Just in case the latest exciting installment of Police Academy (Citizen’s style) wasn’t enough to make a blast of this blessed, Hallmark holiday, I offer you the funniest blog I have stumbled over in a long time. LOL troubles me because it’s said so often that we now need another acronym for when we truly laugh out loud. In the chortling sense, or till tears run down our faces. Maybe you can think of a new shorthand. In the meantime, I did both when I read Subourbon Wife’s funny, then touching posts, and hugged my kids.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, emerging mystery writer Karyne Corum is back with her series about a job that has more than a little in common with being a mom. Like moms, cops have to call it like they see it, instill order, and sometimes risk everything to protect the ones they’re charged with keeping safe. A very Happy Mother’s Day to those with that job description. And I hope everyone enjoys this latest exciting installment of Police Academy, suspenseyourdisbelief-style!

Despite the, dare I call it rush, of my team’s first take down, the stairs and what lay beyond, still waited. I gathered my team and we slowly ascended, cutting to each corner, providing cover for each of us as we went.

I was sweating and my heart kept tapping out this crazy staccato of nervousness.

At the top of the stairs, we paused, looking into a room that was lit only by the light from a partially cracked doorway. The room was wide and filled with a variety of shrouded objects that cast menacing shadows in the darkness.

I gave directions in a low voice. We entered in a half-diamond; myself and the secretary would take the left side, the pharmacist, the right.

As it was none of us got more than three steps in before we spotted a figure seated in the far back of the room. She sat behind a table, a nondescript shape in front of her that looked vaguely familiar. To her left, several large boxes and boards obscured the corner of the room.

“Don’t come any closer! Don’t come any closer.” Her voice was half-hysterical, half-terrified and if we’d not been so pumped on fear and adrenaline, we might have heard it for what it was.

Instead, we shouted to her to drop the weapon. We could both see and hear the sharp pops of a weapon near her. She kept telling us not to come any closer, we kept countering that she drop the weapon.

The secretary, unable to take the tension anymore shot first and then we followed suit. (Later I told her she was just bloodthirsty.) By the time we had finished, the woman slumped forward, lifeless. All three of us cautiously proceeded forward, anxious about who might be hiding behind that obstruction.

The pharmacist, closely covered by us, took the turn around the corner, and made the last discovery, and third kill of the night. A man swathed all in black, sat down and below the woman’s body, a handgun at his feet. Before he could reach his weapon, he was shot dead.

Once the last shot was fired, we were able to discover the worst error of our entire night. (There were several.) The woman, handcuffed and posed in front of a staged weapon, was a hostage. An innocent civilian whom we had just shot dead, assuming she was the threat. Looking back many things became clear. Her voice had not been threatening, but pleading with us. We couldn’t see her hands in the darkness, but we had been convinced they held a weapon.

“Great, you shot the hostage,” I teased the secretary.

“I heard gunfire right by her.” She defended herself with a shrug.

Even the shooter, when we examined the scene afterwards, hadn’t actually been holding his weapon when he was shot, and therefore, in any court of law would be considered, technically, unarmed. Let’s face it, we’ve all seen enough legal shows to know just how many criminals get off on a technicality.

In the aftermath as we followed procedure and sketched out the various crime scenes, counted bullet casings and interviewed witnesses, it kept running through my mind just how badly it had all went down.

We had jumped to conclusions that had cost lives, one innocent, one guilty. We had faced dangerous situations and made snap decisions based more on our feelings than common sense.

I was inordinately thankful that the only blood spilled came from a plastic bottle and words, at least in this case, do not equate to bullets.

Karyne Corum is the married mother of one preschooler. She lives in Central New Jersey, and has been telling stories since she was a little girl–only now they get her into a lot more trouble. Fortunately, she can write her way out of most of it. Her many jobs prior to accepting the inevitable include actor, security guard, executive assistant and massage therapist. She is currently at work on her first full length novel, which keeps her up at night almost as much as her four-year old son does.

When I was a senior in high school, and had been rejected by the very last college I had yet to hear from–Barnard, which ironically became my alma mater after I transferred there two years hence–an old friend of my dad’s was visiting from Scotland.

