To my lovely family,

It has come to my attention that you all have a major concern about drought in the area. Or that you all suffer swift and devastating short-term memory loss immediately after having evacuated your bladders and/or bowels. Or worse, that you believe the horrible Toilet Monster — a Kindestod-type character that could have come straight out of the Grimm brothers had indoor plumbing been their contemporary — will rear up and visit havoc upon our household should you part with your bodily waste.

Well, as a representative of the management in this establishment, I am here to confidently assure you that you can rejoice and rest easy: Nothing bad will happen should you choose to flush the toilet after using it.

Seriously, trust me on this.

I know, I know: It can be a bit intimidating to push that handle, what with the barely audible noise it makes as it performs its essential function. It can be difficult to say good-bye to a substance to which you have absolutely no emotional attachment.

But believe me, it’s better in the long run.

And despite what you seem to think, I will NOT be angry at you if you flush. Let’s just clarify that right now. Nothing would delight me more than to use a toilet that hasn’t already been “marked,” or to live in a house that doesn’t have the vague and constant whiff of a port-a-potty.

While we’re on the topic of actions that would not make me angry, let me add that there is absolutely nothing wrong with bringing your used dishes to the sink. It’s crazy but true. The kitchen table will not suddenly collapse should it be freed of its burden. After all, it’s the legs that keep it standing, not the peanut butter smeared, crumb littered plates resting on its surface.

The sink will not open up and swallow you whole should you choose to place your dirty dishes therein. The sink LOVES dirty dishes. In fact, you can hear it sobbing gently every night after I have whisked the dirty dishes from its maw and deposited them in the dishwasher to be rocked and scrubbed to sleep.

It misses those dishes. Don’t make it sadder than it needs to be.

Also, every time you grab my shirt and use it as a handkerchief and/or hand towel, my soul dies a little bit. Just so you know.

If we’re out of something that you use but I don’t — shredded wheat, blue cheese, chia seeds — it is perfectly acceptable to tell me. It would not make me feel inadequate to find out I didn’t guess this. In fact, I would prefer to know you need more of a certain item BEFORE I go to the store than to hear you ask if I picked up said item AFTER I get home. As efficient as it would be for me to perform a complete inventory of the fridge, freezer and cupboard every single time I go to the grocery store, I don’t. Instead I rely on the GROCERY LIST I place IN PLAIN SIGHT on the KITCHEN COUNTER to determine what we need. No special password is required to make entries on this list. Simply pick up the giant novelty pen with feathers on top for easy location and jot away.

Speaking of food, if you are standing in front of the fridge, door open, head inserted, looking for something, and I am engaged in an activity in a different room or on a different floor of the house, you will probably have better luck locating said item than I will. Contrary to popular belief, being born without man junk does not give one a photographic memory or the ability to recall at will the location of every item in the fridge, freezer, pantry or someone else’s sock drawer with pinpoint accuracy.

At the very least, try moving some items around and looking for longer than 10 seconds before asking me to solve the Mystery of the Missing Mustard while I am upstairs attempting to unclog a toilet that hasn’t been flushed in 24 hours.

And so help me, if you use the last of the mustard, don’t put “Mustard” on the list and then ask if we are out of mustard, I will cut you.

Don’t get me wrong family, I love you. Usually. It is only by having frank discussions about these things that we will keep our sanity. Or what passes for it.

