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~ Sam

My daughter finished theater camp last week. In the performance on her last day, her group did a song from A Chorus Line. That day, I heard more show tunes and Broadway play soundtracks than I have heard since I was kid, in that same theater classroom, and in various theaters in San Diego and Los Angeles. 

My parents shlepped me to every play that came to town - and some to L.A. - when I was a kid. I suppose I should be grateful, the culture, the exposure to music and art, but now, I can’t stand even the smell of a theater. Strangely enough, as soon as I walk into a theater (or theater classroom), I smell what I call “theater dust” and I begin sneezing. Also, I attract the most eccentric personalities the drama class or theater audience has to offer. More than once I’ve breathed in feathers from someone’s boa during a performance, or been smacked accidentally by a dance instructor trying to indiscriminately guide her young dance troupe through a performance.

But it’s cool. All part of childhood, mine, theirs, who can tell sometimes.

When we went to these shows when I was young, here is how it went: my mother would cry during every ballad (or, sometimes, act one to finale). My father started snoring before the first intermission. I would lie and say I had a horrible stomachache which granted us early departure from whatever play it was - Beatlemania, Cats, Oklahoma - sometimes. Only Annie and West Side Story got me revved up. All of the other plays were the same show, different costumes, and I have several gay male friends I hope never read that.

But it’s true.

So when I saw the theater camp performance last week, every age group doing different songs, I was shocked to realize I know the lyrics to (all!) the songs I tried very hard not to like and intentionally not absorb as a kid. ”Too mushy,” was my reasoning. Every play I saw involved over-dramatization, I never could figure out why - so the people in the back or really high seats could see and hear? Because that is the way “artists” behave in their element? Whatever the reason, the sentimentality didn’t give me goose bumps, it made me gag. I preferred the understatement of emotions that occurred in the ball games my father took me to.

Doing the dishes the night of Zoe’s performance and thankfully last day of theater camp (I can only take so much dancing-singing-exaggerated upper body movements), I unconsciously started singing One!.

one singular sensation every little step she takes 
one thrilling combination every move that she makes
ooh sigh give her your attention
do i really have to mention

“Do I really have dementia?” repeated my husband, sitting at the dinner table behind me. “Why did you ask me if I have dementia?” I replied. “Because you were just singing ’Do I really have dementia?’!” he said. (Hubby can beat you at sports trivia, but I’m afraid he’s a theater ignoramus).

I was singing a show tune from A Chorus Line, one of my least favorites. What’s happened to me? I’m not my mother. I’m not my mother. I didn’t even know I was singing it though. Shit. I guess I do have dementia. 

Dementia - not a laughing matter at all, but defined as a “decline in a person’s mental capacities and intellectual abilities that is great enough to affect the person’s normal daily functioning.” Evidently I do not have the vascular kind, but the kind that - as time wears on - works it’s way into every cell of the body that pulses, reverberates, regenerates, remembers, and alters the cells, for better or worse.

Their childhood, my childhood, who can tell sometimes, it’s all randomly recalled and put together later. One singular quotation and a little theater dust, and a line from a chorus line reveals a circle of inner workings. 

The best dramas contain complex ironies.

(Worth noting: I do have songs from Wicked on my iPod. You got me.)

I had a rule since my kids were old enough to start pre-school or pee wee sports: no more than two activites, per child, at one time. Otherwise, you’re asking for trouble: running around all over the place, asking for help from other family members or friends, never sitting down to a meal together, and getting kids to bed later than recommended on school nights (the horror).

I now believe that making rules is a way of tempting fate. I’ve adopted a loose interpretation of rules policy, because rules inevitably get broken. Besides, in order to be enforced, a rule needs a good reason to exist. Reasons, like people, change, so intuition is more reliable.

My old rules have been broken, by me. My son is currently playing soccer, flag football, and on two baseball teams. My older daughter is doing soccer and Girl Scouts, my youngest daughter is about to begin tumbling at a neighborhood dance studio (but being shlepped to the siblings activities counts too). My former “I will never” mentality is something I laugh at, like my spiral perms of the 80s.

I’ll own up to the full agenda, the absence of a rational family schedule. The problem is this: I can’t deny what I believe nurtures a timely and healthy need. If there is a desire to do something, logic dictates that it was created by a void waiting to be filled. I am willing to try - and let my kids try - things that I know will play a major part in the future of who we all become. I believe character is developed and destiny revealed in the interests, talents, and instincts we show from ages little to older. Idleness is the enemy.

