The Mother Tongue now Family Matters

My monthly parenting column has been picked up by the Los Feliz Ledger, the neighborhood newspaper for Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and the Hollywood Hills.

They'll be running it every month, but I'll be posting it here too for your review and comments.

There are a couple of things that are different from when the column ran on the family page of the Ventura County Star. First, that community is about sixty miles north of L.A., which means that my family was completely anonymous. No chance of running into my readers at school or while gassing up the car. With the Ledger, I'll know many of my readers well, considering that it lands on the doorsteps of 30,000 of our neighbors once a month. I've stopped using the kids' names, and I will probably have to leave out some of the juicier stories, what with their potential for embarrassment. Unless the subject is me, of course!

Second, this paper's format requires a shorter piece, so the length has been cut by about 1/3. Ouch. Writing something substantive in 300 words or less will be a challenge. Or impossible. So expect it to be pretty light, subject-wise. OK, here it is...

Driving Me Mad
By Kristen Taylor

My husband was the first to recognize that we’d entered the next stage of parenting.

I thought that maybe he had seen me pull off an impressive new mothering maneuver, but no. He said, “We’ve reached the driving stage.”

Chauffeuring may be a great profession, but I didn’t apply for this job, and in this case, it doesn’t pay.

Before entering this stage, I was super smug about how little I drove. When the insurance agent asked me my mileage I yelped, “Six thousand a year!” expecting a trophy, or at least some concern about why I didn’t get out more. Back then, our family was all about the three square miles around our house, which had everything we needed, including sneakers and frozen yogurt.

Our daughter was the first to leave the sanctuary when she won the Magnet school lottery. Then our son had the audacity to make friends with kids whose parents didn’t know about our proximity test: “In case of emergency, can you walk it?” We started racking up the miles.

This year, the girl goes to school in North Hollywood, swims in Pasadena, and has friends in Beverly Hills. The boy is younger, but his friends and activities still put me in neighborhoods I only know from the weather forecast. Even with carpools, driving them around is a massive time-eater, and an ecological guilt-inducer.

All this driving isn’t necessarily a solvable problem, though hiring a driver is a juicy daydream. And I know what the parents of teenagers are thinking: Just wait until they start driving themselves. I can hear the conversation with the insurance agent already, and I’m well aware that there won’t be any trophies.