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When my daughter, Clementine, was a baby she went through a period where, instead of sleeping, she screamed her head off.

Every single night.

If we hadn’t all been so miserable it probably would have been funny: like clockwork she would wake up around midnight and then cry inconsolably until three. All of the baby books I read suggested that she was just getting her days and nights confused, and that we should simply “nudge” her back into a normal sleeping pattern. I don’t remember exactly how we were supposed to do the nudging, but I do remember that Baby NyQuil was frowned upon. Or, at least it was frowned upon as far as giving it to the baby went—adult consumption was probably expected. (Although the adult version of Baby NyQuil is usually called “Scotch.”)

Luckily for us, and despite the lack of any decent advice, whatever we did (or didn’t do) eventually worked, and by the time she was a year old her sleeping patterns became normal again, and have, with a few exceptions, stayed that way ever since.

My son Clyde, on the other hand, never had a problem with sleeping through the night. There were no late light scream sessions, no “confusion” between day and night; unlike Clementine (with whom I had the TV schedule memorized), with Clyde I nearly forgot what late night television looked like.

Imagine my surprise, then, when this summer, thirteen years after his birth, Clyde finally went through his “completely normal” baby phase of confusing his days and nights. And while he doesn’t cry inconsolably like his sister did seventeen years ago, that doesn’t mean there isn’t screaming involved. It’s just that, this time, the screaming isn’t being directed at me.

Of course, that doesn’t make it any easier to wake up to. Especially when the screaming is soon followed by shouts of “Kill the settlers! Kill the settlers!”

That’s right: Clyde is a gamer. Which means that, for him, days and nights are not just confused, they have ceased to exist, because in the dark, manky reaches of a teenage boy’s lair, lit only by the glow of a computer screen, what difference does it make if it’s day or night outside? Of course, it doesn’t help that some of the people he games with live halfway around the world, so that what is night time for Clyde is the middle of the day for them. (Although, on a scale of one to hobo, I’m not sure which is worse—gaming your nights or your days away.)

I realize that this habit of his—obsessively gaming into the wee hours of the night (or perhaps the wee wee hours, since it is usually when I get up to pee that I notice he’s still up)—is something I’m supposed to wring my hands and worry over, but I just can’t find it in me to be too bothered that he’s rather forego sleep for an adventure. Maybe it’s because I played Dungeons and Dragons all through high school (yeah, I was not only a nerd, I was that kind of a nerd), or maybe it’s because I enjoy eavesdropping on Clyde’s one-sided conversations (the headphones mean I can only hear his responses, and believe me, “Kill the settlers” is one of the tamer things I have heard), but as far as I’m concerned I have to agree with Clyde that between sleep and gaming, gaming seems to be a whole lot more fun.

And besides, aren’t you supposed to sleep when you’re dead? Or at school? Something like that. And anyway, it could be a whole lot worse: he could be a settler. Talk about having to sleep with one eye open.

My family has always been really big on co-sleeping. And when I say “my family” I mean my kids, and when I say “big” I also mean my kids. Basically, what I’m trying to say here is that my kids still get in bed with me, even though they are now both pretty big.

In Clyde’s case “pretty big” means “really, really big.” As in huge. As in it feels like a full grown man is crawling into bed with me every time he gets under the covers, probably because he is practically the size of a full grown man. Which would be fine except for the fact that there is already a full grown man in my bed—my husband—and two full grown men and one full grown woman are a bit much for a queen sized bed. It feels like I’m sailing steerage class on the Titanic. And by the Titanic I mean that this ship is doomed.

When my daughter was little we had a very simple and fail safe solution to the problem of involuntary co-sleeping: we had another child. (I call this the “gardener’s solution.” If you want to drive unwanted species out of a flower bed all you need to do is plant something that will outcompete them. And nothing can outcompete a baby when it comes to taking up space. They are like one of those magic sponges that start out as a little capsule and then become a full sized bath sponge. With the pills you just add water; with babies you just add sleep.)

When it came time to kick my son out of our bed, however, I realized that our previous method was not going to be a sustainable solution—I was not going to just be able to have more and more children indefinitely. (Yeah, I know that that should have been obvious the first time, but in my defense I was too sleep-deprived to think clearly.) And so, having already used my quota of parental brilliance on the first solution, this time around I took the lazy mom’s approach and did nothing, telling myself that the problem would eventually sort itself out. After all, how many teenagers still get in bed with their parents, right?

Turns out that the answer to that question is “one.” But when that one is your teenager, and when the bed in question is also yours, it turns out that “one” is more than enough.

