Other People’s Kids Suck!

I’m not usually a judgmental person, but I have to say … other people’s kids suck.

So many of other people’s kids are too hyper, foretelling a career jacking cop cars to sell for parts in Oaxaca while high on crank. Meanwhile, my kids are just adorably spunky.

Other people’s kids are afraid of the roller coaster on the pier, suggesting they’ll end up living their lives, well into adulthood, barricaded in their bathrooms while their octogenarian mothers slip tortillas to them under the door. Meanwhile, my kids are just prudently cautious.

Other people’s kids wear low-rise jeans from Gymboree and tell smutty jokes, forecasting a shame spiral that’ll land them in the Simi Valley flesh trade.  

While my kids are simply precociously irreverent.

 
Other parents are too strict, too loose, too close, too far, too young, too old, too horizontal, too vertical, too latitudinal, too longitudinal, too flatulent, too constipated, too slavish, too supercilious, too supercalifragalisticexpialidocious. While Henry and I strike a perfect balance. 

Which is why I’m not worried that we didn’t know our five-year-old, Bridget, went to Kindergarten in a skirt with no underwear on. Or that her skirt “twirled up” on the playground. Or that, on a separate day, she told her classmates during rug time that she’d gotten a shot in her vagina. Which apparently was some kind of misinterpretation of how the pediatrician handled her pinworm outbreak. (Also, some of the kids didn’t know what a vagina was. Which seemed odd.)

And I’m not worried that our seven-year-old, Clare, told her friends, which means basically the whole school, about the “Tunnel of F@@k”.  

 
This was a phrase, coined by me, based on an incident we had while on vacation in New York.

We got stuck in traffic heading into the city, as one does, and Henry cursed. Clare told him he owed her a dollar for cursing and he started throwing toll change in the back seat yelling, “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”  

And then I had the bright idea that the mid-town tunnel would be the Cursing Tunnel and the four of us could say any dirty word we wanted, consequence free, and then there’d be no more dirty words for the rest of the trip.

So Henry and I led the girls in a chorus of “damn, hell, crap, damn, hell, crap.” As we emerged from the tunnel, I was just thinking we’d gotten off easy when I heard Clare say …….”fuck?”

And I’m certainly not worried that Bridget told everyone in carpool that “Mommy likes her wine,” just because of that one time when the second playdate chardonnay snuck up on me and I got in the trampoline and started rolling around in a ball trying to knock kids down as I shrieked, “Mommy cannonballll!”

We did have two cancelled playdates last week, but I’m sure they’re legit. A dead aunt. Scarlet fever. Locust plague. Not because some neighborhood moms caught us watching Winter Wipeout through our venetian blinds.

It’s not like anyone’s judging us. Is it?