experimenting with “deviant” sexual practices? Or that there’s absolutely no level of indecency that’s permissible for children to even peripherally encounter? Or is it that merely by being exposed (sorry) to grown up stuff, they’ll grow up too fast? I’d argue that living in poverty grows a kid up faster, and for the wrong reasons, than being exposed to an ironic, double-entendre joke that they probably won’t get anyway!)

Seems obvious to me that these mothers’ concerns are almost comically misplaced.

Okay, so the ice cream probably isn’t even available in most stores, anyway. But even if it were, even if were being served by your kid’s school, to play Devil’s advocate, who cares? I can guarantee you that if my boys saw that flavor in the supermarket freezer, they wouldn’t be able to pronounce “Schweddy” anyway, and as far as they know, balls are for soccer. And even if they did ask, “Mom, what does that mean?” I could — being quick thinking and, you know, the adult in the situation — say something like, “oh, just a silly name for an ice cream.” Which on the face of it, is exactly what it is.

The world is filled with strange, scary, poorly-understood, vaguely or overtly violent or sexual stuff. Filled with it. So what do we do? Ban Ben & Jerry? And then what?

No, really: then what? Tell me what you think!

First day of school, last year. I can't help being organized, but I fear it triggers an excess of impatience.

Well, the title says it, eh? I’m confessing: I’m horribly impatient. (Those of you who know me are, I realize, sitting there rolling your eyes, like, duh.)

I want to be started with things, and then I want things done. When I wanted to become pregnant, I wanted it to happen pronto, and quickly became frustrated and upset when it took longer than immediately (6 months, for the record). I was sure we’d never find a house we liked and could afford (it took 3 months, for the record, though the closing process dragged for another 5 months until moving day because the house we chose, or that chose us, was owned by a guy whose finances were, let’s say, questionable). My husband likes to chide me for this sort of “we’ll never….” impatience, and in general he’s a very patient man (he’d have to be, with me, right?).

But there’s one way in which he’s not so patient, and because it’s the same with me, I worry. We are both impatient with our sons. Not cruelly so, but there are times I feel like we’re both hurrying them along, prodding them, and sighing impatiently when they dawdle or disregard us or otherwise act like, you know, distracted little boys.

True, both of our children know every single button there is and seem to delight in pushing them, over and over, to the point where even the spawn of Gandhi would be stomping around in parental looniness. But I’m finding I don’t enjoy being Mama Looney, and I don’t like seeing my impatient tendencies on display in my normally calm husband’s demeanor.

True, we’re both tired often, and busy all the time. True, too, that when you strive to raise boys who are capable and responsible, you feel (as we do) that slacking off isn’t the best approach. And true, most of all, that I’m constitutionally unable to be loosey-goosey. There are things I can’t compromise on, at least not easily. I’m too organized to be lax, and sometimes that feels like a big burden to carry around.

For example, I can’t just say, “oh, whatever” on certain rules or habits that pertain to sleep and eating (mostly because good sleep and decent meals are, I’m 100% sure, keep my boys healthy and not beyond-the-bounds-of-reason nuts). If there’s a birthday party that starts at noon, I know that food won’t be served until 2pm (I’ve been to enough kid parties to have this fact firmly in mind), so I make sure they eat a little something before they go. Case in point: at a recent amusement-park party with James, he seemed to be the only one who had eaten first. Meanwhile, a friend of his fainted from heat and hunger.

For another example, I can’t just stick a cold piece of toast in my kids’ hands and drive them to school because we were so lackadaisical that we missed the bus. We never miss the bus. I don’t get missing the bus. So I prod them to get up on time, prod them to finish their breakfast (which I also can’t compromise on; there’s a girl at Daniel’s bus stop who has a cookie and a glass of milk for breakfast, which would never fly at our house), prod them to go upstairs at the precise time they need to be upstairs so they have enough minutes to get their dawdling version of tooth-brushing and dressing done), prod them to get their backpacks sorted out. I don’t enjoy the prodding — but I can no more stop it than I can switch eye colors or the genetic lottery of my mom’s bad feet and my dad’s problematic skin.

So I’m impatient. But I’m looking, I’m keenly searching, for ways and times I can be less so, times I can deliberately let the guard down so my kids can see a more carefree mother in front of them. I can’t stop being organized or thinking four steps ahead, and we still won’t miss the bus, be late for piano lessons, or not have clean underwear on hand.

