finslippy

Competitive parenting

Want to see my September column in Redbook? Say no more.

When it comes to parenting — and most everything else — I'm cursed with both a competitive streak and terminal laziness. I deeply want to excel, but I'd rather not work at it. I'd prefer that my natural skills and charm catapult me to the top. That competitive mind-set kicked into high gear when I got pregnant. I compared myself with every pregnant woman I could find. I found it difficult, however, to figure out if I was ahead. How do you measure pregnancy success? Degree of rosy glow? Lowest number of stretch marks? To the extent that I could quantify my superiority, I found that instead of winning, I seemed to not even be placing. I spied a beaming pregnant woman in the bookstore, and she didn't have any lunch-related stains on her shirt. While taking a waddling stroll, I spotted a woman with what appeared to be a third trimester belly, and she was jogging. Jogging!

The rest is here.

This is my last column for Redbook. There's a new editor-in-chief, you see, and she's shaking things up. That's what she's there to do! If you have any opinion on that, there's a comment section over there. Is all I'm saying.

Updated to add: Whoa, readers of mine! Although my column is ending, I'll still be working with Redbook in the future, and I happen to be quite fond of my editors there. I appreciate the supportive comments on their site, but there's no need to threaten or abuse them. Also, remind me to stay in your good graces. Phew.

Here's a story about the bathroom.

Yesterday I had a business lunch at a fancy lunch place, which, as we all know, is where you go when you need to business in the middle of the day. First thing I did when I got there, after greeting my date in the work-appropriate manner (passionate frenching) was visit the bathroom. I had just emerged from the subway, and there is no way, after riding the subway, I can sit and eat anything until I scour myself from the elbows down. Maybe also the face. Maybe my face touched something. I can't be 100% sure it didn't.

Before I've even entered a restaurant, I fret over the location of the bathroom. Restaurants enjoy hiding their restrooms so that you have to wander about, sometimes finding yourself in the kitchen before someone sets you straight. This is how the restaurant staff gets back at you for making them feed you. I hate this. I hate walking around with that look on my face. That "I'm acting as I know exactly where I'm going, and I'm about to march straight into a supply closet" look. And then there are the places that can't just indicate "Men" and "Women" on their separate bathroom doors. They have to get cute about it. And you standing in front of the two doors, wondering, "Damn it all, am I a 'Buckaroo' or a 'Cowpoke'?"

Fortunately, my initial worry was alleviated right off the bat. Before I had even sat down, the waitress saw my haunted I Touched Subway expression and pointed me toward the restrooms. She was clearly new at her job, and hadn't learned to loathe us.

The bathroom door had a W on it, which I swear I hesitated about for half a second. "Is that 'Women,' or 'Whoa, This Room's for Dudes'?" I wondered. This was a classy establishment, however, so I was fairly confident in my decision as I strode in.

Here's what happened next. As I was closing the door to one of the stalls, I got my shoe stuck underneath it. I looked down at the shoe and the stall door and tried to figure out how I had managed to wedge my foot in such a painful manner, and I pulled on the door, hard, which is when it came loose and slammed into the front of my skull. I then fell back, where the toilet was, and had to fling both arms out to brace myself against the sides of the stall. Which caused my leather-soled flats to slide on the tiled floor, just enough that I landed, hard, right on the toilet seat. This all happened in a few seconds. WEDGE-SLAM-FALL-BRACE-WHOOPS-THUD. It was fantastic. My head hurt a lot.

I was inexpressibly thankful that I was alone, and no one had witnessed this ludicrous display. (Nor did anyone see me attempt to close the door again, once I had recovered, and find that the door wouldn't latch, and then go to the next stall, and then the next, before realizing the mechanism that latched the door was a turn-y thing and not a pull-y whatsit. I blame the head trauma for this.)

I swore no one would ever know of my embarrassing episode, so naturally I immediately told my lunch date. And then I got home and told Scott and Henry. And now I am telling you.

Coming out

I’ve been dishonest with you all for far, far too long. I can’t lie any longer.

Are you sitting down? You’re probably sitting down. If you’re not, you should sit down. Or lie down, with your legs slightly elevated. How and where you recline is entirely your call. I’m just saying, if you’re standing when you read the shocking truth I am about to reveal to you, I will not be liable for whatever happens next.

It’s about my hair. The color it is now? It’s ... well. It’s not real, per se. And by “per se,” I mean “at all.” It is not at all real.

