2010 August » CoupleDumb

Saturdays with Mommy

Aug 312010

The Author of this post is Cheryl Martinez

          My daughter has to spend most of her time with a babysitter. I have to work two jobs to make ends meet at home and it’s really just the two of us. I always want to show her how much I hate being away from her all day and so I promise her one day a week just the two of us. I always have Saturdays off so we spend the entire day out of the house. We set the Security Choice alarm and hop in the car and begin our girls day. The first thing we do is head down to the park and enjoy the weather. It’s usually not long until she wants to go to her favorite part of our lady’s day out which is going to a movie.

          I let her pick any film she would like that isn’t rated over PG-13. Sometimes she fights me on this but I really don’t think that my nine year old is ready for those types of movies. She is already allowed to watch PG-13 movies because it seems like kids are growing up faster and faster each day. She always tries to pick the most grown-up movies she can find because she literally is nine years old going on thirty. We get a giant thing of popcorn to share and we each get a jumbo soda. Sometimes we’ll even catch two movies if she has a difficult time picking her favorite one. I really want her to feel like she’s the only girl in the world on Saturdays.

            The guest author was brought to you by our friends at Security Choice.

What’s your mettle?

Kids and why you can't kill them

Aug 312010

Our Tuesdays are now sponsored by La Scuola school. Please take a look at their site at www.reggioinspired.com and give them a call at (305) 278-9555.

Tuesday we discuss kids and kid stuff. We discuss parenting and how Motherhood and Fatherhood are a relationship unlike many others. We discuss children and their development. But we tend to steer away from talking about when kids deal with adversity. We, as parents, want to believe that hardship is exclusively dealt to and handled by adults. This could not be farther from the truth. We shield our children from the boogey man of reality only to find the bastard snuck in through there window when we weren’t looking. Adversity is a reality for children. The only thing that is left to ask a parent is: What is your mettle?

Lee says: I grew up in a weird household. My parents were both there. They both worked very hard outside the home. My parents would take us (I always refer to us because I was always with my big sister, Aidi) to work or provide a nanny so we were never alone. My parents didn’t let us go outside much and I did served as a chaperone to my sister when she began dating. We were sheltered to the point that my father would tell us to shut our eyes if a couple kissed on the big screen. Let’s forget the fact that the subject matter and rating of said films were probably grossly inappropriate for us (Exorcism?). My parents were micro-managing worrywarts who wanted to control all input of information.

What they couldn’t shield us from was the ups and downs of life. Try as they might, sadness, tragedy, nastiness and fear did reach us, from death to someone trying to break into our home through our bedroom window to family tension to threatened kidnapping by a family member to financial woes …and on and on. My parents had a very weird way of dealing with stress. My parents are on average, anxious people. Stress was normal for them and adversity just amounted to varying levels of stress. The more crap the world threw at them the more they seemed to enjoy it. They worked very hard and also partied hard. It was only until recently that I realized my parents were major workaholics, thrived on drama and had taught me (and my siblings) to do the same.

One thing as parents that we are honor bound to do for our children is teach them resilience. Shielding children from pain is impossible but teaching them how to deal with hurt is not. We need to sit them down and get them use to expressing their feelings. We need to get them use to strategizing and problem solving on their own. If Mom and Dad always fix their messes then they will never figure out this all-important skill-set. We need to allow them to fail, get hurt, make mistakes and flub their recovery. This all builds resilience.

A decade ago, everything was about resilience. We were told to create resilient children and how resilience was the leading reason why some children who lived through trauma were successful and others who had experienced a lesser trauma were not. Resilience is a positive capacity to deal with stress and said capacity is both learned and innate. However, as a parent, you can see how modeling dealing with stress in a healthy manner is paramount to creating a resilient child.

So the bottom line as a parent is what is your mettle? I choose to be something malleable and harden upon certain threats. I know it’s not that kind of mettle but the tensile strength of a parent’s resolve is what matters.

Paul says: On the positive side of dysfunction, I have no clue what adversity is since my parents had a kind of constant background noise of adversity. Job loss and spoiled milk had pretty much the same level in the ‘Oh my God!’ factor. Whether this was brilliant preplanned parenting or not, the end result is that I weather all adversity about the same. I go to the extremely practical with more than a little out-of-body shock.

The milk is bad? By more milk. Dog dead? Get a new dog. O.K., so this is not the best way to deal with stuff. This is why I have Lee to teach them to emote. Between the two of us, Mr. Fluffy gets buried and mourned.

Review of Sugarbabe by Holly Hill

Reviews, Opinions, Rants

Aug 302010

When I was in college back in the early 80s, I had a work-study job that was very boring. The only interesting part of the experience was my boss. Let’s call her Donna. Donna was a woman, probably in her late 50s who was meticulous in her appearance, from her perfect albeit overdone make-up to the bows of her blouses always tied up high on her neck. Her penmanship was exquisite and she did her job with an impressive compulsiveness that garnered her much praise at the university. Donna was perfection. She wasn’t by any means a beauty but occasionally she would let slip that she was not a saint either. Donna shared the occasional story of having her martinis and she would say things like ‘I am old but I am not dead.’

One day, while I watched her eat her lunch, she told me she had a very valuable nugget of wisdom to share with me.

She told me how she had grown to see me as a daughter and wished she had shared this brilliance with them when they were younger. She said to me, ‘Do you know what would be the best job for you?’ I shook my head. ‘Be a mistress.’ My eyes must have bugged out because she explained herself. ‘Look, you find a man who is married. He sets you up in an apartment, gives you an allowance, you only see him a couple of times a week and you can go to school. You would have most days and nights free and you can do your own thing!’ Of course I was appalled and stuttered something about sex and immoral and infidelity. She just smiled and said, ‘Sex is no big deal if you find a nice man and he takes care of you.’ What Donna did not understand is that it would take me 20+ years to understand that. Reading ‘Sugarbabe’ by Holly Hill, just reminded me that all good ideas have a drawback.

          Holly Hill, a pseudonym, is a psychologist who decides to become a ‘Sugarbabe’ looking for a Sugar Daddy. After a failed affair with a rich, married man, where she gave up her career and began to live a rich, lavish lifestyle that only her boyfriend could afford, Holly decides that she could become a professional mistress and takes out an ad, which reads like any other contracted employment. The story is her search for a decent Sugar Daddy and finding that pseudo love does not satisfy her heart.

          Her real life story reads like any other memoir except for the subject matter. I felt a bit voyeuristic at the same time I felt like I was assisting someone with a study and appreciated the frank, descriptive language as she documented emails, interviews and experiences with these men. The book was fascinating as a social experiment and a little hard to read when I would realize that this was not fiction. I often felt as if I was reading someone’s diary, which in some respects, I was. I can only imagine how cathartic this must have been for her to write. Holly Hill’s ‘Sugarbabe’ is a frank account of a woman discovering herself. I highly recommend it.

          I was provided a copy of the book to review. No one has paid me for my opinion and frankly, there hasn’t been enough money printed to buy my opinion.