Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

The alarm rings at 6 am for Teen Spirit. But that doesn’t mean he actually gets out of bed. No, it’s Hepcat who pops out of bed and goes to Teen Spirit’s room right next door.

“Up, up, up, up, up,” he says loud enough to wake the neighbors. “The bed weasels are coming. The bed weasels are coming.”

Hepcat has been saying that for 10 years at least. It was cute when Teen Spirit was 7. Now, well, it’s a tad pathetic. But it seems to rouse the 17-year-old sleeping giant.

Teen Spirit slowly rises clinging to every last second of his dreams, which he is sometimes still muttering about as he rises. Finally, he makes his way to the shower but first to the kitchen where he routinely takes a long swig out of Tropicana container.

While Teen Spirit is in the shower, Smartmom takes over. Hepcat usually goes back to bed because no doubt he’s been working (or so he says) until 4 in the morning.

Smartmom waits in the dining room for Teen Spirit to emerge from the shower wearing the black terry-cloth robe with polka dots she gave to Hepcat for their first anniversary. Hepcat never wore it and now that Teen Spirit has claimed it, it’s lost to him forever.

The half hour or so before Teen Spirit leaves the house can be a special time of parent/teenager bonding and connection. Or not.

As Teen Spirit carefully selects his jeans (“These aren’t tight enough; where are the really tight ones?”), his shirt (“This isn’t tight enough”), his tie (yes, he wears a tie. How else to rebel at the uber-alternative high school?), and his suit jacket (again, how else to rebel?), he checks his Facebook, charges his iPod, listens to someone’s MySpace page and even WNYC on the kitchen radio, while he takes a few bites of toast or cereal.

“Is it cold out today?” Teen Spirit always asks his mom.

“What am I, Soterios Johnson?” she often says, but that doesn’t stop her from checking weather.com.

Then comes the hunt for the shoes, a pair of black Bostonian wing tips.

“Have you seen my shoes?” Teen Spirit asks predictably.

“I assume they’re where you took them off last night,” Smartmom says (also predictably).

When Teen Spirit was 7, the Oh So Feisty One, who was only 1 at the time, always knew where his shoes were. While Teen Spirit, Smartmom and Hepcat searched high and low for his footware, toddler-sized OSFO would come down the hallway holding his Velcro sneakers. It was the cutest thing. After awhile, they’d just ask her first.

Now Teen Spirit finds them for himself. Eventually. And when he does, he packs his backpack, puts on his ear bugs and is ready for his walk to the Q train.

Phew.

It is always a great sense of accomplishment when Teen Spirit finally leaves the house in the morning. But it also means it’s time to wake up OSFO.

The OSFO Morning Show couldn’t be more different. When Smartmom comes into her room at 7 am, OSFO pops up like bread from an over-wound toaster. It takes her exactly one hour to do everything that she needs to do, including showering, selecting with great care her outfit (jeans and T-shirt), dressing in said outfit, carefully brushing her hair, eating breakfast, brushing her teeth, doing any homework she missed the previous night, packing her backpack, grabbing her lunch and running for her Seventh Avenue bus.

It is such an accomplished act of female independence and grace that it takes Smartmom’s breath away.

It wasn’t always thus. When OSFO was younger she was hard to rouse in the morning; she’d drag her feet getting dressed and was often late to school even though PS 321 was just around the corner.

But that was then and this is now. At New Voices, her new middle school on 18th Street near Sixth Avenue, the principal, Frank Giordano, urges the kids to get to school on time — and OSFO is taking that very seriously. She rides the Seventh Avenue bus by herself now and is determined to catch the 8 am. There’s nothing like a bus schedule to get you moving in the morning.

OSFO may only be 11 but she looks far older when she’s leaving the apartment. House keys. Check. Student MetroCard. Check. Cellphone. Check. Lunch.

“See you losers,” she says as she goes out into the world.

Smartmom doesn’t remember her parents ever talking to her about the birds and the bees. Sure, her mom probably gave her some kind of pamphlet about menstruation and told her about sanitary napkins.

But sex and all the rest: Smartmom has no memory of ever having that conversation.

At school, Smartmom has a vague recollection of watching films from the 1950s about puberty. It was in Mrs. Jarcko’s science class and they blend in with her memories of films about malaria, elephantiasis, and other tropical diseases.

When Smartmom got her period for the first time, she was just about to leave for sleep-away camp. It couldn’t have happened at worse time. Her mother packed a big box of sanitary napkins and a belt and sent her on her way. She was 12-years-old and felt nothing but embarrassment and shame. The last thing she wanted was for her bunkmates to know that she had her period. It really did feel like the curse. Instead of putting her soiled sanitary napkins in the bunk’s garbage pail, she took long hikes and disposed of them in the woods. No one would ever know except the raccoons and the deer.

Because of those difficult memories, Smartmom has always tried to create an open atmosphere in which information (and conversation) about puberty and sex are readily available. The funny thing is this: Teen Spirit and the Oh So Feisty One don’t always want to have “the talk” when she brings it up. They are, however, very open to books that tell the tale in an interesting and age-appropriate way.

In other words, they like to get the info they need, but in a private and discreet manner, and only when they’re ready.

When Teen Spirit was in second grade, Smartmom read a review of a book called “It’s So Amazing: A Book About Eggs, Sperm, Birth Babies and Families” and rushed out to buy it.

She figured: why not? It’s never too early to learn the facts of life in an age-appropriate way. Indeed, it was one of the best purchases she has ever made. And a great spur for conversations about sex.

Recommended for kids ages 7 and up, the book by Robie Harris with illustrations by Michael Emberley, uses a variety of techniques, including cartoons of an inquisitive bee and an embarrassed bird, to dole out the facts of life. But there’s real information on these pages. With great illustrations and text, topics covered include changes in boys’ and girls’ bodies during puberty, intercourse, birth control, chromosomes and genes, adoption and adjusting to a newborn sibling. There are even gentle and age-appropriate discussions of masturbation, sexual abuse, HIV and AIDS and homosexuality.

Smartmom put the book in a prominent spot in Teen Spirit’s bedroom and knew that he would get around to it when he was good and ready. They looked at it together when he was in second or third grade and talked gently about what was in there.

“It’s So Amazing” is the kind of book that can grow with the child. When a girl in Teen Spirit’s class announced that she had two moms, Smartmom used the book to answer some of his pressing questions about gay parenting (which mom is the dad? How did they make a baby? Etc.).

A few years later, when his need to know was even more urgent, Teen Spirit read the book on his own cover-to-cover one evening. And then read it again, cover-to-cover, the very next day. Smartmom could tell he was relieved to have all that information under his belt (so to speak). And he was relieved not to have the conversation with his mom or dad. Thanks to that book.

It’s a bit harder — although vitally important — to have the safe sex conversation with a kid once he or she reaches high school. Unfortunately high-schoolers are notoriously resistant to receiving any information from their parents.

Smartmom knows that he’s pretty up to date and that there’s a condom-dispensing machine in the restrooms at his school. She also knows that he collects those stylish NYC condoms because she found an unused condom being used as a bookmark in his copy of “Death of a Salesman.”

Sure, they make great bookmarks, but she hopes that, if he is sexually active, he’s using them correctly.

When OSFO came along, Smartmom knew from the start that she was going to be very open with her about her body and how it works. As for those funny sticks in the blue Tampon box on the bathroom shelf, OSFO has been well aware of them and their function for years.

In other ways, too, Smartmom has tried to undo some of the shame and secrecy she experienced as a child. When Smartmom was a girl, she needed a bra at least a year before her mother bought her one. That’s probably because she hit puberty in the heyday of bra burning and 1970s-style women’s lib. But Smartmom remembers feeling funny about her floppy breasts in a see-through white T-shirt one day in sixth grade. And that’s when she and her mom finally went to the bra store on Upper Broadway, where an elderly Jewish lady with a tape measure expertly (and somewhat invasively) fit her for her first bra.

For at least two years before OSFO showed any signs of budding breasts, Smartmom dropped hints about shopping for training bras. Just in case. Not to rush things, Smartmom just wanted OSFO to know that her mom would be there for her whenever she was ready.

When OSFO was about 6 or 7, Smartmom asked if she’d like to look at the funny cartoons in “It’s So Amazing.” She was interested but only to a point. Smartmom learned then that OSFO only wanted as much information as she was comfortable with and it didn’t pay to overwhelm her with too many details.

That’s why it’s important to take cues from the child about what they are and aren’t ready to learn about.

For OSFO, “The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls” from the American Girl Library has been a lifesaver. She’s had it around since she was about 8 years old and has consulted it for information about everything from proper tooth-brushing technique, healthy eating, hair care, braces, pimples, periods and bras.

OSFO keeps the book in a private spot near her bed and it, like “It’s So Amazing,” is in heavy rotation.

While these books are fantastic resources, nothing replaces those important conversations between parent and child — though those conversations never quite go according to plan.

What if Teen Spirit had discovered Internet porn when he was just a 13-year-old? It would have been inevitable, right? If so, Smartmom and Hepcat thought it would be a good time to have the “sex is beautiful” conversation and the “what goes on between you and your body is personal and private” chat.

But Teen Spirit would be so mortified to have that talk, given that it meant his parents knew that he’d been looking at porn sites. If Smartmom knows her boy (and she does), he would storm out of the apartment and spend the next 24 hours in his room sulking.

Some of Smartmom’s female friends handled the situation by telling their sons that porn was disgusting and exploitative against women. But Smartmom wouldn’t want to create any kinds of shameful or bad feelings about Teen Spirit’s potential discovery of sex — even if it was on a Web site exclusively devoted to large breasts.

Sexual orientation is very personal and no parent should ever get in the middle of it. It’s all about knowing what to say and what not to say. If it involves health and safety, parents should talk. If it involves legislating ideas about sexuality, parents should stay out of it.

Sometimes sex talks can feel like an intrusion. When Smartmom decided to impart important details about menstruation to OSFO, OSFO already knew everything and wanted to keep the whole matter on the down low.

Smartmom has big plans for when OSFO finally gets her period. She fantasizes about a mother/daughter bonding ritual that will include circle dancing, pagan prayers to the goddess, candle lighting and life affirming chants.

But Smartmom knows that’s not going to happen. While she does strive to create an open atmosphere about sex and the body, she must, of course, take cues from her girl.

And OSFO is simply not the circle-dancing, goddess type.

Sex education, like everything else when it comes to parenting, requires loads of trial and error. It’s important to stay attuned to your child and the way he or she likes to receive information (from you, a book, a film, or at school). Rest assured: if you provide kids with what they need to know in an open-hearted, age-appropriate, and non-invasive way, parent and child should survive the experience just fine.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper.

Sleepaway camp has really changed since the days Smartmom was a camper at various northeastern summer getaways.

As a kid, she went to camp for eight weeks every summer, a nice long
stretch of time to adjust to a change in scenery, a new cast of
characters and a healthy taste of self-reliance.

At the same time, Smartmom’s parents got a major vacation from being
parents. They came to visit on visiting weekend, took her out to lunch
and dinner and that was that. They had eight blissful weeks to
themselves.

Smartmom remembers crying her eyes out on the last day of her
favorite camp. She actually didn’t want to go home and it took a few
days to get back in the swing of things on the Upper West Side.

She never really found out what her parents did while she was away.
But she sort of assumed they weren’t exactly pining for her return.

So it was an even trade. Smartmom loved her time away at camp, and her parents loved their time to be alone.

While plenty of Park Slope kids go to camp for eight weeks, most
go away for two or four. Many parents don’t admit
to needing a vacation from their kids. That would be sacrilege: a form
of child abuse. Not wanting to be around your kids 24/7? Why, that’s a
sign of bad parenting.

But parents do need the break — and need to stop feeling guilty about it.

Since the beginning of July, Smartmom has run into more than a few
summer empty-nesters tooling around the Slope, having romantic dinners,
catching a first-run flick or just holding hands on a nighttime stroll
through the neighborhood (remember those?).

t’s not that these parents don’t miss their kids. It’s just that
they enjoy taking a break from being parents. Smartmom likes it
so much that she booked a week at the Sea Breeze on Block Island to
revel in alone time (she takes a break from Hepcat, too).

Smartmom was lucky that Hepcat was willing to stay home to supervise Teen Spirit while she was writing fiction at the beach.

Some parents are clearly enjoying their kid-holiday, but some look
bereft. They miss their kids and can’t wait for their return. In a
sense, summer camp is empty-nest practice, a stage of life that
terrifies many. It’s as hard for some parents to be
away from their children as it is for their kids to be away from them.

But it’s not like you can’t e-mail your kid as many times a day as you want. At the Oh So Feisty One’s camp, parents can e-mail their kids on a password-protected Web site. The kids, however, cannot e-mail back.

Whatever happened to sending a heartfelt letter or postcard? I miss you. Please write. Hope you’re having fun.

The problem with e-mail access is that Smartmom feels remiss if she
doesn’t send OSFO one, two, even three electronic updates a day (after
all, The Brooklyn Paper is now posting news stories every single day!).
Smartmom can just imagine the dining hall debacle. Some kid gets pages
and pages of e-mails. Poor OSFO looks up hopefully. “Nothing for you,
kid. Sorry.”

It just breaks Smartmom’s heart.

And it’s not just e-mail. Nowadays, you can literally obsess over
your child’s experience in camp. Some camps post photos on the camp Web
site. Other camps actually have a video camera in the dining hall.

