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When I was a child I really, really hated boiled peas. I hated everything about them: their sickly green color, the fact that they smelled like a combination of rotting swamp water and a freshly dug grave, the way they burst open in your mouth like little pustules, but most especially, I hated the taste. They tasted bad to me: really, really bad. Somewhere along the way from childhood to adolescence my antipathy for peas settled down into a more normal loathing, and then, with adulthood, it became an even more normal dislike. In fact, these days, if I had to I could even eat a pea and be gracious about it, and while I would never go so far as to actually order something off the menu if it listed peas as the primary ingredient, if they do show up in my food I am not completely anal about picking each and every single one of the little round abominations out of the dish. Not completely anal, but still—a tiny bit anal, nonetheless.

Which is probably why I have never been a big fan—let alone an enforcer—of the “clean plate club.” The memories of needing a quart of milk to help me gag down a handful of peas have always been too fresh for me to ever seriously contemplate putting someone else through that torment—anyone else, actually, let alone the people that I love. And so the food rules at my house have always been somewhat relaxed. Sure, like any other parent I experimented with the whole “just try one bite” thing, but then I remembered how much of my pea despising occurred before the pea ever touched my lips, and I relented on even that. (When you think about it, “How do you know you won’t like it if you’ve never even tried it” is actually a pretty stupid argument. I could count on one hand the number of times I have been presented with something truly disgusting—fermented fish eyes, for example—and it turned out to be my new favorite food. Really, if something looks disgusting to you, the best you can reasonably hope for is that when you try it it won’t make you spew chunks all over the table. And what kind of recommendation is that for a food? “How do you know it won’t make you hurl if you’ve never even tried it?”)

Interestingly enough, my refusal to join the food police has made me more of a pariah amongst my fellow parents than almost any other parenting decision I have ever made. Every time I let my kids hop up from the table without first studying the leftovers on their plates like an ancient priest reading auguries other parents look at me like I’ve broken some sort of secret parental pact to torture all of our children together. It’s enough to make me feel like the only guy at the bar who doesn’t beat his wife.

It’s no better when I try to avoid the accusing “clean plate club traitor” looks by only serving foods I know my kids will finish: you’d think I was sending my kids to school with a crumpled pack of menthols and a thermos of black coffee every time I let them take a baggie full of Lucky Charms and a piece of cold pizza for their sack lunch.

And yes, I’ve heard the argument that the only way your kids will ever grow up to have any kind of refined palate at all is if you are diligent about exposing them to all kinds of food when they are young, but that’s a chance I’m willing to take if it means that meal times can pass at my house without all of the drama and fun of a water boarding session.

And, of course, without any damn peas.

“So, this one time, at band camp…”

This is a joke that has been made frequently at my house over the years, ever since my daughter, Clementine, first attended camp four years ago. Now, thanks to the fact that the youngest member of our family has just finished his first week at camp, this joke looks to have gained a whole new half-life. (Technically, since both my kids play stringed instruments they go to music camp, not band camp, but we believe in keeping our jokes pure around here.) Of course, even if my son hadn’t gone to music camp (as if), we would probably still keep making the joke, since over time it has morphed into our favorite way to tease a member of the family who is geeking out on anything at all, from SuperWhoLock, to Minecraft, to GofT.

Usually the joke is made at the point when when someone starts speaking of their current obsession in either hushed, rapturous, tones or high-pitched squeals (okay, the squealing almost always comes from the female half of the family). And it is almost always done with affection and tolerance. Because why? Because geeking out is cool, that’s why.
Ever since Clementine and I first dressed up to attend the midnight release of the latest Harry Potter book almost ten years ago, I have been a fan of geeking out. I have been more than willing to stand in line in the snow with people dressed as Hobbits, argue the merits of Team Edward vs. Team Jacob, and get into serious debates about the best Batman villain. I have pulled my kids out of school for Marvel Marathons, written to Daniel Radcliffe’s agent asking for a personalized Christmas card (and gotten it), and spent countless hours on Cafe Press and Etsy looking for the perfect Geek Gift. And I have not regretted a minute of it.

