Leanna Kay

Now that my kids have gone back to school, I have to face facts. I am a bad mom. I thought I was doing okay. I really did. After all, my kids arrived back at school with only a few bruises and mosquito bites, seeming no worse for the wear from their summer spent hunting bugs in the hot sun. I wasn’t expecting a “mom of the year” award, but I thought was doing a passing job. Until I started comparing notes with the other moms about how their kids spent the summer.

“Susie spent three months learning to play the violin.” (Okay, there’s no “Susie”. Names have been changed to protect privacy. Honestly, names have been changed so I don’t get pelted with rotten fruit at the next PTO meeting - or worse, so I don’t have all the angry moms gang up and vote me in as PTO president. (Shudder).)

“Well, Ronnie spent the summer at basketball camp honing his skills. He wants to be a professional some day.” I could go on and on about the high minded pursuits of my kids’ school mates. But I won’t because it’ll only make me feel bad.

“So what did your three do this summer?” Someone asked me.

“Uh…” I thought over the months of laziness and tried to remember how we’d spent our idle hours.

“They played with sticks a lot.”

“You mean they spent the summer in arts and crafts camp building models of the Eiffel Tower?” “No,” I admitted.

“Actually they pretended the sticks were guns and they shot pretend aliens. Then they made teepees from the sticks and finally we burned them and roasted marshmallows.”

The other moms were looking at me with expressions of horror as if I’d just confessed to eating my young. I would never consider hurting my children. Though apparently I’ve ruined their chances of success in the NBA. Maybe they can make a career out of imaginary stick use. If not, my kids are doomed. Doomed I say.

I’m heading to Maine to visit my college roommate. I haven’t flown since it was lawful to fill your carry-on with violent weapons like nail clippers, sewing scissors and bottled water filled past the four ounce mark. So no doubt I’ll have fun stories about how I was frisked and had my sneakers blown up as possible shoe bombs. Because if you’re looking for a terrorist, look no farther than that nervous middle aged blonde woman with a luggage full of kids’ photos.

The boys are at an age where they ask me everything. Actually they’ve been asking questions since they were born.

DREW at the age of two - “Mommy, why do dogs bark?”

ME - “Because they’re saying ‘hi’.”

CHRIS when he was three - “Why are elephants gray?”

ME - “Cause God made them that way.”

When they were little, questions were easy to answer. And if they weren’t, they usually accepted any answer I made up. Now the questions are getting much more complicated and impossible to evade.

“Mommy, can we talk about how babies are made again?”

It was so much easier when I could just say God made babies in heaven and sent them down on clouds to be with their Mommies and Daddies. Apparently fourth grade boys are much wiser to the ways of the world than this. They have animal science this year and unfortunately it’s not a far stretch from the creation of cats to the creation of humans.

“We can talk about anything, always,” I replied, silently cursing that parenting book I’d once read which encouraged parents to always be open and honest with their kids. Obviously that expert never had to have the sex discussion with their children. I tried to use the tone that told them there was nothing I’d like more than to discuss procreation with them. Nothing other than a frontal lobotomy or maybe the removal of an organ without anesthesia. “What do you want to know?”I asked, when I should have been changing the subject.

“Well if a girl has the eggs and a boy has the sperm, how come all the eggs don’t turn into babies?” Drew asked as his mathematical brain computed the procreation possibilities.

Instead of thinking of a really good answer, I just started babbling. Something about how sometimes the eggs aren’t any good. Then I thought about the jar of rancid peanut butter I’d opened earlier in the day. I’d been going through some sort of weirdo health nut phase a while back and bought organic peanut butter with oil on the top. When I opened the jar, it smelled like an elephant broke wind inside so we immediately chucked the thing in the trash and grabbed a jar of Jiff instead.

I have no idea why I thought rancid peanut butter would make a good illustration about sex. Someday my children will have to work this through with a therapist. . Hopefully it will be that stupid guy who wrote the parenting book that got me in this messy conversation in the first place.

“Remember the rancid peanut butter?” I asked. “Well you can have peanut butter and you can have bread, but if the peanut butter’s no good, you can’t make a sandwich out of the ingredients can you?”

Drew nodded in sage understanding as if I’d just unlocked the secret of the universe. “So making babies is like making peanut butter sandwiches?”

“Sure.” And then I changed the subject before he could ask where the jelly fit into this equation. Because some types of learning are best left for college.

The Word of the day is BLOT.

Blot is what you get when your brother whacks you hard enough in the nose with a baseball bat so that you’re snotting and bleeding at the same time.

Drew made this word up by combining blood and snot.  I think he was trying to make his brother feel better.  Not in small part because he was the wielder of the baseball bat which accidentally came into contact with Chris’s nose.

Let’s hope there’s never a need to use the word BLOT in our household again!

It stormed last night. At the first jolt of thunder, I heard the pitter patter of little footsteps telling me that Lauren would soon be jumping into bed with me so I could save her from the wrath of God - or the loud bangs. Whichever.

It’s amazing to me that my children think I’m capable of stopping a thunderstorm. You’d have thought in the last few years they would have observed enough incompetent behavior on my part to start an internet search for better parents.

There was the time when I backed out of the driveway without first checking to make sure no one had left any scooters behind the car. (Okay so it was me who left the scooter out - but whatever.) Then there was the day we went caving and I decided it was time to develop claustrophobia and have a little panic attack while trapped fifty feet below the Earth’s surface led by a geriatric guide whose fingers twitched as he TURNED THE LIGHTS OFF! What if he’d had a stroke while stumbling around in the dark looking for the light switch? I know I almost did.

I could go on and on with examples that should have clued my kids in that Mommy is less than capable. But for now, they seem oblivious.

I got Lauren settled down and back to sleep in her bed and not an hour later, Chris came in telling me he was scared. He crawled in bed with me and was instantly calm and asleep. I asked him later what scared him. Apparently there were loud bangs outside (caused by the dog). He made the obvious assumption that we were under full-blown alien attack and ran to me to save him. Because I’m capable of saving my children from green monsters that fall from the sky. They’re so innocent and naive.

And I love it.