Smartmom has to admit that she spent way too much of her alone time
on Block Island checking to see if there was a picture of OSFO on her
camp’s Web site. When she couldn’t find something for days, she
considered calling the camp and telling the organizers to put something
there. Or else.

Finally, Smartmom found two photographs of her OSFO
participating in a camp-wide Olympics. From what Smartmom could tell.
OSFO looked very engaged and even (dare she say it?) happy.

It was a huge relief to see that picture. Especially as it came just a day after OSFO’s first letter arrived by snail mail.

“Dear Mom and Dad, I like camp — sometimes. I have to take swim classes and I really hate them. The food is bad!”

OSFO’s white stationery was covered in frowning faces. And in teeny
tiny letters near the bottom of the page it said, “I am kinda homesick.”

Talk about writer’s block on Block Island! Smartmom could barely
type a word after Hepcat read her that letter over the phone. Sure, the
letter was written on the second day of camp (what kid isn’t miserable
on day two?), but it certainly put a damper on Smartmom’s creativity
(insert Smartmom’s creativity joke here!).

When Smartmom got back from Block Island, she found another letter
in the mailbox. It was written a full four days after the last one. In
big block letters, OSFO wrote:

“NEVERMIND. Camp is fine.”

And there were loads of smiley faces.

Relief and happiness coursed through Smartmom’s veins. That night,
she and Hepcat spent their first night of freedom together. They tried
Park Slope’s new Five Guys Burgers and later had margaritas at the
Miracle Grill, where she saw some summer empty-nesters.

“Your kids are in camp?” she asked.

“Yes, but we just got a call that our youngest son is homesick,” the mom said. “We’re about to talk to him.”

She saw their cellphone on the table, and Smartmom felt a pang in her heart. She remembered that first letter from OSFO.

“Give it a few days,” she told her friends. “He’ll be fine.” And she
meant it. Before they know it, the kids will be back. Summer
empty-nesting season will be over and life as a family will resume.

Until next summer, that is. Might as well enjoy your romantic dinner for two.

Photo by La Tartine Gourmande on Flickr

This is from this week’s Smartmom from the award-winning Brooklyn Paper.

Smartmom and Hepcat were silent driving away from Camp Fuller after dropping the Oh So Feisty One in her bunk. Smartmom could tell that Hepcat was sad even if he didn’t say a thing. She’s learned to read all of the signals given off by her pathologically understated man.

They’d had such fun driving up to Rhode Island: a real road trip adventure. As the family made its way up hellish I-95, Smartmom read aloud from “Trinity,” the 400-page best-selling young adult book about a high school girl with a major crush on a vampire.
They stayed at the Hamilton Village Inn in North Kingstown, RI and had a fun dinner at the Steamview, an old-fashioned, family-style restaurant decorated with antique toy steam engines.

Smartmom and OSFO were packing for most of the week prior to camp — a major bonding experience full of rolled eyes and flash-flood fights. OSFO, who objected to the inadequate way that Smartmom folds clothing, re-folded her clothing and packed the entire trunk herself; neat as a pin.
Driving away from OSFO’s camp, Smartmom had a pit in her stomach. This was only OSFO’s second summer at a sleepaway and Smartmom knew that her girl was nervous.

Last summer’s all-girls Quaker camp had decidedly left-wing leanings dating back to the 1930s. It was wilderness-oriented farm-camp that was more than a little rustic (i.e. composting outhouses called Kybo’s, no windows or doors in the bunks, mosquito netting required).
Smartmom thought it would be a good back-to-basics experience; very empowering for a 10-year-old girl brought up in brownstone Brooklyn.

Not.

OSFO didn’t exactly hate the camp, but it was a little too crunchy granola for her. Smartmom thinks she was more than a little homesick and she really didn’t like the outhouses.
Smartmom was relieved when OSFO showed interest in another sleepaway camp.

This time, she was an educated consumer. Windows and doors on the bunks. Check. Real toilets. Check. Traditional camp activities like a mountain-climbing wall and skate-boarding. Check.
Perhaps most important, she was going to camp with a good friend, which made all the difference to OSFO.
Still, in the weeks before camp, OSFO was feeling anxious.
“Maybe I’m not a camp type of person,” she told Smartmom one night when she should have been sleeping. “If this one doesn’t work out, that’s it. No more camp for me.”
Smartmom consoled her with tales of her own camp experience.

Like OSFO, Smartmom hated her own starter camp and wrote miserable letters home.
It didn’t help that all the counselors decided to go to Woodstock leaving the campers to fend for themselves for a day or two (or so she remembers; it was 1969 after all).
But the next year, Smartmom went to her beloved — and now defunct — Ethical Culture School Camp, a camp she remembers fondly to this day.

To Smartmom’s relief, OSFO seemed to take to Camp Fuller immediately. She was the second arriving camper and got to choose the bed she wanted. Later, when her friend arrived, she took the bed right next to OSFO’s. Hepcat carried her heavy trunk into the bunk and Smartmom made her bed, arranged her Ugly Dolls and placed her toiletries, her contraband gummy worms, and her stationery on her shelf.
There were no tears or clinging hugs. OSFO seemed comfortable in her bunk, especially once her friend was there. She did look a tad nervous when her counselor announced that there would be a swimming test within the hour to determine who needed to take swimming lessons. She assured OSFO that the test was really easy, but OSFO looked dismayed.

Still, that didn’t bring on any tears or requests for her parents to stick around. In fact, OSFO seemed eager for Smartmom and Hepcat to leave. They both gave her a long hug.
“I love you,” Hepcat shouted out as he got into the car.
Hepcat paused before starting the engine. Smartmom could tell that he was feeling blue. He and OSFO had had such fun on their Rhode Island road trip; he’d even started giving her some pre-pre-driving lessons.
“Which pedal is the accelerator, which is the brake?” she asked at one point. “What does a yellow signal mean?”
The two of them have a lot in common. Like Hepcat, OSFO is very handy, very creative, and very good with a glue gun and a drill. She loves her dad’s kooky sense of humor and they share all kinds of in jokes and a private vocabulary.

Two weeks without the OSFO was bad enough, but to make matters worse, Smartmom was about to depart for Block Island for a week of writing.
No wonder it was such a silent, depressing drive away from OSFO’s new camp toward Smartmom’s ferry. They desperately need some quality time together without the kids. But it wasn’t meant to be.

“Are you OK?” Smartmom asked Hepcat as they waited for her ferry in Point Judith.
“I’m gonna miss OSFO and miss you,” he said sweetly. Smartmom noticed he said OSFO’s name first, but it didn’t bother her. Not too much. Hepcat snuck a peek at his watch
“I better go,” he said.
“The traffic may bad you better head home now,” she told him. They lingered in a long, comfortable hug. She heard the horn of her high-speed ferry.
“Love you,” she said. And now there were tears in her eyes.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

Everyone knows how much Smartmom hates it when friends move away. Not only does it induce major separation anxiety, but it also throws her into a neurotic tizzy about the choices she’s made in life.

Such was the case last spring when Smartmom found out that her friends, Ay and Eye, were planning a big move to a small town in Canada. Smartmom wanted to know all the details but especially WHY.

Why would they want to leave this nirvana known as Park Slope?

Why would they want to leave their gorgeous brownstone on Third Street?

Why would they want their son to attend fifth grade anywhere other than PS 321?

Why would they want to part with their tight-knit klatch of Third Street stoop neighbors?
Ay and Eye calmly explained that they’d simply fallen in love with this Canadian town, which is both a summer and winter resort. The elementary and middle schools are walking distance from their new Victorian home. There’s a great independent bookstore, a vegan restaurant and a coffee bar. Perhaps best of all, Canada has free universal health insurance and they won’t have to go through the agony of applying to public middle school.

Well, it all made sense. Sort of.

And Smartmom admired them for being brave. Moving to a new place without friends and family was a hard thing to do and Smartmom was impressed, even envious. Smartmom has always fantasized about moving to an exotic locale far from her family (just kidding).

Still it was hard to swallow. Ay and Eye are iconic Park Slopers. Smart, politically progressive, vegan, well-read, community oriented, neighborly and fun to talk to. How would they live without everything that Park Slope had to offer? How could they walk away from one of the best neighborhoods in the world? (How could they live with such good old American hyperbole?)

Smartmom pretended to be really excited for them. She oohed and ahhed when they showed her a picture of their beautiful new house and the cute Main Street in their new town. But inside she felt empty, sad, and a little bit confused.

Later, Smartmom called Gluten Free, who moved to a big Victorian upstate five years ago.

Gluten Free said she knew very well why someone might leave Park Slope for greener pastures. She’d found it in the bucolic Hudson Valley where her family was able to afford lots of square footage, a beautiful backyard, nature nearby and an artsy, small-town atmosphere.

Smartmom was a basket case when Gluten Free, Dadu and their kids up and left. Deep down, she was deeply hurt that they could abandon her. The thing was: Smartmom and Hepcat were losing two of their best friends.

Over time, Smartmom and Gluten Free adjusted to their long-distance relationship. They now talk on the phone many times a week — often when Smartmom is walking down Seventh Avenue. Smartmom, Hepcat and family are regular guests in the guest room of their super-sized Kingston home. And Gluten Free and family are regulars in Smartmom’s small (and, thanks to Hepcat, shrinking) living room.

Last week, Ay and Eye had an informal going away party in the living and dining room of their palatial brownstone. As Smartmom walked up their stoop, she wondered how it was possible to walk away from all this — even if it did mean free health care.

The party itself was a scene right out of a promotional video for a Fourth Avenue condo. Interesting looking friends and neighbors wandered in and out. Rotisserie chicken from Union Market, chocolate cake from Sweet Melissa’s, fresh fruit, cheese and wine, the table was a regular smorgasbord of Slope cuisine.

Smartmom dreaded the good-bye. She wasn’t sure what to say. She thought she might cry. After all, she’d known the two of them before they were married; before their two children were born; before they’d bought their brownstone; back when they lived on the fourth floor of Smartmom’s apartment building.

Smartmom felt a deep surge of regret. Why hadn’t they done this more often? In the hustle and bustle of Park Slope life, they’d had plenty of sidewalk conversations, but hadn’t been to a party together in years.

As Smartmom and Hepcat readied to leave, Eye came over and gave Smartmom a hug.

“We’re having another party for everyone who couldn’t make it to this one and for everyone who wants to come again…”

Smartmom was relieved. She’d have one more chance to experience the neurotic mix of emotions she was going through. One more chance to dread the good-bye. One more chance to savor time with these wonderful people she’s proud to call her friends.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

The night before Memorial Day, Mrs. Kravitz and Mrs. Cleavage were baking and bitching in preparation for their Third Street building’s first BBQ of the season.

Mrs. Kravitz was rolling dough for her pies. Earlier, she’d prepared a pecan filling, and bright red and pink cherry halves in a sugary mix for a cherry pie.

The scene was like something out of a quaint Southern kitchen. Two Southern girls (one from Texas, the other from North Carolina) transplanted to Brooklyn, channeling their southern childhoods spent baking pies.

Or so Smartmom imagined.

There was something so cozy about it. Smartmom admired the ease with which Mrs. Kravitz rolled the dough — like it was second nature; something her mama taught her how to do.

Or so Smartmom imagined.

Mrs. Cleavage sat on a high stool by the toaster and prepared a delicious pasta salad with snap peas; she wasn’t happy when Mr. Kravitz and Smartmom wanted a preview.

“I’m going to have to make another one tomorrow if you people don’t stop taking bites,” she threatened.

The conversation moved seamlessly from one juicy topic to another (husbands, ex-husbands, children, parents, neighbors, and friends). But mostly it was food talk — a running commentary on what was being prepared.

In the dining room, Mr. Kravitz and another neighbor were trying to figure out how to make a proper mojito. After much trial and error (Errors? What errors?) they settled on a recipe.

Finally, when the pecan pie was ready, Mrs. Kravitz offered tastes. Truthfully, It didn’t look like any pecan pie Smartmom had ever seen. It didn’t taste right either.

“It needs more sugar,” Mrs. Cleavage said.

“Too many eggs. It’s too eggy,” Mrs. Kravitz said tasting the pie.

“It needs more sugar,” Mrs. Cleavage said again.

“So eggy. It’s like a pecan quiche,” Mrs. Kravitz said chewing slowly.

“It needs more sugar,” Mrs. Cleavage said one more time.

“I forgot the sugar. I forgot to put sugar in,” Mrs. Kravitz gushed.

“What do you think I’ve been telling you?” Mrs. Cleavage told her seriously.

At 4 pm on Memorial Day, Mr. Kravitz fired up the grill near the recycling pails in the building’s cement front yard.

The building next door, festooned with red, white and blue balloons, was also having a BBQ — a bittersweet goodbye party for a family moving back to Australia after a few years on Third Street.

A teenager from down the street, a talented young chef, brought over his homemade BBQ sauce, which was instantly slathered on the ribs. As the meat cooked, a gaggle of neighbors and friends placed pot-luck dishes on the makeshift table — some plywood boards over garbage pails covered with a red paper tablecloth.

Ravi, Smartmom’s 14-year-old neighbor, brought down his sitar and played a complicated raga for the crowd. The music, buried beneath the sound of the children’s water fight and the insistent chatter of the grown ups, provided an exotic soundtrack for the May night.

“Is it the Mojito’s or are these the best ribs you’ve ever tasted?” Mr. Kravitz asked Smartmom. She had to agree. The spare ribs were so good that she couldn’t stop herself from eating them — her fingers brown and sticky.

Then it was time for Mrs. Kravitz’s pies: old fashioned country pies in the midst of this very urban BBQ.