Edmund White once said “I have no contempt for that time of life when our friendships are the most passionate and our passions incorrigible and none of our sentiments yet comprised by greed or cowardice or disappointment. The volatility and intensity of adolescence are qualities we should aspire to preserve.” And I couldn’t agree more.

There are some things we will never have to teach. Cynicism. Hopelessness. Despair. These things, unfortunately, seem to come naturally to most people, given enough time. And just because I believe we should prepare our kids for the fact that the outside world will never be as easy or forgiving as the tight world of their family and friends doesn’t mean I want them to “grow up, already.” Especially if “growing up” means leaving behind the things you feel really passionate about.

It always makes me said when I see an adult that is “too cool” to genuinely like anything, but when I see it that same aloofness in a child it is actually a little but devastating. If you don’t have room in your life to be an absolute(-ly annoying) authority on all things Percy Jackson at age nine, what is ever going to really capture your imagination at age twenty-nine? Or fifty-nine?

Besides, there is just something so accepting about the geek world. Although they might go to the mat over which slash pairing has the best fan fiction, it’s not like you’re going to be left all on your own in the lunchroom just because you’re a diehard Kirk/Spock fan. At least, you won’t be left alone by the other geeks.

In fact, lately I’ve been thinking that next year might be the year my family finally makes the ultimate geek pilgrimage to the San Diego ComicCon. That way we can all experience the very best in geeking out together. And also, I’ll finally be able to say to them, “So this one time, at ComicCon…”

Looking back over the years that I have been writing this column, one subject stands out above all others: shoes. Man, I sure do write about shoes a lot. You’d think, for as often as I have covered them, that I would be some sort of Carrie Bradshaw-like shoe aficionado. That I would know the difference between a Jimmy Choo and a Manolo Blahnik. Or that, at the very least, I would have an opinion regarding Nikes versus Adidas. The truth is, however, I could not care less about the shoes I or the people in my family are wearing: as long as everyone has at least one matching pair, I am content. And sometimes I don’t even care if they’re matching: when it comes to flip-flops, for example, does it really matter if they are two different styles? As long as one of them is not some four-inch tall wedge-style flip-flop (the stupidest shoe design EVER), who cares if one of them has pink Barbies on it and the other one is leather? If someone calls you out on it you can always say “Well, why were you looking at my feet in the first place? Pervert.”

But, yeah: for someone who doesn’t really care at all about footwear I sure do seem to write about it a lot. And, as usual, the reasons behind this are the same reasons for so many of the inconsistencies in my life: my children. It is well documented (in this very space) that my children’s shoe loss makes Cinderella look like a rank amateur. However, whereas before this has only been a minor (okay, major) annoyance, now it has become a true matter of life or death (at least as far as my feet are concerned), because this summer marked the arrival of the dreaded day when they both started wearing the same size shoes as me. I think you know where this is going. Yes, the time has come when my own damn shoes aren’t safe in my my own damn house, because now, after my children have shed their shoes out in the wilderness like a couple of inconsiderate snakes, they always know where they can go to get an “extra” pair: me.
If I was the sort of person who believed in monsters under the bed it might freak me out to take off my shoes at night, place them on the floor next to me before I go to sleep, and then find them missing in the morning. I might think that the bed monster was trying to lure me into sweeping my hands back and forth under the bed in the early morning hours, all the better to grab me and pull me under. Instead I know that I have been suckered by a monster of a different order, that my shoes have been tossed somewhere in my dark and messy house, and that it is my unlucky task to try and find them.

I could of course always try waking my kids up and asking them what they did with my shoes, but if the chances of getting a straight answer out of them in their waking hours are slim then the chances of getting one when they are comatose asleep (the only way a teenager sleeps, apparently) are none. And besides, if they had it in them to remember what they had done with any pair of shoes, ever, then we wouldn’t have reached this sad, shoeless state in the first place.