1. Notice an ad for a live theater production aimed at children.
2. Feel immediate guilt. You don’t do cultural stuff like this nearly as much as you should and your children need to, like, get intellectualized and stuff. Also, what else are you going to do on a Sunday afternoon at 1 p.m.?
3. Visit the show’s website. Read testimonials from parents about how amaze balls the production was. Doubt that little Connor instantly became a math prodigy after watching dinosaur puppets, but still reckon the show might kill a few hours.
4. Click on the “Buy Tickets” button.
5. Recover from aneurysm induced by ticket prices and scroll down, looking for seats that won’t cost the equivalent of a new set of tires.
6. Discover that the only somewhat affordable seats will place you in the back of the highest balcony or so far to the left or right of the stage you will have an obstructed view. Ponder if your children will even notice.
7. Feel immediate guilt and scroll back up until you find a happy medium. Back row of the orchestra section is perfectly acceptable.
8. Click on tickets. When the computer asks if you want to donate money so an underprivileged child can go see the production automatically click on “Yes.” Wonder if there’s any way you could actually take the underprivileged child yourself, since you can already tell by the fact you are spending so much money that your children will hate the show.
9. Recover from second aneurysm induced by final total. Taxes and “occupancy fees” — whatever the hell those are — have added an extra $50. Wonder if it’s worth it.
10. Feel immediate guilt. You caught your youngest trying to stick a pencil in the cat’s ear the other day. You need to get these kids some culture, stat.
11. Buy the tickets.
12. Feel immediate guilt for spending so much money.
13. Tell your spouse about the event but do it in code so the children don’t pick up on it. Children are programmed to think everything is about to start five minutes after they learn about it, so if you mention it now they will lose their s—t and ask you every hour when the show starts. Even if you say “Next April,” they will persist.
14. The day of the event, 10 minutes before you are scheduled to leave, tell your children about the show. Your children will announce they don’t want to go, no matter how well you play up the event in question. (“It features live dinosaurs!” “I hate dinosaurs.” “You love them.” “I’d rather just stay here.” “And do what?” “Roll around on this exercise ball.” “It’s LIVE motherf—king dinosaurs!”)
15. Force march everyone to the car and then into the theater.
16. Look around the audience and wonder where the underprivileged kids are. These children all look distinctly privileged (yours included). Note that some of the little girls are wearing outfits that cost more than your monthly car payment.
17. Explain to the children why you aren’t sitting closer to the stage.
18. Enjoy the first 10 minutes of the show, when the puppeteers bring out baby dinosaurs. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done.
19. Explain to your children that, even though they have raised their hands whenever the narrator asks for volunteers, it doesn’t mean they will get the chance to go onstage.
20. Comfort your children when a giant prehistoric dragonfly puppet gets too close to them.
21. Point out the legs of the puppeteer moving the triceratops that just lumbered onstage, because it is kinda big and your kids are starting to lose their s—t.
22. Clutch your screaming, sobbing children and escort them to the exit when the giant T-Rex puppet crashes through the scenery and roars at the crowd, prompting roughly half of the audience to erupt in terrified tears and more than a few patrons to soil themselves.
23. Wonder how the show’s producers sleep at night knowing that they have literally scared the crap out of a bunch of toddlers.
24. Vow not to try another trip to the theater for a long time.
25. Smack your forehead when your son spies a poster in the lobby for the theater’s upcoming double bill Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci and asks, “Can we go see this?”
26. Remind him that he called your Gilbert and Sullivan CDs “garbage” and explain that real opera is a million times worse.
27. Feel immediate guilt for dissing opera.
28. Go home and let your children roll around on an exercise ball.

By now you’ve probably seen the clip shared ‘round the world of Professor Robert Kelly being interrupted mid-Skype interview with the BBC by his two adorable children:

Kelly, an associate professor of international relations at South Korea’s Pusan National University, has been commended for keeping his cool during the whole affair. He neither broke contact with the camera nor smacked the child with a brick, as some might have done. The children have been praised for being so darn freaking cute.

But I think we are missing the true hero of this entire episode and that is the frantic mother who comes slamming into the room and hustles the kids out with the speed and dexterity of a special ops commando.

This moment, now forever cemented into our hearts and YouTube viewing histories, is pure gold because it perfectly and silently sums up parenthood.

While the rest of the world is busy being articulate, well-groomed and capable of discussing weighty matters such as the geopolitical ramifications of leadership change in South Korea, parents are a bunch of lumbering, frantic maniacs scrambling about on what amounts to a never-ending suicide watch over creatures who have the speed and determination of pumas but the common sense of dog turds.

(At least one commentator has already described the scene as the “patriarchy in a nutshell,” but honestly, I can just as easily see a mother in the interview seat while a beleaguered dad scampers after the tiny offenders in the background.)