“Still needs more sugar,” Mrs. Cleavage said slowly chewing Mrs. Kravitz’s cherry pie.

But the kids didn’t care. They didn’t want anything to do with the pies.

It was the s’mores they were after. They gathered round the small BBQ with their marshmallows on sticks and prided themselves on their roasting technique — not too dark, not too light. Perfect.

A little boy from down the street called Smartmom over to see what he’d done.

“This one’s perfect,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” Smartmom told him, admiring the lightly browned marshmallow.

“It’s for you,” he told her.

Smartmom was touched. She watched as he patiently placed his perfect marshmallow on a graham cracker, added a square of Hershey chocolate and covered it with another graham cracker.

Once the marshmallows were gone, the party seemed to wind down. Neighbors looked for their pots and pans.

“Thanks for letting us glom on to your BBQ,” Smartmom’s friend Brooklyn Mabel told her. “We always glom on to your BBQs,” she said.

“We love to have you,” Smartmom shouted after her as she walked toward Sixth Avenue with her husband, daughter and son.

The clean-up went quickly. Smartmom filled large contractor bags with miscellaneous garbage; neighbors collected wine and beer bottles and tossed them into the recycling. Mr. Kravitz carried the plywood downstairs; he let the BBQ stay out for the night as the charcoals cooled. There was a feeling of summer in the air as the first BBQ of the season came to an end. The children went upstairs to sleep.

It was a school night, after all.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the award-winning Brooklyn Paper.

Smartmom has so many mothers. This year, she sent cards to her
mother, her stepmother, her mother-in-law, her sister, and Beautiful
Smile, the housekeeper and so much more.

What would she do without all her mothers? Each one is unique; each one has something special to offer.

And
with good reason; there’s no need to get all your mothering from one
person. Spread it around and you get all kinds of mother-love from the
women in your life.

On Sunday, Manhattan Granny came out to Park
Slope for a brunch of smoked salmon, trout, whitefish salad and
pumpernickel bread from Blue Apron Foods.

Wearing an Agnes B.
T-shirt, white pants and an elegant designer jacket, Manhattan Granny
looked like a million bucks. She listened to Teen Spirit play a few of
his own songs on the guitar in the dining room.

“He’s Dylanesque,” Manhattan Granny told Smartmom. “I’m very proud of him.”

Diaper
Diva, Bro-in-law and Ducky joined them for brunch. Bro-in-law brought
bunches of peonies, roses, and lilacs for the moms in attendance.
Thoughtfully, Diaper Diva gave Smartmom a gift certificate for a Diva
manicure at the new Dashing Diva salon on Seventh Avenue.

Oops.
Smartmom forget to get Diaper Diva a gift. Sure, she’s not her mother.
But the sisters love to fete each other on Mother’s Day.

Even before she became a mother, Smartmom gave Diaper Diva Mother’s Day cards and gifts for her prowess as a world-class aunt.

After
brunch, Bro-in-law slept on the couch, Manhattan Granny shined
Smartmom’s wedding silver, Diaper Diva cleaned Smartmom’s kitchen.

What would Smartmom do without her moms?

Later
in the day, it was time to visit with her stepmom, MiMa Cat and Groovy
Grandpa at their 27th floor Brooklyn Heights apartment with the great
view of New York Harbor.

The Oh So Feisty One came up with the
name MiMa Cat when she was just 2-years-old because the beloved (now
deceased) cat, Rupert. Now they have a huge Striped Bengali named Raj.

MiMa
Cat showed Smartmom the pink flower arrangement that Smartmom and
Diaper Diva had sent from Park Florist. She seemed touched by their
gift.

Smartmom isn’t sure when she started recognizing her
stepmother on Mother’s Day. Ah, the seesaw life of the divorced child:
Smartmom used to think it was some kind of weird betrayal of her mother
to acknowledge her stepmother on Mother’s Day.

She wasn’t even
sure if MiMa Cat wanted to be acknowledged. But that was then, this is
now. Smartmom and MiMa Cat are closer than ever; stepmothers deserve to be honored on Mother’s Day.

When
Smartmom got home, Hepcat called his mother, Artsy Grandma, who lives
on a farm in Northern California. He caught her on her cellphone on her
way into San Francisco to spend the day with Hepcat’s sister and
brother-in-law.

They wished her a happy Mother’s Day, asked about her garden and her building projects and told her to come visit. Soon.

That
night, Smartmom called Beautiful Smile. She is the unconditional mother
everyone needs; the nurturing grandmother who soothes you when you’re
feeling down; and the caregiver that her children, even at age 11 and
16, love to be around. Her spirit of love and kindness infuses their
Third Street apartment like Buddhist air freshener.

She’d spent the day in Coney Island being honored and feted by her children, her grandchildren and other friends and family.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” Smartmom told her.

That
night when Smartmom got into her pajamas, she realized that her
Mother’s Day was mostly about everyone else — buying the brunch,
setting the table, shuttling to MiMa Cat’s, the cards, the gifts, the
phone calls. She’d told Hepcat not to buy her anything.

“I feel like we’re hemorrhaging money,” she’d said.

Teen Spirit apologized because he never got around to getting her a gift.

“Oh
that’s all right, I’m just glad you’re here,” she told him. OSFO gave
her a nice card. But everything was okay. She didn’t feel sad. Not at
all. She felt buoyed by the love of all the mothers in her life.

Mother’s Day is for the moms — all of them. It takes a mother to make a mother happy on Mother’s

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

So, Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany are selling their gorgeous limestone mansion on Prospect Park West for a cool $8.5 million and buying a place in Tribeca.

Sure, the mansion is a bit out of Smartmom’s price range, but she did check out the listing on the Sotheby’s Web site, where the home is called “one of the all-time great houses of New York [where] sunlight fills the grandly proportioned rooms all day long through oversized windows.” (Oh, so that explains why Connelly and Bettany always had their shades drawn tight!)

Of course, the neighborhood is abuzz. In Smartmom’s case, the buzz started at 3 am on Tuesday, with that first e-mail from her twin sister, Diaper Diva. Luckily Smartmom was sleepless on Third Street, so the pair chatted in the old-fashioned way — over their cellphones.

“One thing you have to say is they kept up the integrity of it,” Diaper Diva told Smartmom as they surveyed the pictures together. “They kept the original details and decorated with a light touch. I like the mix of the mid-century with the Victorian.”

Then Diaper Diva went back to bed. But Smartmom couldn’t sleep as she tried to figure out how Jen and Paul could possibly walk away from all that?

Why would anyone — especially anyone with a house like that?! — leave Park Slope for Tribeca? Why would anyone give up a view of Olmsted’s magnificent Prospect Park for one featuring the West Side Highway and New Jersey?

In some ways, Connelly and Bettany’s Manhattan move calls into question everything that people like Smartmom hold dear. That house on the corner of Carroll Street is a Slope dream, a home to lust over: a historic, 5,200-square-foot mansion crammed with architectural details and facing a beloved park. If they were miserable in a house like that, what does that say about the rest of us? (You got it: we’re more miserable!)

Then again, if Jennifer Connelly can walk away from such a great home, maybe it is possible for all of us to give up the material things that we always think will make our lives so wonderful (but never do).

Smartmom would prefer to think that Connelly, a lifelong Brooklynite, just wants to try life on the other side of the East River. That would be less of a blow to Slopers because we all know that Park Slope is a Shangri La compared to Tribeca.

Still, Smartmom still took it personally. After all, she liked having the actors as neighbors.

They were just a nice couple with kids. All right, they were Hollywood royalty — she has an Oscar; he has, well, those tall, gorgeous, British good looks — but they were good Slopers.

They kept a low profile.

They seemed smart.

They filled their front garden with tulips.

She rode her bike in Prospect Park and played with her kids at the Third Street Playground and the Tea Lounge (though the one on Union Street, not the less-fancy original on Tenth Street!).

Like Us magazine is always pretending, these stars really were “just like US.” Or so we could pretend.

But now they’re walking away from us.

So Smartmom is walking away from her Prospect Park West envy. Yeah, right. What Smartmom wouldn’t do for a cool loft in Tribeca.

Last week, Smartmom sat in a doctor’s waiting room and looked for a magazine. She was hoping for something like the New Yorker, Vogue or even Us or People for some celebrity slime, but settled for Family Circle.

It wasn’t the cover photo of lovely potted pink peonies and green leaves that caught her eye. It was the vaguely retrograde cover line.

“Quick and Healthy Family Dinners,” it said.

Just five simple words and Smartmom’s mood started a downward slide. There she was, sitting in the waiting room with her ailing father, and all she could think about was making dinner for her family.

What to make?

And, more important, why to make it? Well, the family has to eat, and even though Hepcat is a terrific cook, he almost never prepares a weekday meal. He’s great at those show-off meals when friends and family come over: the risotto, the roast leg of lamb, the chicken curry …

But the daily doldrums of dinner falls to Smartmom despite her 1970s cred as a feminist with a certificate in assertiveness training.

And it’s partly Smartmom’s fault. Like other femimoms, the kitchen is still where Smartmom defines herself. It’s the Jewish mother equation: I love you therefore I feed you.

But after nearly 17 years of parenting, everything Smartmom cooks is so boring. Sure, the kids seem to enjoy the Smartmom basics: her chicken and veggie stir-fry, goat cheese salad with dried cranberries, lasagna, and a grilled cheese sandwich to die for. But more often than not, Smartmom finds herself heating up Annie’s Mac and Cheese or Annie’s frozen cheese pizza. (What, in Buddha’s name, would Smartmom do without Annie’s?)

So Smartmom stared at the artfully styled Family Circle photos of fish tacos, beef and chimichurri sauce, salmon burgers, chicken nuggets, Asian peanut noodles, and broccoli and ham quiche. She knew the pictures were nothing but glossy propaganda for Motherhood, but she couldn’t help herself; she felt herself getting inspired to revitalize her home cooking as a way to prove to herself, her children, and the world that she really is a great mother.

Smartmom gobbled up the magazine’s suggestions before her eyes. Maybe reading these recipes would turn Smartmom into a real balabusta like her grandmother, who prepared succulent pot roast, succulent lamb chops, and lemon merengue pie in her spotless kitchen on Avenue J.

Smartmom felt the familiar pangs of inadequacy course through her. Why wasn’t she more motivated to be a great homemaker? A part of her longed to do the kind of cooking her kids would remember for the rest of their lives.

She has great memories of Manhattan Granny’s beef bourguignon from the food-stained pages of her Julia Child cookbook.

Smartmom even remembers the time her father followed a recipe in the James Beard Cookbook for steak tartare, a dish made with raw ground beef, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, onions, capers, and raw eggs.

Can you imagine?

Smartmom wonders what Teen Spirit and the Oh So Feisty One will remember about her cooking.

The thought made Smartmom want to rip out the magazine’s handy recipes and stuff them in her Jack Spade bag. Teen Spirit and OSFO might love this stuff — or maybe not. It all sounded delicious, but kids can be so darn fussy.

And Family Circle made it all sound so easy. Too easy. “Take a break from take-out,” some copywriter wrote. “Try these good-for-you versions of your family’s favorites.”

Smartmom hated to think of the number of times a month they order from Szechuan Delight or Coco Roco. Just last week, OSFO had her favorite, chicken and brocolli in white sauce, two nights in a row. The woman who answers the phone doesn’t even ask anymore if they want soy sauce, duck sauce or mustard (for the record, no thanks).

Smartmom was amazed. Family Circle even had a reduced calorie version of General Tso’s chicken, which is Teen Spirit’s perennial favorite, made with low-sodium soy sauce, canola oil, skinless chicken and one head of fresh broccoli, steamed.

Smartmom vowed to jumpstart her home cooking. Teen Spirit would be going to college in just over a year. She still had time to entice him with delicious meals that would keep him longing for his mother’s home cooking. Forever.

Hepcat has never forgotten his mother’s tamale pie. Every time he visits the family’s farm in Northern California, he asks her to prepare it. And she, of course, does, thrilled that her son still loves her tasty cooking.

Finally, the doctor was ready to see Smartmom’s father and it was time to put the magazine down — and spit out forever the notion that food = love. The guilt. The insecurity. There was surely more to mothering than a reduced-fat version of General Tsao’s chicken. Smartmom knew that for sure.

So of course she would be calling (718) 788-5408 later that very night. The woman on the other end of the line at Szechuan Delight is always glad to hear her voice.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the award-winning Brooklyn Paper:

Smartmom had never read Lenore Skenazy’s column in the New York Sun before Tuesday, when Dumb Editor told her that Skenazy had become Parent Enemy Number 1 by letting her 9-year old take the subway home from Bloomingdale’s to an unrevealed Manhattan neighborhood.

By himself.

“Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence,” Skanazy wrote. “Long story longer: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cellphone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.”

The ensuing hysteria landed Skenazy on all the talk shows defending her seemingly indefensible position. She let her little baby — just a few years out of Mommy and Me classes! — ride the big bad subway. She must be chastised! She’s worse than that woman who drowned her kids in the tub!

Dumb Editor wanted to know what Smartmom thought of all this.

“Do you, for example, let the Oh So Feisty One take the subway by herself?” Dumb Editor asked (now you know how he got his name).

Of course she doesn’t! The 11-year-old OSFO just started walking to and from school by herself last September and they live right around the corner from PS 321.

Smartmom knows that OSFO could probably take the subway by herself, but she’s not sure if she really wants to. First off, where would she go?

It’s not like it’s 1967 when Smartmom was 9 and her parents let her take two city buses to school every morning.