But there have to be ways to let down my guard. Right? Help me out here!

My sons don’t do a lot.

That is, they don’t do a lot of extra-curricular activities, at least not by today’s standards. Both boys play soccer (using the word “play” loosely here; James may end up being more instinctively athletic, but rest assured no one in this house is going to college on a sports scholarship), and they seem to enjoy it. Both take piano lessons, because I like it. Seriously, that’s why. I always wanted to have learned a musical instrument, and never did. So when a second-hand piano became available to us for next to nothing, I grabbed it, ditched my dining room table, and turned that spot into our music room (much grander than it sounds; it was too small for a dining room, anyway). They seem to like it, particularly Daniel, on his second year. Proud mommy moment alert: when my next door neighbor said she so enjoyed hearing the sounds of his playing through our open windows last summer.

And that’s it, activity-wise. Not including religious studies, which I mention only because our participation in the church’s family program takes up one precious afternoon. I’m sure there are mothers who look at a color-coded family calendar that’s packed with activities, with not one afternoon between Monday and Friday left fallow, and feel they’re doing the right thing. Or who feel that even if it’s not ideal — no one has time for a real dinner and everyone’s doing their homework either in the minivan or while waiting for their sister’s hip-hip lesson to end — it’s what they have to do.

I am not one of those mothers. I like my time, and I like their time.

This spring, we have piano — one lesson after the other, at our teacher’s home — on Wednesday. Monday is religion, and even that’s ending in a couple of weeks. Friday is soccer practice for both boys (score one for Mom having both teams’ weekly practice on the same day, albeit on different fields. Score another one for mom because the reason they’re on the same day is that my husband coaches James’ team, so he conveniently scheduled practice when it was best for me. Hey, I see no reason their activities shouldn’t also work for me.) Soccer games are on the weekends, and that’s fine with me — don’t tell my kids, but I enjoy going to the games sometimes more than they do.

Daniel: soccer player and competitive pizza-eater.

James, on the right, at a game last fall.

So yeah, I have this down to a system that works — we generally eat dinner at home, I don’t have to work out military-level carpools, and I’m not spending a fortune, either. Except of course for the times it doesn’t work. Like yesterday. All that happened is that Daniel’s coach moved the regular practice to that evening in advance of the bad weather called for this Friday (a winter storm’s a-coming. On April 1st.) We could do this: Piano is 3:45 to 4:45, and soccer is 5:30-7pm. My intentions were good, trying to get to both: Daniel gets more physical activity out of practice than out of the game itself, and it was actually a nice afternoon. Why not, I thought, grab the little guy off the bus at 3pm, pack up the piano books, homework, water bottles, soccer equipment and a change of clothes, then pick up Daniel at school, go to the piano instructor’s house for piano (and homework), go grab some pizza, then get to the soccer field, and let Daniel drill and scrimmage with his Pirates while James and I kick a ball around on the side.

It started okay; the pizza was a boy-pleasing idea (pizza — or any meal out — on a weekday? Are we on vacation? Can I say how much I love that this scenario is so out of the ordinary for my sons that I can still wield it as a treat? Score three for mom). But — and I should have anticipated this, given how devoted Daniel is to consuming large amounts of pizza — the meal was nowhere near digested by soccer time. Halfway into a scrimmage, he was clutching his stomach. Plus, the previously pleasant afternoon turned abruptly chilly. Rather than watch his brother or play around himself, James wanted to sit in the car for a while, and promptly shut the door on his fingers (major tears, no lasting injury, thanks). Homework got all confused somehow, and by the time we got home the whole pre-bed routine was at sixes and sevens.

In the lives of some modern mothers, many of whom I see weekly basis relating their drop-off and pick-up schedules that defy the space-time continuum (there’s no way to drop off your daughter at dance and be on a lacrosse field three towns away at the same time, even if you have the baddest-ass SUV on the planet) and lamenting how much fast food must be eaten to keep the schedule humming, my wacky Wednesday was nuthin’. Confusion with homework? A non-routine bedtime routine? Pshaw!