I know that I should be flattered; after all, it’s not many teenagers that are even willing to sit next to you at the movies, let alone cuddle. And I also know that I shouldn’t be worried: it’s not like he’s coming in after bad dreams, or from some fear of being alone. There are still plenty of times during the day when his door is closed and the vibe is clearly one of Go Away Now. But I guess there’s just something about the night that causes all of his prickly teenage-ness to soften enough to want to cuddle. Which is great. Really. Really really great. No, seriously, it’s awesome. Or, at least, it would be if I had a standing appointment with a chiropractor.

When my kids were toddlers parents with older children would always tell me that one day I would look back and miss the days of temper tantrums and diapers. I’ve got to say that while that scenario hasn’t happened yet, I’m still open to the idea of it one day coming true. And, in the same way, I’m still open to the idea that one day I will miss waking up every morning crammed into bed like I’m in some kind of Hee Haw skit.

Or maybe that’s just the sleep deprivation talking again.

When I was growing up dumb blonde jokes were all the rage. As in “How many dumb blondes does it take to screw in a light bulb.” Looking back, I can’t really remember what it was about them that made blonde people such a fun target, but I have a feeling that what for my grandparents was probably an “Old Farmer” joke, and for my parents was probably a “Polack” joke was, for my generation, a “dumb blonde” joke. In any event, all three of them had the same theme, which was basically “can you believe how dumb these people are?”

One joke I remember in particular was the “green up” one. As a man is showing off his new house to a friend he keeps interrupting his tour to yell “Green up! Green up!” out of every window. Finally, overcome with curiosity, his friend asks him what he is doing. “Ah,” the man replies, “I hired a bunch of (old farmers/Polacks/dumb blondes) to install my new lawn, and I’m just reminding them which side of the sod to plant facing up.”

I thought of this joke the other day as I watched my children try and make grilled cheese sandwiches, and had to keep repeating the words, “Brown up! Brown up!” the whole time.

I thought I had made my instructions fairly specific. Butter the bread. Place the bread butter side down in the pan. Top one piece of bread with cheese. After the bread has browned to your satisfaction, put one piece of bread on top of the other. Brown side up.

My original instructions hadn’t included that last part, but when I saw the monstrosities that they were creating I realized that I had vastly over-estimated their culinary skills. Or maybe just their skills in general. Suddenly all those ridiculous warning labels you see on appliances started to make sense. Oh, I thought. So this is why they added the “Do not use while showering” warning to the blow dryer. Although, at least with the blow dryer you can kind of understand the end result someone was going for—clean, dry hair in record time. With the grilled cheese sandwich debacle it was hard to imagine the thinking behind it, if, in fact, the end result they were looking for was a grilled cheese sandwich.

As I listened to their excuses about how it wasn’t really their fault—after all, they had never made grilled cheese sandwiches before—I started to feel like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. “But you do know that there is such a thing as a sandwich, right? And that in that sandwich the fillings go on the inside.”

There was a time when I would have been convinced that the whole debacle was just a ruse to get me off of the couch to make their grilled cheese sandwiches for them, but lately I’m not so sure. It’s possible that they just might be this incompetent.

It’s possible that they really don’t understand that the shower curtain only works as intended when closed. It’s possible that they really don’t understand that a you have to take the lid off of the tupperware before you put it in the dishwasher (at least if you want it to get clean on the inside). And it is possible that they think that grilled cheese sandwiches were meant to be eaten with fork.

Having talked to other parents about this situation (and others remarkably similar to this one), I kind of have to wonder why the original butt of all of those jokes wasn’t “children” in the first place.

Maybe because there’s nothing funny about being the person who constantly has to play the straight man. Or at least clean out the frying pan later.

The other day my husband sent me a disturbing text while I was still at work. I just got home it read, and I found Clementine…cleaning the bathroom.

My reply was instantaneous. Keep an eye on her. I’ll pick up some holy water on the way home. Sounds to me like a classic case of demonic possession.

Yeah, he replied. You’re probably right. But maybe, just in case, we should wait until she’s through with the bathroom.

Good call I shot back.

When I got home it turned out that the holy water wasn’t really necessary. For one thing, the bathroom wasn’t all that clean—it was barely “human teenage girl” clean, let alone “possessed by a vengefully clean spirit” clean. And for another, Clementine was already out doing something else by then, something that was more in keeping with her general nature. Or at least what I considered to be her general nature, because after the bathroom incident I really wasn’t sure I knew what that was anymore.