Sure, she got mugged every now and again. On the subway and on the street. But that was de rigeur. Kids were frequently having their bus passes whisked out of their hands back in those days. But Smartmom was a pro — and she was pretty blase when it happened.

It was barely worth a mention to her parents.

And the subways weren’t just for going to school.

On weekends, Smartmom and her friend, Best and Oldest, would take the subway down to the Village to buy leather jackets and velvet coats at vintage clothing emporiums like Royal Rags on East Fourth Street and Ridge Furs on West Eighth Street.

It was fun, wild and free to be a kid in New York City in the ’60s and ’70s. All the grown ups were having a good time so why not the 9-, 10-, and 11-year-olds?

Oy, have things changed. When Skenazy revealed in her article that she let her son take a subway and a bus home (without a cellphone), she was accused of being the world’s worst mom.

That’s because, even though New York is safer than ever, parents are more protective than ever — and more judgmental.

It all started with Etan Patz, the 6-year-old boy who left his Soho home for school one morning in 1979 and was never heard from again.

Things really changed in New York after that.

Patz was the first missing child to be featured on a milk carton. And that milk carton was the beginning of the end of carefree childhood for New York kids.

No more riding your bike in Central Park without your parents. No more trips to FAO Schwartz, Wollman Rink, even Bloomingdale’s, without your parents helicoptering over you.

No more 9-year-olds on the subway.

It’s a shame because New York is a great city to be a kid in and part of being a kid is doing things all by yourself. It’s how you learn how to be a New Yorker — and how you learn to spread your wings and fly.

The strange thing is this: New York is safer now than it was in 1979. It’s nowhere near the most dangerous city in America anymore. The crime rate has been falling for years.

Although New York is safer than ever, other things have changed. For one, parenting was invented (didn’t you hear? The Yuppies invented it in 1984). Now parenting is a neurotic national obsession. From “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” to Baby Einstein videos, New Yorkers are now driven to be as good at parenting as they were at, well, everything else.

Sure, this may have been a reaction to the laissez-faire parenting of the 1970s, but we turned out all right, didn’t we? (Dumb Editor note: We did?)

With this drive to be the best parents in history, came the narcissistic belief that children are completely created by their parents. That means kids need to be with their parents 24/7 whether playing educational games, doing homework, eating in restaurants, even hanging out at Union Hall.

Likewise, parents don’t want their kids to do anything without them. They can’t fathom the loss of control and they’re just too darn scared.

So, it’s no surprise that when Skenazy let her 9-year-old do something on his own, it freaked out a lot of parents. Clearly, if a New York City kid is going to have a learning experience, mom and dad better be close by (or at least connected by cellphone).

Smartmom has even heard about parents who take their kids to college for the first time and actually hang out. Sometimes for days. Even weeks.

Boy, that’s a far cry from when Smartmom’s parents dropped her off at SUNY Binghamton and drove away. See ya later. Bye bye.

Sounds like Skenazy’s kid was dying for a childhood adventure away from his mom and dad. If he lived in the country, he’d be running around the woods or making a house out of a refrigerator box.

Kids need to feel like they’re free.

So, you’re probably wondering, when is Smartmom going to let OSFO take the subway by herself?

By herself?! You’ve got to be skenazy! Smartmom won’t ever let OSFO take the subway alone.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the award winning Brooklyn Paper:

Last month, when Smartmom decided to get rid of the red, ultra-suede club chair in her living room, Teen Spirit was fit to be tied.

“How dare you throw away that cornerstone of my childhood,” he screamed.

Then the Oh So Feisty One chimed in. “Say it: ‘I will not throw away, give away, or sell the red chair. Say it!’”

Despite their protestations, Smartmom, with great difficulty, single-handedly moved the chair from the living room into the dining room to further await a decision on its fate.

At first, she put it on its side so that it wouldn’t take up too much space. Then OSFO put it right side up so that she could sit on it at dinnertime. You see, OSFO likes to eat in that chair — that’s one of the reasons it’s so dirty.

Smartmom should have put the kibosh on eating in the living room — on the red chair — but she never did.

But it wasn’t only the dark stains on the ultra suede that bothered Smartmom. The chair took up too much space in the family’s living room. It was like a black hole swallowing up all the room’s sunlight and blocking the windows.

It was just too big.

Still, Smartmom knows how attached her children are to that skuzzy old chair. For Buddha’s sake, that’s where Teen Spirit watched Pokemon videos and “Beauty and the Beast.” OSFO was breastfed in that chair, where she did spin art and ate snacks (hence the paint stains and the caked-on food).

When she got older, OSFO watched “The O.C.” and “Gossip Girl” in that chair. Teen Spirit played his guitars there; his friends used it as a bed when they slept over.

Smartmom knew that she was probably a cruel, insensitive mother to get rid of that chair. Think of the memories embedded in it. It’s like a Proustean Madeleine.

Memories, schmemories. The springs are coming out of the bottom; it smells. Years ago, she hired Macy’s Upholstery Service to clean it and even they couldn’t get the stains out.

Sure, it’s a fancy chair. It had been custom made for Manhattan Granny by a snazzy upholsterer in Soho. But as soon as she saw how much space it took up in her minimalist living room on the Upper West Side, she had it shipped to Park Slope.

That was 13 years ago. And it’s been in Smartmom’s apartment ever since.

“You’re always changing things,” Teen Spirit told Smartmom. “When you’re upset you move the furniture.” Smartmom was stricken. But she knew he was right. When she’s upset, she rearranges, tidies piles of paper, folds clothing.

After a few days, Smartmom decided to try to find a new home for the chair. That way, her children wouldn’t feel like she’d just tossed it away. A young married couple came over to look at it. They seemed to like it. The guy said it was probably too big, but the woman seemed to want to make it work. Smartmom measured the chair for them.

Later, the young woman called to say that the chair was too big. Smartmom was disappointed, but soldiered on. She asked Mrs. Kravitz, her downstairs neighbor, if she wanted it. Her living room is big and she’s been wanting to get rid of what she calls her yellow “grandmother chair.”

Smartmom reasoned that it would be nice to have the chair in the building not too far away. That way Teen Spirit and OSFO could visit it.

Mr. and Mrs. Kravitz came up one night to look at the chair. Smartmom plied them with a $20 Cabernet (which is a lot for her!). But that didn’t help. They didn’t want that big chair in their living room either.

Smartmom is still trying to find a home for the chair. If no one wants it, she’s going to call Housing Works and they’ll come and cart it away. In the meantime, it sits quietly in the corner of the dining room next to the entrance to the kitchen.

Secretly, Smartmom fantasizes about taking it downstairs on big garbage day. Teen Spirit is still p.o.’ed. The other night, he pointed angrily at the white plastic Eames chair that Smartmom put in its stead in the living room and said, “You don’t expect us to sit on that do you?”

So the chair waits. Smartmom waits.

Anybody want a nice, big red chair? It’s free.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

Novelist Ayelet Waldman caught a lot of flack when she wrote in the
New York Times that she loves her husband, writer Michael Chabon, more
than she loves her children.

That’s a weird thing to say (no
matter how much Smartmom likes Chabon’s work!). How do you measure such
things — with a scale, a ruler, or a measuring cup? Do you monitor your
heartbeats, heavy breathing or the swelling of your chest?

The
media, especially the blogosphere, went berserk over Waldman’s honest
(if strange) assertion, and Waldman became the poster mama for bad
mommies everywhere.

Then came Britney, the prom queen of moms you
never want to have. She takes drugs around her kids, and drives her
pick-up truck with her son on her lap without a seat belt.

She’s
guilty of one egregious act of bad mommydom after another. She’s also,
apparently, mentally ill. Still, the public can’t get enough of her via
the celebrity magazines, blogs, and television shows.

Waldman, in
a recent issue of New York Magazine, empathizes with Spears for all the
public vitriol that she has had to endure and tries to explain why the
public (especially other mothers) likes to vilify mothers.

“One
way to find consolation in the face of all this failure and guilt is to
judge ourselves not against the impossible standard of the Good Mother,
but against the fun-house-mirror-image Bad Mother. By defining for us
the kind of mother we’re not, the Bad Mother makes it easier for us to
live with what we are.”

So that’s the standard now? Buddha knows,
we can’t live up to the Berkeley Carroll ideal of the perfect stroller
mom, but can it really be that Waldman believes that it’s good enough
to just stay one step above lousy moms like Britney, Ayelet Waldman, or
Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in a bathtub?

But
being “better than bad” is not the same as being good. And what is a
“good” mom and how do you know whether you are or aren’t? There’s got
to be some objective standards, right?

The problem is that it’s
hard to quantify. That’s why things like extreme selflessness, baking
cookies and sewing homemade Halloween costumes have become misplaced
markers of mommy achievement.

Baking cookies has always been one of those good mom measurements. Do you? How often? And from scratch or mix?

And
selflessness — that gets (homemade) brownie points. What about when a
mom needs some meditation-time for herself? A night with the girls and
some margaritas? Never. I’ll just sit by the crib and suffer, she
thinks.

But some of the best moms would neither know how to be
selfless nor the difference between Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker or Mark
Bittman.

That’s because none of that stuff has anything to do
with good parenting. What’s really important is how you talk to your
kids and whether they feel loved for who they are.

Smartmom believes that good mothering comes in many sizes, shapes and colors. But there are, of course, some mommy basics:

Moms
(in partnership with dads) are required to love, feed, clothe, shelter
discipline, and educate their children. They must make them feel warm
and secure; comfort them when they are sick; hold them (and listen to
them) when they are sad.

Still it takes a whole lot more to win
the Mommy sweepstakes. Here are some of the ways that Smartmom has
tried to win the crown:

• Reading the entire “All of a Kind Family” series to OSFO and agreeing not to cry at the sad parts?

•
Forcing Teen Spirit to take that musical theater class in fourth grade.
He hated doing it but Smartmom was — you guessed it — trying to be a
good mom.

• Throwing elaborate, themed birthday parties for Teen Spirit (Beatles, Harry Potter and Who Wants to be a Millionaire)?

•
And what about all those trips to see the dinosaurs and the dioramas at
the Museum of Natural History with Teen Spirit and those endless hours
in the basement of the Children’s Museum of Manhattan with OSFO?

Doesn’t
that stuff count for something? Ask your kid. The real time to measure
whether you are a good mom or not will be 20 or 30 years from now when
your kid is sitting in a therapist’s office talking about the long or
short list of terrible things you did as a parent.

The shortest
list wins the mommy Olympics. And you can bet that baking cookies or
making Halloween costumes won’t be the crux of the issue. Smartmom can
just imagine what Teen Spirit and OSFO will have to say about the
emotional damage she — inadvertently, mind you! — caused them.

Will
Teen Spirit tell his therapist about the time she slapped him in the
face when he refused to write a memoir for his third-grade teacher?

Will OSFO tell her therapist about all the times Smartmom embarrassed her in front of her friends?

Will they complain about all those fights between Hepcat and Smartmom about HIS clutter in the living room?

Will they hate her for calling them Teen Spirit and the Oh So Feisty One in her Brooklyn Paper column?

All this talk about good and bad mothering got Smartmom thinking about a good mother she has known.

Smartmom’s
mom, Manhattan Granny, got bonus points for refusing to move to the
suburbs when everyone was ditching the city for backyards and ballgames
in Westchester.

An urban mom years before there was Urban Baby,
dinner was take-out from the sadly defunct Williams’s BBQ on the Upper
West Side and a Sara Lee brownie. Saturday meant a Fred Astaire movie
at the Thalia or the Martha Graham Dance Company at City Center.

But most important, Manhattan Granny was a loving person who was always great to talk to; analytical and incisive as needed.

Sure, Smartmom has spent years complaining about her mother with her therapist about — wouldn’t you like to know?

And
they’ve had more than one receiver-slamming fight on the phone. But
that’s not the point. The best moms, like Manhattan Granny, are quirky
and interesting and can’t be measured by whether they’re selfless
martyrs or good bakers.

“The most important thing is creating a
space where your child feels safe and can experience childhood in a
happy and playful way,” Diaper Diva told Smartmom over a recent oatmeal
breakfast at Sweet Melissa’s.

Which brings us back to Ayelet
Waldman. Who cares if she loves her husband more than her kids? The
important thing is whether she covers the basics and sprinkles in a
heavy amount of herself and the things that matter to her.

Like Smartmom’s kids, Waldman’s are going to talk about her in therapy anyway. So why not?

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

Hepcat is in California visiting his mom and life is different whenever he’s away. How so? Smartmom has to be both good cop and bad cop.

She’s not used to being bad cop — but she’s learning. Oh, is she learning!

The Oh So Feisty One likes to do her math homework with Hepcat by her side and not having him home caused more than one meltdown.

“I don’t understand,” she screamed the other evening as Smartmom tried to explain how to find the common denominator for fractions.

Smartmom racked her brain. Ever so slowly, it came back. Smartmom may be a smart mom, but simple math can still flummox her.

Things got so bad that OSFO insisted she call Hepcat in California.

When he picked up the phone, he patiently explained how to do it. Still, OSFO was having a tough time. But thanks to Hepcat’s cross-country explanation, Smartmom figured out how to explain it to OSFO.

“I know how to explain this,” she told OSFO, who finally got the concept.

Teen Spirit hasn’t mentioned Hepcat much. That’s probably because he feels a little freer without his dad’s tough love of parenting (the 16-year-old Teen Spirit needs a lot of tough love).