But I realized something yesterday: the slightly sick stomach and the bored/cold/injured younger brother weren’t really the problems (these things might have happened even if our usual routine hadn’t been interrupted, after all). The problem was that I didn’t feel comfortable and relaxed with the craziness of the day. I feel better with just one thing per day, and with some days with nothing on the calendar and time to oversee homework and get dinner started, then letting them play by themselves while I get some bits and pieces of work done. Yesterday, I was discombobulated and vaguely annoyed (misplaced my checkbook in there somewhere, too), and that rubbed off on everyone else.

It’s like I always say (apologies to the grammar police): If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

Yesterday, I got a lovely email from a fellow blogger I recently “met,” named Jennifer Carsen, who writes the blog Mommy Tries. She told me she’d given me a shout out in her blog, and in a sort of good-side-of-the-chain-letter way, I want to give back. Writing, mothering — both are, at many times, lonely pursuits. Knowing others are out there doing the same sort of things is an enormous help: the 2000s version of “mother’s little helper.”

Plus I just love Jennifer’s blog’s tagline: “Bringing you good-enough parenting since 2010.”

So, the deal is that another blogger of Jennifer’s acquaintance named her a “Stylish Blogger,” and set out some rules for accepting the award. Here’s what I have to do, to accept the same award from Jennifer:

• Write this post and link back to the person who gave the award to me. Done. I’ve really enjoyed reading Mommy Tries since I found her (which happened when I noticed that some of my readers were clicking over from her site — sweet!).

• Share 7 things about myself. See below.

• Award (and notify) 5 great bloggers. See below.

So. Seven random things about me.

1. I’m one of those offspring who got a pretty evenly split gene dump from each parent, and the older I get, the more I see this phenomenon expressing itself. I am my mother. I am my father. I parent like my mom, I have her bunions (thanks, Mom!), her obstinacy, and her fierce child-love that is often, and sadly, misunderstood as plain meanness. I parent like my dad, I have his ruddy skin (thanks, Dad!), and his intelligence as well as his impatience.
2. I have a varsity letter from high school in … badminton. Go ahead, laugh. Like Sue Heck from the TV show The Middle, I joined the sport that didn’t have tryouts or cuts. My friend Janet and I played fifth doubles. And we loved it. So there.
3. I never wanted to be anything other than a writer, never. But, it took me until late in my junior year of college to realize I could make a living as something other than a novelist or a poet (which I smartly enough figured out I probably couldn’t support myself doing). Seriously, I was 20 years old before I realized that someone out there has to actually write the stuff in magazines, and hey! I could do that!
4. I am addicted to HGTV and the Real Estate section of the New York Times Sunday paper. In my life, excluding my parents’ home and my college dorms, I’ve lived in … wait, let me count … 7 apartments and two houses. And I can’t get enough of the idea that the next, better house (whether that’s my own, but magically improved by Mike Holmes of Holmes on Homes on HGTV, or a new one that meets my ever evolving needs) is around the corner. Maybe literally!
5. I often have a giant bowl of hot buttered popcorn for lunch. Sue me.
6. I’m cheap. Like, seriously cheap. This whole “green” thing suits me down to the ground, because to be green means to save, right? I wash Ziploc bags, for heaven’s sake. I use gift bags for presents, but I’ve only actually bought two or three gift bags in my life.
7. I’ll probably never get over not having a daughter. My sons are my soul (Daniel) and my heart (James). But my girl? She’s just missing.

OK, now the other bloggers I’ve been loving, either just lately or for a good while now:

• Debbie Koenig of Words to Eat By. I love reading food blogs; if I were to add an eighth “thing” about me, it would be that I love to read recipes. The ratio of recipes I read to recipes I end up cooking is about 10 to 1. But Debbie’s ideas and recipes are perfect for families where the kids gotta eat, and parents aren’t interested in chicken nuggets. (And she’s got a book coming out!)
• Jennifer Lawler, a writer, author and mother who is an inspiration to me. She blogs about writing and about her daughter, Jessica, at Finding Your Voice. I’d say she’s found hers.
• Christina Frank of Living in Splittsville. Christina’s blog is about a midlife makeover post-divorce. She funny, insightful, and last week we both were deeply touched by the same Derek Walcott poem, “Love After Love.” She’s a seeker, and I love that.
• Lisa Bonchek Adams, whose blog is “writings on breast cancer, grief & loss, life, and family.” Yeah, all good stuff, right? But she’s honest, funny, and a wonderful writer.
• Meagan Francis, of The Happiest Mom. Meagan’s one of my longtime writer-buddies, and she never, ever ceases to amaze and inspire me. Practical, relaxed and smart as a parent (of five kids!), she’s an endless font of ideas and action. Go read her blog and just try to come away without a new idea or a fresh perspective.
• And Jen Singer, the Mama Blogger of all mom bloggers I know, whose Momma Said is the “back fence” of the Internet. Because she was funny and keepin’ it real before that became a catch phrase.