I was lying length-wise on my childhood bed in my childhood room, sobbing. I was a kid and am now an adult who tends to hide her feelings from all but the most intimate in my circle. It was a sign of how heartbroken I was that even as this Scotsman sat on the edge of my bed, trying to say goodbye to this out of control, angst-ridden adolescent, I couldn’t pull myself together.

I had been dreaming of going to college for a long, long time. Only one thing penetrated my caul of sorrow, and that was when Jim said the following in his thick brogue.

“Jenny, I know you won’t believe this now,” he said. “But sometimes, the things that seem the worst to us turn out to be for the best.”

Then he patted me fondly if a little awkwardly–remember, out of control teenager, and Jim had at that point only a four year old–simple, easy–and got up and left for points east.

(Scotland’s east, right?)

I applied late to Bard College. I went there for two years and left for a reason that still seems divinely steered given how much I loved Bard–but that’s for another post.

What’s for this one is that Jim was so right that I remember his words these many years later, and still recount them for basically anyone who will listen.

Sometimes the worst things turn out to be for the best.

If you really take that to heart, you can weather a lot of blows. You can anticipate that what seems like a big ole punch to the gut just might turn out to be exactly what you needed.

We’re at a point like that again now. It’s not anywhere near as bad as that final rejection letter felt. But things are a bit in upheaval, we’re not sure how the next step of our lives might shake out.

I’m trying to remember Jim’s words. I’m hoping that for anyone who’s in a similar place, those words might have meaning, too.

Oh, stop it, everyone who’s saying, Kids aren’t monsters! How can you talk about those sweet wittle wee ums that way?

This might be a surprising statement coming from me, who recently waxed rhapsodic on mommy ‘hood and the legendary lore of childhood. But what I was hoping to do with those thoughts is encourage a focus on the good parts, not suggest the bad never happen.

There are days–at least parts of them–when my own two wovely wittle wee ums behave like monsters. My six year old gets giddy, which is all well and good until you need to get her to the bus and she is whooping and hollering with glee that is an exact mirror–in OPPOSITE LAND, that is–of the expression on my face. And sometimes my almost four year old gets hungry ONE HUNDRED times a day, acting every single one of those times as if he is starving, even though I just served him fruit/nuts/cheese/mini crackers five seconds ago.

These behaviors really aren’t that bad as things go, I guess. Maybe only bordering on monstrous–depending on how much writing I’m trying to get done between whoops and snacks.

But we all know a kid or two who really is a monster. A brat. An ill behaved wretch.

Have there always been kids like that? Even when children were supposed to be seen and not heard? Was seen and not heard meant to keep the monstrous in check–with a strap for when the whooping got too loud NOT to be heard?

I would love to read a historical account of brattiness. But till I find one, here’s a piece that discusses what to do when a monstrous child shows up at your house for a play date. And here’s another that lays it on the line about a certain privileged sector which is perhaps uniquely producing monsters.

There’s even a paragraph about a new subset of bullies that targets kids who don’t wear Dolce & Gabbana.

See? Kids are monsters.

Maybe we all are at heart till society steps in to channel us and smooth our rough edges.

The problem today is a false self esteem movement has told us that those same wittle wee ums will develop lifelong self esteem issues if we criticize them. You can’t say, Don’t do that, you have to say, Please do x.

I’m gonna let out a good old-fashioned fooey. If I see my kid doing something mean, or dangerous, or just hopelessly spoiled, s/he needs to know how I feel about that.  That’s not going to cause bad self esteem. The opposite: good self esteem arises from knowing deeply who you are.

It’s up to us parents to curb monstrous tendencies with discipline and, perhaps most importantly, recognition.

When they act monstrously, admit it, then stop them.

And I promise. One day they’ll all be big non-monsters with good self esteem.

I went to a baby shower recently and several people advised the mom-to-be to tap into a network of moms. They will be your saving grace, everyone said.

I love my mom friends. I love how having kids the same age can bond and connect you with so many women–give you instant, deep topics of conversation; lend you the unshakable certainty that this woman, if left in charge of your kids, would guard them with the same fierceness you would. (And possibly more, a topic for another post.)

But I didn’t feel the need for my own network until I was a mother of two and my oldest had just turned four.

A lot of people would say this was a long time to go with out any stroller clubs. Or coffee outings. Or even just take-her-for-a-half-hour-while-I-shower breaks.

