1. “because I said so, that’s why.” Yes. That was me. And more than once. The phrase of parental last resort–and it’s not a resort that I’d like to visit as often as I seem to be doing.

2. There was a time, back in the day, when I thought team sports were the exclusive realm of the Great Santini and his offspring. I didn’t play a team sport growing up (me and hand-eye coordination were strangers for a long, long time); I don’t follow a particular team; I don’t get the whole “team” thing. Mostly I just don’t play well with others, is what it boils down to.  But then Liam fell in love with soccer and there I was…standing on the sidelines in the freezing cold, driving all over New York to games, and here in Abu Dhabi, I’m back in the shlep-wagon, out to soccer school, over to practice…And you know what? Being on a soccer team (and having the great coaches he had in NYC–thank you, Sean and Marcus) — it’s the best thing that could’ve ever happened to him.  Of course, my weekends are shot to hell, but hey, who needs a weekend away, right? Rah rah rah go team.

3. “do you know how many starving children there are in the world who would eat that?” I have a very clear memory, when my mother would say that to me, of saying back to her “well why don’t you mail my food to the kids in Biafra then, hmm?”  Funny, she didn’t seem to appreciate that idea. I remember also thinking to myself “I will never, ever say such a stupid thing to my kids.”  Yeah. Well. Um. What can I say. It’s true, dammit. So eat your carrots!

4. In graduate school, I spent a lot of time thinking about feminism, poststructuralism, gender theory, and other stuff that now makes my early-middle-aged brain hurt to even contemplate. At the time, however, my friends and I sat around talking learnedly about how gender differences were really just socially constructed ideologies that could be done away with if parents would just be a little more, you know, thoughtful.  I believed my own words until the first time my little boy picked up a stick and said “pwang pwang pwang…”  I’m still a feminist but now I’m a feminist who has to accept that she has sons who will, for reasons known only to their DNA, step over or around the socks on the floor, leave the toilet seat down, and look at her blankly when she says “why did you knock that over?” Let me be clear–they are made to put the socks in the laundry, wipe off the toilet seat, pick up the thing they knocked down. But I’m fighting against genetics, here, people, which means that, yes, I’ve been that person who smiles and shrugs and says “well (nervous giggle), you know, boys…” Ugh.

5. Related to 4: when my boys were toddlers, I’d watch their adorable chubby selves playing “bakery” in the sandbox and look in horror at those ill-bred “big boys” playing chase and I’m-gonna-shoot-you-with-my-triblatteringlaserpistolgrappler.  I’d be all smug and judgey and decide that the mothers of these boys had utterly failed. I mean really, what mother would let her children play such a violent game? Um…hi. That would be me. And I’ve even said “run around and chase with your friends,” because I recognize that children are like puppies. They need to be exercised regularly or they’ll just wreck the furniture. .

6. MY children will never be like those OTHER children who walk around surgically attached to their screens. Cue hysterical laughter here. Computers, e-readers, DSi, iPod touch…the electronics in this family could stock an Apple store. I think we manage their computer time pretty well but the sad fact is that when screens are up, bickering is down.

7.  You know how when you were little and your mom would spit a bit on her shirttail or (worse) her fingers and smootch at your cheek to get off the remnants of your last meal? And remember how you thought “god that is gross!” Remember how you thought, nah, you’d never do such a thing? Yep. I thought so too. And then just yesterday, I grabbed Caleb’s arm just before he got on the school bus and swiped–with my shirt and some spit–at the glob of jam on his cheek. He said “MOM THAT’S DISGUSTING” and squirmed away.

8. I never thought I would have sons.  How’s that for hubris? I always wanted to have children but in my mind’s eye, it was always me and charlottedoralucyameliaruby reading Little House on the Prairie and playing dress-up and then later, when they were grownups, my daughters and I would hang out and have long conversations about Life and Shoes and Relationships. They’d tell me what to wear so I didn’t look too dowdy and we’d be the best of friends.  But noooo, the gods have a larky sense of humor and so I am the mother of boys, which means I don’t sit on the beach and flip through magazines. No, it’s SWIM and DIG and PLAY BALL WITH ME and DIG and SWIM.  And when I’m an old woman living alone with a hundred cats, the boys will buy me the valu-pak of Depends and the high-grade cat food, and congratulate themselves on being good sons.