And yes, I know that’s more than five. As I said above, sue me.

Order the pineapple pizza if that's what you like (even if the kids don't)

You know what’s funny? It’s not most sitcoms (ba-da-bum!). What’s funny is that after the last time I wrote about the CBS TV sitcom “The Middle,” my friend Sally wrote to agree with me, and also to wonder how it was that I even managed to sit down for an 8pm show. Sally and I both have young children, and yes, watching a show that starts at 8, which is the boys’ basic bedtime, is tough (and no, we don’t have a DVR. Yet. It’s on my list. Thanks in advance for that suggestion).

But it’s not impossible. And that small effort is part of a larger determination to not let my life, or my husband’s, be run over by small feet and sticky fingers.

And that brings me to my report on last week’s episode of “The Middle,” which totally let me down. I was so high on the Hecks a few weeks back, when Mike, the dad, stepped up to the plate and told another dad that, in fact, it was his job to tell his mean tween daughter that her manipulations and deceit were bad form. It would have been so typical-sitcom if he’d laughed it off, but he didn’t; he took the other guy to task. Go Mike, I thought.

But the other night, Mike and Frankie Heck dropped the ball. I won’t belabor the recap, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m a TV junkie (as if) or obsessed with this particular show in a way that would be unseemly (I mean it’s not HBO or anything!). But here’s what happened: the Heck parents realized that they were doing way too much for their three kids, at the expense of their own comfort and pleasure. They only ever ordered the kind of pizza the kids liked, they ran around on their lunch hours getting supplies for school projects, they lived without first-rights access to their own TV remote, for heaven’s sake! So they decided to take back their house and their lives, getting pizza with pineapples and watching what they wanted, kids be damned.

It was way over the top, natch, especially when Frankie rid the family room of any trace of her children and refused to drive her youngest to the library. And also naturally, they gave up soon enough, specifically when they realized that not driving their bookworm kid to the library meant he was spending too much time online, and had already made plans to meet in the park “a guy he was chatting with online.” Uh, oh. Bad parents. Bad!

It was funny, sure, a little bit. But when Frankie, the mom, after capitulating once again, tells a random mom with a baby that she should start now to not give her baby every little thing he ask for, to not subsume herself in his needs (“It’s too late for me, but you can do it!”), I felt so… let down.

She missed the point, the show missed the point. You can drive your son to the library and make a point of buying the polka-dot umbrella for your daughter’s dance routine without giving up your own life. Mike and Frankie compel their eldest to babysit one night so they can go to see a cheesy 80s cover band at a local bar mid-week. And why shouldn’t they? Why is the choice — bear with me, I’m talking now about all of us in the real world now, not just these fictional TV people — between doing everything for our kids and never doing anything for our kids?

Which brings me back to my friend Sally and the modern-day wonder of my husband and me sitting down at 8pm every so often because, damn it, we want to watch a show. We get the bath/books/bed routine done ahead of time, and shoo the little darlings off to their beds by 7:59. The little guy usually falls asleep pretty soon after, and I don’t care if the older guy stays up puttering in his room for a while (what he actually does in there is the subject of another post; when I check in later I try to piece his routine together with clues like an overturned piggy bank, scribbled notes taped to the walls, and which books are face-down on the floor around his bed), as long as he’s not in my hair. Hey kid, after bedtime, unless you’re sick, I’m clocked out (as much as parents ever clock out).

At 8pm, the remote is mine. Minus the remote, which hadn’t been invented yet, this is how my parents rolled. They did an awful lot for us — you know, like paying the mortgage on time, feeding and clothing us, and extras like driving us to dance lessons and dates and taking us to really high-class resorts in the Catskills with actual running water and ice cream for dessert. But their parental self-sacrifice did not include cooking to order for us or doing our homework (though my dad was aces at helping with big projects, like the shampoo he helped my sister make for a science fair, or the Inca terrace-farming project he all but created for me).

Listen, I’ll certainly order half the pizza plain, but the rest is going to have something totally icky on it, like eggplant.

