Category Archives: parenting

Mothers in arms

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Photostock (freedigitalphotos.net)

Photostock (freedigitalphotos.net)

Lifelong friendships begin with bonding over their children

Motherhood has a secret code. It’s something only those who have struggled with 3 a.m. feedings or juggled a car seat, a purse, a diaper bag, a bag of groceries and a baby or two can understand. While it sometimes feels like those needy little creatures rule your life, among the unparalleled joys of parenthood, many moms say their kids have provided them with wonderful friendships with other mothers.

“I just really cherish all the friendships I’ve made from my kids,” said Susan Manzo, who has a group of women she’s been close to since her son, Nick, was in kindergarten at Monte Vista with their daughters. The moms have remained close. Now Nick’s a sophomore at San Marcos, and instead of complaining, “can’t you be friends with moms of boys instead of girls,” he’s in love with all the cute girls at the group’s annual ski trip, Manzo said.

When the girls were in the fifth grade they started a mother-daughter book club. “Our girls have these great relationships with these other women who aren’t their moms,” said Nancy Lorenzen, who participates monthly with her daughter Kirsten, Manzo and seven other mother-daughter pairs. “We all really enjoy getting together. I think it’s easier to get together with people in a similar life situation or life phase,” said Lorenzen.

That urge to bond with others in the same phase of life is part of what drove the founding of PEP (post partum education for parents) 25 years ago, said board member Jennifer Brannon. In addition to offering support and advice via a 24-hour “warm” line and monthly expectant parent classes, the nonprofit group also has weekly groups, starting from when babies are about six weeks old. “Once that class has been meeting about 12 weeks, they spin out in their own groups and meet at parks. There are kids that are 14 and 15 and the PEP groups still meet,” said Brannon.

“I’ve always been amazed at how much your kids dictate who your friends are,” said Rachael Steidl, the mother of Emily and twins Ashley and Whitney. When her twins were born, Steidl joined both Mothers of Multiples and PEP. While her initial motivation was education, she also made friends. “I really cherish the friendships for the time. … I was one of the first of my close friends to have kids and my relationships for that first year and a half probably changed drastically. … I felt really inadequate because of the fact that I wasn’t working, that I didn’t really have anything interesting to talk about. I mean how many times do they want to hear how many diapers I’ve changed and how many loads of laundry I’ve folded.”

While the closeness shared in those early days can fizzle, many women become bonded for life. Now a grandmother, Fran Davis met seven of her dearest friends more than 30 years ago as a parent at Starr King Preschool. “I thank my stars that I found Starr King. It was the core of all my friendships. (It) was a window or a door to the world for me, and I have never looked back.”

Davis believes the cooperative preschool tended to attract like individuals. The group has been through divorces, remarriages and the death of a spouse. “We’ve shared all stages, which is pretty amazing.”

Over the years there have been camping trips, weekend getaways and other excursions, with and without their extended families. “When our kids were little we would go down to Toys ‘R Us,” Davis said. As their lives have changed, so have their activities. The women now meet regularly as a book group. “Half of our book group is devoted to talking about what’s going on with ourselves and what’s going on in our lives. Right now we’re talking about a lot about the situation in the United States and how distressed we are.”

The group has even discussed some kind of communal living situation, “for when we get really old,” Davis said. “We were pretty much all stay-at-home mothers. … I think that’s a really sad thing that women who have to work these days don’t have opportunities to spend the time that it takes to make good friends.”

Indeed, finding that balance between work and family is a big topic of discussion among today’s mothers. “For a long time I didn’t know what anyone had done in my (PEP) group. It’s like ‘Oh, that’s right, we all had careers before this, I forgot,’ ” said Steidl, who founded her business, Santa Barbara Parent Source, partially based on input from her fellow mothers. “I remember when those issues first started coming up and it was so interesting to hear what people had done and see them in the light of a woman and not just a mom.”

Originally published in South Coast Beacon

Jungle Mom

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Photo by Sura Nualpradid freedigitalphotos.net

Photo by Sura Nualpradid freedigitalphotos.net

I pity the first girl who stomps on my son’s heart.

I realized something about myself recently and it’s not very pretty. I may be an anti-violent, NPR-supporting, bleeding heart pacifist in theory, but when it comes right down to it-I would kill to prevent my son from suffering heartache.

I may not be a tiger mother, but I’m a jungle mom nonetheless. It stuns me how quickly I turn into Mama Bear when something threatens my cub.

