Angie Kinghorn

Training your kindergartner: It’s pay now or pay later

It turns out you can take a lot of parenting lessons from the financial world. Fiscal responsibility is a model for child discipline. The parallels are creepily accurate.

You want to buy something? You can pay for it now and pay what it costs. Or you can charge it and pay for it later. Depending on how much later you decide to pay, you’ll end up paying a lot more than what you owed in the first place.

Interest is a bitch.

You want to build something with your money? Put in the work now and start saving. Don’t get everything you want the minute you want it. Delayed gratification results in a bigger payout in the end. If you put your money in the market, put it in for the long haul, knowing there will be ups and downs (and risks), but in the end, it will likely be worth it.

In our culture of instant gratification, this approach isn’t mainstream. We want it all and we want it now. Who wants to stay in the starter home for 10+ years when you can get a low-interest mortgage on a McMansion like all your friends have? Why would you want to save when you could be using your paycheck to decorate? What point is there in driving the same car you had in college when you can get a new Lexus with such a low monthly payment?

Perhaps the most valuable parenting advice I’ve ever heard was from an experienced mother who was addressing our Sunday school’s group of young moms. We were talking about discipline, and she said, “Basically, it all boils down to this: you can pay now or pay later.”

It sounds so simple.

And it’s anything but.

We’ve grown up watching paying later become more and more en vogue. Look at the national debt, individual credit card debt, grace periods on car loans and furniture. The idea of having to wait for a payoff is abhorrent to most of us.

It shows in our parenting, too. Paying now when it comes to raising your child is inconvenient. It means that if your kid pitches a fit while you’re out running errands, you have to make good on that threat to go home and put them in time out, even if it means you don’t get to finish all the things you need to do.

It means that you leave the playground early because of one child’s mistakes, which also punishes the other sibling. You might have to leave a restaurant mid-meal or a party in mid-swing because your child won’t behave. It’s not fun, but you’re paying now for a better behaved child.

With babies, it means letting them cry so they can learn to sleep. Pure hell, but better than a year of your life with no sleep. Same when it’s time for the pacifier to go. With toddlers, it means enduring a tantrum rather than giving in to the demands of a tiny would-be despot.

In a nutshell, it sucks. And as you watch other parents charge their debt to the future, you wonder whether you’re a crazy person for insisting that your kids behave, and that they do it yesterday.

What put me firmly in the “pay now” camp is a vivid childhood memory. I was about the age my twins are now, sobbing because my mom wouldn’t allow me to go to a party. It was my own fault; I’d done something she’d told me not to do, and that was the consequence. The memory is seared onto my brain; I can tell you where I was standing when I begged to be allowed to go anyway, and how she told me that she wished very much that I could, but that she’d spelled out the consequences and I’d broken the rules, and that was that.

The other morning I called my mother to ask her advice about our daughter, because she’s inherited a double dose of strong will from both Mark and me. She’s probably a lot like I was at her age. Amazingly enough, my mom has no memory of not allowing me to go to that party, but it made such an impression on me that I can still tell you what wallpaper I saw through my tears as I pleaded to go, and I can smell the Halston wafting from her sweater when she hugged me. I’m sure that afternoon of my tears was hell on my mother, but since the memory is that powerful to me now, I’m guessing that it was worth it. I don’t remember being kept home from any more parties.

At any rate, we’re paying now. Our daughter did not behave well on a visit to the pumpkin patch last weekend, and I told her repeatedly that if her attitude didn’t improve, she couldn’t go to the birthday party she was supposed to attend. So we had our very own version of the talk I had with my mother 20 years ago, and I made her stay home. And no, it wasn’t fun.

I also kept thinking about the mom to whom I’d RSVPd “yes,” and how terrible it was to back out at the last minute. But when I next saw her, and apologized, she wasn’t mad. On the contrary, she was impressed, and thanked me. She’d had to explain to her daughter why Anne wasn’t at her birthday party, and apparently it made quite an impression.

I think we’ve made an impression on Anne, too. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we have to go through this again for it to really sink in. If that happens, it will be ugly. There will be tears. But I’d rather pay now, while the consequences are small in the grand scheme of things, than pay later. Compounding interest on discipline matters gets you into bigger trouble than you’d ever face with your bank or your credit card company.

So even if it hurts, we’re going to pay now.

How about you? What’s your philosophy? Do you pay your child discipline toll up front, or are you charging it to the future?

The red room

“Isa! Glad suburbia isn’t keeping you away!”

“Not a chance, Neil. Be a doll and do me up?” She turned and he deftly hooked her bustier.

“Thanks. So, is this big table of hens a straight party?”