I’ve now been writing Confessions since May of 2009, when I tapped out my first post, The Birth of a Mean Mom. In reading over random past posts this morning, I felt the urge to re-read a couple of favorites, just to see if I still agree with myself (for those of you who are not writers: writers do this all the time. And in case you’re wondering, yes, I do still agree with myself ).

So, as 2010′s clock runs down, I thought I would share seven of my favorite posts from the last year.

In January of 2010, I wrote a post called Spoiled Rotten, in which I wonder whether the modern parenting penchant for doing every little thing for our kids (because we want to coddle them, because it’s faster, because it’s easier) might in fact backfire on our kids later, when they expect things to be done for them (and are quite naturally disappointed), and when they don’t have the skills to do things for themselves. As I wrote:

Then there’s the other kind of spoiling, which to me is far, far more insidious. It’s the kind of spoiling that encompasses everything from the sense of entitlement that grows like a cancer in homes when kids get everything they want without a moment of having to wait, or save, or consider whether they need it; to the lack of respect that’s bred in families where kids are not required to speak kindly to each other or the adults around them, or where manners aren’t enforced; to homes in which there are no rules, no clear sense of who’s in control. That spoils kids because it slows their progress toward maturity.

In April 2010, it was bullies, in a post titled Bullies, Bad Boys and Mean Girls: When Do Parents Get the Blame? I was upset and disturbed by the story of the young girl driven to suicide by bullying (this was before the recent media attention paid to bullies targeting homosexual kids and teens, but it’s all part of the same sad continuum). And I wanted to know:

…where are the parents?

Now, I don’t believe that parents of middle- and high-school kids can be as savvy about what their kids are doing as, say, I can. But I do believe that we all, as parents, should start as we mean to go on. I’m constantly walking a fine line between wanting to know what’s going on in my sons’ lives, the part that exists outside the boundaries of our home, and letting them be free to make friendships and deal with the sometime fallout of those friendships. And I plan to continue that, as best I can. I don’t plan to give up, and I think a lot of parents do.

Moving on to May 2010 –  appropriately for the month dedicated (supposedly) to mothers and motherhood — I wrote a couple of posts that zero in on mother-y feelings. The first is Let’s Tell the Truth About Mother’s Day, in which I make my case against treacly sentiments about mother-love, triggered by one of those Facebook status lines one was meant to copy and paste to “prove” how they loved their children. As I wrote:

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!).

The second May post, You Can’t Always Get (The Kid) You Want, is about how mothers all have to — if they’re honest — deal with the fact that what we imagine about motherhood, about what sort of child we’ll have, doesn’t mesh with the reality of the kid we actually get. Here’s what I said:

It’s heartbreaking not to get the child that you want. These longings, these things you imagine, they are less about the child himself (he’ll be smart, he’ll be gorgeous, he’ll be a good friend to many, he’ll be a wonderful father or the person who finally cures cancer), but about you. What you imagined you’d be doing with your child when he is one, or five, or 11 or 21.

In July 2010, it was all about happiness. When I wrote In Does Being  Mom Make You Happy?, I had just read a New York Magazine article on the subject of parents and happiness. Do we go into this adventure expecting to be made happy by it? I said this:

…while I expected that I would feel pride in his being, joy in the sight of his face and a renewed sense of being needed and wanted, purely physically at first, but psychically, too, as I raised this human being; while I anticipated that I would fall madly in love with my son and any other children who followed him out of my body, it honestly never, ever occurred to me that he would make me happy. Or that parenthood would be all joyful, or even, I don’t know, as much as 25% joyful. I knew it would be a lot of shit (literally, at first), a lot of snot, a lot of laundry, a lot of money, not a lot of sleep, not enough sex (in the early months and years), and other scary and amorphous non-happy-making things later.

Jumping forward to last October, I got into a contemplative mood, after hearing about the death of a mother in my town. In Hail Mommy: A Requiem for a Lost Mother, I struggle –  not for the first time — with the sadness of potential loss that comes with the whole package of parenthood. As I wrote back them:

The one thing I am absolutely sure of is that I won’t soon get the image out of my head of Alexa’s mom in that class last spring, her blond hair precise and neat, her hands folded in her lap, facing the hardest moment a mother is likely to face with such composure. Hers were the only dry eyes in the room. Maybe she’d cried it all out already, or saved her tears for when she was alone. Or maybe she knew something that I resist understanding but know I must learn: That to raise your children, you have to be open to the pain of knowing you may not be able to finish the job.