When he was younger, I was mostly fixated on doing everything in my power to help my son avoid physical pain. Implanting a GPS tracking device and a boundary collar always sounded perfectly reasonable to me. It was only my husband’s mockery that prevented me from sending Koss out to play in full body armor. I would have wrapped him in Charmin from head to toe, like that kid in the old commercial who goes out to play football and practically tips over from all that cushiony padding.

I was always jealous of the mom in that commercial.

My imagination splinters into a million fearful little pieces whenever I think about anything bad happening to my son.

But now that Koss has successfully survived enough banged up knees and bruised elbows to keep the Band-Aid and Bactine business booming for years to come, it’s his emotional pain that keeps me up at night.

The fact is we’re still warming up to puberty, so at this point his hurt feelings dig much deeper into my overactive imagination than they do into his psyche. I will often still be reeling over some playground slight or hurt from weeks back when Koss wants to invite that very same kid I’ve been mentally murdering over to play.

Pesky old reality is no match for the mind of a mother.

Just thinking about the prospect of his many broken hearts to come is enough to make me growl.

I can’t help myself. Just thinking about that future girl who will someday make him cry drives me nuts. I want to kill her. I want to rip her to shreds. The mere thought of that girl transforms me into every single awful parent-of-an-only-child stereotype, though some might call me a murderous lunatic.

Gee, I hope his future girlfriends never read this column. That would be awful. Just awful.

Karma’s a bitch, and I certainly had my moments. As a former teenage girl, I know just how mean they can be.

Plus the fact that my genetic eggs are in this one and only one precious basket makes me guard it all the more zealously.

But here’s the rub. As a parent I’ve found that it’s almost impossible to try to comfort someone and develop their character at the time. With girlfriends and husbands, your job is just to listen and be supportive and hate whomever they hate at that moment. In those cases it’s easy to blame it on the other guy.

But when you’re comforting a child you sometimes have to fess up to the fact that it’s not always the other guy’s fault. Human relationships are complicated and they’re only just beginning.

Kind of makes me wish for the good old days when I would dream up tactical scenarios of how I would jump into the lion’s cage at the zoo to rescue my son.

When Leslie’s not busy cocooning her son in bubble wrap she can be reached at Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. For more columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com.  Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on July 20, 2012.

The Neurotic Parent Comes to Santa Barbara

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The Neurotic Parent's Guide to College AdmissionsSome people say that getting your kid through the college application process is a lot like childbirth-you have to experience it yourself to really understand it. Unlike with childbirth, where the endorphins kick in and make you forget most of the pain once you hold that precious baby in your arms, the only chemicals associated with getting your child into college are stiff drinks (for the parents) and plenty of aspirin. Luckily, we can now add a healthy dose of laughter to the college admission cocktail, thanks to J.D. Rothman’s new book, The Neurotic Parent’s Guide to College Admissions. With a sassy, sarcastic style that reminded me of The Official Preppy Handbook, Rothman does a spectacular job of skewering the collective craziness that overtakes otherwise rational people during this phase of their lives. At the same time, it’s not just funny but also provides valuable insights and incisive anthropological observations into the process. “There’s a collective neurosis kind of thing that takes place for parents during this time of their lives,” explains Rothman, who is an Emmy-winning television writer and lyricist in her other work life. After an eye-opening college tour with her older son (now a junior at Duke), she started the anonymous Neurotic Parent Blog as a way to reflect on the nutty parents who had “started their kids in college preparatory programs in the fifth grade,” as well as the “thousands of shockingly bright, polite, alert students, all of whom were vying for her son’s (or your daughter’s) spot.” Up until that trip, she had “no idea there was this level of insanity about the college admission process.” The blog quickly caught on and went viral after a post about Cornell’s hotel’s ugly bedspreads. Rothman admits that she too got caught up in the craziness. Some of the other students had out of this world accomplishments, like “discovering galaxies,” so she wondered how her son would ever compete. Like many parent trips, the first one you feel during the college application process is guilt. Rothman writes, “Clearly it is all your fault. While you were letting your child engage in normal activities like summer camp, babysitting and bowling, other kids were interning for their senators, training seeing eye-dogs and starting hedge funds in Sri Lanka. As a result, for every impressive kid, there are 50 even more outstanding ones.” She observes that even parents who were “not neurotic about other things like eating and sleeping still became neurotic about the college admission process. … Thankfully it is usually not both members of a couple,” she laughs. “Thankfully” is right. Though I often want to give therapy bonds as baby shower gifts, this book will make a pretty good substitute. Laughter is clearly the best therapy for Rothman, who offers up an amusing “prayer for the SAT” (please protect me from mis-bubbling and using passive voice, bless my number two pencils and protect their points), two pages of “haikus for the neurotic parent” and an entire chapter about “barista readiness” (a college degree is fine, but at the end of the day, they’d better know how to prepare a venti, sugar-free, nonfat, vanilla soy, double-shot, decaf, no foam, extra hot, peppermint white chocolate mocha). Asked if her current book tour has made her more or less neurotic, Rothman, who will appear at Chaucer’s on Sunday at 2 p.m., says, “definitely more, but now I’m neurotic about selling books.” Of course it doesn’t hurt that her younger son was recently accepted into his “dream school.” Unlike the rest of us there will be no more college applications for her to deal with in the future-unless the kids don’t like being baristas and want to go to graduate school. The upside? That might mean there’s another book in her future, and ours. Since my son’s only in seventh grade-and hasn’t, to my knowledge, written any symphonies or cured any diseases-this is definitely one book I plan to keep on my shelf for future reading. As Rothman says in her “orientation to college angst,” “whether you have a kindergartener or a 12th grader, may your child’s search be full of multiple acceptances, generous merit scholarships and chill roommates.” If they’re not, may you at least retain the ability to laugh at it all! = Spend your tax day in a lively reading and conversation about the insanity of modern college admissions at Chaucer’s Books, 3321 State St. Sunday, April 15 at 2 p.m.