Just about every morning while Hepcat was away, Teen Spirit feigned a real or imagined malady.

“I think I drank some curdled milk yesterday,” he told Smartmom clutching his stomach one morning.

“I am definitely coming down with something,” he told Smartmom on Friday morning, lying with his blanket over his head and the rain pouring down outside his window. “Can I stay home from school?”

Teen Spirit would never try such shenanigans if Hepcat were home.

“Don’t make me use the ice,” is what Hepcat would say if Teen Spirit was refusing to get out of bed in the morning. “Do you want me to get the weasels?”

That usually makes Teen Spirit pop out of bed and head for the shower faster than a speeding slacker.

But Teen Spirit knows that Smartmom is a world-class pushover. On more than one occasion, she had allowed him to stay home.

But she’s learned her lesson. He usually feels better by 3 pm. Much better. And then he has the nerve to ask if he can go out and see his friends. Grrr.

Smartmom may be a wuss, but she hates to be duped.

This week, Smartmom struggled against her pushover tendencies. She tried to channel Hepcat 3,000 miles away. “Don’t make me get the ice,” she whispered to herself. “Should I get the weasels?”

It worked. She felt emboldened by the fact that she was alone and she had to set down the law. Consequently, she and Teen Spirit had a huge fight on Friday morning. Smartmom wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

“Get up NOW. You’re going to be late!” she screamed and she really meant it.

“Two more minutes,” he begged.

“No,” she said.

“Please” he pleaded.

“NO,” she said it so loud the upstairs and the downstairs neighbors probably heard her. Luckily no one complained.

Finally, Teen Spirit got out of bed and grumpily got into his skinny jeans, his father’s old leather aviator jacket, his grandfather’s wingtips and stormed out of the house.

Smartmom felt a mix of triumph and pain. She hates when Teen Spirit leaves the house that way (it probably reminds her of the door-slamming fights she had when she was an adolescent). No doubt, that’s why she lets Hepcat be the bad cop while she gets to be the sympathetic one.

Indeed, Hepcat’s absence is forcing Smartmom to have one heck of an insight. When he’s not around, she has to exercise the parts of herself that she doesn’t bother to face when he’s around. Like remembering how to do math problems and giving Teen Spirit a piece of her mind.

Clearly, Hepcat not only comes in handy when Smartmom can’t quite remember something mathematical, but at those more-important times when Smartmom doesn’t want to face her anger. When Hepcat is around, she need use only a fraction of her power — just the way she likes it, apparently.

After Teen Spirit left for school on Friday morning, Smartmom felt lightheaded. There was a tingling sensation in her body mixed with a true sense of power.

She was a toughie and it felt really, really good.

Teen Spirit might even have gotten to school on time

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

The owner of Union Hall, the Union Street bocce bar popular with hipsters, rockers and (until last week) new moms, has changed his mind after a week of criticism for his hastily announced “No kids allowed” policy.

Starting soon, owner Jim Carden told Smartmom, the bar will once again welcome in moms and their kids for some downtime (and drinks!) a few afternoons a week.

Whew! Now, can we all get along?

Carden had been under fire — and also hailed as a drinking class hero — ever since he posted a “No strollers” sign in the front window last week.

Plenty of mommies took to the blogs to slam Carden, but just as many defended him.

“I went to Union Hall [and] was appalled to be sitting next to toddlers while trying talk to my girlfriends (sometimes graphically) about life,” wrote one poster on Brooklynian. “So I’ve not been back. I’ll give it another try if it’s not going to feel like a preschool.”

That was one of the more polite posts!

Carden certainly wasn’t the first bar-owner to lower the boom on the Bugaboo set. Who can forget the bartender at Patio on Fifth Avenue who wrote the now-famous (or infamous) “Stroller Manifesto” on an A-frame sandwich board?

“What is it with people bringing their kids into bars?” wrote bartender Andy Heidel in thick white chalk back in August, 2006. “A bar is a place for adults to kick back and relax. How can you do that with a toddler running around?”

Smartmom can see both sides (she wouldn’t be Smartmom if she couldn’t find the neuroses in everything!). Yes, it’s convenient to bring your kid with you if you don’t have a babysitter. But do parents really need their Rob Roy with a side of rug rats?

Maybe. Carden told Smartmom this week that it was mistake to just put up the “No strollers” signs without an explanation to the neighborhood.

Herein is that explanation: “It was strictly liability,” Carden said. “A lot of parents are great and mindful. But some are not that attentive to their kids when they’re in here. This is a bar with an open stairwell and a bocce court. This is a business and we don’t have the staff to police it.”

It’s not like Union Hall has anything against parents and kids — far from it. Carden and a few of the bar’s employees have kids of their own.

“But Union Hall is not a community center,” he said. “We want to be here for a long time. We’ve got a long lease. We don’t want to jeopardize that for anything [with a possible lawsuit].”

So for now, that means no more mommy groups at the bar. One mom wrote Smartmom to say that she’s not happy about this turn of events. She lives in a 650-square-foot apartment, and there’s barely enough room for her, her husband, their 18-month-old and an elderly, deaf cat.

So she likes to get together with friends in a public space like Union Hall. Especially when it’s cold outside.

“In the winter, sometimes we go to a bar during ‘off’ hours with our kids, let them run around, let the adults chat and have a drink whether it be alcoholic or not,” she said. “We assume that a bar or bar/restaurant would be happy to have some business during the off hours.”

Good assumption. Carden now says he will open Union Hall to kids and parents a few afternoons a week.

While some parents might resent the segregation of parents and regular customers, Smartmom think this is a great compromise for mommy groups that need somewhere to go and a neighborhood sorely in need of indoor spaces for parents and kids.

Still, local parents will have to face the fact that Union Street is not a small village in the English countryside with a charming pub that doubles as a gathering place for families with children and dogs. Smartmom loved the feeling of those places back in 1978 when she took a bicycle tour through southern England.

But this is Brooklyn. And Union Hall is a grown-up bar. Smartmom would even go so far to say that it is designed as a place for the younger Park Slope crowd — you know, those post-pubescent adults without gray hair that aren’t attached to strollers and children. They tend to congregate at brunch places and bars on Fifth Avenue.

Heck, they’re almost as young as Smartmom and Hepcat were when they hung out at that funky bar they called windows on the weird on Avenue A.

Come to think of it, Smartmom can’t remember any kids in Puffy’s, El Teddy’s or the Ear Inn in Soho back in the 1980s. Kids certainly existed, of course, but they didn’t have social lives like kids today.

Today, clearly Park Slope’s “young people” need a place to hang out just like Hepcat did when he had a specially designated bar stool at the Great Jones Café.

And it’s not like Union Hall never lets children through its very grown-up doors. Downstairs, the club sponsors special all-ages shows with such popular bands as Care Bears on Fire and Teen Spirit’s incredible new band, the Mighty Handful. These shows, which happen on Saturday afternoons, serve non-alcoholic punch with sour gummy worms.

But other than afternoons for mommy groups, and the occasional all ages music show, Union Hall is declaring itself a kid-free zone on nights and weekends when it wants to be a grown-up bar.

Smartmom is okay with that. Just because they have a huge Bocce court, Union Hall is not, for the most part, a place for kids. Or parents who don’t want to get a babysitter.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from Brooklyn Paper.

Smartmom was walking on Lincoln Place when she saw Old Mom Friend walking in the opposite direction. Neither of them paused to say hello at first.

Although Smartmom has always enjoyed their sidewalk conversations, on this particular day she wasn’t sure she was in the mood for what might be an anxiety provoking conversation about college.

Frankly, Smartmom didn’t feel like getting agitated about the future of the tall guy with the low voice and facial hair who lives in the bedroom next door to where she sleeps.

At 16, Teen Spirit is such a work in progress. It’s his life now. A quick review of what he’s been up to doesn’t really express the scope of who he is.

Suddenly, Old Mom Friend stopped in her tracks and turned around. “I haven’t seen you in ages,” OMF said.

“I didn’t recognize you with that big winter hat on,” Smartmom said. It was only partly true.

The conversation went just as Smartmom expected. OMF wanted to know if they’d visited any colleges yet. Smartmom wasn’t sure what to say. The truth is, Teen Spirit, doesn’t even want to talk about college.

OMF wanted to know if Teen Spirit was thinking of applying to music schools.

She wanted to know if he had a list of the schools he’s interested in.

Standing on the corner of Lincoln Place and Seventh Avenue, Smartmom felt the anxiety rise up inside her like acid reflux.

OMF and Smartmom go way back. They used to talk in the backyard of PS 321 when their boys were in the same second grade class with an enchanted teacher named Ian, who taught the class the history of baseball and directed the kids in a play about the subway.

Over the years, they shared anxieties about their sons, their teachers and the curriculum at PS 321. When it came time to apply to middle school, Smartmom remembers many an anguished conversation about that cheerful topic.

Teen Spirit and OMF’s son both attended MS 51, a public middle school on Fifth Avenue. There were few opportunities for the moms to share anxiety anymore. The kids no longer needed their moms to take them to and from school. At the occasional school art show or play, however, Smartmom and OMF would run into each other and have a quick worry fest about something or other.

When the boys were in eighth grade, the moms ran into each other on one of the high school tours and shared plenty of agita as they walked nervously through the hallowed halls of the High School for Telecommunications Arts and Technology.

The boys ended up in different high schools. Two years ago, Smartmom ran into OMF at the Subway sandwich shop on Seventh Avenue, where they yakked about how nervous making it was to have their boys taking the subway alone.

When Smartmom saw OMF the other day she almost kept on walking. It’s not like Smartmom is in denial about all this college stuff. It’s just that, she’s trying to stay calm for as long as possible.

But here in Park Slope, you’re supposed to be ahead of the curve, ready for the next phase, seriously way in advance because…

That means you’re paying attention.

Smartmom and OMF wished each other the best of luck. They were going to need it over the next year or so: college tours, SATs, applications, financial aid, admissions letters.

But most of all: those anxiety provoking conversations on Seventh Avenue.

In May of 2006, I wrote a Smartmom for the Brooklyn Paper about Heath Ledger because something he said about his life in Brooklyn with Matilda and Michelle moved me.

Sadly, the actor who said the following to the Hollywood Star is now dead: “My life right now is, I wouldn’t say reduced to food, but my duties in life are that I wake up, cook breakfast, clean the dishes, prepare lunch, clean those dishes, go to the market, get fresh produce, cook dinner, clean those dishes and then sleep if I can. And I love it. I actually adore it.”

He was only 28 years old.

When I went to Cobble and Boerum Hill in search of Heath, everywhere I went shopkeepers and neighbors had such nice things to say about him. Here is an excerpt from that story meant as a tribute to a wonderful actor who made Brooklyn his home for a while. He will forever be remembered for his brave and sensitive portrayal of Ennis in “Brokeback Mountain.”

Smartmom loved Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain.” In fact, the scene in the tent with Jake really got her juices going. Literally. A little rough, a little raw, it was one of the best movie sex scenes in recent memory.

Truth be told, Smartmom got all hot and squirmy sitting next to Hepcat in the Pavilion not long ago. Then, the other day, Smartmom read a short on-line piece about her man Heath.

“My life right now is, I wouldn’t say reduced to food, but my duties in life are that I wake up, cook breakfast, clean the dishes, prepare lunch, clean those dishes, go to the market, get fresh produce, cook dinner, clean those dishes and then sleep if I can. And I love it. I actually adore it,” Ledger told the Hollywood Star.

It’s no secret that Smartmom thinks — hell, even dumb moms, think it, too — that there is nothing sexier than a man who takes good care of his children, SHOPS FOR GROCERIES and cooks. Clearly, Heath is loving his life as baby Matilda’s dad and Michelle’s “husband” in Boerum Hill.

Later, Smartmom shared her view of Heath with Dumb Editor (who also liked “Brokeback Mountain,” although he did not find the tent scene as pleasing as Smartmom). “Why don’t you go down to BoCoCa — or whatever the brokers are calling that neighborhood nowadays — and find Heath? Then you can see for yourself.”

Smartmom is never thrilled when she has to leave her upholstered divan to do some real reporting. But if it meant a chance to see her man Heath, Smartmom was game. She changed into Heath-stalking gear — cowboy boots, blue jeans, jean jacket and dark glasses — and boarded a Bergen Street-bound F-train.

When Smartmom arrived in the land of Heath and Michelle, she walked up Smith Street and peeked into the Cafe Kai, which had an ultra welcoming sign on the door that said, “We’ve Been Waiting for You.” Despite a full menu of organic tea, there was no H or M. Smartmom spotted a seriously cool woman’s clothing store called Dear Fieldbinder. Hoping to see Michelle, with Matilda in the Bjorn, shopping with Daddy Heath, Smartmom walked into the high-end dress shop.

Smartmom spotted a black t-shirt that would look perfect underneath the jacket she’s wearing to her 30th high school reunion in a few weeks. She plunked down $32 for garment — but this wasn’t shopping, this was recon! Smartmom asked the saleswoman, Sadie Stein, if she’d ever seen Heath or Michelle.

A huge, mischievous smile crossed Stein’s face and her eyes shone through her oversized tortoise-shell glasses.

“I was driving down Smith Street with friends and saw a really goofy looking jogger wearing bright red sweat pants, an Africa t-shirt, a really weird headband, and big sunglasses, flailing his arms about like this.”

She demonstrated what looked like a cross between modern dance and kick-boxing.

“He looked so funny, we had to stop the car. And then my friend figured out that it was Heath Ledger!”