I did have one very good friend who had kids, one close in age to my oldest, and we spoke all the time. And I had my own mother, who listened to each tidbit from my baby-filled days as only a rapt grandmother AND child psychologist can do. I wasn’t utterly alone in the tundra. My husband is a perhaps unusually good parenting partner, and I relied a lot on him.

Those first years seem a long time ago already, and I’m trying to remember how each day passed. In a slow, lazy loop from nap to bath to feeding to story to shake a rattle because this is supposed to be good for her/no, I really prefer to read, to silliness to dance around to I need some food, you can watch me eat, back to nap again…I’m writing it now and it sounds like heaven.

Maybe that’s why I kept to myself so much. Or maybe I just used to be more of a loner.

I’m still glad to be where I am now, though. Until my daughter was four and went out into the world without me for the first time for preschool, I didn’t know what everyone was talking about.

That the moms you meet will become some combination of best friend and family without your even trying.

I live in a new neighborhood now, full of moms.

There are so many communities for us to find, real and electronic. One of the ones I began to visit when I finally poked my head out into the world along with my daughter was Baristakids. This site offers everything from laughs to day trips to take with your kids. And today they’re publishing one of my own pieces on parenting.

It’s a moment I can’t wait to share with every one of my mom friends.

This post stirred up a lot of mombast (you know…like bombast; sue me, I watched Motherhood with Uma Thurman yesterday and it made me think of all the cute ways “mom” can be worked into otherwise adult vocabulary). Anyway, for examples thereof, read the comments.

It’s funny because what the piece made me think more than anything is not that Jennifer is wrong for wanting Lily to have the Best Party Ever at the Little Gym (or egads, American Girl). Still less that Lulu is wrong for depriving Prince of goody bags, which after all probably account for at least a fractional amount of our excess carbon footprint.

But that *everyone* is wrong for seeing either choice as wrong or right. It’s something unique to our generation that keeps couching things in these terms. Good and bad. Which really translates into good for the kids, or bad for the kids, of course.

Either we’re congratulating ourselves on throwing the best party–or teaching Moomba the right values–or else we’re guilting ourselves into thinking that whatever choice we make, it will be wrong and our kids (who else?) will suffer for it.

Well, maybe someone will suffer. But it won’t be the kids, sick, happy and stuffed full.

It will be the moms and dads who totter beneath a stack of pizzas higher than a small building. Or scrambling to fill the goody bags, clean up the wilted leftovers of balloons, and scrape cake gunk off carpet, shoes, and teeth.

I say, throw a party if you enjoy doing so. If this is a yearly rite you’d like to give your kids. And, secondarily, if the kid in question enjoys it. If you or he would prefer something different, that’s good, too.

More importantly, let’s stop worrying if what we did was the exact right thing.

Birthdays will come every year. Party or no, we’re all getting older. That will go down a little easier if we give each other a break.

Have you ever read a book and seen parts of yourself?

I mean, really. Who hasn’t?

But right now I’m reading one, and whether it’s because of my particular life stage–very memorable and identifiable: that of Parenting Young Children–or because of the talent of this author, or some combination of the two, I keep half-smiling, half-grimacing as I read.

I should rush in with the inevitable (and also true) caveat that I really don’t see much of myself in this quad of unhappy characters. I feel lucky to be passionately in love with my husband of fifteen years. And my children delight me way more than the ones two of these characters are raising do.

Still, the author gets some moments just. so. right.

Like when the mother, who’s also scrabbling to maintain a freelance career, is trying to finish up a piece while her children clamor for attention. Her voice takes on “a shrill edge of panic when three year old Noah pound[s] his small fists on the door.” How I have worked to keep sheer panic from streaking my own voice.  I’m not dangling off a cliff edge–quite–but there’s something about needing desperately to work– wanting to really, which in some way makes things worse–while at the same knowing that your kids need you. Something about being torn almost in two. We’re meant to live our lives in one piece.

When an author gets details like these so right you want to cry and grin and scream all the same time, and you happen to be a writer, you can’t help but compare your own work. Are there moments in mine that will make readers feel such a bolt of connection? In another piece I’m working on about the genre of psychological suspense, I refer to empathy as the essence of reading.