“Oh yeah. A bunch of ‘em had that Fifty Shades book. One actually asked me if we had a ‘red room of pain.’”

“Neil, you need to get out of the city. What you read on the subway here, you hide on the playground there. Yeah, I believe it. That damn book is the reason most of the other moms I know have Kindles.”

“Go give ‘em what they want, then.”

“So, Christian or Ana?”

She dodged his swat as she ducked out.

The pole was hidden behind a screen. On cue, the music changed, the lights dimmed, and the lights behind her flared. Seduce the pole, seduce the party.

“Look at that! She’s hanging upside down with only her legs!”

Isa knew that voice. Teenie.

“Good call on the book club venue!” Kathie.

“Yeah, too bad Isabelle couldn’t make it,” Jennie said. “Course, this doesn’t seem like her scene.”

Isa began to shimmy up the pole. They would have had the two drink minimum by now, she had on a wig and stage makeup. But the red room was small. She didn’t like her chances.

Screw it. If they know, they know.

She flipped off the pole and stood as the screen rose, flashing her book club and most of the PTA a clear view of her cheeks.

“God, I’d kill to have that ass,” a voice said. Allie or Jamie, she couldn’t tell. Well, put a pole in your house and get on it, she thought. Best workout around.

The music began thumping. The bass pulsated through her body, caressing her from the inside out. Isa felt it vibrate up through her shoes into her hands, weaving its magic. She twined around the pole like jasmine.

“Look at that tattoo!” It was Laurie, squeaking like a mouse. “The snake! There! No, wait, there –”

Isa flipped off the pole and moved to the front of the stage.

“I feel like I’ve seen that tattoo before,” Teenie said. Isa couldn’t see her through the lights. She slid onto her knees, feeling the wood floor bite into her knees through her fishnets.

“Me, too,” a voice added.

Just finish.

“Doesn’t Isabelle have a tattoo like that?” Teenie asked.

“Yes! I wonder if it’s a thing, like in the city,” someone added.

The music ended, then Neil’s voice echoed, “Give a big hand to Isa!!!”

Gasps.

Isa turned and blew kisses toward the dark corners of the room.

So much for book club.

********************************************************************************************************************************

This is a piece of fiction written for Write on Edge, an online writers’ workshop. This week’s prompt was simply the photo you see at the top of this post. We were given 450 words to let our imaginations take us…well, wherever they might go.

Constructive criticism is welcome!

 

Confession: I didn’t volunteer–until now. And that’s ok.

 Forgive me, for I have not volunteered

Volunteer Spot is all about, well, volunteering. When Carissa asked me to post, I laughed, because I’m the least qualified mom on the planet to talk to you about how to be a great school volunteer. I spent my career as a preschool mom actively avoiding all calls to action, making one batch of homemade play-dough per year and bitching mightily about the need to do so when you can buy perfectly good Play-Doh at Target. If money was due for anything, I was that mom running up to the room mom’s SUV at carpool line trying to wave her down before she drove off so I could pass her a $20.

But this year my kids are in kindergarten, and I’ve signed up to be a room mom and a library volunteer, and it’s largely because I’ve spent the past three years not volunteering.

So let me tell you about not volunteering. This side of the story is important, and it’s not something you hear a lot.

Listen closely if you’re a room mom, desperate to fill your sign-up sheets with bright-eyed parents. When you see that same mother screeching to the curb minutes before the bell sounds every morning, sporting the same yoga pants, dirty hair, and streaked mascara she’s had on every other time you’ve seen her, remember this story. The class Halloween party may be the least important thing in her life right now; she may be hanging on by a thread.

This is why

Our twins started preschool when they were two years old. They went three mornings a week, and there were requests for room moms, for volunteers for the parent council, for parents to make play-dough, for parents to bring party supplies and food for various holidays.

My father was dying, nearing the end of a 12 year battle with cancer, and I looked at those sign-up sheets and made a conscious choice not to put my name on any of them. I was exhausted, having spent the summer going to my parents’ house almost every weekend to spend time with my father, watching as he deteriorated before our eyes. I was still reeling from postpartum depression when his health really started to spiral, and in those days I never went anywhere without Xanax. When the phone rang late at night, anxiety forced bile into my mouth. Had he died?

So those sign-ups, in the face of my father, growing ever thinner, juggling a basket of medications, not to mention my mother, sick with worry … in the face of my family crisis, the very idea of volunteering was ridiculous. Preschool was a place to drop my kids off so I could rest for a few hours.

And you know what? That’s ok.