Here’s the thing: when Clementine was about one year old she and I met my friend Nancy for breakfast at Martanne’s. There I was, trying to balance a squirming baby on my lap and eat a plateful of chilaquiles when Nancy came to my rescue and scooped Clementine out of my arms and deposited her in a high chair. Clementine happily sat in her high chair and gummed a tortilla while I got to eat my breakfast with both hands, a luxury I had nearly forgotten about. When we got home I pulled out the high chair we had never used, and that’s where Clementine ate her meals from then on. (Well, up until a year or so ago. High school really put a cramp in her style.)

The point is that I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to notice that Clementine was ready for the high chair without Nancy’s intervention. It’s strange: even though we have the photographic proof (in the form of school and Christmas photos) that our kids are constantly changing, sometimes it takes someone—or something—else to really make it obvious to us.

The funny thing about this is that we can so easily see these changes in other peoples’ kids—how often have you found yourself muttering to yourself about the sixteen year old who was still required to drink out of a sippy cup? (To be fair, the family that instituted that rule did so after the third time a drink was spilled on a computer, making me think that that was actually a pretty sound rule for people of all ages. Unfortunately, my scotch just doesn’t taste the same out of a sippy cup.)

You’d think that as often as I complain about constantly having to buy ever larger shoes for my children I would be intimately familiar with the concept of people—and children in particular—always being in a state of flux. But it’s just like George Bernard Shaw said: “The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”

The (attempted) bathroom cleaning incident was followed a few days later by an attempt at doing the dishes, an attempt at sweeping the kitchen floor, and even an attempt at putting the trash out. (Sorry to all of you people who tried to drive down my street that day). Fortunately, by that time I had grown accustomed to the idea of the new and improved “helpful” Clementine, and was able to cancel the scheduled exorcism.

Unfortunately, It wasn’t soon enough enough to get a full refund—that’s okay, though: it’s always good to have one or two of those in the bank.

I have a confession to make: I don’t have voicemail.

I say “confession” like it’s something I should be ashamed of, but the truth of the matter—and, I suppose, the real confession—is that I don’t feel bad at all about not having voicemail. Yeah, so: sorry, not sorry.

I know for a fact that this is annoying to many people. The reason I know this is because they keep telling me how annoying it is—usually to my face, because, you know, no voicemail.

“I tried to leave you a message, but you don’t have voicemail,” they’ll say, usually in the same tone of voice they use when they discover that I don’t have tissues and expect them to blow their nose on toilet paper.

Or sometimes they’ll just be concerned. “Do you know your voicemail isn’t set up yet? Do you not know how? Would you like me to do it for you?” (Conversations like that make me glad I have a screen lock on my phone—I would rather someone publicized my search history than enabled my voicemail function.)

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but in all likelihood I have my kids to thank for the fact that I have no voicemail, because it was only after realizing that they never, ever listened to a single voicemail I sent them that I was able to accept that living a voicemail-free lifestyle was even an option. I figured that if they were able to avoid all of my long-winded instructions, rants and exhortations and still somehow manage to function, than I should be able to live without the political campaigns, appeals for money and rambling stories that I used to get in return. (And those were the calls from my children).

So far it’s worked out great: not only do I never have to scramble to look for a pen so that I can write down a phone number that’s absolutely buried in the middle of a long and tedious voicemail (people, it’s not a mystery novel: your phone number should not be so cleverly concealed in the message that it catches your audience off guard every single time), but it also helps me catch out the people who are trying to convince me I’m either going crazy or senile. (“But I left you a voicemail about it,” they’ll say. “Hmm, that’s funny,” I’ll reply. “I don’t have voicemail.”)

No voicemail also means I don’t have to agonize over my outgoing message. Who would agonize over their outgoing message, you ask? Well, going by some of the really teeth-grindingly awful outgoing messages some of you out there have, I’d say that apparently the answer is: absolutely no one. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be agonizing over it. They most definitely should. (My friend Jack used a recording of his daughters singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in its entirety as his outgoing message for years. When I called him on the awfulness of it he admitted that he was fully aware of the fact that it was so long and tedious that many people just gave up and left no message at all. Which, I think, was his point. His was the passive aggressive version of no voicemail.)

I’d try the same thing, but the truth is the people I most want to avoid voicemail from are my kids, and somehow I think they’d be immune to recordings of themselves. Or at least if not immune, then so determined to leave some bit of bad news that they were willing to suffer it.

