Posts tagged as Underparenting
"Finding Out": From Cris Beam's "Mother, Stranger"
Cris Beam left her mother's home at age 14, driven out by a suburban household of hidden chaos and mental illness. The two never saw each other again. More than twenty years later, after building the happy home life she'd never had as a child, Beam learned of her mother's death and embarked on a quest to rediscover her own history. What follows is an excerpt from her nonfiction account, Mother, Stranger, published today by The Atavist. It is available as an ebook single for the Kindle, The Nook, the iPad or iPhone and other outlets via The Atavist website. READ MORE
A Year Ago Today: Underparenting The Sweary Child
"My parents raised me with rules and standards, which I gradually learned to break over time. I can remember my mother remonstrating with me, probably in the middle-school years, for my overreliance on 'holy crap.' It was no doubt a relief to my father when I devolved into full foul-mouthed teenagerhood and he could go back to saying "dog-fucking son of a bitch" during Eagles games or whenever. But he didn't try to speed up the process."
Words!
"Fuck!" the kid said, from the back seat of the car. They pick these things up from everywhere, the two-and-a-half-year-old children do. The child is like a runaway threshing machine rattling across the landscape of language, ingesting and scattering everything in its path: grain, chaff, string beans, feed buckets, chopped-up bits of mailboxes. How much of what your child says is understandable? the developmental survey form asks. You mean articulate? Or comprehensible? "The greens are taking care of the eights," he says. Or: "Welcome to Metro." Or: "I want a toaster in my ear." READ MORE
The Misplaced Child
There was a loud but muffled scream, and when I looked up, the kid was gone. READ MORE
Despite All His Rage, Billy Corgan Still Just Doesn't Make A Lick Of Sense
Pitchfork points to a doozy of a post Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan put up on his paranoid spiritualist website, Everything From Here To There. He is coming out as one among those who The Awl's Tom Scocca eloquently refers to as "degenerate idiots who deserve to get polio and live out their days in iron lungs while Child Protective Services takes away their children to be properly raised." Corgan writes: "I for one will not be taking the vaccine. I do not trust those who make the vaccines, or the apperatus behind it all to push it on us thru fear. This is not judgment; it is a personal decision based on research, intuition, conversations with my doctor and my 'family'. If the virus comes to take me Home, that is between me and the Lord." READ MORE
No H1N1 Vaccine For You, Kiddo
"Keep calling back," the receptionist at the pediatrician's office said, ringing off. They were out of H1N1 flu vaccine, she had told me, and they didn't know when the next batch might be coming. So keep calling. READ MORE
How Awesome Would It Be to Have The RZA as Your Dad?
Self-professed recovering video-game addict the RZA (a.k.a. Prince Rakeem, The Abbot, Bobby Digital, Bobby Steels, the RZArector, Ruler Zig-zag-zig Allah, etc.) tells his sons, "If it was up to me... You wanna make me happy? Four hours of video games a day is enough."
The Terror of Butt Elmo and Butt Pooh
The Awl's Tom Scocca takes Underparenting to a new level: "Diapers are for catching urine and feces. They represent neither entertainment nor education.... Butt Elmo, by contrast, represents a world in which it's not merely branding that's out of control but cross-branding. Every space is a promotional opportunity for something else."
Stroller-Bullying on the Red Line
It was a mistake to get on the Metro train with the kid riding on my shoulders. I should have taken him down and buckled him into the stroller out on the platform, even if it meant missing the train. But I had taken the wrong branch on the decision-making tree, and there I was, standing up in a packed train car at evening rush hour, with one hand on the kid's ankle to hold him in place, and another hand on the overhead handrail, which meant there was no hand remaining to put on the stroller handle as the train jerked into motion and the clumsily half-set foot brake came off, sending the stroller wobbling away from us, bumping through the crowd. Sorry, excuse me, sorry! READ MORE
The "Family Bed"
The beeping came on as the backdrop to a predawn dream-beep-beep-beep-and then, mhmm, is that the alarm clock?-beep-beep-beep-but too faint, unless we'd dropped our alarm clock under the bed and then dropped a comforter over it-beep-beep-beep-so it was maybe the bus, outside, idling, somehow generating a high-frequency overtone to the rumbling-beep-beep-beep-beep-or was it hrmm just the pulse in my ears-tinnitus, the blood surge-beep-beep-beep-hmrff NO, it was definitely, somewhere, an ALARM CLOCK, but- READ MORE