My father collapsed only a few weeks into the school year, on Labor Day, and died two weeks later. My mind was where it should have been–fully present with my family, not freaked out about who would organize all the things I’d signed up to do at school and now couldn’t.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel guilt. I’m hard-wired for guilt. But I also recognized that it was all I could do to tread water as a parent that year. How do you explain grief to a pair of chubby-cheeked two year olds who see a lack of chocolate pudding as catastrophic? How do you tell them your tears are ok, not to be scared, that Mommy’s just sad and misses her daddy? Explaining my grief to my children was (and still is) like a hot poker to the stomach. The effort knocked the breath out of me. There was no guidebook for it, no “What to expect when you have to explain death to your toddlers.”

It scared them to have Mommy burst into tears without warning in the middle of their bath, or in the middle of Target. They struggled to comprehend the idea of heaven, and where exactly Grandaddy Tom had gone. Even with loving parents trying to explain it, that’s a heavy load for a couple of two year olds.

And this is why, again

So the next year, when they were three, I reached for those sign-up sheets, right?

No.

I still didn’t feel ready. Helping my mother with the practicalities of the estate after my father’s death was just as draining, in a different way, than sitting in his hospital room.

And then, in late October, my husband started having horrible pain. Initially his doctors thought he had a kidney stone, and gave him narcotics and told him to wait it out. He wore jeans and a t-shirt for the Halloween party we hosted. We joked that his costume was Robert Downey, Jr., because he was high on pills and would periodically pass out.

Then we found out a few days later it wasn’t a kidney stone.

It was testicular cancer.

Again, volunteering was the farthest thing from my mind when the doctors told us they had to operate the very next day, and that no, there was no time for a second opinion. Mark’s parents drove up and took the twins back home with them, and he had his surgery. My mother and I sat in the waiting room, both of us in our own private hell. Only 13 months ago, my father had died, and now my husband was having surgery for cancer.

In the end we were lucky. His cancer was stage one, and the more highly treatable of the two types of testicular cancer. He still had to undergo a six week course of radiation, which started the week before Christmas. My husband began to look like an echo of my father during his radiation: drawn, gray, thinner by the minute. His usual appetite for steak and burgers vanished; he’d manage half a bowl of soup for dinner.

My kids’ preschool teachers that year didn’t see much of me at all, and when they did, I was usually crying. I missed one pickup entirely because I took a nap and slept through my alarm. I was the opposite of a volunteer mom. I was a mom just trying to get through the day and present a happy face for her kids when they got home. Yet we were also trying to be open with the kids about what was happening, in an age-appropriate way.

Again, there’s no, “What to expect when you have to explain your husband’s cancer to your three year olds.” At least, none that I found. We did the best we could to be honest with the kids, and they knew Daddy was sick, but at that age, “sick” meant a cough, a runny nose, a tummy ache.

If you find yourself needing to not volunteer, that’s ok. You don’t have to be supermom. If your life is exploding, take a step back and pick up the pieces. You have to be whole before you can help anyone else. People do understand. Really. Sure, if you’re anything like me, you’ll beat yourself up, but others won’t. If they’re like the dear moms at my preschool, they’ll bring you casseroles.

Finally this year, I’ve signed up. For, um, a lot.

As for my story, this year my twins are five and in kindergarten, and now I’m finally volunteering.

I intended to volunteer for something small. Something really small. And somehow I’ve gone a bit bigger than I intended.

Okay, way bigger than I intended.

For starters, I’m a room mom. (I know, right?) We went to our kindergarten open house and there was space on the sheet and I thought, “Well, I’m never going to know what’s going on around here if I just pull up and drop them off every morning and repeat in the afternoon for pick up. I need to be here.”

And then I saw a sign-up sheet for library volunteers. Libraries? Books? Sign. Me. Up. I spent a lovely hour in the library today helping my twins’ kindergarten class check out books. The kids were beyond excited to have Mommy at school, and I was happy to be able to meet their classmates.

All this means I’ve joined the PTA. And I’ve found that I like knowing what’s going on at  school. This particular PTA is incredibly active, and just having been to a few events, I’m starting to know some of these superwomen.

And I am in awe.

I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I occasionally wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I’d intended to use all this free time to write.

But … I’m finding that I like volunteering. Yesterday I spent 2 1/2 hours at the car dealership having my minivan oiled and de-gunked (why yes, that is a technical term), and I used most of the time to input information into the class website I’m building.

I’m happy to be getting to know people–parents, teachers, and administrators. I’m starting to associate faces with names and I’m there often enough to learn things like where the bathrooms are.

How will I feel in a few months? I don’t know yet. But I’ll be sure to let you know.