If there is one thing I fear, though, it is that the plans we make in our lives equate to less freedom of choice. For all that we have in our day, and when we turn out the lights at night, I feel gratitude, but sometimes, when it is quiet and finally still, I feel a pull in another direction. Or, an “Am I doing this right?” self-audit when I wake up in the night and can’t get back to sleep. 

I suppose, and usually fall back to sleep thinking, as long as I follow what is in my heart and what my gut tells me, it’ll be okay. As long as my kids do the same, decisions will prove less faulty.

That is the only plan I have right now. Avoid rules and let intuition be the guide. Those priorities that await us after the school bell rings in the afternoon bring us to what we need one way or another.

I have ten thousand things awaiting me this late summer afternoon as I try to write this while my kids play Battleship. It’s all pretty mundane stuff. But I am as blessed with the boring details as I am with the excitement. I have to remember that.

To tip the balance in favor of excitement, however, I have begun to dream at night about the freedom that awaits me while the kids are in school. I will be writing, reading, baking souffles in silence if I want. I just ordered some books online to read during practices, tumbling, or during school hours. And I just finished a good one, “The Third Angel” by Alice Hoffman.

pages 252-253: “It’s chemistry, you know. There’ve been studies done and it’s been proven. Love is ancient and mysterious and you can’t mess with it. If you do, it backfires and you meet with disaster. That’s a fact.” 

Intuition trumps rules everytime. 

It was about thirty years ago, my father was taking me to the pediatrician. I had strep throat or somehing like it. My little hand was cupped in my father’s hand as we approached a mustard-colored stucco building and the elevator that would take us up three floors to Dr. Goldstein.

But on the way in, I noticed a couple with a baby, sitting on a cement bench next to a planter outside the building. They, the mother and father, were both sobbing. They took turns holding the baby. Crying.

I’m thirty-seven years old now. I think about that still, moreso now, because I have babies of my own.

I passed that building today. I tried not to look at it. Dr. Goldstein’s office building was in a medical complex that still exists, and to get to my daughter’s doctor appointment today, I had to drive into the same complex, near Children’s Hospital.

Today was Zoe’s follow-up x-ray to see how her osteo-chondral defect was doing. This summer she has swam nearly every day, practiced with her soccer team, ran up and down the beach, with no complaint of ankle pain. I wasn’t so worried about this appointment like I was the others. Last night at bedtime, I explained to her this x-ray wouldn’t take long like the MRI, it would be a let’s see how you’re doing type of check up, and none of us made anything - emotionally or otherwise - of it.

Until I drove by that building this morning and thought of those parents and their baby thirty years ago. Pit in my stomach. Burning in my eyes. Glance back in the rearview mirror to see my daughter swinging her legs to hip hop on the radio. Offer of thanks to whoever is listening.

“How was your x-ray, honey?” I asked Zoe as she walked out of the x-ray room in the Pediatric Osteopath’s office. “Relaxing,” she said. Relaxing. Okay.

So we’re led to a different room, the appointment is speeding along quickly, and I am confident we’ll be out of the office in no time. But even if we’re not, it’s okay, I think. Everyone here is so nice, and heaven knows, they’ve seen enough to provide them a compassionate perspective in life.

On the way to Zoe’s check-up room, I looked inside an office and saw an x-ray of a baby on the…whatever it is x-rays are illuminated on. Whatever the reason is a baby needs an x-ray, whatever could be wrong with any child, I cursed it, right then and there. Change it, make that baby okay, please, and mine too I said silently to myself and whoever else was listening. The x-ray tech who led us to the room looked at me as if I’d seen something I shouldn’t have seen. She wore a white top, black pants like scrubs, and had a tight blonde ponytail. She had the say no more than you need to thing down, and the look on my face was one of sad discretion. She read this, pulled on the doorknob and nodded at me. “The doctor will be right in.”

I love the pediatric osteopath. Turns out, Zoe’s osteo-chondral defect is better, smaller, and she no longer even needs to wear “the boot.” We got the okay to move on in life, activity level normal, officially come off the DL, and I said thank you again to whoever was listening.