When Leslie’s not stressing about her son’s lack of Olympic curling credentials, Mandarin language and Ethiopian cooking skills, she can be reached at Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. For more columns visitwww.LeslieDinaberg.com.  Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on April 13, 2012.

The Bratty Bunch

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Photo by David Castillo Dominici, freedigitalphotos.net

Photo by David Castillo Dominici, freedigitalphotos.net

Do you ever have the urge to discipline someone else’s kids?

What about when their parents are sitting right there, yukking it up, chatting with friends or drinking cocktails, and otherwise ignoring the fact that their little brat is:

A.) Talking back to a teacher, lifeguard, parent, or other adult

B.) Tormenting a defenseless younger child

C.) Teasing an older child who could, by all rights, stop the little monster in his tracks, but is too nice (or well-mannered) to do so

D.) All of the above.

Doesn’t it drive you nuts?

I don’t know what I want to do more, put the kid in a time out or throttle the parents.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am hardly the strictest mom in the cul de sac, and my son is definitely not the best behaved on the block, but he knows that no means NO, and stop means STOP, and that there are serious consequences when he doesn’t behave in the way he’s supposed to.

That seems like a pretty basic rule for getting along in society, but you wouldn’t know it from watching some of these rude, self-absorbed, bratty little jerks in action.

I’m not the only one who’s annoyed.

In a recent Newsvine poll, 83 percent of the participants surveyed said that today’s kids are more self-centered than those of past generations.

There are lots of theories about why this has happened. Pediatrician Dr. Philippa Gordon told MSNBC, “I see parents ferociously advocating for their children, responding with hostility to anyone they perceive as getting in the child’s way- from a person whose dog snuffles inquiringly at a baby in a carriage, to a teacher or coach whom they perceive is slighting their child, to a poor, hapless doctor who cannot cure the common cold. There is a feeling that anything interfering with their kid’s homeostasis, as they see it, is an inappropriate behavior to be fended off sharply.”

I understand the impulse to do everything you can to make sure that your child is safe, healthy and happy. That protective instinct is as natural as breathing for most parents.

But somehow my parents, and most of my peers’ parents, managed to avoid coddling us the way so many parents do now. In fact, I remember my parents as being much more concerned about instilling proper behavior toward others (including themselves) than the other way around.

What happened?

Babble.com writer Madeline Holler postulates that, “We Gen Xers, who were so benignly neglected that we now over-compensate as parents by co-sleeping and baby-wearing and opting out. And that we’re so fixated on our children’s well-being that we wind up teaching them that other people’s feelings are less important than our own, that kids should first make sure they feel good, then (if ever) worry about others.”

It could be that.

