By Marla Jo Fisher, The Orange County Register
If you read my column regularly, you know that when they passed out the parenting manual for raising kids, I didn’t get one.
I was too busy talking to my friends in the back of the class.
Oh, wait, that’s my son, according to his algebra teacher.
But that’s another subject.
In any event, it is frequently brought to my attention that I’m doing things all wrong. Sometimes, this information comes from my children, Cheetah Boy and Curly Girl, who are now adolescents and old enough to know how they’re supposed to be raised.
“Stop shouting,” Cheetah Boy will tell me, when I discover that he’s gotten another F on a chapter test. I usually decline to follow this advice, even though I know shouting isn’t necessarily the best way to handle this news.
They also advise me to stop cursing, which admittedly I should do, and to “chillax,” which is apparently a recently coined verb designed to raise my blood pressure even higher than it was before.
Readers also write to give me parenting advice, some of which is excellent, some not so good.
Some readers just tell me to get the heck out of their newspaper, either because they find my attempts at humor annoying, or because I’m just too darn fat.
To those readers who write and tell me to lose weight, because I’m too ugly to be in their paper, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll lose weight when you stop drinking a case of beer every night, beating your kids and embezzling from your boss.
Fat people don’t have more problems than anyone else, they just wear them on the outside where they make easy targets for people who’ve gone off their medication.
I had one reader call me to task for daring to call my kids’ orthodontia a “cosmetic procedure.” You’re right, ma’am. Clearly it’s right up there with brain surgery as a medical necessity.
After I wrote a column about having to suffer through my kids’ teenybopper music in the car, Marilyn Barber of La Habra emailed me about her friend who formerly endured her teenage kids constantly changing the radio station on her car. Now that those kids are 18 and 20, Marilyn wrote me that her friend waits until they fall asleep, takes their car keys, sneaks out and changes their radio settings to country stations they hate. Now that’s a mom after my own heart!
Chris Esparza of Corona wrote to me after I wrote about my son being embarrassed by me at his Pony League baseball games. In the interest of embarrassing him further, I asked readers to give me suggestions.
Chris said the best way to embarrass a teen at his game is to wear brightly colored shoes and a yellow T-shirt with his team number and the slogan “World Champion” emblazoned on it, while calling his name. Then tell him to pose for pictures afterward with his friends.
Other readers had similar suggestions, including wearing a T-shirt with his picture on it and shouting his special nickname out loud.
I took my kids to an Angels game not long ago as a family outing, but Cheetah Boy ran into some friends and went to sit with them instead. This irritated me, so I spent the rest of the game blowing him kisses and telling him in sign language how much I loved him. He didn’t care too much for this, but his friends and I found it amusing.
Recently, I wrote about my difficulty deciding what to do when my kids lie to me. Talk to them? Seek a grand jury indictment?
I got a long, interesting email last week from Dr. Catherine Bailey, whom I don’t know, but who really sounds like a woman who knows what she’s talking about.
She told me that she thinks “most kids are like cats. They want what they want, when they want it and you get their attention by being the provider of the goodies, which of course are provided when they are on track. Not on track, no goodies.”
She added that “raising kids is a lot like herding cats. If they are generally moving in the right direction, it’s good enough.”
Well, thanks, Catherine. I do know rather a lot about herding cats, after spending the past 25 years around newspaper reporters. So that’s some darn good advice.
Marla Jo Fisher was a workaholic before she adopted two foster kids several years ago. Now she juggles work and single parenting, while being exhorted from everywhere to be thinner, smarter, sexier, healthier, more frugal, a better mom, better dressed and a tidier housekeeper. Contact her at mfisher@ocregister.com. Read her blog at http://themomblog.freedomblogging.com/category/frumpy-middleaged-mom-marla-jo-fisher/.