And in November 2010, I gave a shout out to a fictional dad, a sitcom parent who didn’t take the laugh-track easy way out, in “The Middle”: A Sitcom Dad Actually Gets it Right. I wrote about how I was surprised — and pleased — to watch a half-hour mass market TV show in which the father not only isn’t a thinly-drawn dope, but also steps up to the parenting plate. He declares, in an episode that involves tween girls being mean to each other, that in fact it is a parent’s job to tell their kids when they’re being, you know, idiots:

…he [Mike Heck, the dad in "The Middle"] said what he needed to say to Mr. Shannon’s Dad: When kids are headed down a path that’s going to make them mean, and a bully, and a braggart — and they sure as hell might; sometimes they’re idiots, right? — you say something. Because that’s our job.

And this has been my job (well, part of my job!) for the past year. I’ve enjoyed it and learned from it, and hope you have to. Thank you for your comments — I read and think about all of them. Keep ‘em coming! And let me know if there’s a Mean-Mom subject you think I should write about in 2011. Happy New Year!

Right after this, he *almost* let me kiss him. Almost.

My second son, James, is bewildering and bedeviling in shifting measures, like all offspring, but I have been feeling for a while lately that, while he’s as capable as his big brother of winning or crushing my heart, I understand him better. To put it in actorly terms, I have flashes of brilliance and insight, dealing with him, where I can totally see his motivation.

Why? Because I am he, and he is me. Replace his penis and dormant male hormones with girl parts, let his hair grow (not a a lot, but a little; at his age my mom kept my hair cut in an early-70s pixie, the better to suit my superfine strands), stick him in Dr. Brown’s Delorean set for 2010, and he’d be me. First, in looks. Here’s a pic of me and my sister, when I was around 4:

That's me on the left, with the mini dress (cute, right?) and the Mr. Spock hairdo.

And then here’s James at more or less the same age as I am in the photo above. Also, you’ll note, he’s with his brother. I have more photos of him alone than my parents did, thanks in large part to easier photo technology, but still it’s harder to find photos of him than of his big brother, or without his big brother:

That's James on the left. It occurs to me that he hams it up in photos, with Daniel as straight man. Just like me and my sister.

Here’s how he’s like me in other than looks:

1. He’s gregarious, entertaining, smart and funny (what, you don’t think I am, too?!). That is, when he feels safe. Otherwise, he appears either painfully shy or snootily standoffish.
2. He’s got a dramatic streak 14 miles wide. Direct quotes: “Oh, now we’ll never get there!” (said on a normal-length trip to Grandma’s house marred solely by a short spate of traffic buildup); or “You never make macaroni and cheese” (which I do make pretty darned often, thankyouverymuch); or “I bumped my head and it really, really, really hurts,” when it quite obviously was the lightest possible bump in the history of kids’ bumped heads.
3. He’s a loyal friend, and even at the tender age of 5 1/2, he sees straight through cliquey-ness and cattiness and he instinctively avoids it. It’s cute to watch, because he has no idea that he’s steering clear of the knot of “in” boys because their interactions appear shallow or showy. He’ll say it’s because they’re too loud.
4. He’s not interested, at all, in pleasing grownups who attempt in good-hearted but exaggerated ways to be friends with him. So, teasing and tickling are out, out, out. This of course leads to some bewilderment and temporarily hurt feelings among relatives who don’t see him much, but he’s not giving it away for free, and he sees through a ruse from a mile away, so just don’t try.

I’m musing on this topic for two reasons today. One  is that, on this second week of summer camp after school ended, James is only just now easing into that transition. He finished kindergarten, which was a very big deal to him. The other day, when we were in the car and no one else was talking, I heard him say, softly to himself, “why couldn’t I just stay in kindergarten forever?” So my baby is at a turning point, and he’s not sure who he’s supposed to be, the big first grader, or the baby clinging to kindergarten. So while Daniel leaped eagerly from second grade to a return to the summer camp he loves, James has been more needy, so of course he’s on my mind (and keeping me up at night worrying) more than usual.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m mulling my little one’s resemblance to myself, physically and psychically: I’m trying to figure out the most effective way to deal with a child who is, you know, like me. My grandmother, rest her glorious, tart, sweet soul, used to say that you have to parent each kid the way he or she needs to be parented. Which sounds simple and makes sense, until you get to the part where you have to figure out what those needs are.