As for the room mom stuff, we haven’t gotten to the point where we’re asking parents for time commitments or cash or party supplies yet, but when we do, I am making myself a promise that if I don’t hear from a few parents, I will remember myself a few years ago. You never really know what’s going on inside another household, and I hope my own experiences can help me make a year or two easier for any of the parents around me who may need it.

 

This post was written for Volunteer Spot, an amazing online resource for parent volunteers in schools. Check out their new site for room moms, Room Mom Spot. They’ve also just launched an iPad app, Clipboard by Volunteer Spot, which turns any iPad into a clipboard sign-up sheet.

You can follow Volunteer Spot on Twitter @volunteerspot

On Facebook, find Volunteer Spot at https://www.facebook.com/volunteerspot . Go visit–this is the last week of a sweepstakes to win an iPad for you AND $500 for your school!

VSpot_BackToSchool_Room_Parent

Save time {and stress} and get more parents involved
at school with VolunteerSpot.com! 

VolunteerSpot’s FREE online signup sheets make it easy to organize parents and signup to help for just about anything: classroom helpers, snack schedules, carnivals, library volunteers, parent-teacher conferences and more….  No more ‘Reply-All’ email chains! Please share with your room mom, teachers and parent leaders…

Plus there’s a huge Sweepstakes on VolunteerSpot’s Facebook page! 
Win an iPad for YOU and a $500 for your fave School! Enter here

 

Partly cloudy in perpetuity

Depression.

Not a great friend at any time, but an especially brutal companion during the early years of motherhood.

It’s sheer insanity sometimes, a return to middle school in the middle of our lives. Every day I line up to pick my kids up from school, and 90% of the moms there are driving the same make and model minivan that I am. Most are even the same color.

One by one the vans sprout the same magnets for dance schools, swim teams, and elementary schools, until you could stalk a family just by looking at their bumper.

It took me by surprise when the babies were born, this realization that evidently there was one right way to do this parenting thing. Or at least, that’s how it seemed from my haze of pain and postpartum depression. When we ventured out with the twins, my every nerve was twitching, waiting for them to cry or spew at an inopportune time.

Through my veil of postpartum depression (and through no fault of their own), my friends intimidated me. They didn’t just have it together, they had it all monogrammed. No plain burp cloths or onesies for their progeny; my friends’ babies were decked out in smocked bishop dresses or monogrammed john-johns at all times, usually accessorized with monogrammed pacifier clips.

I was aiming low. All I wanted was to look normal at a glance. My plan for projecting new mother normalcy involved a drug cocktail of antidepressants and Xanax, ridiculously expensive concealer, and Spanx. And if I could avoid leaking breast milk through my dress during church, all the better.

Both twins had severe reflux and threw up like they were paid to do it. One morning Anne went through NINE onesies before lunch.

They ended up in whatever was clean, and we went through upwards of three dozen burp cloths a day, and they were plain cloth diapers. No monograms, no ribbons.

My friends were constantly taking their babies to professional photographers.  Infant shoots, three month shoots, then six months, nine months, a year. My kids wouldn’t stop puking long enough to stay in a clean outfit.

Comparing myself and my children to my friends and their children was probably the most toxic thing I could have done for my postpartum depression. When every fiber of your being screams that you’re not good enough, the last thing you need is to add more voices to that chorus and to give them more ammunition. Yet five and a half years in, I still struggle to stop trying to measure up.

Depression affects far more people than most of us would think. Many are lucky enough to have a fleeting or single encounter with the disease, and these are often the stories we hear, of brave survivors who fought their way out from under thunderclouds to stand, triumphant, in the sunshine.

And then there are the rest of us.

The rest of us, for whom depression is not a one time gig. Those of us who fight our way out from under the raincloud, glimpse blue sky long enough to feel that most teasingly painful of emotions: hope. When we stand triumphant to proclaim depression’s defeat, we lift our faces to more rain, and as it runs like tears down our cheeks as we realize that our forecasts might be partly cloudy in perpetuity.

One episode of major depression raises the risk of another. Two further increases that risk. And by the time you’ve hit three, it’s practically guaranteed that depression will be a constant in your life.

When I say constant, I don’t mean constantly depressed. Depression is like quicksand, a hidden trap sprung without notice. Once you’ve been caught several times you learn to recognize it sooner, and if you’re smart enough to get help, you learn how to help yourself out of the quagmire.

You also learn that partly cloudy means partly sunny.

To all of you out there struggling, know this: you are good enough. You don’t need to keep up with the mommies. Do your best, and it is enough. Be gentle with yourself, and take comfort in the knowledge that there are a lot of us out there who know what it’s like.

You might not spot us in public because we’ve learned to smile. But we’re there.