Or it could be that in a culture that embraces snarky comments from “American Idol” judges, where Fisher Price has a toy called “Mr. Men Mr. Rude” and Mattel battles to control a line of dolls called “Bratz,” downright bratty behavior has become not only acceptable but cool.

But I suspect that the real reason most people give their kids such a free ride when it comes to bad behavior has nothing with over-protectiveness, cultural influence, or worrying about their children’s fragile self-esteem. I’m guessing they’re just exhausted, with too much to do and too little time to do it.

Not that I’m giving the parents a free pass on disciplining their children-and not that I’m going to step in and do it for them anytime soon, tempted as I may be.

But think about this the next time you see one of these sassy little brats at the pool, or the baseball field or the playground. And if he or she belongs to you, think about it extra hard.

Is Generation X raising Generation Rude? Email Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. For more columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com.  Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on March 23, 2012.

The Keeper of the Calendar

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Image by digitalart, freedigitalphotos.net

Image by digitalart, freedigitalphotos.net

For as long as I can remember, my girlfriends have been an important part of my life. We’ve graduated from Kool-Aid and cookies to brie and Cabernet and have gone from dissecting Barbie’s hairstyles to debating whether “Blonded by the Light” or “Brazen Raisin” will better cover up our grays, but one thing remains true after all these years: without my girlfriends I’d probably never have made it this far.

My girlfriends are the ones that keep me (relatively) sane. They’re the only ones who really understand my drink order at Starbucks, or my irritation with the ten-items-or-less-line, or my love-hate relationship with Christmas.

This is why girls’ nights out are so important. They’re therapeutic, actually medicinal, and I’m not just talking about the vodka in our martinis. Men are great for a lot of things, and not just killing spiders (which my husband refuses to do) and reaching things on the highest shelves. But you can’t really talk to men about the importance of chocolate, the beauty of a new lipstick, or the ability of the perfect pair of black boots to update your whole wardrobe.

They just don’t get it.

My husband doesn’t really get it at all, but he doesn’t really complain about it either. I tell him I’m going out with my friends, and he looks up from the crossword puzzle, nods, grunts, and maybe, if I’m lucky, tells me to have a good time.

We’ve been together for 19 years and in all that time, he’s made social plans seven times, not including Mother’s Day and my birthday, where I have to remind him about what I want to do at least three times a day for a month beforehand, so I don’t think that really counts.

I’m the keeper of the social calendar and that’s okay, it’s worked for us all these years. At least until recently, when I told him I was leaving the house to meet my girlfriends. He looked up from the crossword puzzle, nodded, grunted, and said, “OK. I’m having boys’ night out on Thursday.”

Excuse me? Did I put that on the calendar? Since when are you scheduling your own “play dates,” honey?

I was sure I had misheard him. But no, come Thursday night he put on a jacket and actually left the house, all by himself. This has got to be a fluke, I thought.

Then it happened again the next week. Uh oh. Was my husband finally realizing how much fun it was to escape his family for a night on the town? This could be big trouble for me.

I thought I could nip the problem in the bud the night we both had plans. After all, a PTA meeting (followed by cocktails, but still, “It’s for the kids”) trumps an action movie, so he would just have to reschedule. I told him this, quite reasonably, I thought. But he just smiled, devilishly, and said, “It’s okay honey, your mom’s going to watch Koss so we can both go out.”

Oh dear. Couldn’t he at last have called his own mom?

The next thing I know he’ll be planning mancations and taking up fly fishing and snow boarding and how will I ever get away to the spa with MY friends if that happens?

I definitely need to stop this train wreck before it’s too late. He needs to tone his social life way down if I’m ever going to be able to keep up with mine.

“Honey,” I begin, in my sweetest most devious voice, “We need to talk.”

“Yeah, I’ve been forgetting to tell you something,” he says.

All right. I bet he’s going to tell me that he’s been spending too much time with his friends and realizes he would much rather be home spending time with his family, while I’m out with the girls.

I smile in anticipation.

“The guys and I are talking about a boy’s weekend. Let’s check the calendar.”

Uh oh, you mean my calendar?

Oh no. I’m doomed.

Share your tips for keeping your man at home with Leslie at email. For more columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com. Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on January 27, 2012.

Dirty little secrets

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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?

=

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.

Do Kids Make You Fat?

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Photo by artur84 freedigitalphotos.net

Photo by artur84 freedigitalphotos.net

Only if you add sugar.