This author did better than make me empathize with her characters. She made me feel like they’d empathize with me.

The emerging writer Peg Brantley writes a wonderful blog that I’ve mentioned on this site before. Her post today is about occasions and what level of joy we bring both to them and to more “ordinary” days.

For some reason she got me thinking that many of the New Year’s resolutions we make probably just aren’t that important. It’s my dear friend’s birthday today and when I was selecting her ecard (“when you care enough to click the send button”, quips my husband) there was one that went something like:

“And this year I promise to exercise every day…and lose weight…and, oh, fudge it, let’s have some cake.”

So I think a lot of resolutions go by the wayside because there are more important (or pleasurable) things to focus on.

I posted the below comment on Peg’s site. Some of it may not make perfect sense–Peg and I have a running joke about how a Perfect First Draft is like Bigfoot, ie, a mythical being–but I wanted to copy it here.

So I always remember the important things.

I am parenting young children right now (mine are six and about to turn four) and I gotta say, they make every day exciting. From seeing my kindergartener figure out how to use a card to keep the dense lines of text in chapter books straight so she can read, to hearing my son begin to say “car” instead of “tar” or call his teacher Caroline instead of, yes, Taroline…Each day brings something new, precious, and that I know I won’t get to experience for very long. And doing this along with my own LOML is a miracle, too, one for which I give thanks every night.

Writing a new novel is always excitement of a fever pitch. A (non-perfect) first draft takes me about five months to write, which is lucky–I couldn’t stay at that level of excitement continually.

And then there’s snow, and food, and my siblings and parents–all excitement producing in their own ways.

I guess there are the mean times too–when I get a rejection or told to revise something I thought was Perfect (you know I am prone to this, Peg or hear that people still want to take down planes or see my kids bicker instead of appreciating that these are about the only years they can say with a straight face, We’re going to marry each other and drive a tanker (that’s my son’s contribution) when we grow up…

I don’t mean to say it’s all excitement all the time. But the days I don’t pause with tears of joy on my eyes, at least for a moment, are few, and for that I’m deeply thankful.

What kinds of things bring joy to your everyday?

When my daughter was two years old, my father took care of her on Mondays when I saw psychotherapy patients. I remember coming home one time and asking how the day went.

“It’s amazing how tiring it is,” my dad said, “to read all day.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. I was home the other four days of the week, pregnant with our second, and sitting in the nursing rocker and reading story books just about fit my energy level. There were days we read for six or more hours, stopping only to eat (both of us) and nap (also both of us).

Now my daughter is six and no matter where she is, if I start to read, she will stop everything and become transfixed. She’s not a kid who melts down very often, but reading stops her cold when she does. (And when I am in Good Enough Mom mode to use this tactic as opposed to pleading, yelling, and frowning my fool face off.)

She likes everything from THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO to those illustrated story books of her babyhood. Right now we’re reading THE SECRET GARDEN and she is rapt. We’ve gotten up to book six in the LITTLE HOUSE series. Only Laura’s age stopped us–she likes characters she feels akin to. The old Carolyn Haywood series turned out to be pure magic.

Now, because I’m a writer and a voracious reader myself, I might chalk this up to some weird encoded thing and think, Isn’t genetics cool.

But my son is as different a kid as you could hope to see. He loves cars and gadgets and fixing things. He watches the world and notes his observations; my daughter lives in a dream state and narrates it.

But my son adores reading as well. If bedtime is too late for a “tory” he cries. His books differ–they have pictures of vehicles and he would enjoy an airplane manual if I could get my hands on one. But in terms of enjoying the written word, or at his age, I should say, hearing text, he is an ardent fan.

How did this happen? Is it because the kids’ dad and I read all the time? Because books fill our house, threatening to overturn, forming a bulk of what’s in the kids’ rooms? Because I read so much to them?

Is it purely genetics after all? Or environment? Or both?

Then there is the question of how a book loving child will fare in the world he or she inherits.

I hope and pray that my kids will always have books to fill their lives, that their children’s children’s children will. I hope that if this passion grows and evolves and morphs in ways we cannot predict at this point, one thing will remain always needful in our world: a love of story.

I believe that humans need story the same way we need water and breath. It’s why we gossip, and chatter, and rubberneck at the scene of calamity.

