"Mom, what's a poker face?"

The girls and I have so much fun dancing around the kitchen and family room. We are generally silly, dramatic and crazy, all at once. Of course, a lot of the best dance songs have, at best, questionable lyrics. So the question is, am I being a bad parent by exposing them to Lady Gaga?

Lady Gaga's songs are just fun to dance to and be dramatic with, but how do you explain a bad romance? And when your kindergartener walks around at home singing, "oh, oh, oh, poker face, poker face" you know she is singing that at school, too!

I've toned it down a bit by just playing the "Glee" versions (sorry Lady Gaga - didn't pay for your actual songs), but the words are still there....

I take comfort in the fact that most of my childhood, I had the wrong words to many songs and clearly didn't get a lot of them (songs from "Grease" anyone?) Anyway, what can I do, girls just want to have fun! (fun, fun, girls - now you are singing it too!

Where did Mommy Poot my tooth?

My oldest daughter, who I call Queen Bee, finally lost her top front tooth. It's been loose for weeks, enabling her to do all sorts of gross things with it. We've been calling her snaggle (short for snaggle tooth) for the way she could make it stick out between her lips with no other teeth showing. So this tooth has been the talk of the family for weeks.

Well it finally came out on Tuesday - so night of celebration and exciting tooth fairy planning? Uh, no. That is our night out and the sitter pretty much gets to our house when I get home. So we had about 10 minutes of high-fives, looking at the hole in her mouth, loo

king at the tooth, and then rush, rush rush. Go over dinner with the sitter, get changed, look at homework, feed the dogs and I'm out the door. Didn't think another minute about the tooth. I put it on the top counter, very obvious to anyone over 4 1/2 feet tall. Oops.

When I got home, after the kids were asleep, the babysitter informed me that QueenBee was very upset that she couldn't find her tooth to leave for the tooth fairy. She had looked everywhere and couldn't find it. So now the dilemma - do I put it under her pillow for her, or not? Would she want the dollar, or want the experience of putting it under herself? I chose to wait, figuring I could apologize in the morning and talk up how now Daddy could see it (he had been out of town until Wednesday night).

Well the morning was a disaster. On top of the fact that I have to get everyone up, ready and out the door by myself since my husband was out of town, I had clearly made the wrong choice when it came to the tooth. QueenBee was so upset she wouldn't speak to me (or do anything to get ready) for 30 minutes. Which of course led to frantic scrambling to get out the door, coupled with some yelling. Always good to yell at a kid who is already down, right?

Here is the topper - last night I found a note she had written to the tooth fairy. It had slid down the side of her bed. Here is what it said:

No mom of the year prize here, I tell you.

MA - Mom's Anonymous

Last week, a friend confessed that she loves to read true mom confessions - a place where we can all go to express our anger, fears, screw-ups, and, occasionally, joys.  This seems like a good thing to me - we need a place to go to vent or just see that others think that raising children isn't such a joy all the time.  

Today my mom gave me Anna Quindlen's "Last Word" from this week's Newsweek to read.  It is about parenting and how we all need to stop pretending that being a parent is "easy and intuitive."  She goes on to describe a couple of studies demonstrating that just having parents join a type of parenting support group can actually produce better parenting.  This makes sense, right?  If we keep all of the struggles, fights, and breakdowns to ourselves, they just build up.  As does the guilt.   But, if we talk about how hard parenting is, we will help ourselves, our children, and others.  She called it "AA for mom's:  'Hi, I'm Anna, and I repeatedly ignored demands for juice and then snapped because the whining was driving me insane.'"  Love it!

So, I'm detecting a theme here.  More and more, the conversations I have with friends - close friends that I "confess" things too -  are about how hard being a mom really is.  How it is truly, and insanely, harder than anything else we have done.  And we have all done some pretty amazing things, way (way) back when.  

I recently came across a description of parenting that was both accurate and terrifying.  So, I will share it so you too can nod, agree and then say very loudly - well now what???

"There is no harder job than parenting.  There is no human relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or even not-horrible for any particular child.  It is a job that simply cannot be done right."

(excerpted from Orson Scott Card's Ender in Excile, page 300)