9. I would never make separate meals for my picky eaters. If they don’t want to eat what I cook, then they’ll go hungry. HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHA My children’s eating habits keep me in a state of perpetual humility. I have failed here and here and here and will probably fail again at dinner tonight.

10. God. Some people just can’t shut up about their damn kids. That’s what I thought. And then I started a blog.

Double-dipping this week: this post also links to the wonderful lovelinks site–it’s like Cheers bar for small bloggers (or micro bloggers, in my case). It’s where everyone knows our (screen) name and they’re always glad we came, where everybody can see that all our troubles are the same…and now everyone knows that I’m old enough to remember that show when it wasn’t in reruns! Click on the button below to find some great reading–and then come back on Thursday to vote for your favorites. I won’t even be mad if you don’t vote for me!

The ad is from 1981, not a year particularly celebrated for female achievement (although it was the year Britney Spears was born, so I suppose that counts for something).

I love legos and this ad only stoked my lego-love. My kids are lego freaks and over the years, my only consolation for finding those sharp-edged pieces in the couch, on the floor, embedded in rugs–on pretty much any flat surface–has been to feel all smug that my kids play with such a gender-neutral toy, a toy that is endlessly creative, blah blah blah.

Then I saw this ad on the lego page site:

If Polly Pocket mated with a Star Wars mini-fig, or if hookers gave away bobble-head doll versions of themselves…here’s what would result: chicks hangin’ at the Friends cafe.  When you click on the live screen, these figures sway back and forth, hugging each other and kissing each other on the cheeks. Maybe they’re whispering sweet nothings to one another–maybe it’s the lego version of “The L Word.”

But no. Nothing so interesting as a set of interlocking lesbians.  Instead we’re told that “Stephanie” likes planning parties; that “Andrea” thinks music puts life in full color (the only African American in the group and she’s the one telling us about music?); that “Emma” likes drawing, fashion, and make-overs. Girls who receive these sets can build a tree house, a car, an animal hospital, a beauty shop, or a cafe.  There are no intricate moving parts and when the sets are completed they look really bad dollhouses.  I imagine that completing Emma’s treehouse might not give the same sense of accomplishment as building this:

This thing swivels, jiggles, and moves; it creates destruction and chaos–and when you’re done playing with it in this form, you can take apart the pieces and combine them with any other lego pieces into any creation you can imagine. Emma’s tree house is always going to be Emma’s tree house. I suppose you could take the tree apart and stick the branches onto Mia’s animal hospital, but somehow that doesn’t strike me as satisfying.

Let’s recap, shall we? In the span of thirty years we’ve gone from celebrating a scruffy little girl’s ability to build whatever the hell she wants from a pile of multi-colored bricks to teaching girls that their strengths include parties, fuzzy animals, and make-overs.

Lego isn’t the disease, obviously, just a symptom. (In writing this post, I found out that several organizations devoted to challenging gender stereotypes are up in arms about these new girlie-gos).  Lego claims that it was just–wait for it–responding to consumer desires.  Apparently little girls only want to play with beauty parlors and kittens, so Lego made beauty parlors and kittens.

Okay. Even Lego has to make a buck, I guess (although with a lego set purchased every seven seconds or something, seems to me the company could’ve tried taking the high road). And okay, boys and girls have different ways of playing, I get that (years of watching perfectly innocent sticks become swords, guns, airplanes–pretty much anything that makes a noise or could inflict bodily harm). So yeah, maybe a seven-year-old girl wouldn’t want to build the Star Wars Death Star (and then un-make it, turn it into 85 other things, and then two years later whine “why can’t we make the deaaaaaath staaaaaaaarrrrrrr”).

