Picket Fence Post

How was your Thanksgiving celebration? Fill in any of the Dysfunctional Family Bingo card squares? Hopefully not. I was happy to have gone a weekend without filling in a square. (I received at least one sarcastic comment about my Dysfunctional Bingo project from a family member who asked, “Which one did I inspire?” I declined to answer.)

All in all, I considered our Thanksgiving holiday week to have been a success because (I’ve been keeping my standards mighty low these days, a technique that has, thus far, worked for me):

– There were no arguments during Thanksgiving dinner, with the exception of a mild disagreement about the rules of the odious Yankee Swap of which I was not a participant.

– No one contracted food poisoning or the swine flu or the plague or mad cow disease (though that seems like such a dated ailment now, doesn’t it?).

– No one got into an accident or ran over anyone’s mailbox with their vehicle or with an errant Tiger Woods-mobile.

– The three Picket Fence Post children have all their limbs and health intact, though they did bicker and fight with one another so much that, at one point, I gave myself a ”Time Out” and fled to my bedroom so I wouldn’t have to listen to them squabble.

– My sisters-in-law, who ventured out at midnight on Black Friday to shop, were not trampled to death.

As for the remainder of the Thanksgiving holiday: The day after Thanksgiving, the Picket Fence Post family and the Picket Fence Post  grandparents decided to brave the rain (a Nor’easter had been predicted but never happened) in order to see a balloon parade which seemed a bit, oh, what’s the word, uh, underwhelming, yeah, underwhelming is the right word for watching semi-inflated balloons being dragged down city streets. You couldn’t even see The Cat in the Hat’s face from where we were standing because it was slumping over as if the feline had had a rough Thanksgiving night at the pub. But at least the kids got to see Santa after the brief parade concluded and tell the big guy what they want for Christmas. (When I heard that The Girl asked Santa for an iPhone, I started banging my head against a wall.)

During the weekend, I celebrated Thanksgiving by partaking of another all-American tradition: I took the iPhone Girl Wanna-Be and a friend of hers to see a movie about a love triangle between a human, a vampire and a werewolf. (For those who’ve been living under a rock, I’m talking about the new installment of the Twilight series, New Moon. I wrote a column about why women my age are so obsessed with the series here.) I also got the chance to do a whole mess of reading.

Now that it’s the Monday after Thanksgiving (and the kids have another day off from school), I’ve already been asked how my Christmas shopping is going . . . an inquiry at which I scoffed. “Christmas shopping? I haven’t even thought about it yet.” That was kind of untrue, as I did ask the children to write Christmas lists so that The Spouse and I can start thinking about gifts, but we haven’t done anything about it yet beyond the contemplation point.

About the headless Pilgrim above: That’s the result of the kids playing in the dining room and knocking over the male Pilgrim that was decorating my table. I’ll play “Taps” for him a little later this afternoon.

For years I’ve been capitalizing on a  concept originally created by a Brookline psychologist in 2000 as a tool with which to deal with familial tension during holiday gatherings: Dysfunctional Family Bingo.

Dysfunctional Family Bingo is like a regular Bingo game except that the squares on the Bingo card are filled with crazy incidents that could plausibly happen during a holiday dinner like Thanksgiving or Christmas. But unlike regular Bingo, believe me, this is not a game you want to win, at least not unless you’ve had your Zoloft prescription filled recently. If you actually are able to fill out five squares in a row to get Bingo, well, I feel for you my friend; you’ve clearly endured an oddball holiday gathering. Perhaps you should write a best selling memoir about it.

But for most of the rest of us, hopefully, reading through the 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card will be a subversive, snarky way to recognize that there’s no such thing as a “perfect” holiday dinner and that everybody’s family is a tad off-kilter.

So, for your reading pleasure, I introduce my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. (Go to this link to see the card.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Item #1: Time Magazine Takes on Helicopter Parenting

Recently, my twin fifth graders were given an assignment to create hats which represented a vocabulary word they’d been given. As the deadline for them to bring the word hat into school neared, I asked them two things: Did they need me to get them any supplies and how they were progressing. Other parents, I later learned, took a MUCH more involved role in the creation of their kids’ hats, helping the children come up with phenomenal ideas on how to graphically and physically represent a word’s meaning in hat form.