My only hope at this point is that their feet continue to grow past the point where my shoes are a viable option—either that or I start buying shoes so hideous that no one would ever want to wear them.

Remember that the next time you see me walking around in 4-inch wedge flip-flops.

The other day, while scrolling through Facebook, I noticed what seemed to me to be a particularly odd post: “My family sucks: nobody woke me up for dinner.” My first thought upon reading this was, of course, “Ha ha. What a loser.” But then, a few lines later I saw the same post from a different person, and then, a few days later, I saw it yet again from a third person. These people didn’t know each other, and in fact, their posts weren’t all exactly the same: even though they all could most definitely be classified as “complaining,” some were whining, whereas others were just plain angry (“FML” as opposed to “thanks for nothing, Mom”).

In fact, the only thing these three people had in common was that they were all posting at about the the same time of day—or rather, night. They were all posting at about one o’clock in the morning. Also, none of the posts complained about not being called for dinner. As in “You can call me anything, but don’t call me late for dinner.” No, all of these posts specifically said wake.

That seemed rather odd to me: I don’t know about you, but personally I would be pissed off if somebody woke me up for dinner. “What the hell are you doing?” I would say. “I’m sleeping.” (In fact, I used to say that very thing when my son Clyde was a toddler and would come into my room at night carrying some cold, wet tidbit from his own dinner for me to “finish.” There’s nothing like being woken by the pickle from a hamburger (you hope) being pushed between your lips. It’s like… yeah, no, actually it’s not like anything at all. Some experiences are completely singular, and that is one of them.)

These people, though, seemed to feel differently. They were all positively put out that no one had bothered to wake them for dinner. Who knows? Maybe it was a medical issue. Did they, perhaps, all suffer from the same glandular problem? Or maybe it was something more basic than that: some babies, I have heard, sleep so soundly, and so much, that the only way their parents can get them to eat enough is to wake them up every four hours to eat. (Yeah, I didn’t have one of those babies, either). Maybe these people were just the older version of those babies, and their poor caregivers, exhausted after years of round the clock feeding, fell asleep and missed the one am feeding. How sad, to think that for the rest of their lives someone will have to wake them up to remember to eat. How will they ever live a normal life? (I can see it now: someone sprinting from the banquet hall in a panic: “Oh no! We forgot to wake Julie for her wedding dinner!”)

Or maybe it’s not a medical issue at all. Maybe they are trying to bulk up for some movie they’re about to star in, and need to be woken every few hours to chug down some raw eggs and a protein shake. But then again, how realistic is that? After all, how many people ever get to play Batman? (Insert Michael Keaton joke here.)

The only other possible explanation is that they somehow think that the rest of the world should change to suit their strange, nocturnal lifestyle, with breakfast served at the crack of noon, lunch in time for the five o’clock news, and dinner at midnight—after, of course, they are finished having their eleven o’clock siesta.

But that would be so… selfish. So self-centered. So teenager. Wait a minute: now that I think about it, that was the one other thing they all had in common.

Oh. Never mind, then: case closed.

When my daughter, Clementine, was in kindergarten, we were discussing the best way to handle a playground bully. I was giving her what I thought was good advice—figure out their insecurity and then mercilessly attack them about it—when she stopped me with a sigh and said, “Mom, I’m not like you. I like people.” And then she went on to handle the bully in her own way. It must have been an efficient way, because she never mentioned the bully again, and it must have also been a nice way, because I never got a call from either the teacher or an irate parent.