I have no doubt that having kids makes your heart fuller and your wallet slimmer, but what about your waistline? According to a study by the University of Iowa College of Medicine and the University of Michigan, living with the little darlings also makes your belly bulge. And I’m not talking about pregnancy pudge here. Nor am I referring to all of that “drinking for two” that most fathers-to-be indulge in.

Nope, an examination of the nutritional cost of parenting found that simply living with children boosts your fat intake by almost five grams a day.

Could this mean that those last few bites of macaroni and cheese, pizza crusts and Girl Scout cookie crumbs actually count as calories? Even if you eat them standing up? What if you don’t want to carry the rest of the soccer snacks all the way back to the car? Or what if you bought the extra box of candy for a good cause? Those calories couldn’t possibly make you fat.

As caring and health-conscious parents, my husband and I do our best to intervene with the Halloween candy, Christmas cookies, gingerbread houses, Hanukah gelt, chocolate Easter bunnies and infinite supply of birthday goodie bags. Was it possible that this conscientious parenting was making us fat?

Before I got too stressed out about all this (and began foraging through the leftover birthday goodie bags for chocolate), I went to the most reliable and accurate source of health information available, Google. What do you know, not only does having kids make you fat, so do a lot of other things.

The International Journal of Obesity asked a group of scientists to weigh in on some of the causes of obesity. Number one was subscribing to The International Journal of Obesity.

Their remaining top ten list: 1. Inadequate sleep (there is definitely a connection to having children there). 2. Endocrine disruptors — substances in some foods that may alter fats in the body (I knew all that celery would end up biting me in the butt). 3. Pleasant temperatures — air conditioning and heating limit calories burned from sweating and shivering. 4. Fewer smokers — less appetite suppression. Also, dying makes you very skinny. 5. Medicines that cause weight gain. 6. Population changes — more middle-aged people in the population, who have higher obesity rates. 7. Older mothers — they tend to have heavier children (because they can’t hear Junior when he asks for that fourth cookie). 8. Genetic influences during pregnancy. 9. Darwinian natural selection — fat people living longer. 10. “Assortative” mating — overweight people procreating with others of the same body type, gradually skewing the population toward the heavy end (and providing a boon for the wedding registry business by providing the “supersize” option for china, bedding, towels and lingerie).

Architecture can make you fat too. That’s right, now they are saying that buildings and the way they are designed can make you fat.

“Take out all the elevators in buildings and people would be more fit,” urges a British architect. Even making stairways easier to find will help encourage fitness. And putting houses closer to shops, restaurants and workplaces will encourage people to walk or ride bikes. That’s right, that suburban ranch house that you bought once you had kids…it’s making you fat.

To counteract this phenomenon, I hear that an aerobics tycoon in Dallas is developing a 51-acre community that will be geared around a comprehensive wellness program.

Homeowners will pay a premium to build their own homes alongside a personal trainer, in 300 hour-long sessions. Only a limited number of cars will be allowed in the complex because guess what–you know what else makes you fat–cars. According to a study of Atlanta residents, there is a correlation between driving and weight gain. Each additional hour spent in a car per day is associated with a 6% increase in the likelihood of obesity. You know where moms spend most of their lives? Cars.

All of which leads me to the obvious conclusion that the witch in Hansel and Gretel must be thin because she built her own house, drives a broom, and eats kids instead of living with them. Hmmm…could this be the new Atkins Diet?

Do kids make you fat? Sound off at by emailing Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. For more columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com. Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on October 7, 2011.

Fired

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Photo by imagerymajestic freedigitalphotos.net

Photo by imagerymajestic freedigitalphotos.net

Kid Goes to Junior High. Mom Gets Fired. Film at 11.

When I walked my son to school on his first day of junior high I had a rather unexpected revelation: I had just been fired.

Sure, I was still his mom and I would never be completely pink-slipped from that role. But I had definitely been laid off from the unpaid part-time job I’d been doing for the past seven years at his elementary school.

In junior high it’s not just the kids that don’t want you around, the teachers don’t really want you there either-at least not the way they did in elementary school.

It’s not that I don’t have plenty of other things to do with my time-some of which even yield an actual paycheck-but that steady list of volunteer tasks, which included everything from attending school board meetings, driving on field trips and planning assemblies to cleaning paint brushes, running reading groups and popping popcorn, has now dwindled to zero.