My hair started to turn gray when I was in high school. I was not surprised, as the Bradley family has a long, illustrious history of premature graying. I didn’t mind the gray hair all that much. It wasn’t until my twenties that it occurred to me to color it away. Actually it didn’t occur to me at all—it occurred to my hair stylist, who insisted I “do something” about all the gray. It was making me look “mousy,” she declared.

I did not want to look mousy. Does anyone?

So I started coloring, and haven’t stopped, and now it’s been 15 years of my Adventures in Hair Color. I’ve gone from brown to reddish-brown to brownish-red, with a couple of horrifying forays into something approaching blonde. It never occurred to me, not once, to stop. The thing is, once you start coloring, you’re stuck. Hair color that’s growing out looks awful. Especially when the hair that’s growing out has morphed from silver-flecked brown to brown-flecked silver.

Because my hair grows unusually quickly (about an inch a month) and because no matter what I do, my hair color fades quickly, I have about a two-week window during which I actually like the way the color looks. For the first week, my hair color is so dark that my face looks like I have an awful virus; then it looks pretty good; then my roots begin to show; then all of a sudden my hair has turned sort of reddish-orange and I have gray temples and I count the days until my next hair appointment.

This is madness. Expensive madness. Once I realized that hair color from a box didn’t look anywhere near as decent as getting it professionally done, I’ve been spending upwards of $100 a month on hair color. That’s more than I spend on my gym.

All of which is why I’m not doing it anymore. As of my last coloring appointment (July 25th), I’m done. I have no idea what it’s going to look like. It could look horrific. It could make me look ten years older. I don't care. I want to see what’s under there. I need to find out what I look like. And I need to be okay with it.

I asked Henry what he thought about me letting my hair go gray. “I don’t know, Mom,” he said. “You might look like…”

I waited for him to say it: An old lady.

“…a punk rocker,” he finished.

That’s a little optimistic, but I’ll take it.

An unpleasant encounter

I am lucky to have come across merely a few dangerously unstable people in my life. Here is one of them.

It was 1996, it was the end of the workday, and I was exiting the office of my Web 1.0 job. I was the managing editor of a webzine. We called them webzines, sadly. It was the kind of webzine that purposely misspelled words, and interviewed super-hip bands I had never heard of. I was 27, but I already felt too old to work there. One of my fellow editors was still in college. That seemed about right. During my first pitch meeting I mentioned this thing I heard about called “Burning Man.” It was new to me, but from the looks on everyone’s faces, I might as well have suggested we write about Jewel. The editor-in-chief rolled her eyes and I knew I would never recover from that faux pas, or any of the trillion others I would commit because I had no idea what was cool. I spent most of my days at the webzine trying to look like I understood what everyone was talking about, or cringing at all the ironic typos.

We were housed in a small, narrow office building just north of Houston Street (of course), the kind which is mostly occupied by business that employ leggy German models (as one does). Just standing in the elevator among all those cheekbones was enough to destroy any last shreds of self-confidence I had left by the end of the day. I was rushing out of the elevator on the day in question when I saw a woman just outside the door, studying the directory. She was a handsome lady—in her late forties or fifties, I’d say, blonde and immaculate, and let’s just all picture Martha Stewart, because I would swear that’s who it was. Although I’m sure it wasn’t. I’m 83% sure.

While she studied the directory, she was blocking the exit. I was sure she saw me, and anyway in order to leave I had to hit a red button that emitted a piercing beep when the door unlatched. You could not help but hear this when you were outside. It deafened anyone within a block radius. I assumed, therefore, that when I hit the button she would look up and move. I waved at her, but she kept gazing at the directory. The pride of Deutschland was lined up behind me. I hit the button, paused, and slowly opened the door. I opened it a few inches so I could say “excuse me,” but before I could say anything I saw that she was bending over, like she was examining something on the ground.

“Oh my God,” she gasped. “Oh God.” She was clutching her ankle. Which, it immediately became clear, I had hit with the door. Now, because I hadn’t opened the door so much as gently nudged it forward, I could only imagine that she had some sort of injury that I had aggravated, with my door-opening. Still, I felt terrible. My frantic need to get some distance from the building had caused me to injure an innocent bystander.

I began to apologize. A lot. What else could I do? I apologized and apologized. She wouldn’t acknowledge me. Her hands were trembling. I shuffled aside to let the assorted beautiful people out. They were unaffected by our non-leggy psychodrama and they glided down the sidewalk, leaving me alone, standing behind Martha Stewart. She was hissing some stuff. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know what she was hissing.

“I’m really sorry,” I repeated. “Can I get you something? Oh dear. I guess you didn’t hear the alarm go off, huh?”