I feel blessed. I feel pain for families of - like the sobbing parents of the baby thirty years ago - who don’t get good news. My heart, especially when I go near Children’s Hospital, is an open wound that reveals an intersection of bliss and pain and that is where I live a lot of the time. 

Right now, recovered from the memory of appointments and outcomes of current ones, I’m watching a movie with my kids and their friends. The soundtrack of this movie is all I hear, even over dialogue, which is all I tune into usually…but not tonight.

living on a dream ain’t easy, but the closer the knit, the tighter the fit…’cause you’re living in the love of the common people smile from the heart of a family man daddy’s gonna buy you a dream to cling to momma’s gonna love you just as much as she can…and she can

I think now I know why I have held on to dread for so long. It’s not all explained away in the behavior I saw modeled to me. It’s high time to move past that reasoning. Last night as my husband and I clinked our wine glasses watching tall ships in the harbor, I talked myself somewhere into this realization:

By worrying, some bad wiring in my brain has programmed me to think that I am preparing myself for whatever ill is inevitably to come. I have thought all along that planning any disasters will provide me the ability to sidestep them when some version of said disaster becomes reality. Don’t know how, but yesterday I came to understand that fear will only expedite what it is I worry about. I inexplicably understood at once that fear handicaps me and escorts me into a disadvantage, not advantage. I was calm when I realized this, but I also knew, it would take some time to undo a lifetime of mental scenario creating.

I get that way when my kids are with other people besides me, even if it is my parents, in-laws, sister-in-law, close friends. Even when I am supposed to be realxing - like date night away from the kids who are with my parents at the Zoo - I can’t completely unwind because the kids aren’t with me, next to me, in my line of sight. I like to hear their breathing.

So I have to drop the dread. It’s stupid and contrary to what I have seen all my life, it is not useful. And I’ve got to do this by myself.

A glass of wine usually helps me relax and undo a puzzle or two. Hubby and I usually talk about ourselves or the kids on date night. Either that, or we pretend to be ESPN sportscasters doing play by play analyses of (single looking for hook up) people at the restaurants where we have our dinner dates.

After a glass of wine, after dinner (crispy calamri with spicy Vietnamese dipping sauce, Kobe beef burger with smoked bacon, bleu cheese, parmesan fries, Caesar Salad with anchovy toast and blackened filet of salmon) I was ready to misbehave with chocolate. As it turned out, I really, really did misbehave.

Hubby and I went to a local dessert place where the line was out the door and about 25 people deep. I went inside to look at the dessert menu and specials and YAY! they had what I’d been craving for weeks…chocolate pots de creme. I set my heart on this one thing to bring me ultimate gratification. Got ready or the sweet, deep, rich chocolate flavor and silky texture. “Guess what they have guess what they have?!” I exclaimed to hubby. He was second in his excitement only to me, me who looked lovingly at the plate of everyone who was already enjoying theirs, with yellow flowers as garnish, whipped cream delightfully added in some shape to the dessert.

Pots de creme isn’t a mousse, not a brulee. Pots de creme I think is closer to a pudding. Chocolate pudding was my favorite as a child until the 80s when everyone went crazy for chocolate mousse and I was no different. Chocolate just…gives me a fix that I need.

We finally got to the front of the line, and the pots de creme were all gone from the dessert case. “You’re not out of pots de creme, are you?” I asked. The girl working the register looked at me reluctantly, but like she thought I could handle what she had to say.

She was wrong.

The pots de creme were all gone, she said. “We waited in that line to be told your chocolate pots de creme are gone?” I glared at the poor girl. Not my style to do this to front line people.

She nodded her head uncaringly at me, returning the favor.

At this point, I am a little girl wanting her chocolate pudding, and everyone is going to be as miserable as I am if I don’t get it.

I sat at the little outside table sipping tea. “Honey, eat your chocolate tiramisu,” said my husband, eating his toasted coconut something. The girl at the register had tried to talk him into a bran muffin. Saturday night in a hip part of town where desserts are the main thing and she tried to sell him a bran muffin. I wanted out of this place, I was suspicious, disappointed, and there was that feeling again. The I’m not in control feeling, the what do you mean I can’t depend on what I thought I was getting feeling.

