Dirty little secrets

Dirty Little Secrets bookI have a confession to make. I spent most of last week delving into other people’s secrets and now I’ve got a dirty little secret of my own: right now my son is playing computer games and eating Doritos so I can finish this column.

There, I said it-I admit that I am far from a perfect mother. It feels good to say it out loud.

That’s just the cathartic effect that Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile were going for when they wrote-or should I say compiled the confessions for-their book, Dirty Little Secrets From Otherwise Perfect Moms. It took me all of a half an hour to read through such ditties as:

-“I lied and told my son’s preschool he was potty-trained so he could get in. I acted surprised when he had an ‘accident’ every day.”

-“I bit my daughter’s finger trying to steal a bite of her cookie.”

-“I let my two toddlers eat Milk Bones right out of the box. I figure, if they’re not barking, they’re fine.”

It took about three minutes for me to come to the conclusion that my friends’ dirty little secrets had to be a whole lot dirtier than these.

Boy was I right! Here are a few favorites, with names withheld to protect the not so innocent:

-“At least once a week I tell my husband we’re out of milk, then stop off for a martini on my way to the grocery store.”

-“Sometimes I tell everyone that I’m really angry and I give myself a timeout. Since at our house you get a minute for each year of age, this is my way to get some time to myself.”

-“On an exceptionally bad day with my three kids, I gave each of them a teaspoonful of leftover codeine cough syrup so I could have a couple of hours of peace and quiet to regroup, breath deep and possibly even take a shower by myself. I did this about three times. It was a sad day when that bottle ran out.”

– “When my daughter was little I told her that if she swallowed gum it would stick to the inside of her stomach and then all the food would stick and she would eventually explode. She accidentally swallowed her gum about a month ago and she thought she was going to die so I had to fess up that it wasn’t true.”

-“Our son walked in on us having sex and we told him we were wrestling. Of course it backfired when he tried to join in!”

-“When my kids were little they loved standing up in the shopping carts at the grocery store. I told them that if they fell out they might break a tile on the floor and then the store would take everything we owned to pay for it.”

-“My dirty little secret is pot. So long as you don’t get so wasted that you completely ignore your kids, pot is great. It’s a stress reliever and even makes those stupid Nickelodeon cartoons kind of fun.”

-“Most days my favorite member of my family is the cat.”

-“When my daughter was little and she had a tantrum and didn’t want to go to preschool, I told her the police were going to come and take her to jail if she didn’t shape up.”

-“I have wine every night at dinner and wake every day with coffee and will scratch your eyes out if you deny me either one.”

So there you have it. The cold, hard truth is that being a parent, more often than not, is just a daily game of Survivor and often we moms (especially but not exclusively) feel like we should be voted off the island. But doesn’t it feel better to come clean about those dirty little secrets?

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Share your dirty little secrets with Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. For more columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com. Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on January 13, 2012.

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