Family vacationing is not a lot of things, such as relaxing and rejuvenating. But it is one major thing, and that’s illuminating. Silly as this might sound, I know my boys better now than I did before we left, and I watched them, even if just a teeny bit, grow in the 6 days/5 nights we were away. They became a smidge more worldly-wise, and also a large measure more deeply themselves. Really, if when we as adults go away to a place we’ve never seen or experienced, we etch more grooves into our personalities, why wouldn’t the same be true of  our children? Being in a new — and overwhelming, overtaxing, exhilarating — environment brought out what’s uniquely James about James (his intellectual approach to things like fear), and uniquely Daniel about Daniel (his devotion to facts and detail).

You just can’t underestimate the power of the Mouse. Even this natural-born cynic fell under the spell of old Walt’s magic. Or should I say, Magic (this being the most-often used word in the 43 square miles of Disney universe). You turn a corner, and there’s a band! Or a parade! You stand still for 5 seconds and a staffer (excuse me, “cast member”) comes up to your child and asks for a high-five and an accounting of their day. Before you know it,they’re chatting about the best way to rack up points on Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, or debating favorite characters. And they’re all so bloody nice. You do a lot of waving. A lot.

But I have a couple of observations. Which you might expect I would.

One: Innocence rules. A lot of parents who go to Disney World lament the fact that there’s merchandise wherever you turn, and it’s true. It’s an empire, and empires have to sell stuff to make it all profitable–and to increase the sort of intense (insane?) loyalty that keeps people coming back for more. Take those ubiquitous Disney princesses, which some smart Disney marketer decided, a few years back, to group  together into a sort of irresistible-to-little-girls cabal. They’re all there, from the Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty of my youth to the 80′s and 90′s and early 2000′s gals like Mulan, Belle, Ariel, and Jasmine. The force of their allure is so strong it began to appear odd to see a little girl dressed in her regular clothes. The place was crawling with princesses, decked out in polyester gowns and glittering tiaras. Your kid sees the movies, aches for the merch, and then to visit them in “person,” and then you’re dumped right into a store post-ride and you buy some more. It’s a cycle, and you could call it vicious. I prefer instead to just skirt around it. Literally. We went in plenty of stores (mommy needed regular doses of air conditioning, for one thing). But we didn’t buy much at all.

Both boys brought their own wallets with their own stash of dollar bills they could use. James bought: a lollipop, a postcard, a Donald Duck keychain and a Woody Kooky Pen. And I bought him a Mickey t-shirt. Daniel got: a lollipop, a book of postcards, a pen, a Donald keychain and a Goofy Kooky Pen. And a t-shirt from me. This plan worked so well that, in one store James and I browsed while Daniel and his dad hit a ride Jamie was too chicken to try (Splash Mountain), he tried on a Mickey-ear hat done up like Lightening McQueen, as well as a Goofy hat (both of which were adorable, see):

without once asking if he could have them. As he put the McQueen hat back on the rack, he even volunteered, to another mother nearby, “we’re not buying anything. We’re just shopping.” Good boy.

When I say innocence rules, I mean this: My kids know who the characters are, but in a similar way that I did as child. These were quasi-real beings to hopefully get a glimpse of, not an experience to buy into. That’s literally all they see; the rest — the autograph books you can obsessively fill with character signatures; the pins you can buy and trade with others, the princess and pirate garb — is all just eye candy. They have only a dim idea of how huge the whole thing can be, and that’s by design — mine. I don’t deceive myself into thinking they’ll never ask for more and/or buy into it further, but neither do I urge, push, or encourage them to see, do and want more. Which, believe me, plenty of parents do. I saw it.

Two: Diapers and Disney are an odd mix. The first time I went to Disney World, it was quite literally a different era. It was 1976. We drove down in our fake-wood-paneled station wagon, just my parents and sister and me. I was 10, my sister 13. My brother, at 3? He stayed at home with my aunt. (Before you get all boo-hoo about baby bro, by the time he was of age, and my sister and I were in college/on our own, he got trips aplenty that we never imagined, speaking of different eras). But anyway. I don’t recall having seen strollers. Today? There are thousands of strollers, thousands. (Which you can also rent, and which parents rent for kids as old as my sons, too). Here’s just one of the many designated stroller parking areas:

Acres of them, I tell you. Acres.