After The Eldest Boy told me about how awesome some of the other kids’ hats were – the ones who got help from a proud parent — I wondered if I was a lazy slacker mom for not suggesting more ideas and for not helping my children create more intricate hats. (I simply let them think it through and execute their ideas on their own.) Or was I, by my insistence that they do the project themselves, engaging in my own, small form of civil disobedience by refusing to hover over my kids?

Time Magazine would say that I was bucking the fear-driven helicopter parenting trend and actively participating in the backlash against it with my inaction.

In her story, “Can These Parents Be Saved,” Nancy Gibbs wrote in Time:

“. . . [T]here is now a new revolution under way, one aimed at rolling back the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads. The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down.

A backlash against overparenting had been building for years, but now it reflects a new reality.”

God, I hope that’s true. The backlash hasn’t quite reached my own little Boston area suburban hamlet yet; my 11-year-olds’ teachers still want parents to sign off on far too many homework assignments — indicating that mom or dad has seen the assignments or that the kid completed something — a fact about which I loudly complain on a daily basis. But my fingers remain crossed as I wait for this movement to land here. Underparenters unite!

Item #2: NYT Tackles Rudeness at Holiday Dinners

Right in line with my upcoming 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card (see Item #3 below for my plea for you to help me out), today’s New York Times has a story featuring horror stories of rude relatives — of the ilk I’d love to see appear on my Bingo card — from people who’ve survived Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with their extended families and lived to laugh about it, because, seriously, what else can you do but laugh? (Laugh and pass the wine, I suppose. Or write memoirs about it. Or columns, blogs.)

One anecdote from the Times story involved a teacher who was pregnant with  her first child when she spent Thanksgiving at her in-laws’ house:

“For months, the teacher’s mother-in-law had been saying that she wanted to be in the waiting room when the teacher went into labor, and the teacher, who recounted her story on the Mothers-in-Law Anonymous section of Grandparents.com, had been politely rebuffing her.

So at Thanksgiving dinner, with the family gathered around the table, the mother-in-law (referred to on this site as ‘MIL’) took the matter into her own hands.

‘MIL announced to me and the entire family the following,’ the teacher wrote. ‘I WILL be in the waiting room while [daughter-in-law] is in labor, and all of you are welcome to come too. MY SON will come and give me updates every hour on the hour.’”

That’s EXACTLY the kind of thing I’m looking for to include on my Bingo card . . .

Item #3: Send in Your Holiday Anecdotes

Don’t forget, I’m counting on you. I’m collecting your amusing family holiday anecdotes (like the one above) to help me fill the squares on my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. I won’t reveal identities if you don’t want me to, so please feel free to e-mail me (meredithobrien@hotmail.com) a brief explanation of a humorous/insane/annoying instance which occurred at a family holiday event (like Thanksgiving). The people who submit the four best submissions will net signed copies of my collection of humor/parenting columns, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum.

Image credit: Hugh Kretschmer/Time.

The Picket Fence Post family survived two Thanksgiving dinners this past weekend and managed to fill two squares on the Dysfunctional Family Bingo card . . . though I’m not sayin’ which two because my loving family members read this blog.

*waving, ‘hi’ to family*

The day after Thanksgiving I (at my parents’ house where the kids watched about 47 hours of TV), we attended a Christmas parade featuring giant balloons (Cat-in-the-Hat, Strawberry Shortcake, etc.) and a few street cleaners which were, no lie, part of the procession. The kids’ favorite part, I suspect, was gathering the pieces of candy which were hurled in their general direction by parade participants. Given that two out of the three kids didn’t really eat much at Thanksgiving dinner — unlike their parents who stuffed themselves –they must’ve been hungry.

As soon as the parade concluded, we went inside the mall along the parade route and got in line to visit Santa. Panic ensued when the skeptical Eldest Boy told me, “I’m not going to see him. He’s not the real Santa. I’m going to write [the real] Santa a letter.” And the kid refused to get in line.

I was concerned that his move would taint the experience of his siblings and prompt a crisis of Christmas faith, but The Girl and The Youngest Boy were distracted by the fact that they didn’t know exactly what they want for Christmas (making Christmas shopping vexing!) and didn’t know what to say to the big guy in red. (The Spouse and I suggested that they tell him they’ll send him a letter with a specific request later.)

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