While I was happy that she managed to solve her own problem, I was also a little bit sad, too, because this whole “liking people” thing meant that my child would never know the joy that comes from reducing your enemy to an emotional puddle in front of you, never know the thrill of walking away from an argument symbolically picking scraps of your opponent’s flesh out from between your teeth. Never know what it feels like to “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” *stares off dreamily* Oh yes, where was I? Anyway, I was upset because it seemed to me at the time that this meant that Clementine would never get to experience the particularly brutal joy of watching your words melt skin from bone. And then, over the next few years I realized that my first analysis of the situation hadn’t been strictly accurate, and that there was at least one person in this world who would always be able to feel the venom of her cruel words. One person who would get to experience having their insecurities held before them and mocked, one person who was deserving of the harshest attacks and the most unrelenting fury.

Me.

Joy. Imagine for a second that you have raised an attack dog from a puppy. Taught it to always go for the jugular, taught it never to forgive the smallest slight, taught it to guard itself vigilantly and brutally. Now imagine that this dog grows up to attack absolutely nobody but you, and you have a slight inkling of how I feel.

Look, I know it’s not really cool to compare a child to a Rottweiler, but the truth is that sometimes it’s a tough world out there, and knowing when and how to stand up for yourself is an invaluable skill. I’m not talking about taking on muggers in a dark alley here: I’m talking about getting out of a two year service contract with a crappy internet provider. Do you really, really not want to pay that late fee? Well, then, sometimes you have to show your teeth and growl a little bit.

There are definitely times when being nice is your best option; immediately after you get pulled over, for instance. Or when you’re standing in the customs line at an airport. (Basically, any time you’re dealing with someone who has the power to authorize a full cavity search, niceness is always your best—and sometimes your only—option.) But other times nice will only get you sent to the back of the line.

Or worse.

It’s telling that I don’t have this fear of niceness with Clementine’s brother—and not because he has the killer instinct she seems to lack. (Oddly enough, he has that whole “liking people” problem, too.) Maybe I’m just too aware of how the feminine tendency to “make nice” can be a handicap as often as it is helpful. And so, I suppose, I should be happy to find out that Clementine has the ability to turn hers off and on at will.

Just so long as she imagines that the person she is dealing with is me.

I once had a dream where I found an extra room in my house. This was after living there for years: one day I just noticed a door that I had never seen before, and when I opened it, instead of finding some kind of Doctor Who-style monster, I found an extra one hundred square feet. It was wonderful, and I immediately began to drag all of the stuff into it that previously had had no real home: the amps, the spare guitars (and ukeleles, violins and violas), entire bookshelves filled with manga and overdue library books, piles of homework and a dedicated table to do it on. It was such a relief to finally have a place to put all of the stuff that so quickly turned the rest of my house into clutter and confusion. And then I woke up. And I was devastated.

To put my devastation into perspective, I also once had a dream where I got to hang out laughing and drinking with Bob Dylan all night, and even that dream was less disappointing to wake up from than the one about the extra room. Actually, “devastated” really doesn’t even begin to describe it: for days afterward I would look in the corner where I had “discovered” the extra room and feel a sense of loss—why, I asked myself over and over, couldn’t it have just been true? (The thing that finally snapped me out of it was the slow realization that if I did, in fact, have an “extra” room, it, too, would already have been chocked full of crap.)

And so I understand my daughter, Clementine’s, disappointment during the heat wave a few weeks ago when she glared at the thermostat and discovered that, no matter how low she set the numbers, there just wasn’t going to be that satisfying click followed by a soothing burst of cold air. What I didn’t understand though was the fact that none of her dismay was caused by a recent dream about our house having air conditioning; she hadn’t been confused, like I had, by some kind of alternate nocturnal reality. No, she had just never before noticed that we didn’t have any air conditioning.

I used to believe that my children could be anything they wanted to be when they grew up: Presidents of the United States, astronauts, cowboys, Cirque du Soleil performers—whatever they wanted. And I still believe that to be true, with one notable exception: private detective is probably off limits to both of them.

