Move Over George Washington….Mount Rushmore Here I Come

I’m scratching my head wondering why a woman has never been elected president in a country that is all motherhood and apple pie.   The 2016 presidential campaign season is in full swing and the field is mainly crowded with men.   Hillary Clinton is trying to be the first female president again.  She’s  pushing the “Gray Card”  that she’s a grandmother and that she dyes her hair and will continue to do so  in the White House.   But impressive as Hillary Clinton’s hair is, she can’t hold a candle to me.  get-attachment (3)Who else can shoot a basketball behind her back,  breastfeed a  newborn baby,  stand on a skateboard and balance  two SAT review books on her head?   Seriously, have you ever seen Hillary Clinton do that? While I’ll admit I am a “bottle brunette” most of the bottles you’ll find around my house are for the baby.  My slogan will be: “Mothers know best.”  Why should women settle for being added to the ticket  as some sidekick VP candidate  standing with their children  as props at the conventions.

My husband doesn’t like the idea of me running for president.  “Who’ll watch the kids?” he asks glancing up from a football game on television.    He’s worried he might have to.

 

He also points out that women get made mincemeat out of  when they run for national office. “Remember poor  Sarah Palin,” he reminded me, “Katie Couric  grilled her  about the magazines and newspapers  she read before she was tapped to run for vice president.   You haven’t read a magazine or a newspaper since you retired as a journalist.”  It’s true.   My eyes are so out of focus I can’t read anything without glasses and they would give my age away.

My husband warned me that an  interview with Couric would go  something like this:

Couric:  I was curious, what newspapers and magazines have you  read before deciding to run for president?

Me: I’ve read many of them, you know, the ones I find laying around the house.

Couric: What, specifically?

Me: Um, all of them, particularly TV Guide, Cooking Light and Family Circle.

“Those aren’t news magazines, what happens if she asks your position on global warming?” he asked. “What if she wants to know if you think it’s man -made or not?”

“I’ll just tell her it’s due to all the firewood you’ve burned this winter  and that yes it’s man-made and that’s why a woman should be elected President of the United States of America.”

 

 

Tiptoe Through the Turnips: How You Talk to Teens

Fisheye Teenager

There are some things  a parent  really fears hearing  from a teen, like “I’m pregnant,” “I wrecked the car,” or “I got busted.”  Figuring out the mind of a teenager is as easy as trying to shove toothpaste back in the tube. From eye-rolling to back-talking, teens push parents’ buttons.   My buttons have been pushed so many times that they’re broken and I might as well have an “Out of Order” sign on my forehead.  At times, raising a teenager can seem as hopeless as owning a Porsche dealership in Detroit.

I  watched a pundit on a  show today who said the answer is to talk to your teens.   Easier said then done.  The language teens talk  keeps morphing into something else.  I heard my daughter speaking to her friend on her cell phone last night  saying, “DUDE…I just got “chirped.” What am I  doing raising  birds? Getting “chirped,”  in case you’re wondering, is being called out on something.  The “dude” part really bugs me since she was talking to another girl.  Shouldn’t it be “dudette” instead?  But that hasn’t caught on.  “Greycation”  means the  grandparents are coming on vacation.  Moody, snotty, texting teens  can be very snide.  But if you get called “a beast” you haven’t been insulted.  It now means that you’re good at something, not that you’re the Loch Ness monster.

If  you catch them saying “my bad” it means a teen was bad.   Everytime I get a phone call in the middle of the night I fear I’m going to hear something bad.   You just have to suck it up and learn to sleep with one eye open.  Unfortunately, there is no expiration date on being a mother.  When you don’t fall asleep, you sit there with insomnia wondering  why your four children can’t  share a bathroom without arguing, when six kids did on The Brady Bunch and they didn’t even have a toilet?

The age spread between my kids just makes matters worse.  I have had to raise a  baby while dealing with teens.  I’ve  had to listen to baby talk of  goo-goo, gaa-gaa where I don’t have a clue what my child is saying, and at the same time  attitude and middle school drama from a teen daughter.  “It’s not troll Mom, it’s TROLLING!” the baby who is now a tween herself sharply corrects me referring to a new phenomenon on the internet where teens now send troll faces to their friends as a prank.  When I ask for a better explanation, I get sassed.  “Get over yourself Mom, you don’t know anything,” she informs me instead of explaining.  When she doesn’t want to practice her viola for orchestra she calls it “dorkestra.”

I’ve lived through this teen stage.  There is nothing that can surprise me.  You have to figure out what their words mean or you get left behind.  Teens believe that their friends are hip and that parents are as outdated as a 1964 Ford Thunderbird Convertible collecting dust in the garage.

As a parent, you barely feel you’ve conquered  thumb-sucking, cleaned out the last Barbie doll with a missing  head from the toy chest, or finished your baby albums when your kids start growing up and testing you.  It’s starts with the “Terrible Twos” with “NO!”  and you just fast forward to the “Terribly Rotten Teens” with “NO!”  “I HATE YOU!” “YOUR THE WORST MOTHER EVER!”   I even got “chirped” by one of my kids last night. At the rate I’m going, it looks like this mother hen will serve worms for dinner tonight.

Here is an article and a post that I found  helpful when I couldn’t pry any more words out of my kids.  Check them out:

20 Examples of Slang Language – Your Dictionary

23 Words Teenagers Love To Use and What They Really Mean – Sam Stryker, BuzzFeed

Is anyone else having trouble talking to teens?  Do you know of a new way a word is being used?   What about punk or chump? I’d like to hear from you!!