I sulked for a little while until I saw my own little girls, and little guy. When I told my parents about my dessert deprivation, my mother mocked me. “No pots de creme? I can’t imagine anything more awful than that!” She said. Well, I can. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. In fact, the worst thing that I just imagined, I forgot it already.

I did an online search today of chocolate pots de creme. They’re not that hard to make. Quite attainable actually, even for a novice pastry chef like me. It is no use standing by when the ability to find the right balance of bittersweet chocolate and sugar is so within my own reach. I can taste the dessert already. And I am not at the mercy of any variable or anyone…I can do this by myself.

I just taught my almost 3 year old daughter how to make pie dough. I doubt she’ll remember it, but I had her alongside me as we added flour, salt, butter pieces and ice water to the food processor, and I let her pulse the dough. When she saw a ball of dough form out of previously dry ingredients, she said “Wooooooooowww, Momma.”

It was cool. Teaching the kid how to make a pie.

I’m not baking a fruit pie today, I’m making scratch chicken pot pie for dinner. The new issue of Bon Appetit has more good stuff in it than any issue I can remember in years. Fried chicken by Thomas Keller, chicken parm from Mario Batali’s restaurant, and a feature on women chefs so tough/beautiful they look like they belonged in Beijing this year. Hmmm, culinary Olympics. Now there is a thought.

Better get my girls trained. Not that cooking is a female sport only - I have worked in only male-dominated professional kitchens - but my son is already spoken for; baseball, soccer, football and fishing. Better keep the lessons of kitchen basics going for my interested offspring, you never know who your child may turn out to be.

Knoing how to make a pie is a skill that can only be beneficial in life.

Besides, what leaves imprints in memory the way a fork leaves an imprint in pie dough won’t be determined until years from now. “I remember when Mom taught me pie crust “or “I remember throwing the change-up until the sun went down every night” are worthy, hopeful recollections.

I have a prized wooden boardbeside me, waiting for the pie dough ball in the fridge to be rolled out to perfect thickness later today. On this board, inch and metric measurements surround all four sides. The board also shows where to roll out the dough to achieve a 8, 9 or 10″ pie crust. It also has a perfect pastry recipe.

Here you go…and seriously, go get the September issue of Bon Appetit.

PLAIN PASTRY, from the really cool wooden board I got at a specialty food store…
2/12 cups sifted a.p. flour
1 tsp. salt
3/4 cup shortening
1/3 cup cold water
yields- 2 crusts for 9 inch pie or 14 tart shells

Directions (from me)
Give flour and salt a whirl in the food processor. Add shortening a little at a time and pulse. Lastly, add water, and stop pulsing when the dough forms into a ball-like shape.
Form dough into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour, up to 8 hours. Roll out on floured surface.

 

                

I put more faith in signs, energies, symbolism and gut feelings than an intelligent person should. One of the reasons I do is because the facts of a situation usually prove me correct.

Yesterday, I went back to school shopping for my kids. I took the opportunity to peruse the women’s clothing as well and I ended up buying lots of blues…blue workout pants, blue lounging pants, blue tanks, blue t-shirts. I recently bought some blue jewelry - iolite and chalcedony - and when I got home from shopping, I changed into my new blue clothes and slipped my blue drop earrings through my ears. Iolite is said to determine the direction of the sun on overcast days, and chalcedony is beleived to ward off fear, improve eyesight and stimulate creativity. These are useful qualities.

This morning, blue has a new meaning. A meaning which of course relates to baseball.

Greg Maddux is now a Los Angeles Dodger (again). 

I hate to state the obvious, but the Padres this year are horrible. Terrible. Sad. Disappointing, to say the least. And even though Maddux is gone, I am still a Padres fan. Even if I moved to, say, Boston, San Francisco or Seattle, or Kona, I’d stay a Padres fan. But with Mad Dog in L.A., a team tied for first in the West with offense the Padres can only imagine, I am a blue-wearing, pro-Dodgers Padres fan. Sometimes attachments are multi-faceted, and loyalties can get complicated depending upon players.

With I think about 38 games left, Maddux should get about 6 more starts in the regular season, not to mention the post season if L.A. wins the division. He is one win away from tying Roger Clemens on the all time wins list. Going to L.A. is his best chance for not only tying but surpassing Clemens. If Maddux comes back next season (to a team that can hit), he has only 11 more wins to tie Pud Galvin, 5th on the all time wins list with 364 W’s.