These are people I could hide almost anything in the world from simply by putting it back where it belongs. People who text me from the next room to ask me when I am getting home. People who have not noticed when we have house guests—even after those house guests have been sleeping on the couch for three days. Unobservant doesn’t even begin to cut it.

There is no doubt in my mind that if a tree fell in the forest and my children were not there to hear it it would not make a single peep. At least not to them. Doesn’t matter if Wolf Blitzer himself was there to interview the tree personally: they didn’t hear it, so it didn’t happen.

I suppose in a way it’s better to live your life only concerned with the things that immediately affect YOU and only YOU; I have seen enough people reduced to puddles at the thought of tragedies halfway around the world to know that being hyperaware isn’t all that great either. But still: it would be nice if they found a happy medium.

Preferably one that didn’t involve standing in front of the thermostat and cursing quite so much.

When I was growing up, my sister and I used to occupy our long, hot Phoenix summers with epically fierce Monopoly battles. (Remember, this was back in the days before Netflix—and, in our area at least, before cable. There were only four channels to choose from, and believe me, there are only so many times you can watch “Pets on Parade.”) And so we played Monopoly. For hours. Because with only two people, a Monopoly game takes forever—especially when those two people fight over every single piece of property like they were MacArthur in the Philippines. (“Don’t worry, Oriental Avenue: I will return for you!”)

Winning one of those games of Monopoly was the best feeling in the world: the joy of watching your money pile up, the pride you felt as your bustling suburban sprawl of houses was finally replaced with towering hotels, the sheer thrill of absolute power as you set the terms for every new deal (“I’ll give you two hundred bucks for your railroads and utilities—take it or leave it.”) Being on top in a game of Monopoly is probable the closest thing most people get to playing God: you, and you alone, get to bless or curse people, depending on your mood and their level of obsequiousness. “I’ll ignore the fact that you just landed on Pennsylvania with three houses if you promise to call me ‘Your Highness’ for the rest of the day. Oh, and go get me a grape popsicle.”

Conversely, losing a game of Monopoly was the worst. The terror of watching your money pile dwindle, the desperation as you sold off first your houses, then the property itself. The doubt that crept in about your previously unquestioned judgement. ( “Why did I waste all of that money on Boardwalk and Park Place? No one ever lands there!”) It was pure bitterness, and every Monopoly defeat tasted like ashes in your mouth. (Ashes, and perhaps a little bit of colored paper: neither my sister nor I were above such pettiness as chewing up and spitting the last of our money at the other player; when people outside our family played Monopoly with us we usually had to make up some story about the cat getting a hold of the money to explain its bedraggled state.)

Actually, when I write it all down like this, the whole thing seems pretty awful. And yet, I am convinced that it was one of the most valuable parts of my childhood. Why? Because it taught me how to lose. Not how to lose graciously. (See: Money, Chewing Up and Spitting Out, Above). And not how to lose willingly, but simply that the awful, terrible experience of losing was a real thing—real, and survivable.

You might be thinking that this is a lesson everyone learns; that unless you lead some kind of a charmed life (like, say, being born into the Bush family), learning how to lose is unavoidable. And you’d be right: it is. The difference, however, is that I learned how to lose when it was still (slightly) acceptable for me to throw myself on the ground about it and roll around and gnash my teeth; with today’s kids, I’m not so sure that’s the case anymore. After all, if you grow up in a culture where everyone gets a trophy just for showing up, what do you really learn about losing?

It might seem cruel to put our children through the agony of defeat when they are so young, and therefore so vulnerable (and so vocal about), but I think that it is crueler by far to make them wait until semi-adulthood to find out that they’re actually not that good at soccer.

Or that buying Boardwalk and Park Place is always a sucker’s bet.