I don’t disparage wanting to go when your kids are small (and I’m talking not of parents with older kids, but those with only tiny ones); I just don’t understand it, personally. My question is a simple, plaintive, why? Disney’s not going anywhere; it’ll still be pouring out the pixie dust when those kids are out of diapers and ambulatory. I saw many hot, miserable  parents with strollers and sippy cups and diapers and princess tiaras. I saw one family with two girls who had to both be under four, sparkled up to the nth degree as pretty princesses, with a defeated-looking dad and a hugely pregnant mother (bear in mind this is August in Orlando). I saw tiny, flushed toddlers passed out in strollers, and big, flushed parents waiting in line for Dumbo with infants in their arms.

In 1976 it didn’t occur to my parents to figure out how to tote a three year old (who still needed naps, I’m sure). These days, it somehow appeals to to parents to haul three kids under four around for several days. The Magic Kingdom’s added on a new section aimed specifically at the under-kindergarten set, called Mickey’s Toontown Fair. It’s awfully cute, with cartoonish, fanciful buildings and a sprinkler park area filled with tots in swim diapers and parents seeking spots of shade while they watch. Couldn’t they have saved a couple thou and stayed home with the sprinkler, and come back with a splash when their kids were old enough to remember? One thing they seem to be accomplishing (besides lining the pockets of the booming stroller-rental trade) is to be creating Disney-philes earlier and earlier.

Three: The pace can kill you (if you’re not careful). Did I mention the part where Disney is 43 square miles? Old Walt Disney, having shoehorned his original Anaheim, CA park into already-developed land, probably felt a rush of exhilaration (and saw dollar signs, no doubt) when he first toured the swampy center of then empty Florida. And it keeps going. In 1976, it was just the Magic Kingdom. I went back to Disney in my 20s, when EPCOT had joined the group. Now there’s Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Downtown Disney East and West, Pleasure Island, and two mega waterparks. And you can tour them all! We met and talked to families who were on 12 day trips. Personally, I can’t eat substandard food for that long; Disney does a fairly decent job of feeding the masses (and though there’s a lot of junk food, there are also a good amount of healthy choices), but I was out of patience with feeding myself and my kids from the same range of options over and over. (A food aside: One of the biggest selling “snacks” at all the parks is a giant smoked turkey leg. Yes, you too can walk around in 90-degree heat looking like Henry VIII in short shorts and a sweaty Mickey t-shirt!). We paced ourselves pretty carefully — no late-night “magic hours” for us (on any given night, a park might stay open till 2am!) — and we generally got out of Dodge and back to our hotel for a swim by evening. Plus, we skipped Hollywood Studios (see Innocence Rules, above; if my kids have no idea about the Tower of Terror, should I be the one to drag them there before they ask?) and the water parks (ditto). And though my original plan called for two days at EPCOT, we kept that to one in favor of a third at Magic Kingdom. Why? The kids loved the tea cup ride:

Daniel, spinning Madly. My favorite photo of him from the trip.

...and here's James, also gettin' dizzy with it

…and so did we. I’d rather hang around and do a handful of favorite rides four times over, than drag tired kids from one end of the property to another to “see” it “all.”

So, that was our trip! Any questions?

I’ve written about this sort of vacation before, and I’ll write about the whole multi-generational family vacay again, I’m sure, but for now I bring it up because it was yet another chance for my boys to take in little tiny lessons about money. Specifically, the quarters they asked for so they could feed the machines in the game room and increase their stash of rubber bracelets, fake rings, and sticky frogs. As it was vacation, we were liberal with dips into our pockets for extra quarters after they ran out of the modest amount they extracted from their piggy banks at home.

But it was interesting to watch, especially as I’d just written a piece for the website DailyWorth.com about teaching small money lessons to kids. Not big teaching moments: we weren’t drawing up lessons about compound interest or how the Fed works (which I don’t always get myself). But little ones, like the value of a quarter, a dollar, a couple of bucks. Here’s what I wrote for DailyWorth:

I like to treat my five- and seven-year-old sons, but I don’t want them to believe Silly Bandz fall from heaven, or that my wallet is a magic dollar dispenser. So every time they troll the grocery store with me or get tempted by the snacks for sale at summer camp, I try to impart little money lessons—and they’re actually adding up.