I am blue, sad, sorry to see Mad Dog leave San Diego. But I’m simultaneously thrilled to see his career go in a higher direction. Sitting in the stands this year watching him pitch, I enjoyed every second. I made sure I bought Maddux Padres jerseys, got pictures of him on the mound at Petco Park (see above!), and had my son study Maddux’s wind-up, delivery, follow through from our first-base side seats. We tried, my son and I, to tap into that energy and focus we may never see again. I’ve been watching Maddux so long, if you asked me the color of his aura, I would tell you it was blue. Not only that, every team Maddux has played for - Cubs, Braves, Dodgers, Padres - all have blue in their uni’s.

Blue.

The strangest thing about all of this is that I usually hate the Dodgers - I think somewhere on my Driver’s License it says that I have to - but this year, I haven’t, and I don’t. I like Russell Martin and Nomar (can’t help but think about Jimmy Fallon saying “NO-MAH!”), and backed by bats like that of Manny Ramirez, Maddux is in the right place. Even if it isn’t San Diego. I think that’s just baseball.

Red and white…and blue. I get it now, there is a lot to be said for colors and their energies. Baseball is a red, white and blue game that ideally joins and unifies things that belong together. What hasn’t been righted energetically attracts the justice it deserves. This philosophy, in regards to The Professor/Mad Dog/former Padre Greg Maddux makes good sense, even if it tugs both ways on my heart. And I can’t believe I am saying this (only because the Padres have no chance) but GO DODGERS (now that you have Maddux) AND WIN THE WEST!

It’s been the best pro baseball I’ve ever seen, having #30 here in San Diego.

Have you ever been out to dinner and seen that couple - they’re always there - who sit across from each other, eat intently, but say nothing to each other?

I don’t ever want to be that couple. That couple is a symbol of indifference - I’ve heard that is worse than the most biting resentment and seething hatred - and if I ever find myself with nothing to say to my man, I’m out.

Out like a lamp in a unvisited room.

I’d rather have a grapefruit rotated on my face black and white film style than find myself wondering, ”Should I ask him if he still finds me interesting? Is he looking at the young blonde in the scarlett halter dress?” Because if he is at least so angry with me that he wants to dress me with his breakfast, it’s still a better start than endless silence or the wish to be somewhere else.

Well, that is what I don’t want. This is what I do want.

The casual dinner with my man:
Me: You get the grilled fish, I’ll get the steamed clams. That way we can share. Did you ask for another baguette?
Him: Yes, but don’t eat it all like before. Did I tell you who we’re playing Saturday?
Me: Yeah, I know what to expect. Can I get oysters on the half? Please. Please. I won’t do the Hemingway quote over and over.
Him: Are the kids at your parents all night?
Me: Mmm-hmm.
Him, to the server: Excuse me, after you bring that baguette, can we get two dozen oysters on the half, lots of lemon slices?
Him, to me: You’ve never been a cheap date, honey.
Me: But you love me, don’t you?
Him: Unfortunately, yes (with a wink).

The formal dinner with my man:
Him: The kids aren’t here, so I’m getting the works.
Me: I think you should. I want a bite.
Him: Of course.
Me: Are we going to talk about the kids throughout dinner or about us too?
Him: Of course.
Me: Why don’t we go out alone more often?
Him: Because you never shut up when we do (with a wink).

The above scenarios, like my other musings, are a combination of imagined life/real life, because I won’t accept apathy. I’d just as soon send it back where it came from, like a tasteless entree.

I want to be so ridiculously in love with my man, and him with me, that how we look at each other fills in the space of any words left unsaid. Contradictory to this is the fact that I want the man I love ridiculously to be interested in everything I want to say (but understand the things I don’t).

That couple, silent at the table, withdrawn from coupledom, surrendered to an unsatisfactory life, they scare me. They represent love that fizzled out, dreams given up.

I have come to notice that couple in every restaurant I go to, for some reason. I find restaurants to be like  theater. When the work (food) is offered, a happy person glows, a disappointed soul disqualifies itself from the recognition of beauty. I haven’t always found pearls in my oysters, but their liquor slips down my throat better than a pearl would look around it. And I know exactly what to do with a shellfish that doesn’t open up, even when exposed to heat. I toss it. Move right on.

