Mean Moms Rule: The Blog
Observations on parenting in the tween and teen years.
This blog was born in 2009 as Confessions of a Mean Mommy, and gave rise to the book you see over on the right. Since I began blogging, my sons morphed from 5- and 7-year olds who looked to me for just about everything, to 11- and 13-year olds who have perfected their eye rolls and have one foot out the door. This parenting thing just got real.
Thoughts on Becoming a Middle-Aged Mom
So, in a little over 10 days (13 to be exact, and yes, I just counted on my desk calendar), I’m turning 44. This number makes me feel a little weird. A little oogie. (My mother, as point of comparison, became a grandmother at 44. Whoa.) Indulge me, but I’m feeling a little old. Yes, […]
Can We Lay Off Mom-Judging Now? Please?
So just today I got involved in an online discussion about a snippet — seriously, just a snippet — of an essay, presumably written by a writer-mom, in which the mom breezily admits that she wishes the singing-and-clapping of a typical mother-child music-and-movement class was done without her participation. She’d rather, she wrote, be sitting […]
You Can’t Always Get (The Kid) That You Want
Yesterday afternoon, as I was quietly melting away in the 90-degree heat on the edge of the soccer field, watching (well, sorta watching) my son Daniel’s practice, I started chatting with another mother, whose son was in D’s preschool class. We were just having one of those idle, “aren’t they getting so big” back-and-forth things, […]
Mean Mom’s Question Time: How Much Do You Meddle in Your Kids’ Friendships?
Just this weekend, I was talking to my sister, who had recently attended a mini-reunion of her high school class. She told me she talked to a girl who used to live around the corner from us, whose older brother, Charlie, was The Tormenter of the Bus Stop. (I recall that I actually mentioned our […]
On the Day After Mother’s Day: Trust Your Gut, Moms!
As readers can tell by perusing my last post, I’m not on board with junking up emotions surrounding motherhood with borrowed words or treacly sentiment. I’m all about the reality, kiddos. I’ve also never been, since becoming a mom, about abandoning my own hard-won instincts in order to follow any crowd into a place that […]
Let’s Tell The Truth About Mother’s Day
Sigh. Facebook is at it again. well, not Facebook itself, but the community of FBers. As I type, with a day and a half until Mother’s Day descends upon us again, one of those “copy and paste this and put it in your status line if you’re a Mom!” thingies is virusing its way around. […]
Mean Mom’s Question Time: How Much TV Do Your Kids Watch?
Starting this week (and hopefully continuing because it turns out to be wildly successful!), I’m instituting Mean Mom’s Question Time. Because I got to thinking: I can write (and write, and write, and write), but I’d rather discuss sometimes. So. Here’s the topic for Week One of Mean Mom’s Question Time: How much TV do […]
Why I Love Daycare
I’m a big fan of daycare. Not just childcare (as in, having someone other than a parent taking care of a baby or child), but daycare. My journey, as a working mother, to daycare, took me a year and a half and five nannies. Our first nanny, Maggie, was found only after I let go […]
Having Faith: The Spiritual Education of Mommy, Part II
I was thinking a couple of weeks ago about a post I wrote back in November, which for reasons I didn’t articulate at the time, I titled Having Faith: The Spiritual Education of Mommy, Part I. Why Part I? At the time I typed without thinking about it. I must have figured I’d have more […]
Bullies, Bad Boys and Mean Girls: When Do Parents Get The Blame?
Like any parent, I’m appalled and saddened and horrified in equal measure when I hear stories like the one about Phoebe Prince, the Irish girl who, after moving with her family to South Hadley, Massachusetts, was so mercilessly teased–both in the halls of her high school and online–that she committed suicide. Like any parent, I […]
My name is Denise, and I’m a Mean Mom.
That’s the very first line of my book, Mean Moms Rule. Let me explain the “mean” for you, in case you were under the impression that I never hug my boys (I possibly do this too much, as evidenced by the fact that they routinely try to wiggle away from my embraces and especially my sloppy kisses, the urchins), or that I advocate for children to work in coal mines (it’s illegal! Plus, no coal mines in my area!). I say “mean” because my approach often bucks the prevailing parenting trend, which you could call helicopter-y or indulgent (I prefer my own technical term, “squishy”). It’s mean because it’s not easy. Because it’s focused on the end game, not the here-and-now (and anyone who has kids’ll tell you, they are all about the here and now).
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