• Dollars and sense. Candy and ice cream at day camp are usually a dollar or less, and my sons didn’t understand why I was reluctant to just hand over a buck or two. So I totted it up for them: $1 per boy, per day, comes to $10 a week. That number produced newfound respect for how much their snacks really cost. And respect is where responsible spending starts.
• Size matters. The other day, I tossed a loaf of raisin bread in the grocery cart, remarking that it cost $3.50 a loaf. My seven-year-old piped up: “The Subway sandwich at camp is $3.50.” Ding! “That’s one sandwich,” I said. “This is a whole loaf of bread—breakfast for you and your brother all week.” And he got it. I could see him mentally comparing the idea of all those breakfasts against a measly six-inch hero.
• No matter how you slice it… I sometimes let the kids buy pizza ($2 a slice)—but I usually stop them at one slice (they want more for competition’s sake with their friends, not because they’re hungry). I tell them: $2 may not be much money, but $4 is too much for a lunch they won’t finish, especially when I have perfectly good food at home. I have to repeat myself (often!), but the other day I heard my older son say to the little guy, “You don’t need two slices of pizza for lunch, you know.”

Of course, I get regular reminders that this is a big learning curve for them—and me. Yesterday was supposed to be Carnival Day at camp, and I gave the kids $5 for the games and activities. Well, the carnival was postponed due to bad weather, but guess who spent the $5 on candy anyway? Sigh. One step forward, two steps back.

Since the last time we went upstate to this particular resort, in those ancient, lovely mountains, we didn’t have a lot of things. We didn’t have, for example, the experience of my father undergoing (successful!) surgery for lung cancer. We also didn’t have my newest nephew, Nico, or know what college my older nephew Nicholas was going to. The point is, we’re growing, we’re changing, we’re together.

And we’re thrifty!

The experts are, I believe, trying to get it right, trying to give us life-saving advice. Use car seats, for example. Don’t smoke two packs a day while pregnant. But when the attitude veers from helpful to paternalistic and big-brother-ish, and when following it means erasing your own instincts, I get prickly. And so does Debbie, who has written a hilarious and spot-on piece about how she — a food expert! — has, unbeknownst to her, been bucking received wisdom the whole of her son Harry’s life by feeding him the dreaded choking hazards.

Here’s her piece. Let me know what you think:

Debbie Koenig's son, Harry, aka "Mr. Hot Dog"

Apparently, I’m trying to kill my son.

Or so it would seem, now that the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a policy statement pointing out the choking hazards lurking in my kitchen—even going so far as to suggest that manufacturers redesign the hot dog (a notion which strikes me as being just short of insanity). When the statement appeared, it included a helpful list of the 10 biggest choking hazards for children under five. This list zoomed all over the momosphere; thanks to parenting blogs, message boards, and social media, I heard about it from at least a dozen sources. Like all my friends with preschoolers, I read the list, felt a chill run down my spine, and promptly began to beat myself up for the countless times we narrowly escaped tragedy.

Let’s see, which of the foods on that list have I given my four-year-old recently?

