The wheel deal
Bookbags get rolling.

by Terri Mauro

The latest hip, hot, happening, gotta-have-it accessory at my children's elementary school doesn't involve clothing, shoes, or tattoos. It's not pierced ears or pierced anything else, thankfully. It has nothing to do with Pokémon, the Backstreet Boys, or Leonardo DiCaprio. It's a backpack on wheels. And I don't get it.

I watch the kids filing into school, and they look like a bunch of stewardess-wannabes, pulling their little suitcases behind them. When I first saw a couple of kids wheeling their stuff early in the school year, I assumed they had physical handicaps that prevented them from toting their gear more conventionally; or perhaps they were leaving for a trip right after school. But now I'd say at least a third of the schoolkids are doing wheelies, and since I haven't heard of an epidemic of broken collar bones, I've got to assume it's just fashion. And since my daughter's lobbying hard for one, I have to deal with it.

Maybe I could see it if these were high-school kids, with big thick textbooks to haul around, but in first or second grade? What can they possibly have that's too heavy to carry? Are we raising a generation of children who are too weak to raise a notebook, a folder, and a couple of puny readers on their fragile shoulders? It's not like they're doing book reports on War and Peace.

Frankly, I'm still not used to first and second graders carrying backpacks at all, much less overnight bags. In my day--and hear I am probably dating myself back to the Stone Age, and you will be shocked that my elderly fingers can still pound the keys--we actually carried our books in the crook of our arms. Yes! It's true! I don't believe I used a backpack until college, and then only because I rode my bike everywhere. (Hey, remember when bikes had baskets to hold your books? So quaint.)

How well I remember, with my few remaining brain cells. You'd walk along with your notebook and textbooks piled high in your arms, purse over one shoulder, lunch sack clutched in your hand. Maybe a cute boy would come along and offer to help. Maybe you'd drop some books, and a cute boy would pick them up. Or maybe your papers would blow away and somebody would step on your homework and the cute boy would steal your lunch. It was a crap shoot, but at least there was a chance for interaction. What are the cute boys to do now--offer to wheel your luggage? Can a cute boy wheeling two hefty bags behind him walk close enough to you to brush against your arm and give you weeks worth of diary material? Can he even walk close enough to have a conversation? A major mating ritual of childhood seems endangered here.

What will these kids use when they get older and the books get bigger? Baggage carts? Wheelbarrows? Personal valets? Truth be told, in this electronic age, it will probably go the other way--toward e-books and Palm Pilots. They'll keep all their schoolwork in their pocket, and wonder at the old days when they actually had to carry stuff. Instant messages will take the place of passed notes. Somebody will come up with a way to send electronic spitwads. Cliff Notes software will automatically highlight the passages you need for the test.

Ah, it's a brave new world. And our kids are rolling into it, on two wheels.

The truth will out
Talking about adoption, ready or not.

by Terri Mauro

Well, my first major test as an adoptive parent has come and gone, and I think I flunked. At best, a C-. Unpreparedness is, of course, no excuse. Parents, like Boy Scouts, must be prepared always.

I've talked to my kids about being adopted, I've read them stories, I've given them words with which to validate their situations, I've lent an understanding ear. Of course, since both my kids are almost exclusively concrete thinkers, and adoption is a pretty abstract concept, the stuff mostly goes over their heads. My 9-year-old daughter will listen intently as I talk and read and emote, but when I ask her if she has any questions, she tends to say, "What's for dinner?"

And so, I thought there was time before the harder questions would come. And so, I was taken by surprise when one of my six-year-old's classmates looked me in the eye and told me that my son wasn't my real son.

Now, I'd always planned that when a kid said something like this to me, I'd feign surprise and say, "What? He's not real? He looks real to me!" And the kid would laugh, and I'd say some platitude or other and get out of there.

But of course, this took me aback, and so I just said, "Yes, he is." And the kid said, "He is?" And I said, "He's my real son and I'm his real mom." And then the teacher chimed in and said, "I didn't say that, I said he was adopted." And I muttered some platitudes about adoption just being another neat way to form a family, and the teacher said, "I just said that he didn't grow in his mommy's tummy," and looking at the kid's face, I could tell that he was thinking about my boy hatching from an egg or being found under a rock. Unclear on the concept, but knows something's different alright.