Because that’s the real real reason I don’t have voicemail: it made it too easy for my kids to tell me the things they knew I wouldn’t be happy to hear. Like their long-winded explanations as to why we’re out of toilet paper/tissue yet again.

The other day my husband got a phone call from our daughter, Clementine. “Where am I?” she asked him tersely as soon as he answered the phone. Had it been me who answered the phone I would have been stumped. Was this the lead in to a joke? An existential crisis? A demand to be recognized as a unique individual in a unique time and place in history? My husband, however, chose to take the literal route and asked her to describe where she was. Which turned out to be the right answer, because Clementine was, in fact, lost.

Again.

Not spiritually lost, not emotionally lost, but just the usual, good old boring version of lost. The kind of lost, apparently, that thinks it’s okay to call someone up who is nowhere near you and ask them to tell you where they are. I should have gotten this, because it is the exactly the same thing Clementine did to me last Christmas.

When she was in London.

Yes, that’s right, my daughter called me from London to ask me for directions. At first I was flattered that, even though I’ve only been to London a few times in my life she thought I was enough of a Londoner to find the quickest route across Hyde Park. Or maybe that I was enough of a hacker that I could break into London’s massive CCTV network and tell her to “turn down that alley the man and his poodle just came out of.” Alas, I knew her well enough to know that it was neither: it wasn’t that she thought I was special—she just knew that I would answer my phone.

At one AM. Because that’s what time people who are lost in London call you. (To be fair, it was nine AM somewhere—like London.) Regardless, I pulled out my laptop, loaded up Google maps and talked her through finding the nearest Tube station. And I wasn’t even too terribly snarky about the whole thing. After all, I know how frustrating it can be to try and navigate your way around big cities—especially big cities whose streets were laid out before the invention of pants.

Of course then she turned around and did the exact same thing to me when she got back home to Flagstaff. The city she was born in. In fact, she did it to me from downtown Flagstaff, the same ten block area she has lived in her whole life. And a part of the city that was laid out well after the invention of pants, which means that not only are the streets laid out in a handy grid pattern, they are even partially alphabetical.

Not that I needed to know the alphabet to direct her: apparently, what I needed instead was my own satellite, because when Clementine called to ask me, again, where she was, she prefaced the question with the words, “I’m in front of a white building with blue shutters: where am I?”

I know downtown Flagstaff pretty well, but not that well.

I tried asking her the name of the street she was on: no dice. Asking her which side of the railroad tracks only got me the answer “this side.” Finally I got down to basics: can you see a great big mountain anywhere? Is it in front of you or behind you?

I finally managed to direct her to where she was going after breaking the instructions down into “Dora the Explorer” sized chunks. “Go towards the big mountain, over the train tracks, and turn right at the talentless dread-locked busker.” (I don’t need a satellite to know who’s likely to be in front of the Pita Pit—and I’m pretty sure that if anyone should be having an existential crisis, it’s that guy.)

When my son, Clyde, was five years old I picked him up early from school one day to take him to a doctor’s appointment, where, among other things, he was scheduled to receive a vaccination. When I got to his classroom it was obvious that he had been discussing his upcoming ordeal with his fellow students, and also that they had done their best to work him up into a state of dread. I knew this must have been the case because when I walked over to fetch him the first thing he said wasn’t “Can I have a soda?”

To understand the magnitude of this you must first understand that “Can I have a soda?” had been—and still is—his stock response whenever anyone announces they are going anywhere at all. Anywhere. You could say, “Well, I’m off to plan my own funeral!” and Clyde would glance up from his computer game just long enough to say, “Can you get me a soda while you’re there?” (And don’t think a grumpy reply discourages him any, either: your response to the above scenario could be, “The only flavors they have at the funeral home are despair, regret, denial and Diet Denial,” and Clyde’s reply would still be, “Uh huh: can you get me one of each?”

But yeah, this time when I walked into the room the first thing he said to me was “Is this shot going to hurt?”

I responded with a laugh. “Hurt? Of course it’s going to hurt: they’re poking a sharp piece of metal inside your arm. Why wouldn’t it hurt?”

“Do I have to get it?” he then asked, his voice small and a little bit scared.

“Yep,” I said. “’Fraid so.”

We looked at each other for a moment and then he said, “Okay,” and that was that. He got the shot. The shot hurt. And then, when we were leaving the doctor’s office, he turned to me and said, “Can we stop and get a soda?” And that was it. Or at least I thought it was. Then a couple of weeks ago I ran into an adult who had been in the classroom during the exchange, and she remarked that she had never forgotten the honesty of the exchange between Clyde and I all those years ago, which made me think about my whole philosophy about lying.