What I want…I want the rest of my (love) life to be an endless menu, a meal that never ends, conversation over candlelight and genuine fascination with the other person, him with me.

That is the only restaurant where I will ever eat (and a good soundtrack wouldn’t hurt either).

Sometimes I feel like I need to go back to school.

I just watched Jeopardy! for the first time in probably ten years, and I couldn’t think of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s name in the Double Jeopardy round.

When I was in college, I ruled Jeopardy from home. I knew most of the subject matter, got most answers correct, and could not be bothered from 7:30pm-8:00pm each weeknight.

You see, this is possible when there is a steady stream of information and knowledge feeding a young brain.

Not now. Now I’m stupid. Motherhood, it seems, sucks up all of my intelligence as well as energy. I call my children by their wrong names, have memorized now only every episode of Spongebob, and read food labels at the store more than classic novels or exam guides.

I miss college. I miss learning. Not remembering Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s name shocks me about me because Women’s History was one of my favorite classes at UCSD, taught by the unparalleled Stephanie McCurry. I was in her class - discussing the Civil War and how it changed women - when the O.J. verdict was read. I learned about The Triangle Factory fire in her class, now I hear there is a movie in the works about it. Last night I sat in bed wondering who wrote the poem Fra Filippo Lippi (why this mattered or even ocurred to me, I don’t know). Furthermore, while watching the Olympics I realized how little I know about some of the countries being represented. That ignorance gnaws at me like my unfinished manuscripts and underdeveloped ideas. I feel so stupid now, at every time of the day.

I know I could attend classes while my kids are in school, but something keeps me from that MFA program. Not the laundry, not fear or complacency - but hope. Doesn’t that sound crazy?

Because I hope that I have enough collective knowledge - through my education and experience - to breathe real life into future books. I hope I have a knack for watching, absorbing, and applying - in my own voice - situations and characters that people will relate to, fall in love with, despise, and want to read more about.

Because I already feel that way now, about everything I see.

I’m stupid now - aren’t I? - but thankfully I am still curious and amazed daily. I don’t have an MFW, but I have the fire still going.

Sometimes I feel like I’m still in school.

Schools in our area, due to start September 2nd, have begun sending e-mails asking parents to get their kids reading 20 minutes a day to prepare them for the upcoming school year.

Okay.

Just to re-cap, though - last time I actually read a parenting article/watched the news/eavesdropped on other mother’s conversations at the park, I am supposed to have my kids do the following things…on a daily basis…

Eat 5+ servings of veggies and fruits.
Get 10-12 hours of sleep at night.
Read 20+ minutes.
Get 30 or more minutes of heart-rate increasing exercise.
Receive ample sunshine (is it Vitamin D or Vitamin K?) but not too much sun, which leads to…
Apply SPF with UVA/UVB block.
Eat whole grains, not white flour or white sugar containing foods.
Get each of them to 3 different activites after 5pm in clean uniforms.
Limit television watching.
Talk with me or other trusted adults about existential issues.
Brush teeth 2x at least and floss too.
Do chores.
Practice gratitude.
oh yeah, and also…
Be silly.
Play for fun.
Get enough down time.

Okay.

All the while, I ideally need to…

Not ignore my family while writing (blog, column, pages in book) on my laptop.
Read to my children.
Feed my children.
Eat less than 1,300 calories a day.
Exercise for my own good.
Laundry. *
Dishes. *
General picking up of the house. *
Recycle.
Drink 8+ glasses of water.
Smile.
Read something I want to read (not picture books) so I can be a better writer.
Write down what I eat.
Videotape milestones.
Build a successful business from home!
Play with my kids.
Slow-cook a nutritious, healthy meal of lean proteins, whole grains, and plenty of fresh, organic (preferrably home grown) vegetables with fruit for dessert, and get everyone to sit together at the table.
Budget our life including dinnertime meals that break the bank.
Connect with other women.
Program the DVR for the game(s) my husband and son want to see but miss while at practice.
Answer my husband’s 20 calls.
Answer my mom’s 20 calls.
Clip coupons.
Stay positive! (Maintain the mental health all mothers need).
Be grateful.
* Make sure we don’t live in squalor, even in the name of literary ambition.

Well, let’s see. I am pretending it’s 9:00 p.m. and I am looking over this list.

What have I done today?

I said the hell with these mandates and parented by instinct. It worked for my mom.