• Hot dogs: Frankfurters are, without a doubt, Harry’s favorite food. It’s no surprise—my husband and I are raising him to appreciate the finer points of a well-made dog. We actually take road trips just to sample renowned weenies. The AAP recommends cutting them lengthwise until age five, but we stopped doing that months ago.
• Nuts: He doesn’t eat them often, and so far it’s only been as part of a trail mix that features chocolate. (In fact, we’ll only let him have this mix if he eats the nuts—no picking out the chocolate, junior. Further proof I’m trying to kill him.)
• Seeds: That trail mix I mentioned? Sunflower seeds.
• Whole grapes: For the first two years of Harry’s grape-eating career, I meticulously cut them up. Heck, at first I skinned them entirely. But once he became a kid more than a toddler (to my mind, at least), quartered grapes seemed like overkill.
• Raw carrots: Seriously? Baby carrots are among the few vegetables Harry eats willingly. Thanks to his disdain for squishy food, I gave up steaming them when he turned three.
• Popcorn: Harry had his first taste about six months ago. To be honest, I knew this was a choking risk and was pretty terrified—but so many of my friends had been giving it to their tots, I had begun to feel like a wuss. So I sat with him on the sofa and insisted he eat one piece at a time, chewing thoroughly before swallowing. No surprise, that level of vigilance has eased. I don’t leave the room when he’s eating popcorn, but I don’t watch him like a hawk, either.
• Apples: Again, seriously? Harry must wait another year to experience the perfect pleasure of biting into an apple while we cruise the farmer’s market?
• Marshmallows: Yeah. These, we actually used as potty-training incentive. For pee, he’d get one mini-marshmallow. For poop, two. I shudder to think how I risked my son’s life, just so I could say goodbye to changing diapers.
• Hard candy: Only a single transgression here, a few months ago. There was a sucking candy in the goody bag from a schoolmate’s birthday party, and Harry got to it before I did. I blame that kid’s mom.
• Gobs of peanut butter: Harry only gets thin shmears. Phew! At least there’s one item on the list I haven’t used for attempted filicide.

You probably assume I changed my dangerous ways once I read that list. Eh, not so much. According to an analysis performed by Stats.org, a nonprofit research center that interprets statistical mumbo-jumbo, the AAP’s policy statement may be a wee bit inflammatory: “To put the risk into perspective, approximately five children died each year in the U.S. from choking on a hot dog—along with, approximately, 3.3 from candy, 3 from peanuts or other nuts, 2.7 from grapes, 2.3 from other meat, 2 from carrots, 1.7 from popcorn, 1.5 from apples…” And all of these deaths were children younger than three. As creepy as it is to discuss in such terms—and believe me, I know every single one of those children left behind a devastated family—more children Harry’s age die each year in car crashes (or by gunshot) than from choking on the top 10 hazards combined.

Which is not to say I haven’t made adjustments. Reflexively, I check that Harry’s peanuts are halved before he eats them. He’s fully potty-trained, thank heavens, so we’d already cut out the marshmallows. Popcorn remains an occasional treat. And lately we’ve been serving him what we call “dogburgers”: a hot dog cut in half lengthwise, then again across the middle, served on a hamburger bun—a practice instituted when we were out of hot dog buns, not in response to the AAP’s statement. Harry seems to prefer it that way, and if it makes me feel less like a would-be murderer, so much the better.

This has been circulating in old- and new-media circles this muggy month in part thanks to an article in New York magazine, by Jennifer Senior, that has, as they say, gone viral. It’s been Tweeted and Facebooked, blogged about, and discussed on the radio (one good interview with Senior took place on my local NPR station, WNYC, on Brian Lehrer’s show the other day. You can listen to it here, if you’re so inclined).

Um, what do I have to say on the topic? What makes you think I have something to add to the discussion? Hahaha, as the social-media types like to type. Of course I have something to say.

And it’s this: Really? Really? We’re still talking about this? Have we still not come to terms with the fact that becoming a parent doesn’t magically bestow happiness on your head, any more than getting married does? Apparently not. Apparently we’re still, as the article suggests, “surprised” (and of course bemused and not a little bit annoyed, if I may editorialize) that bringing our children into the world didn’t up our happiness factor.

Senior takes as her premise the statement that “most parents” expect having children will make them happy.

They do? I didn’t.

Oh, I get that many people use that word, “happy,” as shorthand for other things, like fulfillment and an increased sense of purpose, but it all boils down to the same idea. We’re all always looking for the magic, make-me-happy bullet, and guess what folks? You are the only person who can engineer your own fulfillment, nurture your own sense of purpose, and create your own contentment, all of which are hard to find, and all of which are unfair to ask a baby or child to give you. Unfair, and impossible.

Yeah, I know–I’m taking what’s essentially a pop-culture article to the extreme; after all, it is a well-written, thought provoking piece, that’s mostly for, you know, passing interest and diversion. Plus, it’s getting people talking, especially about thorny issues like why American parents may be, according to research on such things, unhappier than those in, say, Sweden or France, where support for working families mitigates some of the modern-life issues that make parenting such a tough row to hoe for many of us. Things I pine for, like paid maternity leave, subsidized quality daycare, healthcare coverage, and free or very low cost higher education. Just think — as Senior’s piece points out — how may of the woes of modern American parenthood those things erase!