Personally, I’m all for lying. Lying’s great: getting what you want when you haven’t really earned the right to have it—what could be better than that? What I’m not so big a fan of, however, is getting caught. Getting caught sucks. Which is why I try to never lie in situations where I’m likely to be found out.

There was no way I could have told Clyde that getting a shot wouldn’t hurt and gotten away with it—especially not when there was only going to be about fifteen minutes between the lie and the pain. True, the shot wasn’t going to hurt very badly, but since pain is subjective I didn’t think it would have been right to hold Clyde to my perceptions of pain. After all: I’ve been through childbirth; of course a shot would seem trivial to me. And besides, the question wasn’t “how much is it going to hurt?’ but rather if it was going to hurt at all.

Like I said, this was a situation that would have been almost impossible to lie my way out of—so I didn’t. Unlike the situation that immediately followed, where I told a whopping big lie and got away with it, because, still and all, five-year-olds are notoriously gullible.

I still can’t believe he bought it when I told him the stores were all out of soda.

One day I hope to own a new car.

Well not a new car, of course—that would be crazy, do you know how expensive those things are?—but one that is new to me. And, I must confess, one that is a little bit on the newer side of new as well. Not too new, mind you, just newer than any car I’ve ever owned before. Like maybe one that was made in the decade previous to the one I am currently living in. Not one that was made in the decade I am living in—no need to aim for the stars, after all—but the decade previous. That’s all I ask. But until that day comes to pass I will have to be content with having a car from the decade before the decade before. Which means that my stereo system will continue to be practically prehistoric. If stereos wore clothes, mine would be sporting a handlebar mustache, a hoop skirt and a bustle. (Yes, all at the same time. And no, not in a hipster-y way.) I’m serious: my stereo has no ipod jack, no CD player—even my tape deck gave up the ghost a while ago (which is probably for the best: there’s only so may times you can show up somewhere humming 80s songs—which are the only music anyone owns on cassette tapes—before people start to wonder about you).

In fact, the only part of my stereo that still works is the radio, which explains why it was that I was hurtling down the interstate last weekend hitting the scan button every few seconds in an effort to find something that was not either Top 40 or Norteno music. And also explains how I happened to land on a station that was not at all what it seemed.

In my defense, I thought it was NPR. At first it really could have been NPR: a reasonable sounding man, with a reasonable sounding voice was explaining how it was possible for gays to become accepted in mainstream society. “First,” he said, they need to be recognized as average members of society—your neighbors, and teachers, and friends.” Yeah, I thought to myself, that sounds right. “Then,” he continued, “the people who are prejudiced towards gays need to be shunned as bigots and intolerant jerks.” Yep. “And finally, gays need to accepted into every facet of modern life.” Okay. Yeah. That sounds reasonable.

Then he came to the next part. “And that, my friends, is exactly how the Chinese brainwash you. And how the devil gets you.”

Wait, what?

At that point I couldn’t turn the dial fast enough, and I didn’t even care that the next thing I heard was the thrilling sounds of accordion, bass, and Spanish lyrics.

What the hell is wrong with people? I thought morosely. And my morose thoughts continued all the way until I got to my destination, which was a cabin on the banks of Oak Creek. But then when I got there those thoughts evaporated, because waiting for me were my children and some of their friends. And when I told them the story of the evil Chinese/Satanic plot to to sneakily assimilate gays into our culture they weren’t upset, they were just confused—confused that there was anyone left who still made a big deal about other peoples’ sexuality.

And that’s when I realized that my stereo wasn’t the only thing that was was out-dated. And that not only will it soon become nearly impossible to find a car that doesn’t have at the very least a CD player, it will also be nearly impossible to find someone who is isn’t at the very least minimally tolerant.

And, hopefully, someone who can explain to me why anyone would ever need four different Norteno stations on the same radio dial.

This summer marks a changing point in my household: this will be the first summer of not one, but two teenagers in the house. Which means several things. It means my chances of getting to take a shower at a reasonable hour have plummeted to nearly nil. (We only have one shower in our house, so I’d just like to apologize in advance to all the people who might be standing downwind of me this summer—especially if I happen to raise my arm to wave at you.) It also means my chances of getting a cup of coffee are pretty much nil, too, since it seems that in my house the birds and the bees talk should rather be called the birds and the bees and the beans talk: apparently the urge to consume mass quantities of caffeine appears at about the same time as all other biological urges.