There are adoptive parents of my acquaintance who would skin the teacher alive for having revealed such a personal piece of their child's history. This is an obsessive topic for them--who to tell, how much to tell, when to tell, where to tell, why to tell, whether to tell at all. I tend to be more of a blabbermouth. I've been entirely forthright with my children's teachers, administrators, and just about anybody who sees them on a regular basis. I've asked that when the "family life" unit is taught, adoption be mentioned if at all possible. So I don't suppose my son's teacher thought I'd mind if she shared this bit of his background with the class.

And I don't, exactly. Full disclosure seems the best policy, and I do firmly believe that adoption is as legitimate a way to form a family as any, and thus no cause for secrecy. Yet I would have liked to have known, and to have suggested some appropriate words or appropriate stories. It's clear that his classmates aren't clear about what adoption means, though they know how to be mean about it. Perhaps this will be the reward of our forthcomingness, to frame the subject in such a way that first and second graders will find it to be unremarkable.

I told my son's classmate that your real mom is the one that loves you and feeds you and helps you with your homework and kisses you goodnight and reads you stories and takes care of you. That's what I want my children to know, and their friends as well. If they're real friends, it will be enough--and if not, better my two should start developing snappy comebacks in elementary school than be confronted by the issue for the first time in their teens.

Honesty remains the best policy. But I liked it better when I didn't have to think about it.

Go to your room
Not everyone wants to be alone.

by Terri Mauro

Kids all want their own rooms, right? They want their own private space, they want their own personal decor, they want to sleep without someone snoring or playing music or getting up in the middle of the night or hitting them with a pillow. In some households, kids may need to share rooms due to space or bulk of children, and the best can be made of it. But any kid, given the choice, would want their own room, or so runs the conventional wisdom. For goodness sake, there have been whole episodes of "Arthur" about it, so it must be true.

Tell it to my daughter. She's repeatedly demanded that we go out and adopt some more kids so she doesn't have to sleep alone. She deeply envies her friend who shares a room with two sisters. It's true that she did spend her first 4.5 years with about 11 little roommates, in a Russian orphanage with tiny beds lined up in rows, but surely most children with this background would be overjoyed to have four walls to themselves. Not her--she spends as little time as possible in her room, and not even a stereo, a computer, and a cool couch-like bed can convince her to spend significant alone time there.

My son does play in his room, constantly. You can tell by the fact that every toy in the house eventually turns up on his bedroom floor, along with various boxes, keys, papers, garments, and playthings that make sense only to him. Sometimes he lines up cars on his road-map rug, sometimes he plays with his computer, sometimes he just lays in his bed and rocks. His room is his refuge.

Yet even he is neutral about sleeping alone. And when Elena camped out on his floor one night due to houseguests commandeering her room, they discovered the magic of sleepovers. Now every night becomes a whine-a-thon. Can he sleep in her room? Can she sleep in his? Who gets to use their sleeping bag? Who has to clear space on their floor? (Well, this is mostly an issue for my son. His sister just has to shove some shoes to one side. He has to hire a dumpster.)

We've generally held this experiment in communal living to the weekends, when sleeping on the floor will affect no one's school performance. And so long as it's remained a novelty, it's been a nice sort of bonding experience for them. But this week, with school closed for Winter Break, I've been persuaded to allow it every night, and now it seems more and more as though they want to sleep in the same room so they can start squabbling immediately upon waking, and not have to wait for the other to get up and meet them by the TV. This morning, he was playing his tape player too loud, and she was sleeping on one of his cars, and the sounds of sibling outrage woke me with the morning light.

Maybe this will eventually help my daughter appreciate her sibling-free room. It's certainly made me appreciate it. Forget their personal space--if kids having their own rooms extends my own personal zone of quiet, that's good enough for me.

