Didn't I Feed You Yesterday__ A Mother's Guide to Sanity in Stilettos - Laura Bennett [39]
Usually, though, I think it best to seek out friends who have similar parenting styles. Because that’s all this really is, in the end: a matter of style. Every parent does the job a little differently, and I consider myself blessed when I stumble on people who can enjoy our chaos for what it is.
We recently had a couple over with their children, a “playdate” if you must, and there were seven kids buzzing around the apartment. These people were new acquaintances of ours. We hadn’t been forced by proximity or similar-aged children into spending time with them, but instead had chosen to do so because of their appeal as adults. They had brought a lovely bottle of champagne, which we drank, and for a few hours we sat around and chatted and got to know one another better. Swirling around us was a virtual hurricane of activity. Balls were flying, swings were swinging, action figures were acting. Computers all over the house were pumping out iTunes, or the drone of World of Warcraft as keyboards went tick, tick, tick. The smaller children would occasionally look over at the television to pick up a clue from Blue, while the projector beamed wrestling matches from Nacho Libre up on the wall. One of my children decided to serve cheese and crackers to our guests, especially the lady, and insisted on preparing the delicacies with his grimy little hands. There was a potty incident—there always is—and my four-year-old came shooting through the room in full Superman regalia, right down to the floor-length cape and bright red boots. At one point we had to separate my youngest boy from her youngest girl so as to terminate some tribal mating ritual known only to toddlers.
This all might sound a bit annoying, but my guests were not affected by it in any way. They knew how to laugh and seemed to be enjoying our combined cluster of boisterous children. I like these people. Mind you, there were seven kids between the ages of twenty months and twelve years barreling through our loft, but no one ever had to yell at anyone or level a time-out or complain about any injustice. (Well, who would dare, with Superman himself in the room?) For the most part the adults were being adults and the children were being children. The evening was very old-fashioned, really. It reminded me of the times my parents would visit with relatives or neighbors: my brother and I would run off and play with other kids’ toys in other kids’ rooms, knowing our parents were somewhere in the house, having adult time, which was boring. I spoke with one of my cousins the other day, and he said to me, “Laura, I still remember when you were eight and you would put on your Wonder Woman costume and run around the house like a crazy person, cape flowing out behind you. Do you remember that?”
Yes, I remember that. I still don the occasional costume.
In my house, things haven’t really changed that much since the days of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, when the kids ran wild as the adults orbited around them, looking smart in their tea dresses and dapper suits. Jean Kerr didn’t spend too much time worrying about how to raise her children; she mostly just got out of their way and then wrote about them so she could have a mental room of her own. I think maybe Nora Ephron nailed it in I Feel Bad About My Neck, when she wrote about how parenting as we know it is a modern phenomenon. There used to just be parents, now there is parenting. Somewhere between June Cleaver and Bree Van de Kamp there must be an explanation for how we got to a place where toddlers eat sushi.
“I say dress up every day. You never know when