All of those cliches you read about children growing up in the blink of an eye are true. It seems like one minute I was registering him for kindergarten and the next I was buying him gym shorts for junior high.

Like most jobs that have ended in my life, I miss my colleagues even more than the work itself. Those simple, insubstantial morning and afternoon exchanges with other parents and teachers of “How was your weekend?” “Is Johnny playing soccer this season?” or “Can you believe what happened on Grey’s Anatomy last night?” formed a happy framework for my day.

Every day.

Now I just get up, grumble hellos to my family if they’re still around, and get ready and go to work.

So far the strangest thing about my son being in junior high is that he walks to and from school by himself.

While I like not driving him to school every day, I miss my daily check-ins with my peeps. It’s not like I ever found a best friend at the PTA Meetings, but we did a lot of bonding at bake sales and budget meetings and it’s weird to not have those people in my life on a regular basis.

Like I said, I miss my peeps.

It’s not that I’ll never see any of these people again, but as we cut the umbilical cord on our day-to-day involvement in our children’s lives it takes a bit more effort to stay tethered to the other adults in their community.

Tracy Jackson, who wrote a great book about aging called “Between a Rock and a Hot Place, ” put it very well. “When our children march off to college and into their future as adults, our daily caretaking, mothering and child-rearing duties are suddenly over. We have essentially been fired from the job we have been in training for, recruited to, and served in active duty for much of our lives. We are pink- slipped. No golden parachute to soften the blow. Many of us are truly devastated.”

My son isn’t even out the door yet and I’m feeling that loss.

At the same time I’m reveling in his new independence (who knew a 12-year-old child could actually operate an alarm clock and make his own lunch) and the additional time I’ve got now that I’m out of the carpool lane for a couple of years. I actually read the entire LA Times before work yesterday.

Of course, I’m not completely off the clock. My son came home with a list of school supplies we needed to go buy “right now” and my lunch cart duty at the junior high started this week, so maybe I’m not quite fired … yet. Maybe I’m just downsized.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s not such a bad thing after all.

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When Leslie’s not writing she’s usually on email at Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. For more columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com. Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on September 2, 2011.

The guilt gene

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Image by Stuart Miles, Freedigitalphotos.net

Image by Stuart Miles, Freedigitalphotos.net

G-U-I-L-T should really be a four-letter word.

Years ago, when I was in full-blown rebellious teenage daughter mode, I jotted this quote down from Katherine Lee: “If there’s anything that can match the heights of mother-love, it’s the depths of mother-guilt.”

Boy is that ever true.

I was raised on a diet of guilt. Sure, it was well seasoned with humor (which I must add, so I won’t feel too guilty when my mom reads this), but guilt is so deeply embedded into my DNA that I feel guilty not having mastered guilt yet.

I’ve spent most of my life making important decisions based on the avoidance of future guilt. If I don’t finish the laundry tonight then my son will have to wear dingy underwear tomorrow. What if he gets in a car accident because he has dingy underwear? Does the dentist really know if I skip one night of flossing? If I watch “The Next Food Network Star” tonight instead of “Desperate Housewives” will I be personally responsible for the end of scripted television? What if I skip that one school board meeting and they vote to cut out recess? It never seems to end.

Some days it feels like my whole life has been one, big, guilty, mental dress rehearsal for all of the bad things that might happen if I don’t do all the good things I’m supposed to.

Yet, despite so many years of good girl-dom, good wife-dom and good daughter-dom tangled with all the woulda coulda shoulda catastrophes in my head, I am still surprised by how entwined guilt is with being a mom.

It’s not even noon yet and already the ugly wheels of self- recrimination are grinding against each other in my head. When I dropped off Koss at school, I felt guilty for driving my big fat carbon footprint car (but I can’t afford a Leaf or a Volt, so I feel guilty for not working more to make more money). Then I felt guilty paying $4 for a latte when I had perfectly good coffee at home. But I hadn’t gotten up early enough to make the coffee, another thing that made me feel guilty.

Plus it was Beach Day so I made sure Koss had sunscreen, a towel and his own sandwich in case he didn’t like the ones the other mothers made, but I wasn’t driving on the field trip and wasn’t even going to come to the beach until after lunch because I had to finish writing a story first, which of course, I felt guilty about. Then there’s the fact that I didn’t sign up in time to bring the sandwiches he likes, not to mention all the baking I haven’t done for all the parties and events in these last four years of school.