She writes, as well, of the difference between our generation, armed with our educations and our choices (and the attendant, for some of us, sense of entitlement), and that of our parents, who (speaking broadly here) went from their own parents’ homes to their married homes and leaped right into parenthood. The idea being, no choices to ponder, plus no time to think, equals no crazy-making false assumption that becoming a parent will Make You Happy. (This, incidentally, has always been my mother’s take on our blah blah blah navel-gazing generation: “You people have too much time on your hands. Less talking, more doing, okay?”)

And yeah, there is a big gulf there, leaving to one side all the jawing about choices or lack thereof and what that has to do with how happy (or not) we are. But where does that leave me? I’m smack-dab-bang-on in the cohort that should be wrestling most mightily (and, if you agree with some of the online commenters to Senior’s article, whining the most with the belief that if I’m feeling something, everyone must be) with this problem of unhappiness in parenthood.

Just check it out: I’m well-educated. I had a solid, successful career before I even got married, much less decided to have a child. I was 36 when I had my son, for heaven’s sake. Not to mention I am (or was, at the time) urban. East Coast urban, no less.

And I had that baby. And 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 physically, 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. Can I just say “teenager” and leave it at that?

Later in Senior’s piece, she makes the not unfamiliar point that in the “olden” days, children were essentially economic commodities. Adults had children in part because they had little to no effective way of controlling whether they had them or not, but also because their offspring provided vital help on the farm or whatever, as well as childcare help with the subsequent new siblings. Those who survived, that is. Fast forward to now, and after a bunch of generations during which we got increasingly better at choosing the timing of parenthood and the number of kids, and we’ve reached a point where kids are not home and farm helpers (or, as they were in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, potential money earners in factories and mines). We’ve reached the point where they’ve turned instead into projects. Says Senior: “kids went from being our staffs, to being our bosses.”

Oh. Ick.

I’m not my son’s serf. I met his needs as a newborn, an infant, a toddler, and continue to do the things for him and his brother that they can’t do themselves. I feed, I clothe, I see to their education, I organize their things and their social lives and read to them and get their hair cut and wash their bodies and wipe their butts (still, with the five year old. Sigh. He promises that by his sixth birthday he’ll take the toilet paper into his own hands). When they get older, I’ll still do a lot of those things, and more (hey, I still expect a meal prepared for me when I go to my mom’s house, which is as it should be), but I’ll also expect that they will pick up quite a lot of the slack.

All this is not to say that I want my sons to, when they are able-bodied enough, become my staff (first of all, I don’t have a farm, so there’s that). What I am aiming for? We’ll all serve each other, the needs of the family and of the home. Funny, just yesterday I was talking to Daniel about the things he can do (put the waffles in the toaster, stack his dish in the dishwasher) and the things he can’t yet (grill the hot dogs on the barbecue), and said that as he got older, he could — and would — do lots around the house. I started ticking them off: Change your sheets. Do your laundry. Help mommy cook. Dust and vacuum. Rake the leaves. Mow the lawn. Shovel the snow. Wash the car.

“And if your friends say, ‘hey, Daniel, why did you have to do all that stuff?’ you can say, ‘because we all do things for each other in our house.’ ”

Because, I want him to understand, while we all have the human responsibility (and ability) to effect our own happiness (he can’t “make” me happy any more than I can “make” him happy), we have the familial responsibility to lighten each other’s loads, and each other’s lives.

No whining necessary.

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?

These aren't my meatballs (too much sauce!), but my boys sure do love it when I make them!

So the boys started their six weeks at the local YMCA camp yesterday. I love this camp. Love it. But as with any situation where kids gather, bad food options seem to be the norm. I work around it; I try not to get my hackles up when I see the Snack Shack stocked with Nerds and Sour Patch Kids and heaven knows what else. Kids like candy, right? The battle I’m having — already! on day one! — is whether I’ll give them money every single day for a trip to the Shack (or is it Shak?).