Stein was an unapologetic treasure trove of information about Heath and Michelle. “I also saw the two of them at an afternoon screening of ‘Grizzly Man’ at the Cobble Hill Cinema. I was the only one in the movie theater. They came in after the opening credits and left before the closing credits. Stein thought that was strange. “I mean, it was just the three of us.”

That sounded kinda kinky to Smartmom. (Dumb Editor note: Down, girl.)

Next, Smartmom checked out the various children’s boutiques on Smith Street. Smartmom was almost certain that she’d see them at Area in BoCoCa, shopping for yoga pants, a Buddha-patterned diaper cover, or a $95, hand-knit hoodie for Matilda.

“They’ve been here a lot,” one salesgirl said helpfully.

But they’re not here now, are they, thought Smartmom.

Smartmom headed to Hoyt Street, where, she’d heard, the dashing couple lived. Hoyt is a step back in time to pre-gentrified Brooklyn. The impressive St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church looms over the small-scale neighborhood of three-story brownstones and bodegas and acres of red brick apartment buildings that make up the Gowanus Houses.

Smartmom ran into a small woman walking a fashionable small dog and popped the question. The woman’s eyes moved discreetly towards the building where Heath and Michelle supposedly live.

“But we’ve never seen them,” Dog Lady said. “I think they must have a house somewhere else. They don’t live there.”

Still, Smartmom’s opinion of Healthmichelle was rising to new heights. They are so cool to see the beauty in this very mixed Brooklyn landscape, she thought.

Smartmom walked back to Smith, hoping to see Heath carrying a big bag of groceries. Instead, she saw a Brooklyn house with an American flag in the garden, a barking dog and a memorial sign that said, “John Padillo Way, Battalion One 9/11/01.”

This was a real as Brooklyn gets,

Back on Smith Street, Smartmom swooped into Andie Woo, a dreamy lingerie shop, where she chatted up one of the owners while buying a black bra for the dress she’s wearing to the Baltimore wedding next month (again, recon, not shopping).

“Michelle has been in here LOTS,” said Patti, one of the owners. “She’s really down-to-earth and nice. She’s bought stuff for her mother!”

Smartmom was impressed that Michelle bought lingerie for her mom. While paying for her $65 bra, Smartmom listened to Patti’s thoughts on Heath.

“I really respect the fact that he choose to move here, a real place with real people,” she said. And then, almost as an afterthought, she added that she sees the two of them a lot at Smith and Vine, a tasteful boutique wine shop across the street.

“What do you expect? He’s an Aussie,” said a woman who was shopping for thong underwear.

Heathless, Smartmom popped into Smith and Vine, lugging three shopping bags with her Smith Street booty, half expecting to see them loading up on fine vintage booze.

So it wouldn’t be a total loss, Smartmom did spend $18 on a bottle of sake (recon!). Depleted and hungry, she made her last stop at a real neighborhood hangout, The Food Company — surely a place that Heath and Matilda would feel right at home. Futiley scanning the casual restaurant for Matilda’s stroller, Smartmom ordered a superb turkey club with bacon, arugala, and cranberries.

Even though she hadn’t seen them sipping lattes while walking down the street with Matilda in the sling, Smartmom felt like she knew them both a little better.

They own a derelict building across the street from a housing project and live on a block with blue-and-white plastic Virgin Mary statues in the front gardens. Heath even flails his hands about when he jogs…

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper. No that’s Brooklyn, New York. Not Brooklyn, Iowa.

On Christmas Eve, Smartmom had a nice conversation with Jake, the panhandler who usually stands in front of Ace Supermarket on Seventh Avenue and Berkeley Place.

Jake has a lovely smile and a very pleasant personality. Over the years, he and Smartmom have had many short conversations and she has probably given him hundreds of dollars.

A dollar here, a dollar there, Smartmom gives him money just about every time she sees him.

On the days when she’s low on cash, she crosses the street or makes excuses. “I’ll get you on my way back,” she says fully intending to do so. Usually she doesn’t come back. But Jake doesn’t seem to hold it against her.

In fact, Jake always looks happy to see Smartmom. That may be because she once gave him a $10 bill.

About an hour later he hit her up for more money. “I just gave you $10,” she told Jake somewhat miffed. What an ungrateful so and so, she thought.

“That’s right. Excuse me. Sorry, miss.”

Everyone makes mistakes.

Years ago, Smartmom read an interview with Jake in Stay Free Magazine. In it, he said that he needs $20 a day for food and his room in a flophouse somewhere in Brooklyn. That’s where he sleeps and showers.

But every day without fail, Jake is back on Seventh Avenue, where he’s as much a part of the scenery as the stroller moms, the woman who sells bags made out of kimonos, and the Chinese musician who plays the Erhu in front of Citibank.

Not all panhandlers are as pleasant as Jake. The homeless men who used to sleep on the steps of Old First Reformed Church got on a lot of people’s nerves and caused Old First’s Pastor Daniel Meeter a great deal of tsuris.

“People keep asking why don’t we get rid of them. We can’t. We’ve tried. Believe me, we have tried. They have abused our hospitality, they piss on our building, they leave food around, they leave garbage all over, they play their radio at great volumes,” Meeter wrote on his blog, oldfirst.blogsspot.com.

Meeter tried to help these men, who all allegedly have substance abuse problems, but nothing worked. According to Meeter, they’re still living on the street somewhere.

But at least the steps of his church are free of them.

The police and many in the community believe that generous Park Slopers are the cause of the homeless problem.

“One of the reasons we’re not getting rid of them is because everyone is giving them money.” Officer Nybia Cooper told The Brooklyn Paper.

But are the homeless really that big a problem in Park Slope? For Buddha’s sake, it’s not like the East Village, the Lower East Side, or San Francisco. Indeed, Park Slope has a small group of homeless people who’ve been around for years. They belong here as much as anyone else and have endeared themselves to many in the community.

For some of the same reasons that Park Slope is a red-hot real estate market, it’s a great neighborhood to be homeless in. And like most Park Slopers, the local homeless love to have intense street-side conversations.

There’s the William Burroughs’s look-a-like, who sits in front of Starbucks. Apparently he has an apartment nearby. But he comes out once a month around rent time and asks in a polite whisper if you can spare some change.

There’s the ravaged-looking woman who stands in front of Citibank and the guy who sits on a fruit crate in front of the Apple Tree and always says to the kids, “Don’t forget to read a book.”

If Officer Cooper is right, Smartmom is part of the problem. Yet, she knows she doesn’t have the heart to stop giving Jake or any of these other familiar faces money.

Even Meeter, who had his own homeless problem, admits that giving alms is important — though not necessarily for the reason you’d suspect.

“Giving alms doesn’t solve a problem, especially considering where many panhandlers spend what they get,” he told Smartmom.

“But one gives alms symbolically. When I give alms, I am telling the person I trust him or her, and I don’t care whether he or she deserves it. Giving alms is an act of humility, of honoring the person’s right to demand something of me. Giving alms is a way of saying, We’re in this together.”

Smartmom doesn’t have a problem with these Park Slope regulars, who have been on Seventh Avenue for as long as she has. She does, however, wish that they could get the help they need and improve their lives.

And that’s really the issue. Smartmom wonders if giving Jake money is part of his problem. If she and others like her stopped, would he get a job? Smartmom knows that Jake probably has complicated reasons for living the life he leads. He doesn’t seem to have a substance abuse problem. But then again, maybe he does.

Still, he seems very reliable as he shows up every day and stands in front of Ace or at the Citibank.

In a sense, panhandling is his job. And he does it very well. An unpaid doorman, he’s a good conversationalist, who’s friendly, clean, courteous, and helpful.

The other night, Jake told Smartmom that it would be a tough Christmas because his 95-year-old mother died last month. She lived in South Carolina, where Jake grew up on a farm.

He seemed proud of his rural background and talked a bit about his mom, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time. Smartmom asked if he ever thinks about moving back to South Carolina.

“The farm is long gone,” he said. But he’s really hooked on New York City. “It’s too slow down there,” he told her with a smile. “Too slow.”

Hearing about the death of Jake’s mother made Smartmom sad. But that wasn’t why she gave Jake a $10 bill. She gave it to him because it was Christmas Eve and she wanted to do something special for this man, who always makes her smile.

Here this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

It was like Rockefeller Center in Smartmom’s apartment last week.
The Oh So Feisty One kept bringing her friends in and out of the living room to see the tree.

She and her friends just sat on the
green leather couch and stared as if intoxicated by the white lights
and the glittery gold ornaments.

Even Teen Spirit said it was a
nice tree. So did Hepcat. Grudgingly. He was still mourning the fact
that they spent Christmas in Brooklyn for the third year in a row
rather than in California. But he came around.

Here’s how they
got such a great tree: Two Saturdays ago, when it started to snow,
Smartmom, OSFO and Hepcat went out in search of a tree. What a perfect
time to shop. It was 10 pm in the wet, slushy snow.

The
three of them (and Teen Spirit in spirit) sloshed down Seventh Avenue
to browse trees first at the Apple Tree then at the Key Food. They even
went to the Food Co-op to see if those “organic” trees were still
there, but no go.

Back at the Apple Tree on Garfield, OSFO fell
in love with a short, squat tree at and they made a split-second
decision to buy it.

Forty-five dollars later, they were lugging
the tree back to Third Street. Smartmom hoped they wouldn’t run into
any of their Jewish friends — she’d have some explaining to do.

“It’s
our inter-faith Christmas tree, we’ll decorate it with Jewish stars,”
she would have said. But truthfully, Smartmom felt no shame about
having a tree because as an inter-faith family Christmas and Hanukah
are both meaningful.

And since deciding to do Christmas in
Brooklyn, it felt perfectly right to have a tree. Besides, it gave them
somewhere to put the presents.

Once home, they decided to put the
tree in the living room and just admire and inhale its luscious aroma.
They didn’t even decorate it.

Actually Hepcat found it so fragrant, he had to open the window because it was making him cough.

But
it didn’t make Smartmom cough. t made her think of moonlight in
Vermont and the Christmas scene in “Fanny and Alexander” and the Bing
Crosby movies “White Christmas” and “Holiday Inn.”

It made her
think of Christmas on the farm in Northern California where Artsy
Grandma decorates a live tree with timeless ornaments — some homemade,
some vintage glass ones from the 1950s and ’60s.

Smartmom’s
living room seemed so much smaller with the tree in it. She had to
disassemble the Noguchi coffee table and rearrange the furniture. The
tree took over.

Diaper Diva and Ducky came over to help decorate
it. Diaper Diva is a pro at decorating. And so is 3-year-old Ducky, who
delighted in selecting ornaments and finding a spot for them on the
tree. Hepcat strung the lights. OSFO put candy canes everywhere.

When they were done, they all just looked at the tree and sighed. It really was gorgeous.

Smartmom
liked to stare at it as she sat on the green couch in a state of
reverie that really had very little to do with the birth of Jesus and
more to do with how damn pretty that tree looked in her living room.

Truthfully,
it surprised her how much she loved that tree. In the past, her trees
were a cut above Charlie Brown’s. She was sure that Hepcat was
disappointed. But this year’s tree was wonderful — maybe because
Smartmom was finally comfortable with the decision to spend Christmas
in Brooklyn and make their own traditions here.

It looked perfect in their living room because it was theirs.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

On the sixth night of Hanukah, Smartmom asked Hepcat if he was in the mood to make potato latkes.

It
was a quiet Sunday evening on Third Street. The family had just lit the
jolly dancing Hasid menorah they bought at the Clay Pot.

By the
light of seven sparkling candles, the Oh So Feisty One enjoyed her
gift, a pair of pajamas for one of her Webkinz puppies while Teen
Spirit scanned his new copy of “The Golden Compass” — a good atheist
text on this, the holiday of miracles.

Smartmom could tell that Hepcat was mulling over her request because he googled “potato pancakes” in search of a recipe.

Despite how that sounds, Hepcat is the master chef in the family.

While
Smartmom is known for her short-order cooking — French toast, grilled
cheese and stir-fried vegetables and chicken, Hepcat goes in for the
labor intensive fare, including leg of lamb, risotto, chicken curry and
his famous fennel turkey pasta sauce.

And yes, Hepcat, that big hunk of a Presbyterian farm boy, is a connoisseur of the latke.

In
a way, it is through cooking and eating that Hepcat has assimilated to
life as a Jew. And this thrills Smartmom no end. He loves to prepare
the brisket for Passover, as well as the matzoh brei. And of course:
latkes on the holiday of the Maccabees.

Hepcat cooks the same way
he programs computers. He does a lot of research and then comes up with
his own plan. And that’s exactly what he did with the latkes. After he
looked at dozens of recipes and comments on the Internet, he was ready
to improvise.

Fearless in the kitchen, Hepcat loves to combine whatever is in the fridge. And he almost always comes up with something great.

First things first, the proper equipment needed to be located. In other words, where is the Cuisinart?

Smartmom and Hepcat got all mushy sentimental staring at that ancient wedding gift.

Like
them, it had yellowed a bit and after 19 years of use, it was looking a
little worse for the wear. But after a quick wash, it was good as new
and ready to shred potatoes and onions.

Wrrrrrrr went the onions.
Wrrrrr went the potatoes until they made a loud thud. “It sort of
sounds like a peacock falling off the roof,” Hepcat said, ever the
California farm boy.

Hepcat
is never happier than when he is cooking in the kitchen. Sometimes
Smartmom thinks he missed his calling. And when he cooks for the Jewish
holidays, Smartmom feels extra special because it means that he feels
part of her Jewish traditions as much as she feels part of his
Christian ones.

