Up next, kids, the Joan Crawford biography...

Okay, listen up, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and Sprout. I’m gonna need you to come up with some more realistic parent types for your shows because Caillou’s milk toast mom and pop and Olivia’s ever-sighing, ever-patient fore-pigs simply aren’t cutting it. 

Do you remember watching Roseanne growing up? That shit was real. When Roseanne or Dan flew off the handle yelling at Darleen for being lazy or DJ for just being DJ, you could relate because your own parents had gotten to that place before…the I-can’t-take-it-anymore place.  And as much as they loved you and adored you and relished your every joy, they would gladly hand you over to the next gypsy circus that came along.

In those moments of sitcom gold, your childhood self would experience a Vietnam-style flashback to the moment when you were caught with a half-eaten, week-old ham sandwich molding under your bed or a note from the teacher reporting your use of a few colorful words to describe the reading assignment. You shivered; then you laughed because, this time, it wasn’t happening to you.

The other day, Suttie was watching some kill-me-now kid’s show on one of your networks, and the main kiddie character didn’t want to take a bath despite repeated pleas from his parents (fyi, the top rule in the O’Neal house: mom and dad don’t beg. We tell, they do. It’s like military school, but the food isn’t as good).  After numerous attempts to get little Sid or Max or Zeke (they all blur together after a while) to go happily to the tub, Mom and Dad Pushover suggested that they all pretend that they’re astronauts and fly their imaginary space ships to the bath, laughing all the way.

And that’s when I ripped the TV off the wall and yelled, “Awwww…hellllllll no!” (This is obviously an exaggeration; my husband would kill me if I made us buy a new TV right now.)

But it did make me think about how bad these cartoon pricks were making me look. Here they were glossing over their child’s blatant disregard for the rules and turning his outright refusal into a fun family activity to create some kind of lame-ass memory. In the immortal words of Sweet Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”

This is how a similar situation goes down at our house. The first warning is slow and direct, “Suttie, it’s bath time.”

The second warning comes out a little less clear as I try to think calming thoughts to fight the growing cloud of rage that blinds my sense of reason. It tends to give my speech a certain Foghorn Leghorn quality: “Lookit here, I said…I said it’s bath time now.”

By the third and final warning, I’ve degenerated to a clenched-toothed demonic bellow only rivaled by Linda Blair mid-exorcism, “It’s bath time, son. Get in the damn tub!”

Or…if it’s been an especially trying day, I just point silently to the stairs. Suttie will try to say something, either in defense or as a distraction, and I’ll simply shake my head and point. After two or three attempts and some hard staring on my part, he’ll take the hint and go…painfully, because there is nothing so tragic to a four year old as not saying something that he’s made up his mind to say.

So until shows like Sid the Science Kid and Gaspard and Lisa start writing some real at-home scenarios involving belts and spirit-breaking, we’ll be watching re-runs of Married with Children and Dance Moms as a gentle reminder to our kids that it really could be worse…much, much worse.

A little less sugar, a little more spice...

I used to write a blog. And then I didn’t. And now I’m thinking about taking it up again…at least for the next 29 minutes until I get a new life in Candy Crush Saga and can retackle level 52. Don’t scoff; that shit is hard. Chocolate squares start popping up out of nowhere, and my special candies seem to slide wherever the hell they want to.

Since my last post, my 1 year old became a 4 year old (that’s seriously how it felt: 1 then 4), and because he potty trained and started to be way too self-sufficient, we decided to liven things up around here by having a second one. And in the fastest year known to man, marked by a deafening sonic boom when she blew out her birthday candle, she’s now assumed the spot of resident 1 year old.

And now that she’s toddling around (still with the aid of any nearby piece of furniture), I can tell that my children have totally, vastly different personalities. As a baby, my daughter, Molly, followed a lot of the same patterns as my son, Suttie (remember the kid with the weird name). She slept through the night early, gained weight like a show pig, laughed a lot, and favorited her dad (I’m still convinced he hides puffs in his pockets). 

But in the last few months, a new side to her personality has emerged, one that her brother definitively lacked…a bitchy side. Now I know it’s not customary to use the term “bitchy” when describing a sweet, twinkly-eyed baby girl, and I could have used another term like “moody,” “sassy,” “cantankerous,” “spitfire” (my husband’s go-to), but somehow those synonyms don’t quite encompass all of the emotionally-charged, Veruca Salt-like qualities that my girl will sometimes display.

Don’t get me wrong. She’s sweet too. She gives kisses and loves; she adores her brother and our dog; she’s playfully charming, and her laughter is contagious…while she’s happy. But the minute she feels uncomfortable, tired, ignored, unappreciated, bored, unfulfilled, or challenged, the girl lets her bitch flag fly. This is also true if the wind is blowing from the northwest, if the TV volume is set to an odd number, if I gave her seven yogurt melts when she only wanted six, or I wouldn’t let her rip off my eyelids. You know, the big stuff.

My boy rarely did this. The only reason I don’t say “never” is because I frown on absolutes. He was calm, laid back, easy, and when he got upset, it was over some perceived injustice or out of frustration. He had reasons; his anger had purpose.

But my girl… her inner monologue is something like this:

“Oh, you helped me up, and I didn’t want to be helped up; you just earned yourself a slap in the face.”

“Are those Hello Kitty pajamas? Woman, you know I wear Disney princesses on Thursdays. Now I’m gonna pinch this mole off your arm and cry because you made me do it.”

“Suttie, you’re cool, but I don’t like the look of that Angry Bird structure you just built. It’s too Spanish colonial, and I was looking for something more Romanesque. I’m gonna have to knock it down and throw the pieces violently across the room.”

But even in the face of such…strong will, I’m not concerned. My husband and I are pretty old school when it comes to parenting – we don’t spare the rod, so to speak, we make our behavioral expectations known and they’re enforced, we give both love and tough love – you know, all that discipline jazz. So I’m confident that we’ll be able to teach her, sometimes forcefully, what it means to do right.

But I don’t want to totally stifle the more fiery parts of her personality either. I want to find that fine line that leads from ornery to driven, from selfish to self-assured. And, at the risk of turning this into a feminist rant, I’m glad that, of my two kids, my girl got the gall. I know that, even twenty years from now, she’ll have to fight more for what she wants than her brother will. She’ll have to kick more ass and take more names. She’ll have to be a little bitchy. And if you’ve ever seen her make her wishes boldly known, then you are as certain as I am that the world will not run over her. And, for that, I’m thankful.