With James, I have to pull back from saying breezy, distracting things like, “Oh, but you want to go to first grade!” when he misses his happy, collegial kindergarten. Because of course he does want to go to first grade; of course he does know he’s a big boy; he knows that kind of response is a sop to his ego, which he’s not interested in.

He’s not looking to be distracted; he needs to be heard. You can’t play subterfuge with this kid. You just have to say, “yep, of course you miss kindergarten. Of course you do” and leave it at that.

I have to gloss over the dramatics and praise his good-friend status.

And I have to kiss him while he sleeps, because otherwise I’m not allowed. Come to think of it, was I like that, too? Paging my mom…

How do you shift your parenting styles to suit your kids’ needs?

Me at almost-44, with the glasses and ponytail camouflaging the need for haircolor, and trust me, that's my mom's upper back.

So, in a little over 10 days (13 to be exact, and yes, I just counted on my desk calendar), I’m turning 44. This number makes me feel a little weird. A little oogie. (My mother, as point of comparison, became a grandmother at 44. Whoa.)

Indulge me, but I’m feeling a little old.

Yes, yes, I know all about the 40s being the new 30s, but I already did my 30s, and when I was in my 20s, guess what? I was in my 20s. I’ve been pacing myself, but nevertheless, I’m now middle aged. Middle aged with two small children. Which still, even in these days of advanced-ish-age motherhood (Kelly Preston, anyone?), surprises people. I can almost see a quick calculation in their eyes: She has a second-grader, so let’s say she had him in her early 30s, which I’m going to assume because she seems like the type to have kids later than the national average, so that puts her at, say, 37.”

Sigh. 37: When my gray hairs were lonely soldiers gathering on the top of my head. Now they’ve massed together to form an upstart nation which is staging a revolution on my former natural color. My former color, it must be said, that’s also all but gone. What happened to the rich brown with reddish natural highlights? The roots coming in that are not gray are now a flat darkish color (which Kim, my hairdresser, is happy to point out before she spreads on the goop that will bring me back to the color I see on my kids’ heads now).

I’m in this weird spot. I’m not old, but I’m no longer young. The wrinkle (ha ha!), too, is that I’ve historically looked a lot younger than my chronological age (I’m not preening, it just is what it is; at my first job, when I was 22, I was routinely taken for a 17-year-old intern, complicated even more if the person making the error had talked to me on the phone first, because voice-wise, I sounded the same back then, or even back when I was about 6, as I do now — annoyingly mature). Anyway, now, I’m in this place where I’m waiting for that surprised, “You’re 35! No way! You don’t look a day older than 28!” to slip away, to be replaced with, “You’re 50? Yeah.”

It’s catching up.

I know what you’re thinking: what is this navel-gazing post doing in a blog about raising kids? It’s simple: The people who raise kids are … drum roll … still actual, whole people themselves! And one thing this Mean Mom has been doing, assiduously and determinedly, since that day in 2002 when I had my first son, is holding on to that self. And you know what? That self sometimes feels old. Well, older.

I’m just not hot anymore (except to my husband, but he’s way biased, knowing as he does what side his bread is buttered, yk?). I’m not a ragged mess, I don’t wear what my college friend Penny used to call “yank ‘em ups,” those elastic-waist pants you can buy, in a range of rainbow hues, via mail-order (check your Sunday supplements, or those ads in woman’s magazines, next to the ones for ceramic angels and babies). I may let the time drag between appointments with Kim (letting those grays think they’ll win in their relentless advance, until I pony up the hundred bucks and give them a chemical beat-back). I do my best to stay healthy and energetic: I run, I do Pilates, I lift weights, I wear cool shoes when I can. But I’m still a mom, with an undeniable mom-look: a poochy midsection, tired legs (that used to be hot legs, trust me), and — I just noticed the other day — my mother’s upper back. Hard to explain what that means, but suffice to say, it brought me up short.

Earlier today, I was reading Stephanie Dolgoff’s blog, Formerly Hot, which I really like (read: am jealous of). She has a book coming out, and after I watched the trailer for it (note to self: if you get book deal, think video book trailer), I felt both better (I’m not alone!) and worse (so what if I’m not alone! I’m still no longer hot!).