This intro is my way of saying that food — who’s in control of what’s eaten in and out of the house — is a major issue with me. I don’t care to give up that control, and I don’t think that I should. I’ve written about this before, here. But I also am not an autocrat, and I do remember my own days as a closet (literally) candy-eater. My Daniel has inherited my sweet tooth. (James seems to have inherited the other aspect of my childhood relationship with food; eating just enough to maintain his spaghetti-legs figure). So I want to walk a line between — in the case of camp — packing them healthy lunches, and letting them supplement that with sugar and corn syrup and whatever makes Sour Patch Kids sour (sour mix? Probably not. I think I’d rather not know).

And I must be doing something right, because as I wrote in a guest post on the wonderful Words to Eat By blog, some of my lovingly and freshly prepared foods occasionally rank in my boys’ top favorite foods, even edging out, from time to time, pizza and hot dogs. Which, as Daniel is relishing, are sold for lunch at the Y on Tuesdays and Thursday, respectively.

Oh, and after you read about me, my boys and my meatballs, spend some time on the Words to Eat By blog, by food writer and mom Debbie Koenig. It’s terrific; one of those food blogs you can easily lose an hour on, reading recipes and browsing through photos of the real food she really makes for her real family. Really! She’s working on a book called Parents Need to Eat, Too, by the way, so watch out for that.

And now, it’s just about four hours until I go pick them up, hopefully happy, streaked with dirt, sweat and sunscreen, and with all their socks and underwear and reusable water bottles (one never knows what will be, not not be, in the backpacks), and lips either blue or red from heaven knows what.

What food rules do you bend in the summer? And what dishes do you make that are surefire kid winners?

I don’t have a big family; for better or worse, my two kids are enough for me. But one of the arguments people make against breeding beyond two (or maybe three) offspring is that your time, attention, and resources will be stretched thin. And I’m not (well, the naysayers on larger families are not) saying that it’s all about the cash, thought that’s a big part of it. It’s about the focus you supposedly can’t muster for more than a couple of managable children.

If you have a big, noisy brood (more than me, less than Michelle Duggar, say), you…

• Can’t possibly have them all take piano lessons
• Can’t possibly do homework with each of them, one on one, every day
• Can’t possibly turn them into soccer/lacrosse/ballet stars
• Can’t transmit your values, hopes, dreams, or tell your stories, or mold them into the people you wish them to be.

Which is all a way of demonstrating that, for many of today’s parents, parenting is a project, and who wants to do a poor job on a project as important as growing a small human into a big one? No one does. Listen, I can’t look too far down my nose at parents like that; my kids play both soccer and piano, and when I empty their school backpacks every day, I tear my hair out with all the notices and art pieces and tests and homework pages that I have to sort and organize. How could I possibly deal with more than two of this?

But that’s just the extracurricular stuff and school. The latter you have to do, the former you have a choice about, and my choice has been to keep activities to a minimum, so that there are at least two fallow after-school weekdays. It works for us. If one of them wanted to play baseball, he’d have to drop soccer for that season. Can’t do more. (This stance was cemented this weekend, when I had a chat with a mom from my little guy’s soccer team. These are kindergarteners. She was trying to figure out how she could handle signing up her daughter next year, since in first grade in this league there’s a weekday practice in addition to one weekend game, and the times are fluid, not fixed. She simply could not juggle any more time on any more days. For a six year old. I bit my tongue rather than say, “well, if L wants the soccer, why not have her give up, I don’t know, dance? Mandarin lessons?” She doesn’t take Mandarin; that’s just an example).

But it’s not just the activities. It’s the idea, which has grown into a kind of free-floating anxiety among parents in my general generational group, that nurture is stronger than nature (or maybe it’s that nurture is, by definition, the one we can control); and that if we can do something to change, mold, or shape our child’s life, we have to do it. Have to.

An interesting article appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week, timed for Father’s Day. The writer, Bryan Caplan, is an economics professor at George Mason University, and he cites a whole bunch of research that shows, if you believe it’s true, that what we can do for our kids, in terms of how they ultimately turn out, is actually pretty minimal, and ultimately, in the final analysis, ineffective. All that homework help, pffffft. All those stern admonitions to eat broccoli, pfffft.

