My Olympic Moment: How Do Ordinary Sports Parents Become … Well, Crazy Sports Parents?
Did everyone see this clip, of the parents of U.S. Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman? They are not just feeling what most parent would feel while watching their child compete, at any level: the sense that you hope like hell that she won’t fall/that he’ll save the goal/that she makes the point. No, Mr. and Mrs. Raisman were living their little girl’s every move. Doing the moves for her in their heads, even with their bodies. It was excruciating to watch. I don’t ever want to be that parent. We have a little bit of Olympic fever in our house. Well, …Keep Reading
“I Did It For My Daughter!” I Call Bulls$#t on Rielle Hunter
As you might have gathered from this post I wrote about Octomom, or even this sort of tongue-and-cheek mention of Madonna, I’m not a celeb-worshiper. I like the actors and musicians and others entertainment types, or don’t enjoy them, based on their work, and for no other reason. (I might except some personalities from that “I don’t care so much what you think as a person” divide in some cases; for example, I do admire the work supermodel Christy Turlington does with Every Mother Counts, which aims to increase awareness of maternal and infant health and mortality globally.) Turlington hasn’t …Keep Reading
Other Parents’ Money: It’s Hard to Not Be Judge-y
So, I read this article on Yahoo’s homepage yesterday, about how Nadya Suleman, aka Octomom, spent more than $500 on her hair, while her kids walk around half-dressed and her plumbing doesn’t work (the very fact that I got sucked into the story is why I stopped using my Yahoo email address for anything other than shopping; I go to the page to check my mail and end up reading about how Chelsea Handler hates Angelia Jolie on behalf of her gal-pal Jennifer Aniston, and those are not minutes I get back at the end of my life). In the …Keep Reading
Madonna Needs Me: The Material Girl Wants to be a “Tougher” Mom
So, I heard that Madonna, single mother of four, was on the Today Show the other morning, explaining to Harry Smith that while she believes she’s a pretty strict mother, she obviously can be tougher, given that paparazzi photographs surfaced recently of her 15-year-old daughter, Lourdes, smoking. Madge is not a fan of smoking (good for you, Madge). Here’s the clip from the show. Now, let’s leave aside questions of whether you can lump the famous, wealthy-into-the-stratosphere Madonna in with your average single mother of, well, any number of kids. Certainly, she has plenty of help with her brood. I …Keep Reading
