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How to Fight Like a Five-Year-Old So there I was in front of the YWCA, waist deep in slush, juggling a baby on one hip and a fifty-ton diaper bag on the other, trying to convince my five-year-old son to follow me inside. ME: You'll have fun. DYLAN: I don't want to go today. ME: Come on, Sweetheart. Let's cooperate. DYLAN: Where's my turtle blimp? ME: At home on your shelf. Please come inside with me. I'm getting cold, and I'll bet you're getting cold, too. DYLAN: I WANT MY TURTLE BLIMP!

ME (wondering why an intelligent person like myself is having a conversation about turtle blimps in public): Dylan, please—

DYLAN: I HATE PLEASE! (Falls on the ground and screams loudly so that people walking by will be sure to think that his mother is abusing him.)

Normally at that point I would have tucked Dylan beneath my arm like a football and carried him through the door, only I didn't have any arms—sort of like that time in high school when I played donkey basketball.

(DONKEY BASKETBALL: A variety of basketball in which both teams try to make shots while mounted on donkeys who trot up and down the court looking for spectators to trample.)

Playing donkey basketball was like having no arms because I was hanging on for dear life every time somebody threw me the ball which meant that I kept getting hit in the head.

I'm sure you've all had a similar experience.

Anyway, Dylan wouldn't budge. Not only that but my arms were going into extreme shock thanks to the baby who was (a) eating my hair and (b) putting his fingers in my ear, so I lost it right there in front of the Y.

ME: If you don't come with me right now, I'm going to sneak into your room tonight and THROW ALL YOUR NINJA TURTLES STRAIGHT OUT THE WINDOW!

DYLAN: Uh-uh!

ME: Uh-huh!

DYLAN: Okay fine then I'll just lock my door.

ME: Okay fine then I'll just break it down with my numchucks.

DYLAN: UH-UH!

ME: UH-HUH!

DYLAN (sticking his tongue out): You're so mean.

ME (sticking my tongue out): I know you are but what am I?

At this point Dylan knew he'd been whipped, so he surrendered and followed me meekly inside.

For awhile I felt very guilty about being reduced to a five-year-old's level, but then a new thought occurred to me: generally speaking, we parents try to behave like adults when handling differences with our children which is actually pretty stupid of us because kids have never been adults themselves and therefore have no idea what we're talking about. For this reason, I've decided that if you want to win arguments with your children, you have to fight like they do.

The following is a handy guide that explains how to fight like a kid of any age.

How to Fight Like a Toddler
If you want to fight like a two-year-old, be sure to scream NO a lot and throw stuff, especially food.

How to Fight Like a Grade School Kid
A very useful tactic is to echo whatever your adversary says because it ultimately drives them mad. Here's how it works:

CHILD: I don't want to clean my bedroom.

YOU: I don't want to clean my bedroom.

CHILD: Mom, quit it!

YOU: Mom, quit it,

CHILD: Copy-cat.

YOU: Copy-cat.

How to Fight Like a Fourteen-year-old Girl
No doubt about it. Fighting like a fourteen-year-old girl requires a lot of emotional energy. It can be done, however, as the following conversation demonstrates.

TEEN: Mom, I don't want to practice the piano.

YOU (whining): But all the other mothers' daughters practice the piano!

TEEN: Mom—

YOU: YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND! NOBODY UNDERSTANDS! (Dissolve into tears, run to your bedroom and slam the door, then pick up the telephone and call [a] your best friend or [b] a boy you met at the mall yesterday.)

You'll notice that I don't give any pointers on how to fight like a baby. That's because babies don't fight. They just sit there drooling and pulling off their socks and being totally charming in a wet kind of way and, before you know it, you're hooked for good which is why you put up with them for the rest of their lives.

Babies are pretty darn sneaky if you ask me.

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Teenagori

My four younger sons and I were in the car, waiting for the fourteen-year-old who lives at our house to materialize so we could finally leave on our little weekend trip. At last he emerged, laden with the items he needed to insure that his journey was a safe and pleasant one. In one hand he carried a bag of treats from Sinclair not to be confused with anyone else's treats from Sinclair, while in the other he had a stack of CD's not to be confused with anyone else's CD's. Also he was in disguise—baseball cap and sunglasses—so that no one would recognize him and thereby realize he was actually doing something with his family.


When he got to the car, he announced that he was the guy riding shotgun and kicked everybody else out of the front seat except for me simply because I'm the one with a license even though he already knows more about driving than I ever will. Then he assumed control over the various sound system knobs in our car and leaned back, settling his brain for a long winter's nap and so forth.

Well, ever since that trip I've been very busy keeping a mental list of all the little signs that say we have a fourteen-year-old boy lurking about the premises. Here's what the list looks like.

1. Every radio in every room is turned on full blast even though he's in the family room watching ESPN.
2. That pack of 500 frozen Lynn Wilson bean and cheese burritos you bought yesterday is already gone.
3. It's twenty below outside, his coat is still hanging in the closet, and he's out there.
4. The phone is never for you any more.
5. He flinches if you accidentally touch the hair it took him twenty minutes to blow-dry.
6. There's a trail of shoes through your house that look like they belong to Big Foot.
7. He fills up a whole couch when he sits down.
8. The only time he notices anybody else in the family is when they do something to irritate him. Like breathe.
9. You never even saw the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue this year.
10. The living room lights flicker whenever he makes a pretend slam-dunk in his bedroom upstairs.
11. There's no hot water left for you to take a shower in the morning.
12. Every radio in every room is turned on full blast even though he's in the family room watching ESPN with a full gaggle of teenage boys who look just like him.

Actually, I'm not really complaining. As teenage-type people go, my oldest son and his friends are very nice ones. About the only time they get on my verves, in fact, is when they patronize me.