This, it turned out, was the wrong thing to say. When you strike a person, accidentally or not, you do not imply that it was in fact their fault. Especially if, say, they’re looking for a reason to come unglued.

“You mhurrhurr,” she muttered, and I gingerly touched her shoulder to ask her if I should get her some ice. And then I was on the ground.

I did not expect this turn of events. Even today, I’m not clear on how I got down there. She must have knocked me down, but all I can recall is how confused I was. I was up there and now I am down here. Well.

What happened next occurred in a matter of seconds. Martha Stewart screamed “You little twit. Look at what you did. Look at what you did.” And every time she said “you did,” she thrust her foot toward me, only it was into me, so actually she was kicking me, right around the knee area.

I was trying to figure out if she was kicking me with the injured foot or putting all her weight on the injured foot in order to kick me--because after all, if you have an injury, you should really wait a few days before you use that body part as a weapon—when the people arrived. Almost immediately a crowd had gathered. This is the wonderful thing about New York City. People will not hesitate to step into the middle of any fight—at least, when the involved parties are unarmed, female, and one of them is wearing an expensive pantsuit.

“She assaulted me,” Martha Stewart screeched. She really seemed to mean it. I assaulted her! Could it be true? Was I carrying so much pent-up rage throughout my day that I had to unleash it on someone’s ankle?

But before anyone could even turn to me to get my side of the story, my victim headed off (without a limp) down the street, shrugging people off of her, screaming expletives until she could no longer be seen.

And what did I do? I ran the hell away (in the other direction). People were looking to me for clarification, but more than anything, I wanted to escape. I got on the subway and tried to make sense of it, but it was like trying to decipher the angry rantings of a paranoiac. I hit a lady and she yelled and then I was on the ground and kick run what? I told the story to Scott, and maybe a friend or two, and then stopped. It was not a fun story to tell. It exhausted and confused me. Then there was the secret conviction that it was actually my fault. Why hadn’t I waited a second longer before opening the door? Why had I mentioned the alarm?

I probably shouldn’t add that I spent weeks unable to sleep because I was frantically recreating the incident so that I said the right thing and she didn’t call me names. Fortunately I was in therapy at the time. Not enough therapy, I suspect. At any rate, I am happy to report that I no longer believe I was the responsible party. Mostly. I’ve made some real progress!

I’m not even sure why I’m telling you this story now, 14 years later. I guess because I still think about it. I wonder about that lady. What did she think actually occurred? Did she tell her friends over cocktails about the young woman wearing crushed velvet and platform shoes who brutalized her foot? Or did she slow down after a few blocks, realize she wasn’t limping, and think, “Dear me, I seem to have overreacted again”? Maybe I can get on her show someday, and ask her.

Here are words I wrote elsewhere

Did you forget to read my August Redbook column? Hmm.

I think you should know that while searching the Redbook site for my latest essay, I saw the headline "What to Do with Difficult Kids," and immediately clicked on it because I thought I might find helpful advice. (Not that Henry is "difficult," per se, but let's just say that our waking hours have become delightfully challenging.)

You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only did this column have zero advice, it was also written by me. I'm guessing the good people at Redbook are trying to bring in a little search-engine traffic, with that title. Which means I am certainly not going to click on their "Multiple Orgasm Technique" article because it's probably a recipe for cobbler. Although, come to think of it, I do enjoy a cobbler.

I especially enjoy multiple cobblers.

When you're in New York City, the best place by far to take kids is the American Museum of Natural History. Okay, maybe our kids might prefer one of those massive toy stores with animatronic characters that sing and pelt you with candy, but those establishments tend to cause adult brains to liquefy and dribble out through their ear canals. The natural-history museum is one of the few places our kids enjoy that can keep our brains nice and firm. Everybody wins!

I couldn't wait to tell Henry the plan. He would be out of his mind with joy. The last time we were at the museum, about a year before, he'd wheeled from one exhibit to the next, panting "Can I touch the giant meteorite?" and "Let's see the space show again!" and "Is that a real whale hanging up there on the ceiling? Can it fall down on us?" He had to be dragged out at the end of the day. If you're ever visiting the museum, you can still see little-boy claw marks across the floor leading out of Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall.

The next morning I sprung the news of our upcoming excursion on him as he dug into his granola. I waited for him to look up and beam at me.

Instead he glowered down at his cereal. "That place?!" he said. "Ugh. Bor-ing."

Here are the rest of the words. You may comment there, or, hell, comment here. Or don't comment at all. No matter what you decide, I will love you. I will love you so hard.