Smartmom watched lovingly as Hepcat combined the
ingredients for the latke batter adding more and more eggs until the
mixture looked right. There was no matzoh meal, so Hepcat found some
old matzoh from last Passover and pounded it into crumbs.

Frying
is Hepcat’s specialty. “The big secret,” Hepcat said, “is to make the
oil as hot as you can get it.” (Dumb Editor’s note: Two words:
Grapeseed oil.)

The house filled with the smell of burning oil
and smoke, and Smartmom opened the living-room windows to air things
out. As Teen Spirit and OSFO watched “Family Guy,” Hepcat prepared this
ancient holiday treat for his interfaith Jewish family.

So how
were the latkes? Smothered with applesauce and sour cream, they were
tasty indeed. Smartmom couldn’t stop herself from eating more than she
wanted to (her diet and all). Teen Spirit and OSFO ate quite a few.
There were even some extras for Mr. and Mrs. Kravitz downstairs.

While
Smartmom and Hepcat cleaned up in the kitchen, Hepcat said, “I have no
idea what I did, but I kept adjusting it until it seemed about right.”

Hepcat
may have been talking about latkes, but he could have been talking
about marriage and family life. Smartmom and Hepcat are winging it like
Hepcat did in the kitchen. Raising Teen Spirit and OSFO, living
together in the apartment, making a living, instilling values in their
kids, inventing a life together — it’s all on the fly.

A little
of this, a smidgen of that until it seems about right: it’s all an
improvisation, really. And that’s probably the best approach.

It certainly works for latkes.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper, of course.

Smartmom and Hepcat spent a weekend afternoon going through 13 years of basement storage deciding what to keep and what to throw away.

A rubbish hauler was booked to arrive first thing that Monday. They’d put this off long enough. It was time.

Hepcat, who would rather have a colonoscopy than go through his beloved storage, did at least get in on the act. Something compelled him to do it this time.

Perhaps it was the nagging — or the threat of divorce and dismemberment if he didn’t comply.

Or maybe it was the fires in Southern California where 1,500 homes were destroyed.

That tragedy got Smartmom thinking about the meaning of things. It forced her to contemplate what she would take with her if her apartment was burning and she had a split second to decide.

She wondered if she’d grab the decoupage vase that Teen Spirit had made out of a bottle of wine for Valentine’s Day when he was in third grade.

Or would she grab the heart-shaped bowl that says “Mom” that the Oh So Feisty One painted at one of those paint your own pottery places?

Smartmom knew she’d grab her computer, where most of her writing lives. Much of it is backed up, but just in case …

What about the baby books and her wedding album?

It’s awful to think about. And yet, in the end she knew that she’d just make sure that everyone got out safely and leave it at that.

Though she would grab that computer. Some things are just too vital to her. Smartmom would definitely leave behind her collection of more than 100 vintage globes, the Wedgwood china that belonged to Hepcat’s grandmother, and their wedding silver, which she adores.

There wouldn’t be time. And in the end, things are replaceable.

Eleanor Traubman, a professional organizer whose Brooklyn company is called Inspired Organizing, spoke to Smartmom about this recently. She often asks her clients, “Is it possible to hold onto a memory without holding onto the physical reminder?”

Sometimes the answer is yes. Other times, it is a resounding no. But Traubman believes that it is possible to select a few meaningful things as reminders without keeping everything.
Naomi Village: In the heart of the Poconos

Miraculously, Smartmom and Hepcat were able to substantially reduce their basement storage with a minimum of fighting and biting. If those years of couple’s therapy has taught them anything it is to stay out of each other’s way.

That’s right, Smartmom kept a healthy distance as Hepcat dutifully went through box after box.

She even stopped herself from saying, “Don’t you want to get rid of that 20-volume set of the Handyman’s Encyclopedia that you picked up at a library sale on our honeymoon that is now slightly damp and mildewed?”

She prevented herself from saying, “Do you really need to keep 12 computer monitors that don’t work anymore?”

She resisted the urge to say, “Can’t we trash those boxes of Computer Shopper magazines from the late 1980s” (sure, they’re historic but … ).

For Smartmom, it was easier to part with the mildewed past. Truth be told, a dank, occasionally flooded, basement is no place to keep children’s clothing and toys anyway.

It’s downright disgusting.

Smartmom did uncover some treasures. She even got teary when she found the yellow Little Tykes car that brought Teen Spirit countless hours of joy rolling up and down their long hallway when he was 3.

There was OSFO’s green tricycle and boxes of toys that they couldn’t even sell at their stoop sale last summer.

For Smartmom, it felt good to downsize. Maybe her recent success at Weight Watchers (16 pounds and counting) has taught her that less is more. It feels good to travel light.

Hepcat doesn’t share that belief. He is buffeted by the past. It makes him feel safe and secure. His reverence for things is something that Smartmom both adores and abhors about him.

While she is moved by his sentimental ways, she is also overwhelmed by the storage problems that such ways present.

There aren’t enough closets, bookcases and storage rooms to contain all that we are. That’s why it’s important to find other ways to hold onto the past and recognize that things only tell part of the story.

The next morning, it took five guys from Mr. Rubbish less than a half-hour to put everything in the garbage compactor.

When the job was done, Smartmom felt relieved. She knew she didn’t need all that stuff they’d been clinging to. What matters in life are people and experiences. Sure it’s nice to have mementos — but only as long as you’ve got the square footage.

For now, Smartmom cherishes Teen Spirit’s decoupage vase and the heart-shaped bowl that OSFO made.

And her computer.

That’s where she records her memories. And they don’t take up much space anyway.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper.

Smartmom used to think that parents were responsible for everything good, bad, and indifferent about their children.

She thought that raising children was like raising African Violets or Orchids; tending to a child with the unswerving dedication of a master gardener.

But after being a parent for more than 16 years, Smartmom has learned that, while some kids are like flowers, others are more like exotic mushrooms.

In other words, the less you do, the better.

While no one can deny that it is important to nurture, love, feed, educate and guide one’s children, sometimes being a parent requires a healthy dose of distance.

Take Teen Spirit. In the last year, he has turned into an accomplished rhythm guitar player. And this is the kid who refused every music lesson he’s ever been offered.

But that’s not all. On his own, he’s become an avid reader of early 20th-century poetry and has been obsessively writing songs that could give Bob Dylan a run for his money.

(Smartmom’s his mother. She’s allowed to kvell).

Unlike the Oh So Feisty One, he doesn’t like to share everything with his mom. That OSFO, she loves to be guided and encouraged. When she practices the piano, she insists Smartmom sit right next to her.
“Stop it,” she screams when Smartmom sings along with one of her classical pieces. But if Smartmom dares to get up: “Get back here!”

Teen Sprit couldn’t be more different. He’s always been an independent sort. The less interest shown the better. An overzealous parent can blow his enthusiasm right out the window.

The other day, these thoughts were foremost on Smartmom’s mind as she and Hepcat made their way to Teen Spirit’s solo gig at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Smartmom ordered a glass of Chardonnay to calm her substantial nerves. While Teen Spirit has been playing bass with his band, Cool and Unusual Punishment, for three years, this was his first solo performance.

As audience members filled the dark performance space, Smartmom thought about the dark growing rooms where white, brown and Portobello mushrooms are harvested.

Just like those mushrooms, Teen Spirit was growing on his own without the bright artificial light of his mother’s attention. On his own, he had transformed himself into a serious singer-songwriter.

It all seemed very sudden to Smartmom. That’s probably because she had nothing to do with it. Truth is, he seems to have little use for her constant nagging: Wake up. Take a shower. Go to school. Do your homework. Go to bed.

But that’s what mothers do. That’s part of the job description. And it’s part of the parental delusion of control that their children can’t develop without them.

Waiting for Teen Spirit to play, Smartmom found herself stressing: Would he know how to use a microphone? Was his guitar in tune? Would his hair fall into his face and cover his eyes? Would he remember the lyrics to his self-penned songs? Would he sing loudly enough?

Smartmom was channeling Gypsy’s Mama Rose big time. Sing out Teen Spirit. Sing out.

Turns out, Smartmom didn’t need to worry a bit. Teen Spirit took hold of that stage and didn’t let go.

“This is a song about a family,” he told the audience at one point. “But it’s not autobiographical.”

“A mother says to her daughter, never marry a man like your father, all he’ll make you do is cry, all he’ll give you is black eyes, like the ones that pollute your mother’s face,” he sang.

Some of the songs gave her chills. Others made her swoon. One or two simply took her breath away.

“We are sacred, we are pure, we are rare, we are obscure, we are all that we have left.”

Afterward, Smartmom and Hepcat were in awe of their offspring. But could they take any credit for it?
Sure, Teen Spirit had inherited Smartmom’s musicality and her wondrous way with words. But he owned his effort and his talent fair and square. Teen Spirit had created himself out of sight of his parent’s hovering.

“Was that great or are we just prejudiced because we’re his parents?” Smartmom asked her spouse as they walked to the F train. Hepcat, who recorded the show with his brand new Zoom H4, reminded her, “Some of the other kids’ parents were impressed, too.”

In fact, the mother of Teen Spirit’s oldest friend told Smartmom to tell Teen Spirit that she was very proud of him. Then she paused to rephrase. “No, tell Teen Spirit we were blown away.”

And there it was: Perhaps Smartmom couldn’t take credit for teaching Teen Spirit anything, but he had certainly taught her that not all children are flowers. Some are mushrooms and you just have to leave ’em alone.

Here is this week’s Smartmom from the award-winning Brooklyn Paper.

Here is a tale of good intentions gone awry or perhaps proof of that old adage that no good deed goes unpunished.

Last week in her role as a blogger, Smartmom received an e-mail from highly respected local journalist, who happens to read Smartmom’s blog.

Savvy Journalist sent Smartmom a note that epitomizes the concept of micro-community that Smartmom so cherishes about this neighborhood.

“Hi everyone,” Savvy Journalist wrote. “My neighbor is an assistant principal. She is looking for books, board games, puzzles etc, for classrooms there. If you feel inspired to do a cleanout of your extras and want to pass stuff on, I figure it’s easier to give stuff to her than organizing a stoop sale! Feel free to pass the note on to others in the area who might be interested in helping.”

Below that note, there was the original e-mail that Savvy Journalist had received from her friend.

“Any chance that you have some books that are in good shape that you’d like to donate to the school? I’d be more than happy to come and pick them up. Just let me know. Thanks so much. And pass this on to people you know who might have stuff as well.”

Pass this on. Those are three of Smartmom’s favorite words. And being the Good Samaritan, community-oriented blogger that she is, she posted this information on her blog under the headline: School Needs Books.

The whole thing made Smartmom very excited. Her apartment is inundated with books and not enough bookcases. (Remember that column about Hepcat’s hoarding habits? They continue, you know!) She savors any chance to pass on the literary treasures in her midst that she and her children no longer need.

Later that morning, she received a nice note from another reader of her blog. She, too, responded excitedly to the call-out for books and told Smartmom that she would post the information on Park Slope Parents.

That night, Smartmom told her family about the book drive. She is always looking for a way to motivate the Oh So Feisty One, Teen Spirit, and especially Hepcat to part with books.

“A local teacher needs books for her school,” Smartmom said, pouring on the drama. “These kids have no books in their school, they need stuff to read.”

Before she could say “Karma is a boomerang,” OSFO was going through her bookcase tossing books into the hallway (“Magic Treehouse, Chocolate Fever” and “Franny K. Stein Mad Scientist”). Teen Spirit also found a few books he was willing to part with.

Even Hepcat, pack-rat extraordinaire (“archivist,” “curator of ephemera,” “amateur librarian,” or “dedicated preservationist” are terms he prefers) managed to find a book (one single book): “At Large: the Strange Case of the World’s Biggest Internet Invasion.” (Of course he put up that book; he owns two copies of it!)

The next morning, Smartmom saw an e-mail from Local Teacher, which she raced to open. She had to admit that the terseness of it was a bit startling. Local Teacher wrote that she is not an assistant principal at the school as her neighbor had mistakenly said in the e-mail.

OK. Smartmom is always big on fact-checking.

Local Teacher then went on to say that she was swamped by offers of books, cannot keep up with the demand, and would appreciate if Smartmom would remove the notice.

Ouch.

Smartmom was confused. It wasn’t even a simple and gracious, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Had she done something wrong? Was it Smartmom’s fault that so many people had responded? Was the school angry that so many people wanted to give?

Smartmom thought long and hard about this on her run around Prospect Park. Yes, she was smarting from the unappreciative e-mail. But she also felt like she had tripped upon an interesting truth.

There’s giving and there’s giving.

Smartmom meant no harm in posting Local Teacher’s original message. The more the merrier as far as she’s concerned.

But the problem is this: Too much of a good thing is just that. Boxes and boxes of books require someone to pick them up and deliver them, sort through them, unpack them, and get rid of the books that can’t be used.

It’s all about specificity and making your needs clear. Smartmom thinks Local Teacher should have clarified the scope of her own needs. What she probably needs most is a small group of ready, willing and able volunteers to organize a book drive. She needs help with transportation, sorting, and cataloging. She needs money, energy and people’s time.

It’s a big job, but there are a lot of people out there who have something to give.

Smartmom learned recently that the Community Bookstore is in the process of organizing a book drive for a school library in New Orleans.

If they do it right, they’ll engage the community to help them with the logistics. Like Local Teacher, they’ll need help picking up the books, cataloging them, sorting through them, packing them up, paying for postage and sending them to New Orleans.