But the thing that makes the biggest difference, at least as far as I am concerned, is the complete lack of a need for any kind of day camp. Well, at least on their part. I confess that I still need the daily respite that day camp provides quite a bit. In fact, if it were possible to enroll myself in a day camp, I would. (At one point in my life I thought that I had discovered the adult version of day camp, but then the bartender pointed out to me that day drinking was not the same thing as day camp at all. They also added in something about not having to go home but no longer being welcome to stay there.) And so it is that since The Man (and, depending on the bar, The Woman) says that I, myself, am no longer eligible for “day camp”, it looks like the only option available to me is still going to be sending my kids someplace instead. Even if technically they are too old for it.

In my defense there are a lot of great skills to be learned at a day camp. And I’m not just talking about how to make a lanyard key chain. (Although there is something undeniably badass about a well-made lanyard keychain.) No, I’m talking about the social skills that they only ever seem to learn when they get away from my house. Things like how to stand in line without punching the person in front of them repeatedly in the kidneys. Or how to wait their turn at the lunch (or lanyard) table. Or even (gasp!) how to say please and thank you.

But even without the added benefit of teaching my kids the social skills they failed to acquire at home, I think day camp serves a greater purpose for us all by encouraging families not to kill each over the summer. And I mean, less murder is generally considered a good thing, right?

I don’t know, maybe the murder thing is just a problem in my house. Maybe other families sail through the summer break like the Von Trapps, laughing and singing and hiking the whole time. Maybe. But I doubt it.

All I know is that the same house that is somehow spacious enough for four people during the school year becomes more claustrophobic than steerage class on the Titanic during summer break. And that the same people I can (generally) tolerate all year long somehow start moving their way up the “most endangered” list the further we get from the last day of school.

Maybe it’s not so much that the nature of their annoying habits change, but rather that their frequency does. After all, one crusty mac and cheese bowl in the couch cushions is annoying: six is practically an open and shut case for justifiable homicide.

Even the bartender agreed with me about that.

The other night I ran into an old friend at the bar, and as we got to talking I realized how odd it was that our children, who are practically the same age, have never really hung out.

“We should totally get them together!” I enthused. “It would be great!”

And just like that I was planning outings in my head—maybe the movies, maybe a hike, maybe a backyard BBQ. And then I remembered that the children in question were actually both seventeen years old, and that you can’t plan play dates for seventeen year olds. Well, you can, but I think you have to call it a blind date.

It was enough to make me almost miss the days when I could simply plan a play date, the days when I wasn’t just their social secretary, I was their social director. The days when I got to be the one who decided when the party started, when it ended, and who was invited, and there was no discussion about it because I could win any argument simply by picking up the disagreeing party and walking out of the room.

Of course those days also meant that they could win any argument (or at least prolong it) by throwing themselves on the ground and refusing to move.

I suppose we could both still behave that way (although my back cringes at the thought of picking my son up in anything but a fireman’s carry, and cooperation is always best for that particular lift), but I think that it’s better that we have moved our disagreements from the physical to the verbal plane. Or at least that’s how I feel until the moment comes when I’m actually involved in the argument. Then the fireman’s carry starts to look pretty good.

Part of the problem is that my kids—and my daughter, especially—can turn any argument into a debate. What’s the difference, you ask? An argument is when I say it’s time to clean your room and you say, “I’ll do it later.” A debate is when I say it’s time to clean your room and you say, “How long have you been participating in Western bourgeois notions of cleanliness? Does it satisfy your sense of place in a gender normative society?” Yeah, it’s pretty hard to fireman’s carry your way out of that one.

The truth is, however, I only have myself to blame: I’ve always loved a good argument, and have always been willing to debate any topic with my children, certain in the knowledge that since I am right, I will win. “Why can’t I jump on the bed?” “Because the bed is old, the floor is old, and if you fall off and break your arm I refuse to pay the five-hundred dollar deductible in November, so by the time we get to the doctor’s in January they’ll probably have to amputate and there is no way I’m going to follow you around for the rest of your life making sure you are able to properly wipe your butt with only one arm.”

Used to be by the time I got to the end of an explanation like that they’d forgotten there ever was anything called a “bed” in the first place, let alone a desire to jump on it. But now they beat me at my own game.

“It always comes down to money with you, doesn’t it?” they say in their best fake sad voice.

“Says the person who has none,” I reply. But the damage has been done, and it’s obvious that they will soon be able to out-debate me. Next thing I know they’ll be able to pick me up and carry me out of any party.

Which, come to think about it, actually might not be a bad thing.