It’s enough to make you drown in guilt.

Erma Bombeck once called guilt “the gift that keeps on giving.” She was so right. I used to blame it all on my mom, who has an amazing ability to shoot guilt darts with the slightest change in the tone of her voice. Of course I feel guilty about blaming her, especially now that I realize that she couldn’t help it.

I’d blame my husband, but he doesn’t care. Whoever said, “men feel guilty about nothing and women feel guilty about everything” clearly spent some time with him.

I finished the story but left dishes in the sink and beds unmade in order make it to the beach before the party was over.

The minute my son saw me he gave me a huge grin and a hug. All that rushing and hustling was worth it after all.

Then he hit me with the stinger: “Finally you’re here, mom. What took you so long?”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t respond to Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. But you should at least go read more columns at www.LeslieDinaberg.com.  Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on August 26, 2011.

What’s in a name?

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Photo by sixninepixels, freedigitalphotos.net

Photo by sixninepixels, freedigitalphotos.net

“Manroot” and “Roadkill” were my husband’s favorite baby names when I was pregnant. I could never quite tell if he was serious- especially when he would wax rhapsodic about all the umlauts we could crow “root” with. I just laughed, as I blew off those suggestions as best I could, and continued looking at naming books.

Then he pushed for “Anastasia,” which I thought was pretty, until Zak admitted that he liked the name because of its potential nickname- “Nasty.” Talk about asking for trouble. That’s even worse than “Roadkill.”

“Tumbleweed” had some traction during the second trimester. We also discussed the possibility of a combination of our fathers’ names-“Jim Bob.” I was joking, but again, I’m not so sure about my husband.

Needless to say, I was overjoyed when we both agreed on “Koss” for our son’s name. It’s my grandmother’s maiden name, so it had sentimental significance; it’s unusual, so he wouldn’t have to deal with the whole “Koss K.” and “Koss A.” in school; and it’s easy to pronounce-or so I thought.

In the 12 years and two weeks and two days that my son has been around, I have never once said his name to another adult and then continued on with our conversation.

Kids are fine with “Koss” as a name. I think it’s because all words are relatively new to them, so Koss/Kylie/Klamato, it makes no difference. However, to the Mike/ Jeff/John/Linda/Lisa/Karen generation (i.e. adults), “Koss” inspires all kinds of confusion, and that’s even before he starts telling you about mythical creatures or giving you multiple- choice questions about all the books he read this summer.

An introduction to my son is frequently greeted with: “How do you spell that?” “What language is that?” “Oh, like the headphones?” or most often, “Huh?”

I had no idea that picking an unusual-yet-easy-to-spell-and- pronounce moniker for my son would produce so much additional conversation. I had to feed 75 extra cents into my parking meter the other day, just to explain Koss’s name to a particularly dim receptionist.

I can only imagine the kind of namer’s remorse that “Superman 4Real’s” parents must be feeling right now. Did you hear about those zany New Zealanders? They wanted to name their son simply “4Real,” which is perfectly understandable, but ran into an obscure Kiwi law prohibiting names beginning with numbers. That’s right, there’s actually a law in New Zealand against naming your child “100Proof” and apparently some discretionary power in that country, unlike ours, where they recently took stands against “Satan” and “Adolf Hitler” (the names, not the actual entities).

This whole naming business can be awfully stressful. The Wall Street Journal reports an unprecedented level of angst among parents trying to choose names for their children.

While you can expect to see a lot of Jacob’s and Isabella’s running around playgrounds in the next few years (those were the most popular names in 2010), original names-or at least more original names-are now in. The 1980 Social Security Administration data show that the 10 most popular baby names were given to 41% of boys and 23% of girls. But last year, just 8.4% of boys and 8% of girls were given one of the year’s 10 most popular names.

Not only are popular names getting less popular, apparently the ten zillion baby naming books and websites are no longer adequate tools to select a baby name. The name game is so stressful that people are starting to turn to strangers for help. Mommies- and daddies-to-be can now hire baby-naming consultants, to the tune of $250 an hour.

I could do that job. Flynn Stone, bad idea. Richard Tester, oh please. Harold Butts, are you kidding me?

So, I’ve finally found the answer to Juliet’s oft-quoted question, “What’s in a name?” If I play my cards right, about $250 an hour.

For a special reader’s rate on baby naming consultation, email Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. For more of Leslie’s columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com. Originally published in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on August 12, 2011.