Any parent watching that scene can hear her inner monologue:

“S—t, s—t, s—t! I turn my back for one minute to clean up the cat barf the toddler was using to finger paint the baby and she runs in and interrupts what was probably the most important analysis to take place of Park Geunhye’s ousting EVER. Crap, crap. Am I still in the shot? I’m still in the f—king shot. Just. Gotta. Get. This. Door. Shut.”

This woman is a maternal goddess in my book. Some might deduct points for the fact she “let” the kids slip past her to get into Dad’s interview den, but in my opinion those people are heartless douche bags who can go eff themselves.

Kids are slippery, stealthy, crafty little Houdinis at that age. For all we know that adorable toddler hamming it up over Dad’s left shoulder just undid five “child-proof” locks and drugged the dog before creeping into that room.

The fact that Mom caught them in the act at all makes her a g-dd—n hero, in my opinion. My kids would have managed to pop the top on a value-sized bottle of aspirin and waggle their naked butts at the camera before I caught on that they weren’t, in fact, watching Backyardigans in the living room like I thought.

Hell, even her form is impressive. The speed that sends her practically sliding across the floor, the skill that allows her to corral the toddler and yank the baby’s walker out of the shot, the physical strength that allows her to crawl practically combat style back to the door to yank it shut?

If retrieving interview-destroying little people from Dad’s study were an Olympic sport, this woman would win mad gold, y’all.

What is even more impressive is that she accomplished it on four hours sleep, tops. She has the deadly toddler-baby combo on her hands, which means she is on call round-the-clock, dealing with the demands of two insatiable — but adorable — little maniacs.

Pair that with the fact that Dad was probably sweating bullets over his appearance on the BBC, she’d probably been on high alert all morning. No doubt she helped him pick out his suit, gave him a pep talk, tidied the bed and neatly stacked the books in the background — all without having showered or eaten — before assuming kid duty so Dad could get his brain on in a live international broadcast.

Even if she is, as some have suggested, a nanny, she is AWESOME. I adore her. If I ever get to meet her I’m buying her the biggest box of Chardonnay Rite Aid sells.

“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
-The Princess Bride

Parents need to print out the above quotation and staple it to their foreheads. Because we repeatedly fall for marketing pitches that convince us certain products will make our existence as parents easier. They never do.

Here are five that have earned my seal of disapproval:

1. Nighttime diapers claiming not to resemble diapers

Produced for older children who are still having trouble mastering overnight bladder control — and there’s no shame in that — nearly every brand on the market claims to “look and feel like real underwear!” This is presumably so kids can go to sleepovers and not feel embarrassed.

It would work but for one simple reason: the second urine hits this diaper-in-disguise, it swells up like a marshmallow in a microwave. Unless your kid can convince his pals he has a ripcord in his drawers that he pulled in the middle of the night (“Got ‘em on Amazon”), everyone’s going to know he or she wet the bed.

2. Any lotion/cream/oil/belly balm that guarantees it can “reduce the appearance of stretch marks.”

Unless you’ve won the genetic lottery, your postpartum stomach will forever resemble the jowls of a depressed geriatric.

You want to know what reduces the appearance of stretch marks? Clothes.

Perhaps the marketing folks could start exploiting that. Cotton could go from being “The fabric of our lives” to “The fabric that lets you forget you can grasp a section of your stomach in your hands and pull six inches in any direction.”

3. “No more tears” shampoo

F—k you, Johnson and Johnson. Just. F—k. You.

4. Training pants that claim to make potty training easy.

You know what makes potty training easy? Having a kid who wants to be potty trained. All training pants do is make it easier for your child to pull down her pants and pee on the sofa while you’re in the other room.

5. Thermometers that claim to work.

Thermometers, whether of the forehead-swiping, ear-sticking, or tongue-tucking variety are presumably meant to give us a reliable approximation of our child’s temperature EVERY TIME WE USE THEM. This way we know whether to hit the “Oh crap!” panic button and call the doctor.