Patronizing adults, unfortunately, is something adolescents do as naturally as turning on a radio, then leaving the room. They think we're all big dorks. We wear dorky clothes and listen to dorky music and hang out with dorky friends and have dorky jobs to pay for those dorky cars we love to drive to dorky destinations such as the beauty shop to get dorky haircuts. We're just too dorky to live, don't you know.

So, as I say, teenagers have no choice but to automatically patronize dorks like us. Take what happened to me the other day. I was in the kitchen throwing an unusually fine fit (my fits overall have improved with age, I'm pleased to report) because the house was such a wreck. Well, my younger kids were responding appropriately—i.e., groveling and promising they'd never leave knives with peanut butter all over the counter again, when the fourteen-year-old walked in and observed my performance. Finally, in a completely calm and thoroughly patronizing voice he said, "Gee, Mom, you're being such a psycho-wench right now."

This pretty much stopped me cold. I've been called a lot of things in my life, but this was the first time anybody had ever thought to call me a psycho-wench.

I confess at first my feelings were hurt. I did a quick review of the Great Psycho-Wenches of History and felt that to be included in their company was hardly flattering. Take Aunt Esmeralda in Bewitched, for example. Now there's a psycho-wench for you. As you'll recall, Aunt Esmeralda is Samantha's goofy relative who keeps doing things like accidentally turning Darren's head into a lamp shade and so on. Frankly, she's not somebody I wanted to be when I grew up.

The more I thought about it, however, the more I liked the name. Psycho-Wench. It's kind of snappy, kind of out there, don't you know. Also, people might respect you if you had a nickname like that. They might not give you any (a) lip or (b) sass because who knows what Psycho-Wench will do next. You could even start a club with other mothers of fourteen-year-old boys and call it Psycho-Wenches-R-Us. You could all show up in matching jackets and scare people at soccer games where nobody will ever dare make you feel bad because you forgot the half-time treats again.

Yeah. I'm beginning to think this has definite possibilities.

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Fashion Folly II: The Pool Party If your children were invited to a "pool party," how would you dress them? A. In a swimming suit B. In a swimming suit C. In a swimming suit D. In a swimming suit Admittedly, my experience with pool parties has been somewhat limited. I didn't exactly grow up in the kind of neighborhood where people regularly threw parties of the pool variety. In fact, the closest I ever got to foing to one was when I'd meet a few friends for the Free Swim at ye olde municipal pool where we mostly took hot showers and tried to figure out ways to get Sugar Babies out of the vending machine without spending money. Still, a pool party is a pool party, right? You show up in

a suit you hope makes you look just like that model in the catalogue, then you lounge around the deck sampling a few Doritos along with the guacamole and bean dip. With any luck, you don't even have to get wet before going home. Nothing to it.

Wrong.

Last summer our family of seven moved for a year to a toney neighborhood in New York where we more or less arrived like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. Still, people have been very kind to us, inviting us to gatherings and so forth just like the Victorians used to have the Elephant Man over for the odd cup of tea.

One of the first soirees to which we were invited was a children's pool party.

"Hey, kids," I said. "You're going to a pool party. Just think what fun you'll have doing jackknives and so forth off the diving board. By the time the party's through, everybody will know who the Cannon boys are!"

When it was time to go, I told my kids to put on their suits. And then because we're in such a swanky place, I told them to (a) comb their hair and (b) put on T-shirts, all of which I thought was very farsighted of me. My kids would be both classy and appropriate.

Especially appropriate, don't you know.

Some of you may have guessed by now that I have an unfortunate tendency to get the dress thing all wrong, so being appropriate is very important to me. Usually, I am underdressed for any given occasion, although I have been known to show up like a geek in a skirt when everybody else is wearing jeans.

It's like everybody but me went to gym class for a special maturation program about what clothes you should wear for which occasion.

I don't come by this lack of wardrobe sense naturally. The woman who gave me life has never once made a fashion misstep. Even if she's the only woman in a room wearing a pair of slacks, she looks so totally dynamite that everyone else assumes they're all wearing the wrong thing.

"How do you do that?" I ask her.

She shrugs helplessly, because the last thing she would ever want to do is make somebody feel uncomfortable.

"I know," I say, giving her a bitter snort."It's because you were a rodeo queen when you were nineteen years old, isn't it. Once you've worn a tiara on your brim, you have an aura of confidence that never deserts you."

I, on the other hand, was not a rodeo queen, which may explain my whole fashion problem. Still, I try very hard to get it right. And I tried the night of the pool party.

This is what happened.

We went to the pool at the appointed hour where we were greeted by a bevy of children, none of whom was wearing a swimming suit. Instead, this is what they had on:

A. The girls were wearing Laura Ashley-type dresses.
B. The boys were wearing khaki slacks and blue blazers.
C. I am telling you the truth.

So there we were at a pool party wearing, of all the stupid things, SWIMMING SUITS! Even my kids picked up on the fact that they were the only people present not wearing shoes.

So we sat around the pool with everyone else for an hour or so, eating the kind of hot dogs Martha Stewart would make if Marth Stewart made hot dogs and trying our best to blend.

On the way home Ken turned to me and said, "Well, you got one thing right—everybody now knows who the Cannon boys are."

"This isn't fair!" I stuck my head out the car window and wailed at the cosmos not unlike Job in the Old Testament. "How was I supposed to know how people in New York dress their children for pool parties?"

In the end Providence smiled on me. When I went shopping the very next day, I happened to wander by the Brooks Brothers outlet and noticed that they were closing out all their boy's navy blue blazers. I marched right in a bought one for each of my boys.

So now when it's May and the swimming season is almost upon us, I'll be ready.

"You're invited to another pool party?" I'll say to my children.

"No problemo! Your jackets, my sons, are hanging in the closet."