Anyway. Happy almost-birthday to me; to my C-section scar; to the spider veins; to the further evidence of my mom’s genes expressing themselves (Exhibit A: bunion on right foot. Not hot); to what my son James calls the “cracks” on my eyes; to the tiny spots I see in the magnifying mirror that make me rue the days I spent baking in the sun. I’m going to restrain myself from saying, “but it’s all worth it because I have my beautiful boys.”

The boys are worth … they have no calculable worth. So let’s admit it, fellow formerly smokin’ women who are now deep into motherhood and life-hood: wouldn’t it be great to have the kids and the hot legs?

As readers can tell by perusing my last post, I’m not on board with junking up emotions surrounding motherhood with borrowed words or treacly sentiment. I’m all about the reality, kiddos.

I’ve also never been, since becoming a mom, about abandoning my own hard-won instincts in order to follow any crowd into a place that leaves me wondering if I’m doing the right thing. I can (mostly) figure that out myself.

Though I’ve posted about this before, few people I know address this topic better than the incomparable Jen Singer, mother, soccer coach, blogger, book author, and wearer of leopard print kitten heels (okay, that last part is just my wish for her, and she knows just what I’m talking about).

To celebrate the publication of her fifth (!!) book, here’s a video that says it all. Listen up, mothers. That mumbling and grumbling in your gut? Yeah, listen. It’s not hunger or indigestion. It’s your own instinct, and it’s spot on:

The shoes at the side door (and the kid in them) just get bigger

Over at Mommasaid.net, my friend and colleague Jen Singer lists some of the reasons parenting teens is harder now than it used to be (exhibit A: sexting. Shudder).

Jen actually has a newly-minted, real-life teenage son. I do not, yet (though I do sometimes stare at the welter of kid-size sneakers, boots, and soccer cleats near the door and imagine them three times the size, and my heart aches for a mudroom and a shoeless infant in equal measure).

So no, I have no actual teens yet — but geez, oh, man is my older boy acting like one lately! Recent utterances:

I want my privacy!

Why can’t I have a lock on my door?!

When do I get to make the rules around here?

and our current favorite:

When I have kids, they’ll be able to [eat two desserts if they want; stay up all night if they want; have as much computer time as they want]!

He gets himself quite heated up, in a scarily teen-like manner, over things like having to go upstairs now to brush teeth and get dressed, and not five minutes from now, because five minutes from now is when the bus comes (and no, we can’t go to school late; Mama does not want to break her perfect record of never having had to drive him to school in almost three years. I take my moments of pride where I can get them, lately).

I get why my Daniel is erupting in anger at some inopportune moments; he’s jonesing for more independence. I’d love to give him more, but not necessarily the kind he wants. And that’s the dance I’m trying to learn the steps of right now.

• Not going to happen: He gets to decide what time bedtime is. Uh, uh. Though seriously, and don’t tell him this, I probably could let him “stay up” in his bed as long as he likes; because he’s always been the best sleeper in the house, hands down, he’d probably keel over not to far from the Mom-sanctioned bedtime anyway.

• Will happen: He’s going to start making his own lunch, at least on weekends when I’m not so pressed for time, and pretty soon on school mornings, too (he’s already responsible for packing up his backpack, though that takes two or six reminders).

• Not going to happen: Having two desserts. His sweet tooth is way too sharp and shiny (just like his mother’s!) to allow that. I have already made the decision, and communicated as such to my kids, that for now, I know more about what’s good for them to eat than they so, and I’m in control of the shopping list and the pantry doors.

• Will absolutely happen: He’ll be heading home from the bus stop on his own starting in third grade, when he and his brother will be in different schools, with an hour lag between their comings and goings. No way am I making four trips a day up the block, and it’ll make him feel good to be the guy marching down the hill on his own, as it should (I’d do it this year, but school rules say that kindergarteners have to be met at the bus stop by parent, guardian, or sanctioned-by-written-note substitute guardian, and the little guy is in K. Sigh.)

The good (for now) news about Daniel is that his naturally, deeply sensitive nature usually causes him to turn around and throw himself on me in abject despair once he realizes he’s turned the whole house upside down for the want of 5 more minutes to watch SpongeBob before school, and apologizes in a patently un-teen-like manner. “I still need you Mommy! I do!”

I figure I have a few more years of that. Right? Right?