But unless you buy the $700 hospital-grade version, every parent will at one point be awake in the middle of the night with a feverish, sweating child and a thermometer that gives the repeated and cheerful reading of “97.5!”

If manufacturers really wanted to do parents a favor, they would mass-market the following products:

-A mute button. I’m kidding. Unless the technology already exists.

-A gage that shows how full your children’s bladders are since they can’t be trusted to relate these things reliably themselves.

-Five extra arms. One with a kung fu grip.

-A device that delivers controlled doses of chardonnay into your blood stream with the push of a button.

-A pill that immediately erases whatever dumb kids’ song that gets stuck in your head. (Get bent, Fresh Beat Band.)

You know when you’re going through a tough time and people say, “You’ll laugh about this one day”?

I’m kinda having one of those moments right now.

My last post here was about my daughter undergoing invasive scans to check the size of her cancerous tumors. Implied in that was all the pain this child has suffered since she was diagnosed with neuroblastoma as a baby, from the surgeries to the debilitating rounds of chemotherapy, the nights in the ER with sudden fevers to the non-stop vomiting and diarrhea.

So you can imagine something minor would leave her primary caregiver, me, completely unfazed.

Not even close.

Yesterday afternoon, when the same surviving cancer rock star daughter was closing the car door, she managed to trap her pinky in it.  As in, the door was ALL THE WAY SHUT, and she was shrieking and trying to pull her hand out.

And what did I, mother of a cancer patient, veteran of some seriously scary s—t do? I freaked the f—k out.

“NO!!!!!” I screamed, rushing to her and yanking the door open. Her pinky was slightly bent. And purple. Not good signs, but nothing major, at least compared to the botched biopsy they did on her skull five years ago.

“My baby! My baby!” I wailed, completely out of proportion to the situation at hand, hugging her tight.

“Jack!” I yelled to my son. “Get in the car, we’re going to the hospital.”

A skilled bystander in many a medical crisis, my son said, “Yay! Can I bring my iPad?”

Let me tell you I drove like I was heading to the Hazzard County line, Roscoe P. Coltrane in hot pursuit.

“Move! Please, move!” I called out to absolutely no one who could hear me. “This is an emergency.”

“Mom, you forgot the radio,” my son reminded me.

I punched the dial distractedly.

“No, not this song.”

In a Linda Blair voice I shouted, “I can’t change it, I’m driving! Your sister is in terrible pain!”

He glanced over at her.

“She looks fine to me.”

In truth she did. She had calmed down a lot and just sat sobbing quietly.

This didn’t stop me from screeching into the emergency room parking lot practically on two wheels, scooping my daughter up and running for the entrance.

“Mom! Wait for me!” my son called.

As always, the ER receptionists were calm and collected, which always drives me crazy. My daughter was quickly triaged and brought back for an X-ray.

“No shots?” my daughter asked everyone we encountered, from the receptionist to the janitor to a woman sitting with her sick baby in the waiting room.

“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?” the X-ray technician asked me as she draped a lead apron over my daughter.

“I would kick my husband’s a—,” I replied.

“I’ll take that as a ‘No,’” she said.

Back in the waiting room, my daughter asked if she would need a shot and then demanded to know where the gift shop was and if they sold stuffed animals. This kid knows her hospitals.

In next to no time, she was seen by a doctor, who, after assuring my daughter she wouldn’t need a shot, declared the pinky not broken, just swollen and tender. She wrapped it in a splint and told me to take her to an orthopedic surgeon in a week’s time to check for permanent damage.

My daughter was disappointed she didn’t get a cast, and downright aghast that she didn’t get to ride out on a wheelchair, which is how she usually exits the hospital.

“At least you don’t have to get any shots,” I reminded her.

All told, we were home in time for dinner, bath and bed.

And when the house was finally quiet, I had to laugh. Not because my daughter had been hurt, but because it was such a minor incident compared to everything she has gone through. If this is as bad as it gets from now on out, we’re going to be fine.

At least, we will be if I can learn to CALM THE EFF DOWN.