And so even okay, make a “girl” Lego set. But what about a Princess Knight or Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, or Wonder Woman? What about a group of girl pirates or airship captains?  If you’re going to target to girls, could you at least make your product…interesting?  Complicated? Challenging? Unusual? Little girls may want to play beauty shop, or maybe they want to imagine themselves in tree houses, but hell, couldn’t they at least get a measly multi-piece alien swamp speeder into the bargain?  Something with a little, you know, oomph to it?

Lego. I expected more from you. And so did that little girl in 1981.

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I am half-asleep, wheezing and coughing because I have a cold and maybe a sinus infection, shuffling around making the boys breakfast before school.  Why do they have to eat every morning, anyway? Why can’t they just get a to-go cup of coffee and get on their way, like normal people?

Caleb looks at me. His eyes scan me up and down, like he’s Tim Gunn’s mini-me.

Caleb: Mommy, why don’t you wear make-up?

Me (about dropping the pancake pan): Make-up? You mean like those fancy moms we used to see at your old school?

Caleb: Yeah. I think you should.

Me: Uh…why?

Another full-body scan.

Caleb: Well….you’re a little bit…wrinkly on your face.

Liam (eager as always to be the expert): No, Caleb. You don’t get it. She only wears mascara sometimes. She told me. The other night when she was putting on mascara before they went out to dinner.

Me: standing slack-jawed staring at the panel of Glamour judges who are suddenly sitting at my kitchen table.

Caleb: Why she wears mascara?

Liam: She said she wears mascara when she doesn’t feel well because it opens up her eyes so she looks more awake.  (He fans open his fingers–sort of Bob Fosse jazz hands–next to either eye, to demonstrate this opening-up process.)

Caleb looks at me again: Yeah. You definitely need mascara.

My extended family will officially, legally, extend by one more person today, August 29.

My brother is going to become a father.

It’s very exciting and my mom has gone out west to join him for the big day.  They’ll meet at the courthouse where the papers will be finalized and then they’ll go out to lunch: my brother, my mom, my now-official nephew, his mother, and a few assorted other relatives.

It’s an event that would make Michelle Bachmann’s well-groomed toes curl in horror and make all of Rick Perry’s hair stand up straight (Michelle’s would stand up straight, too, except she uses too much hairspray. Come to think of it, maybe Rick does too).  In fact, my brother is pissing off the entire cohort of the Far Right today, with one simple action.

My single gay brother is legally adopting his biological offspring, the result of a single woman’s trip to a sperm bank some fifteen years ago.

Let’s back up, shall we? A long time ago, way back in the 20th century, my brother entered a management training program. He was fresh out of college and dazzled by the fat paycheck: he hung out in bars, drove a fast car, and was bored out of his gourd. “Look,” he said to me one night, “I like music, cars, and movies. I’m moving to LA.”

And he did. Maybe he quit the management training program, maybe he was—ahem—asked to leave; the details have always been a tad fuzzy.

But off he went, to LaLa Land, intent on making his fortune in The Biz. He didn’t want to act (sensible child); he wanted to be like Mike Ovitz–a player–so he started, where so many others have started before him, in the mail room of a talent agency.

In the mail room, meaning he was pretty much broke. He drove to work in a VW convertible bug that, while adorable, had all the speed and handling ability of a John Deere riding lawnmower, plus the pesky little problem of being unable to pass the emissions test, so it couldn’t be parked on the street for more than an hour or so.

Broke. What’s a guy to do if he needs a little extra cashaloola?  Yep. Make a deposit. Each desposit: fifty bucks.

And let’s be clear: my brother is chromosomal gold, people, chromosomal gold: smart, funny, handsome, athletic, well-educated, kind.

Flash forward ten years or so: my lovely brother has become…well, he’s a player. Drives a Porsche (handles better than the VW lawn mower and passes the emissions test with flying colors). Lives in the Hollywood Hills. Does deals. Has a BlackBerry, takes meetings, rolls umpteen-zillion calls a day.