Fox family
Who wants to adopt someone who might grow up to be a multi-millionaire?

by Terri Mauro

Well, it looks like the lovebirds from "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire" are headed for splitsville. We're shocked, shocked to learn that they didn't fall deeply in love in those 50 or 60 seconds between meeting and marrying. It's enough to make you lose faith in the matchmaking abilities of sleazy TV shows. Next they'll tell us that none of those dates on "The Dating Game" ever worked out, either.

In truth, nobody should be shocked that this microwave marriage cooled so quickly--and if you are, then there's a lovely bridge for sale in Brooklyn, and perhaps I can broker a deal. That would put me in the same profession as the alleged multi-millionaire groom, who turns out to have a misleading bankbook and a mad former fiancé. His momentary bride claims to never have been interested in his money anyway, but just wanted to be on a TV show and have a little fun. And hey, what could be more fun than parading around in a bathing suit and answering questions from unseen strangers? She was shocked, shocked when she won. So shocked, that all she could manage to say was, "I do."

Yet what's so shocking about this whole thing is not that the bride and groom came together under false pretenses--after all, real multi-millionaires and real gold-diggers probably do not need the help of Fox to find each other. The shocking thing is that so darned many people tuned in. Not me, of course; I just read about it. A lot. But from a ratings point of view, if not a romance point of view, the show was a through-the-roof success. And you know, this just encourages them. We get the TV we deserve. If we all watched PBS every night like we're supposed to, this great human tragedy might never have occurred.

Flush with that success, Fox was ready to re-run the original show, and undoubtedly had weeks' worth of vaguely well-off grooms lined up. With programming stars in their eyes, they must have envisioned giving Regis a run for his millions with two or three quickie weddings a week. One wonders what the phone-in contest for those shows would have been like: "Rate these cities in the order of failed marriages conducted there: A. Las Vegas; B. Reno; C. Hollywood; D. Pine Valley." Those dreams are now as cruelly dashed as Rick and Darva's; if your research department can't even turn up a restraining order, you're probably best not sending strangers off on honeymoons.

But I'd like to offer those family-planning Fox-ites another possibility to consider, one similarly rife with human drama, impersonal meddling, and life-altering circumstances, though admittedly short on swimsuits. If they wanted to do a service to society as well as their ratings (and yes, I know, it's television, what's the likelihood of that), perhaps they should be arranging adoptions instead of marriages. Pluck one child or sibling group out of foster care and let them choose from a bevy of prospective moms and dads. The parents would need to have a homestudy and approval from the state, which would be a load off of Fox researchers' minds. But other than that, all the red tape that keeps kids stuck in the system for years would be sliced. Just think of it--happy families created where there were none, parents and children forming a bond that will last forever, or at least until the trip to DisneyWorld is over. Put it on after "The Simpsons," and you're talking ratings gold.

Marrying a man or woman you barely know is still considered foolhardy in our society, but adopting a child you barely know, or going home with adoptive parents you barely know, is not unusual at all. Many folks adopting internationally don't get a whole lot more time together than the multi-millionaire twosome before they commit to a lifetime of responsibility. Foster children are certainly accustomed to having their fate decided by strangers, and going to live with whomever they're assigned to; they'd gain some empowerment in the process of picking the parents they'd like. And prospective adoptive parents are certainly accustomed to jumping through hoops, answering personal questions, and suffering disappointments; they'd gain a chance to plead their case to the most important judge, the children.

Come on, Fox, give it some thought. It can't possibly be more tacky than what you've already done.

No bad kids, just bad parents
A new book confirms what teenagers have always believed.

by Terri Mauro

Faithful readers will notice the shiny new Amazon links popping up all over "Mothers with Attitude" throughout the week (or however darn much time it takes me to update everything), so it seems an appropriate time to bring up a book recently touted in one of Amazon's periodic newsletters about books on parenting and families. Now, I don't know about you, but I seem to read parenting and family books just about exclusively anymore. I remember a time when I used to read novels, but now, save for the occasional Jan Karon snuck in on a quiet weekend, I'm all about neurology and sensory integration and behavior management and no fun.