Turns out, again according to this research (which involved those darlings of behavioral genetics research, twins and adopted children), that nature is far more powerful. We do have an effect, because how can we not, but it may well be that our influence gradually wears off, like the measles vaccine, and there are no parental boosters, not really. They eat the broccoli while they’re with us, but when they grow up, they either eat it or they don’t, essentially.

A lot of the research results Caplan includes in the piece made my eyes glaze over (too many twin cohorts in Sweden and adoptees in Australia I guess; I don’t have the brain for academic-ese). But his conclusion rings true to me:

If you think that your kids’ future rests in your hands, you’ll probably make many painful “investments”—and feel guilty that you didn’t do more. Once you realize that your kids’ future largely rests in their own hands, you can give yourself a guilt-free break. If you enjoy reading with your children, wonderful. But if you skip the nightly book, you’re not stunting their intelligence, ruining their chances for college or dooming them to a dead-end job. The same goes for the other dilemmas that weigh on parents’ consciences. Watching television, playing sports, eating vegetables, living in the right neighborhood: Your choices have little effect on your kids’ development, so it’s OK to relax. In fact, relaxing is better for the whole family.

Rock on, Professor Caplan. He goes on to suggest that this may be an excellent argument for having more children; sure it costs more (in time and money and sleep) in the short run, but in the long run? The fact that you can’t do it all may be the best gift you can give your brood. (Ah, if I were younger, if I were younger…)

Another thing Caplan points out, research-wise, is that the one thing we do that does stick with our little dears is how happy they felt. In short, kids don’t grow into adulthood better equipped because you signed them up for SAT classes, dragged their asses to riding lessons, taught them French, or did their model-of-the-solar-system diorama for them. But they are better off when they remember a safe, reasonably happy, reasonably harmonious home. I can do that!

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?

Oh, no. It was that “someone else” thing that got some commenters into a twist. Maybe, maybe you can admit (if you make it clear that you’re mostly joking, hahaha) that you don’t much care for singing, clapping, or shaking maracas. Maybe, maybe you can say that Gymboree gives you the heebies. But you cannot say that you’d rather someone else took care of that aspect of parenting (and I’m just leaving to one side the whole notion that singing and clapping and maracas of any kind should be considered an aspect of parenting at all).

Because if you admit you’re happy for someone else to do something with or for your child that you should be doing (and hopefully enjoying, but at the very least grinning through the pain), you are a terrible mother. Which few people actually say, but many people — sometimes innocently, sometimes with complete self-consciousness (if not self-righteousness) — firmly believe.

Why?

Why is doing the stuff you truly don’t enjoy, the stuff you’re actually crappy at, more virtuous than not doing it? And why is admitting that not only do you not like these certain somethings, but going on to say that you’d be much happier if you could let your child do that thing with someone else, so much worse?

It ends up not being a terribly large leap from someone sniffing at your parenting skills if you admit you hate Mommy & Me, and turning the eye of judgment on you for working, not because you have to (that’s okay), but because you also want to (inviting “why did you have children?” insinuations).

I freely (and frequently) point out that I am not a crafty person. I pretty much suck at that stuff, to be honest (and I prefer to be honest). I can’t tell you how happy I was to get all those scrapbook pages and poster-paint handprints and frames with glued-on shells while my boys were in daycare. Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it. Nor was I going to apologize for not wanting to do it. Any more than I apologize for the daycare I relied on when starting my freelance career (wouldn’t it have been more virtuous, more good-mommy of me, to juggle madly with my baby and toddler at home with me?).

Nor should my neighbor, a woman who drops her toddler off at a daycare center for a good chunk of every day, apologize or justify her reasoning, even though — as another neighbor (in shock!) pointed out — she doesn’t work outside her home. Well, I said to this other neighbor when she tried to enlist me in her “how could she?!” outrage, not every mother can stay home with her kids all day long. OK, it came out harsher than I intended, but I  meant it.

There’s no virtue, none, for any mother, in pretending she can be and do the things she perceives she must, lest she be judged. It’s very, very easy to judge, and it quickly becomes a vicious circle, an evil feedback loop, hence my too-strident reply to my neighbor. It’s easy for all of us to perch a chip on our already overburdened shoulders and go forth, justifying on the one hand, and judging on the other.

