I left out one scene from yesterday's tale because it didn�t seem to quite fit.

The first time I offered to cook him dinner, he arrived bearing I bouquet of irises and a package of Twinkies. I was amazed by the irises � my favorite flower, a fact I had never mentioned to him. But the Twinkies were a witty rejoinder to a previous conversation, one I'd ended by making a mock case that Twinkies were the perfect food � they had cake and cream and they could not be destroyed.

The Twinkies remained as the centerpiece on my kitchen table for months, a reminder of the night when I�d made apple pie for the first time without my mother. They stayed even after the break-up until one day, during what we now refer to as "the hiatus," I came home to find one of the cats had torn it to pieces. Like so many things about us, it felt like an omen. I had to remove their enchantment as I swept them into the trash. I was not going to let expired snack cakes control my future.

* * * * *

Moving on, RS sent me a link to a story describing the fallout from an incendiary column in a London paper written by a mother who "confessed" to being bored by her children.

I am feeling a little weary of such articles, designed to incite riot over something that is so lacking in riotousness. I don't know a single parent who isn't bored by their children and most will admit it openly. It's not even something that most are ashamed of. The fact is, if you are an adult and you're spending all of your time with people decades younger than you, you will, in all likelihood, be bored some of the time. So what?

Being bored doesn't make you a bad parent. What troubles me, though, is that such statements seem to imply that children are created for our entertainment. That may be true in the short term -- the process is not entirely without its merits -- but really, are our children supposed to entertain us?

Of course, our children -- or my kid, at least -- are definitely under the impression that we are here to entertain them. So perhaps turnabout is fair play. And I'm pretty sure I bore AJ a lot of the time too. When he hears his friend outside playing, he will run away from me so fast that he leaves a jet trail.

The article in the above link proposes (as a straw man that she later sends up in flames) two kinds of mothers, labeled with cutesy acronyms (wow, THAT'S never been done before�). There are SMUMs � Smart Uninvolved Middle-class Mothers; and SCAMs � Smart, Child-centered Active Moms. Nope, no value judgements here.

The thing is, the SCAMs are described as mothers so child-centered as to raise the level to a pathology. We probably all know people we suspect might be like this. Nicole Hollander in her cartoon strip Sylvia (is that still around?) had a character like this called The Woman Who Does Everything More Beautifully Than You. These are the women who will move to the town where their kids go to college like Gen. MacArthur's mother. But I don�t think these people really exist. And if they do, I'm pretty sure they're completely insane in a sparkling-grin-plastered-to-the-face kind of way.

Leave out the U part of SMUMs and they don't sound bad at all. Try defining that U and that's where the debate is. What is uninvolved, really? Does it mean I let my kid play in his room instead of driving him between piano lessons and soccer practice and volunteer work and kindergarten? Is that so bad? Does it mean that I check my email while he's watching Bambi for the 35th time? Because I do that a lot. But I find it hard to believe that I'm uninvolved. Read the descriptions of SMUMs and they don't sound so uninvolved either. It's not like I�m turning the kid loose to be raised by wolves. Moreover, some of us think that kids need time to figure out their own priorities. Kids are less self-sufficient than they used to be. They are used to be handed schedules and information. They are used to being entertained. In the long run, that does them no good. Overscheduling teaches our kids to be followers, not leaders; or perhaps entertained rather than entertainers. So what's one person's bad mommy is another person's parenting style. I'm tired of everyone telling me what to do.

And if I might point out another problem with this scenario, where are the dad�s in all this? They are missing. Apparently, they don't count. When the Daddy Wars book comes out, let me know. That's a book I might read.

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