As a parent you get used to hearing the same things over and over. This is in part because you repeat yourself so much, since children don’t hear anything unless you’ve said it three times. It’s also because kids — at least the ones I gave birth to — ask the same questions and parrot the same phrases every. damn. day.

Son: Mom, why did you just say ‘Jesus’?
Me (cringing): I was praying.
Son: You pray a lot when you’re driving.
Daughter (nodding): You do. You do pray a lot when you’re driving.

But the fun part of parenting is when your children say things you know you’ve heard before, just not from them.

Tell me I’m not alone in this.

Because so far I’ve pinpointed two famous comedians my children are channeling without even knowing it. How awesome is that?

I first noticed it when my son began starting every sentence with, “Remember back when…?” This in itself was amusing because he was only 5 at the time. It got even better when he would take a protracted stroll down memory lane, only to arrive at a non-conclusion:

Son: Remember when we went to see Nana and Papa?
Me: Yes.
Son: And we had to sleep at a hotel on our way there?
Me: Yes.
Son: And there was dead cockroach in our room?
Me: Half a roach, but yes.
Son: And when we got to Nana’s, Nana told us we could go swimming?
Me: Um hmm.
Son: And we went swimming?
Me: Yes.
Long pause.
Son: That was cool.

Tell me you know where I’m going with this.

Back in the ‘90s (I can’t believe I just said that), Chris Farley had a talk show on Saturday Night Live, in which he would do the same thing with his celebrity guests:

Chris (interviewing Jeff Daniels): You were in Purple Rose of Cairo. Remember when you were doing your movie and Mia Farrow was watching and then you came down off the screen and talked to her? And you were in black and white when you were on the screen but when you talked to her you were in color?
Jeff: Yeah, what about it?
Chris: You remember that?
Jeff: Yes.
Chris: That was awesome.

Or, my personal favorite:

Chris (interviewing Paul McCartney): Remember when you were with the Beatles?
Paul: Sure.
Chris: That was awesome.

Even better than this is when my daughter channels the great Steve Martin, something that happens on those admittedly rare nights she doesn’t want to go to bed.

Most nights:

Me: Time for bed.
Daughter: Okay!
She picks up her stuffed lion and goes to bed.

On the occasional night when she’s cranky, has had a bad day, or is coming down with something:

Me: Time for bed!
Daughter (sobbing): Noooooooo.
Me: Sorry, sweetie, but it’s time to go to sleep.
Daughter: Okay, fine, fine.
Me: Do you want Lion?
Daughter: No! (Looking around.) I just want this. (Picks up a Lego figurine.)
Me: Okay.
Daughter: And this. (Scoops up a novelty straw she was playing as a flute earlier.) And this. (Snatches a paper napkin.) And this. (Scoops up a marble.) And this….

Which is how her bed ends up looking like this some mornings:

Now, in The Jerk, Steve Martin’s character does the EXACT SAME THING. When he finds out he’s gone from rags to riches and back to rags again, he shuffles tearfully through his mansion telling his wife:

“I don’t need any of this. I don’t need this stuff. I don’t need you, I don’t need anything. Except this. (He picks up an ashtray.) I don’t anything except this ashtray. And this paddle game. The ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need. And this. The remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game and the remote control and that’s all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, these matches and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game, the remote control and the lamp and that’s all I need. And that’s all I need, too. I don’t need one other thing. Not one — I need this. The paddle game and the chair. What are you looking at? What do you think I am, some kind of a jerk or something? And this. This magazine…”

I know, I know, it’s UNCANNY.

The best part is, my kids are still pretty young. Who knows who they’ll start channeling next.

What do teachers really want for the holidays? I would expect better pay, improved working conditions, more respect from the general populace because they are highly trained professionals, not “babysitters,” and less interference from lawmakers who have no idea what actually goes on in the classroom.

Since I can’t get them that — at least not in the next few weeks — I’m giving them the next best thing: alcohol.

Philly.com published my latest here:

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20161211_A_present_for_the_teach.html

*Please understand that I check with teachers ahead of time to see whether they abstain from alcohol. I’m not completely insensitive. On the other hand, I’ve never met one who couldn’t drink me under the table.