I’m tired of it. As a friend pointed out today, there are way worse things some parents do to their kids than the so-called horror of admitting they’d prefer a cappuccino in the corner (complete with ironic commentary on the bubbly enthusiasm of the mommy & me goings-on) over actually diving in and doing the Chicken Dance with their little ones. And way worse things (abuse and neglect come to mind) than admitting that you’d rather hand over the silly-shaking duties to someone else, like that nice lady in the library.

Not only is my lack of participation in such activities not a measure of my love for my sons (or my suitability for being their parent), I believe my honesty about not enjoying this or that aspect of parenting is a better barometer of my love for them. Because it’s real. I’m showing them me. This is the mom you get, the mom who doesn’t do Play-Doh, the mom who brings the New Yorker to soccer practice, the mom who hides the good snacks until her kids go to bed.

And anyway, aren’t we all just doing the best we can?

D and me, when I didn't know what I was getting (and when my hair was still brown)

Yesterday afternoon, as I was quietly melting away in the 90-degree heat on the edge of the soccer field, watching (well, sorta watching) my son Daniel’s practice, I started chatting with another mother, whose son was in D’s preschool class. We were just having one of those idle, “aren’t they getting so big” back-and-forth things, before we both turned back to our bottles of water/magazines/making sure our other son wasn’t putting rocks in his pockets for me to find in the bottom of the washer (me).

Now, Daniel and this other boy, I’ll call him O. because his first name starts with O (duh), were in a special-ed preschool. Neither had a specific, or lasting, “special” diagnosis. All the children in this school were either late talkers, and/or had needs for occupational or physical therapy, and/or fell somewhere on the increasingly wide autism spectrum, but with the kind of issues you can–with diligence and good services–”therapy” out of them. Now second-graders, both O. and Daniel are normal (well, normal-ish). But when they were the nearly-three-year-olds they were when we put them on that mini-bus with a backpack and extra diapers, they were not talking. At all.

Now, these are not life-altering issues, I realize that, but sometimes I forget how trying it was, for me, to have a child who wasn’t … what I had wanted. Ooh, that sounded bad, didn’t it? It’s hard to say it. And I haven’t thought about it in years, not until yesterday afternoon, when O.’s mom said to me, as she related how O. didn’t talk until he started kindergarten, “I didn’t enjoy him very much back then.”

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.

I didn’t realize how much I wasn’t enjoying the child I’d been given, until one frustrating evening when Daniel was just under 2 (he had to have been, because James wasn’t on the scene yet). My husband was away on a business trip, and I was trying to feed Daniel dinner. There was something he wanted, and his usual pointing and saying “za-dah!” (which was all he said until he finally, finally said Mama when he was three) wasn’t doing it for me. I was screaming, literally, crying, pounding on the table. Just talk to me! Talk to me!

That was when I realized that having a chatty, smart, witty little child — yes, I admit, a mini-me, the gender difference aside — was what I had been waiting for since the day I peed on that stick and saw the plus sign.

Daniel talked, eventually (and yes, as everyone flippantly told me back in the table-pounding days, it’s true that he quickly moved to talking a blue streak, to the point where I found myself wondering if he had an off button). We therapy-ed out the ticks (flipping light switches on and off, for example), and he learned to hold a pencil and relate to other children. (He’s still working on that last one; he’s been late to that particular party, but he’s there, now — he has best friends, and other friends, and while he’s always been liked, he know actually likes other kids in a more or less “normal” way.) He’s smart, sweet, loyal and kind.

And I’m still learning to enjoy the child he is, because he’s still not the child I thought I’d have. Ding! What child is the one we wanted? How can he be, since at the point we’re doing the wanting and the imagining (and, if you’re like me, actually writing mom-child scripts in your head), the child is purely theoretical, or at least embryonic.

Maybe this is a small lesson in parenting, but maybe it’s the biggest one there is: We need to love the child we get, yes (and of course we do; even on the most frustrating days, I loved this boy beyond reason), but we also need to appreciate who he is, who he really is.

Have you learned that lesson yet?