A few years back I wrote a column about how annoying it was to get driving directions from a child: I said it was like dealing with a living pirate map. “You drive to the big tree—no, not that one, the big one…okay then, the second biggest one, whatever—and it’s the third house after the house with the little dog. Well, there’s usually a little dog there. Why are you grinding your teeth like that?” In fact, I think I said something at the time about how there was absolutely nothing more annoying—how it was, as far as I was concerned, the epitome of annoy. Well, a few years have passed since then, and I am unhappy to report that I was wrong: there is something more annoying than getting driving directions from a child, and that is giving driving directions to them.

That’s right: the child who used to give me the “Treasure Island”-style directions is now driving herself places, and it would appear that she wants to receive directions from me in exactly the same manner she herself used to give them: with obscure landmarks and cryptically vague distances. (My favorite is “It’s about halfway down.” Halfway down what? The street? The continent? The planet?) Here’s a typical scenario: the child needs to get somewhere and asks me how. I respond by giving her the address. Deep sigh from said child. “No, Mom. Just tell me where it is.” And so I try to explain cross streets. Again with the sigh, and again with, “Just tell me where it is.” At this point I know that it is useless, but I pull out a map anyway. This pushes the child right over the edge. “Why won’t you just tell me where it is?”

That’s when I realize (yet again) that “where it is” means “what is it next to.” And also that “what is it next to” means “use landmarks that are relevant to me, not you.” So that saying “it is next to the courthouse” is as meaningless as a street address, whereas “across from that alley where your friend Bobby John once threw up two nights in a row” is the gold standard. Of course, the fact that I didn’t know about the Tour de Puke, and have, in fact, never even heard of Bobby John, is, to her at least, irrelevant.

Probably the most frustrating aspect of all of this is the fact that it would be a non-issue if she would just learn how to read a map; this is especially aggravating considering the fact that I had to spend hours and hours of my life listening to Dora the Explorer when she was a child. Hours that I will never get back. What was the point of all of those times I was forced to yell “Swiper no swiping!” if they weren’t even going to learn how to read a map? What was the point of all those sleepless nights spent wondering why the monkey wore boots, but no pants (at least he didn’t wear a raincoat) if the payoff wasn’t going to be just a little bit of cartographic literacy? I mean, Cyber Chase was annoying, too, but at least there they learned the difference between a rectangle and a square.

Although, now that I think about it, the maps in Dora were pretty much pirate-style, too, which actually may explain the map reading disability they all carry today. If only Map had, one time, just given Dora a street address. If only, one time, Backpack had ever said, “Hey kid, you ever hear of Google?” Oh, well. I suppose it could be worse. After all: at least they all still managed to grow up wearing pants.

When I was growing up there was this book I loved to read that was about a Very Dirty Little Girl. In this book the parents of the Very Dirty Little Girl kept trying unsuccessfully to convince their daughter to take a bath, until finally one day a wise old lady who lived down the street told them that they should just let their daughter get as filthy as she liked, and then, when the dirt on her arms got to be about an inch thick, plant radish seeds on her while she slept. Sure enough, a few weeks after they planted the seeds it was harvest time, and the little girl was so mortified to be a walking garden that she never refused to take a bath again and everyone lived happily ever after. The End.

What a charming story. Unfortunately, it is nothing like the story I am about to tell. My story is about a little boy who refused to stop taking food into his room, and how one day, at her wit’s end, when there were no more dishes left for the rest of the family to eat off of, his mother ordered him to go into his room and bring out every plate, cup and spoon he could find. Every one. Even the ones that had gotten kicked under the bed. And how the little boy had come out of his room a few minutes later, green-faced and nauseous, and asked his mother, “Um, so, how exactly do you get rid of maggots?” And how the mother then handed him a dustpan and a broom and said, “Sucks to be you.” And there was no happy ending, and, really, not even a The End, because the very next week the boy was back in his room eating pizza in bed.

That’s the problem with real life as compared to fiction: not only is it is an awful lot messier (and sometimes, especially when there are maggots involved, grosser), there is also the fact that people in real life almost never learn from their mistakes.