But on my more despairing days, I worry that I am passing on a love for a dying beast.

What about you? Are your kids readers? Do you feel you made them so, or is a reader simply born? Either way, do you feel a love of reading to be a good thing in a child?

I hope so. That daughter I started this piece with? When she grows up she wants to be a book seller.

Did you ever notice how children’s Tylenol tastes like grape Kool-Aid these days? Or bubble gum, or cherry candy, or something else I would’ve saved my dimes to buy as a kid.

This is more than just when-I-was-a-kid-I-walked-uphill-both-ways grumbling, so bear with me.

I am struggling with how child-focused our culture–at least a segment of our culture–has become.  Child indulgent might be the better term.

I am wondering if this is good for the children so focused upon.

When we were in Presque Isle some of the people we met told how twenty years ago when they were in high school, the term was aborted shortly after school started so the kids could pick potatoes ten hours a day. A successful harvest depended on the kids doing work that I would probably find difficult at this age.

Life didn’t revolve around kids and their needs. The kids’ lives revolved around the necessities of the adult world.

It’s tempting to see the pendulum as having swung. I’m not sure that’s the reality, but let me go with it for a while.

When an adult wants a meal out in 2009, she can eat chicken nuggets or a burger because, darn, it’s nice for the kids to have a play yard to amuse themselves in while she gulps down her fries. Or she may even go out to a place like Full Moon if she’s lucky enough for one to exist in her neck of the woods, and order tagine while her kid eats chicken fingers and plays with the toys scattered in lieu of a multi-color pit of slimy plastic balls.

Still, the kids’ needs–or demands–are driving this night.

Kids don’t pick the potato crop. They don’t even have to take bitter tasting medicine anymore. It all tastes like Kool-Aid, and we know how easily that goes down.

When my daughter had a pre-UTI and we gave her straight cranberry juice (I’m not talking Ocean Spray, but the Knudsons Nothing But variety) you would’ve thought we were requiring her to drink ground glass. And it hit me, this kid hasn’t tasted anything–anything–bad in her life.

First the sweetish breast milk we are all encouraged to administer for months or years–and mind, I loved nursing, stopped with an ache in my heart, but the fact remains…what if I had not loved it so? What if I was working out of the home, and my child and her optimal state of nutrition couldn’t come absolutely first? Wouldn’t the troupes come out to tell me I am not doing What My Child Needs?

Then there are the dumplings and eel sushi and Thai green curry, which my kids–weird, I know–actually like, and which does save me from having to eat Whoppers at every meal out. But I didn’t taste these things until I was a big kid, and then maybe once a year or less. Now we go out to eat semi-regularly–and we take our kids. I try to make them behave nicely so the adults less encumbered around us can have a peaceful meal. Don’t always succeed, but I do try.

Not everyone does. Kids need to stand up on the benches. Kids’ voices are naturally loud. Once upon a time, kids were supposed to be seen and not heard. Or at least given a smart swat on the butt when they stood up on chairs. Am I romanticizing that state of things?

Then of course there are the ubiquitous nuggets and tenders and boxed macaroni until we parents (me anyway) don’t know whether we should make a second meal–at least offer toasted cheese–if one night we cook homemade and the kids happen not to like our explorative stew.

What happens if our kids have to eat a meal they hate? Or go to bed hungry?

Are we lucky to have reached a level of plenty–one that largely isn’t even dependent on income; nuggets are cheap, how many kids don’t have plasma or playstations–so that kids don’t have to suffer even puny harms ?

Or do those puny harms achieve something ?

Will our children grow up lacking precisely because they lack so little?

Don’t get me wrong. I adore my kids. I believe my primary job as parent–after caring for and nurturing them–is to help them find their passions so that their days can be fueled with joy. Help them discover who they are.

And I like administering the frills of a lucky childhood, too. We’re far from rich, but my kids do have, for instance, a firetruck and princess bed to assist in their imaginary games of wailing sirens and being trapped in a tower.

I know that worrying is supposed to be the plight of parenthood and I get the nightmare visions, too. But one key area of worry for me is this very subject. Have kids’ lives become too easy, or too…important at a young age?

Or are these the years we parents have to teach them their worth and importance?

I’d love to hear what you think.