Plus he’s still really a nice guy, with eyelashes so long they sometimes sweep against the inside of his sunglasses. You’d think maybe either of his sister would’ve gotten those eyelashes but noooo….he got’em.

So one day my long-lashed brother is flipping through GQ and comes across an article written by a man who, in his youth, had made a LOT of donations to a sperm bank, and is now tempted by something called the Donor Sibling Registry, which helps the “donor conceived” get in touch with other possible siblings and/or with the donor him or herself (the DSR is for recipients of egg donations, sperm donations, etc).

Hmm…thinks my brother and clicks over to the DSR himself. Whereupon he finds…a message querying his donor information from a boy and his (still single) mother.

Flash forward again, a few months later: my brother flies to off to meet the boy and his mother.  Brother says that if the woman had a partner, he wouldn’t have gotten involved, but she doesn’t so he did.

And fell in love. With this boy, whose smile lights up the room; who plays the piano beautifully (like our grandfather!); who loves to skateboard (okay, not our side of the family); who is gentle and kind and has long, long eyelashes.

Nephew came to our family holidays and family reunions; he and my brother see each other maybe once a month or so.  My brother flies him to LA or flies out to his city—he was there for 8th grade graduation, for the big piano recital, for birthdays.  No, my bro didn’t weather the 4AM feedings or the tantrums of a three-year old, but he has become a firm part of N.’s life and today he’s making sure that N. knows he’ll be there forever.  N. isn’t leaving his mother or the city where he lives, but this legal step gives N. a guardian if god forbid something should happen to his mom, makes him my brother’s legal heir, establishes clearly N.’s paternity.

I know these high-tech birth stories don’t always end so happily, just as they don’t all look like “The Kids Are All Right,” either.  It would’ve been easy for my brother to have ignored the listing in DSR four years ago, or to have decided that hell no, he didn’t want a teen-age boy in his life.  He’s chosen the more difficult path and I wonder how on earth anyone could find fault with his decision. Isn’t my brother seeking out and embracing “family?” Shouldn’t that make the party of “family values” really happy? Shouldn’t the Bachmanns, the Perrys, the Palins, be celebrating this extension of family, instead of seeing my brother as some lesser minion of Satan? How can a simple declaration of love make people so afraid that they spit venom?

In one sense, nothing will change after the adoption ceremony: my brother will fly back to LA, rolling calls the entire way; Nephew will go back to high school, piano lessons, and the skate park; my mom will go back to Indiana.

Nothing will have change and yet, everything will have changed.  Our family grew today and no one can take that away.

photo: my brother dressed for his high school prom, back in the day. Dapper even before he’d come out of the closet. We should’ve known!

This post from the archives is my submission in the final round of freefringes lovelinks contest. The winner of the contest gets a blog button for an entire month on the website of the brilliant, profane, fearless, hysterically funny Bloggess, courtesy of the amazing Erica at freefringes.  You get one vote…and obviously my ENTIRE FAMILY hopes you’ll vote for me (not to put too much pressure on you or anything), but if you don’t like this post, then click around and read some of the other posts and, if you must, cast your vote in their direction.  And even if you can’t vote at ALL because you’re like the human equivalent of Switzerland or something, you should come back to lovelinks every week and see who’s posted what.

I remembered our conversation when I read Mamabirddiaries today, about parents being naked in front of their kids. We’re not big naked folks around here, although the uniform of most of the boys in this house seems to be shirt, socks, underpants.  Trousers get dropped more or less at the door.

Anyway, so the other day, Caleb nattered on about whatever was on his mind while I got dressed and then he stopped talking, looked at me.

Looked up, looked down.

“Mommy,” he said, “how come little girls have penises but big ladies don’t?”

Hmm.

“Little girls don’t have penises, just little boys. Little girls have vaginas, just like ladies.”

Caleb tilts his head, thinks a bit.

“Nah,” he says. “M.  in my class has a penis. And she’s a girl.”

Hmm.

“Um, how do you know that?”

Shrug. “I just figured that everyone had a penis except ladies. Like you. Penises are good because you can pee standing up.”

Indeed.