Oh, they might think that they have learned. Like in the case of the “Very Sad Boy and the Maggoty Maggoty Day,” the boy was sure that he had learned his lesson. Unfortunately, however, since the maggots had been on a pork chop bone, the only lesson he really learned was not to leave pork chop bones in your room. Pizza, half-eaten burgers, petrified corn flakes in curdled milk—all of these, apparently, are still fine. It is the pork chops that are the problem. Or maybe just the bones.

And what’s worse is that it would seem that even that tiny, tiny lesson didn’t take, because on reflection the boy decided that it wasn’t even really the pork chop bone that was the problem, but rather the lack of a dog to take care of the bone. Apparently the problem wasn’t so much that the boy wanted lo live like he was in a medieval banquet hall, but rather that his serf (that would be me) hadn’t been handy enough about bringing in the hounds to clean up after he was finished. And, I suppose, the chickens to clean up after the hounds.

I sometimes think that if my children walked into a tiger cage, and were mauled, they would only learn to avoid tiger cages—lions and bears would still be “okay” (at least until proven differently with their own mauling). And, in fact, I strongly suspect that if the Very Dirty Little Girl was a real child (and mine), the only thing she would have ever really learned from her radish experience would have been to avoid the produce section of her local market.

At least during planting season.

One of the first things I learned as a parent was that children are obsessed with technicalities. Therefore, setting a rule for a child is like asking for a wish from a malevolent genie: no matter how carefully you think you have worded your request, there will always be some loophole you didn’t see. With the genie, if you ask them for a million dollars they are likely to grant your wish in the form of several tons of pennies—directly above your head. With the child, asking them not to throw balls in the house pretty much guarantees that they will all be kicked.

Like I said, you can try to get around these problems by carefully wording your requests: “I want a million dollars, not to land on me and kill me,” or “No balls may be propelled from any appendage while inside a domicile,” but a clever genie or child will always find ways to get around that. “What? It didn’t land on you; it rolled on you,” and “But I was outside when I knocked the ball in through the window.” That’s why, when it comes to rules, I have found that it is much easier to make mine less specific, not more. And in fact, I have managed to parse them down to one simple rule that even the cleverest of children (that would be my own) have yet to find a way around.

Don’t annoy me.

That’s The One Rule in its entirety. The beauty of such a simple rule is that it can change with the times without my having to amend it. Whereupon on a normal day “don’t annoy me” might mean “no running chainsaws outside my bedroom door before seven AM,” on a day I’m hungover it might mean “no chainsaws outside my bedroom door at all.” (Actually, the rule is almost always no chainsaws outside my bedroom door, because who has to go get more gas when they run out? Me, that’s who. And that’s annoying.)

At first my children complained about the arbitrariness of The One Rule. “But you’re always annoyed about something,” they said. “How are we supposed to know what will annoy you next?”

“You can’t,” I replied. “So why take a chance?”

I like to think my parenting style is a cross between a Hawaiian volcano goddess and Aunty from Beyond Thunderdome: firm, caring, and just a little bit cray cray. To outsiders (and my children) that might seem a little harsh, but the way I see it is that they should be grateful: at least I don’t make them sacrifice virgins or fight each other to the death in a steel cage. (Actually, the problems at my house usually stem from me trying to stop such activities.) When you think about it both Pele and Aunty really had the same goal: keeping the miscreants under their charge from killing each other. That’s where most of their rules—and mine—come from. And if sometimes some of their rules seemed to get a little bit out of hand, well, we’ve all been on those road trips where someone finally says something like, “No one can chew their food more than twenty times or less than three times ever again!”

Which is why I refer you once more to the beauty of The One Rule. Don’t annoy me. If Pele had had such a rule in place than maybe their wouldn’t have needed to be quite so many volcanic eruptions over the millennium. And if Aunty had had such a rule, then Mel Gibson might need never have risked his magnificent mullet in the Thunderdome. But then again, there are some people who just seem born to break the rules. Even if there is only one of them.