These are all great ideas: Books for a local public school. Books for New Orleans.

But be careful what you ask for. In Brooklyn, especially, you’ll get it — so you’d better have the means to accept the gift.

And, not for nothing, but “thank you” is a nice thing to hear once in a while.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the award winning Brooklyn Paper (and they’ve even got the clock to prove it):

Smartmom wonders which of the Oh So Feisty One’s friends she will still be friends with when she grows up. It’s fun to think about, but hard to know for sure. Friendships are complicated and unpredictable. While some are long lasting, others just seem to fade away.

Smartmom met her oldest friend in the world, Best and Oldest (B&O), when they were both fifth graders at a small, private school in Manhattan. Who would have guessed that they’d still be friends nearly 40 years later?

They met on the first day of school. B&O was a greenhorn who’d just moved from Berkeley. She came to school barefoot. Or at least that’s how Smartmom remembers it. B&O had attended a “free school” in Berkeley and told Smartmom about the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations on campus and seeing Country Joe and the Fish at the Fillmore West.

Smartmom could tell that she was the coolest person on Earth and she instantly wanted her to be her BFF.
That first day, Smartmom looked after her new friend. She showed her the way to the lunchroom and took her to the water fountain with the freezing cold water.

But everything changed the next day. B&O sat next to Miss Popularity. Sadly, she could tell that B&O was gravitating toward the groovy girls. Suffice it to say, in elementary school, Smartmom wasn’t the social butterfly she is today.

Lucky for Smartmom, B&O grew tired of Miss Popularity and her crowd after a few months. Smartmom can vividly remember the day B&O asked to sit next to her on a school bus on the way to a tour of the Sabrett hot dog factory in Englewood, New Jersey.

They’ve been best friends ever since.

Just the other day, Smartmom ran into B&O.

“You’re as blind as me,” B&O said after it took a minute or two for Smartmom to notice her.

“I’m not wearing my glasses,” Smartmom told her friend who was coming from a 90-minute lap swim at Eastern Athletic. They stood in front of the big pink house on Garfield Place for close to an hour doing what they’ve been doing for 40 years: Talking.

Neither of them has changed a bit. That’s probably why their friendship has been remarkably resilient. While it hasn’t been without its ups and downs, the friendship is continually fueled by common interests, neuroses and more than a little love and respect.

Who can forget their secret club, the S.U.A.N. (Stay Up All Night) club? At sleepovers, they’d desperately try to stay up all night. Sometimes they’d play Do or Dare. They’d even take turns sleeping. One time, they decided to go out for a picnic in Riverside Park at 6 am.

Who can blame Groovy Grandpa for blowing his top when he spotted them walking along Riverside Drive at sunrise?

“Get the hell over here,” he shouted from the ninth-floor window.

Then there was New Year’s Eve 1969 when Smartmom’s parents let them each have a sip (or two) of champagne while they waited for the 1970s to begin. They were only 11.

Smartmom and B&O went to the same junior and high school, where they shared friends and boyfriends and a lot of good and not so good times.

After college, Smartmom got her first job at a documentary film company because of B&O. Later, Smartmom and B&O got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and made a documentary film together.

Naturally, they attended each other’s weddings. No, they weren’t each other’s bridesmaids because neither of them believes in that sort of thing (and they both have sisters), but B&O did have a hand in who sat where at the party.

B&O gave birth to her eldest daughter just five weeks after Teen Spirit was born. Together they fretted over breastfeeding, pre-school, going back to work, music lessons, high school applications. They continue to fret.

Their families get together for delicious dinners and too many bottles of good red wine. But it’s the phone calls, the coffees, the lunches and the sidewalk conversations that keep the friendship as fresh as the day they met.

Sure, they’ve made different choices in life and taken different paths. And they agree to disagree about lots of things: B&O lost respect for Smartmom because she loved “Thirtysomething,” “Twin Peaks and “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen.

But they both have a thing for philosopher Hannah Arendt, the music of Kurt Weil, and “American Pastoral” by Philip Roth.

There are jealousies of course. Smartmom wishes she were as skinny as B&O, as articulate, and even half as smart. A brownstone like hers would be nice, along with a nice, big garden. B&O envies Smartmom her memory and her total recall of every last detail of the childhood they shared.

Smartmom wonders, which of OSFO’s friends will be the long-lasting ones. Who will she call when she’s having a lonely weekend at college or breaking up with a boyfriend? Who will write her every day when she’s broken both legs and can’t leave Port Angeles, Washington for two months?

Who will wash her hair when she’s stuck in the hospital for a month with pre-term labor and who will she talk to about her career, her marriage, her children and whatever else needs to be urgently discussed?

Over wine. Preferably.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the award-winning Brooklyn Paper:

At first, Diaper Diva didn’t know what to say. What do you tell your
3-year-old when you have to put her favorite birthday present in the
garbage?

That’s right. Ducky received a Dora the Explorer Bath Set from a guest at her Dora the Explorer birthday party.

Cooties. That toy had cooties, and Diaper Diva didn’t want it in the house.

She wasn’t even sure if that particular toy has been recalled. But she felt compelled to throw it out just the same.

Out, out, out you disgusting toy!

Even
the Oh So Feisty One was afraid to go near the possibly tainted toy.
She told Diaper Diva to take it back to the store as soon as the party
was over.

But Bro-in-Law had already removed the packaging from the gift and it was too late to take it back to Little Things.

So Diaper Diva put it in a shopping bag and brought it to the garbage chute in the hallway. Gone.

Birthday
parties have gotten very complicated since Aug. 2, when Mattel recalled
967,000 toys, due to use of lead paint. Sadly, 300,000 of them had
already been purchased for — and quite possibly licked by — young
children.

On Aug. 14, just two days after Ducky’s third birthday
party, Mattel recalled 19 million more toys sent from China, including
toy cars based on the movie “Cars” that had have “impermissible levels”
of lead.

Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to use lead paint in the manufacture of children’s toys — so how did this happen?

Who can we trust nowadays?

Certainly
not greedy corporations that manufacture goods in countries where there
are zero labor, health and environmental regulations.

The day after her party, Ducky looked around the apartment for her missing gift.

“Where are my bath toys?” Ducky whined as she searched high and low.

At
first, Diaper Diva rehearsed some possible answers in her head — “I
lost them on the way to the bathroom”; “Dora the Explorer came by in
the middle of the night and needed them back”; “What bath toys?” — but
Diaper Diva knows that honesty is always the best policy.

So as Ducky got increasingly apoplectic, Diva got up her nerve.

“I
had to throw them away,” she told Ducky, who was crying insistently
now. “The people who made them used a very dangerous material called
lead. It can make you sick.”

“But I want my toy,” Ducky screamed.

Diaper Diva tried to explain about tainted toys, world trade, corporate greed, and even Arthur Miller’s play, “All My Sons.”

But
that was no help to Ducky, who is completely enamored of all things
Dora. But even as Ducky wept, Diaper Diva knew she was doing the right
thing, the only thing any self-respecting smart mom could do.

At the same time, she wondered what other products in her apartment
were tainted with toxic materials and would her child be harmed by any
of her other playthings. Her dishes. Her clothing.

It’s a
terrible feeling to think that you’ve brought things into your home
that can harm your children. Smartmom won’t be buying her children or
her niece any more Chinese-made toys or merchandise. And so much for
all that fun, cheap clothes she gets at Target for OSFO.

This is
a wake-up call. It’s time to spend a little more money and buy locally
made toys and clothing from well-paid, trained people who use safe
materials.

The upside is that this crisis could be a real boon
for local toymakers and craftspeople who make imaginative toys like
sock monkeys, stuffed animals, and wooden games and cars.

Who
needs all those action figures and plastic movie merchandise that just
end up in a big box at a stoop sale with a sign that says, “Free stuff”?

The
truth is, parents buy too much for their children. Less is more.
Buy quality, not quantity. The kids will be better served, anyway.

Smartmom
will shop for Ducky’s next gift at the Brooklyn Indie Market, Lolli’s,
Orange Blossom or online at onegoodbumblebee, which sells these
adorable gnome cuddle babies. Even Little Things has plenty of terrific
non-mass-market toys.

Sure, it’s more expensive than the stuff made in China. But at least they’re not made with lead.

Ducky
still asks Diaper Diva about her Dora bath set from time to time. But a
few years of therapy and she’ll get it out of her system entirely.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the award-winning Brooklyn Paper:

Diaper Diva was fit to be tied. During a beach vacation in Long Island last week, Smartmom and Diaper Diva stopped for lunch at the Clam Bar on the Montauk Highway. Smartmom noticed it first: there was a note on the menu blackboard and in the menu as well that said: It is a condition of service at the Clam Bar that all children must stay in their seats.

Frankly, it made sense to Smartmom. The Clam Bar is an outdoor restaurant with umbrella tables and a bar just off the Montauk Highway. There is no fence or any kind of partition between it and the highway.

Smartmom figured that the stipulation had something to do with the restaurant’s insurance policy and the fear that a car might come barreling into the dining area.

Ducky, Diaper Diva’s 3-year-old sat in her seat while the sisters ordered a delicious array of lunch specialties — lobster salad served in a fresh tomato, grilled shrimp on greens, fish and chips, and clam chowder — but while they waited for their food, Ducky got down from her seat and happily played on the ground near the table.

When Diaper Diva went to get something from the car, a young waitress came to the table and told Smartmom: “You better move your baby. The owner is here and he’ll have to throw you out…” Nice.

Smartmom told the waitress that her sister was on her way and she would put Ducky back on the chair.

“Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? I’m sure there are fights here every day. Ducky wasn’t doing anything noisy or dangerous she was just sitting a few feet from the table playing with pebbles,” Diaper Diva told Smartmom.

Then Diaper Diva pointed at some other children who were walking around.

“What about them? Maybe they should be kicked out!”

Truth be told, Smartmom thought DD was going a little overboard. But she did have a point. When a waitress came by two more times to tell Diaper Diva to move Ducky, an argument ensued.

“It’s totally ridiculous. You have no right to tell me that my child has to sit in a chair,” Diaper Diva told her.

“It says so in the menu,” the waitress said.

“So what are you going to do?” Diaper Diva countered.

“We’ll have to throw you out.”

Diaper Diva was incredulous. While she ranted, Smartmom noticed that waitresses brought bowls of water for patron’s dogs. But they seemed to have very little tolerance for kids. The note on the menu was the first time Smartmom has ever encountered such a request at a restaurant. If the Clam Bar owners are doing it for safety reasons, why don’t they say so in a nice way? (Then again, what if they’re doing it just to be child unfriendly?)

Diaper Diva hasn’t heard the end of it since the whole imbroglio ended up on a popular Brooklyn blog.

Now she’s really fit to be tied. Especially after Au Contraire, a Park Slope psychotherapist sent this missive her way, via the blog.

“Dear Diaper Diva, You may believe that it’s OK for your little future narcissist to grow up believing that wherever she goes, whatever she does, the world will be glad to serve her, but in so doing, you are not, in the truest sense of parenting, serving her. One of the most difficult and essential parts of growing up in a social world is learning that your impulses and desires must respectfully dovetail with those of others, including those living in the adult world. Little children generally don’t eat clams — a bit much for their digestion — so why was Ducky there?”

Smartmom’s friend and blogger, Seeing Green, offered this elegant response to the psychotherapist:

“It’s not the letter of the rule, it’s the spirit that should count. For a restaurant to ask politely that children be in seats is reasonable, but it seems that the Clam Bar was way overreacting. As for Au Contraire, get a grip on yourself, man! What a ridiculous statement to make — ‘Why was Ducky there?’ Maybe because they’re on a family vacation? Perhaps something you missed out on growing up? And also eating clams when you were a toddler?”

But it was this response from a former waitress at the Clam Bar that really put the whole matter into perspective:

“I worked at the Clam Bar on and off for 14 years. I never once had a safety problem with a dog owner. They understand that although the restaurant is outside that does not make it a dog park.

“I did however have countless problems with parents allowing their children to roam the dining area and parking lots unattended as if the restaurant were a day-care center or a public park. The staff takes the majority of the burns and falls to avoid an out-of-control child, but there were many times I swerved and burned patrons (and a few children). Let me tell you, chowder is hot, but steamer broth is some thing else entirely.”

While on vacation, Diaper Diva had to learn the hard way that she wasn’t in Park Slope anymore. Clearly, few restaurants are as child tolerant as Park Slope’s beloved Two Boots (although Lunch, also on Montauk Highway, is remarkably child-friendly).

But parents, like children, have to learn new rules wherever they go. It’s all part of growing up and learning to exist in the complicated, scary world outside of Park Slope.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

What happens in the idyllic brownstone neighborhood of Park Slope if you see a teenager smoking a cigarette on Seventh Avenue?

Obviously, you’d tell the parents of that child if you knew them. Right?

Smartmom’s neighbor, Mrs. Kravitz, recently grappled with this question after seeing a friend’s teenage daughter walking down the street smoking a cigarette.

She even made eye contact with the girl, who hid the cigarette behind her back when she spotted Mr. Kravitz.

“You don’t have to hide it,” Mrs. Kravitz said nicely.

For days, Mrs. Kravitz struggled with her secret. Should she tell her friend? She knew her friend would want to know. But how and when should she tell her?

To make matters worse, her friend was about to go on a special vacation and the timing didn’t feel right.

So she discussed the matter with Mr. Kravitz, who was adamant that she should tell her friend. It doesn’t matter how or when you tell her, he said. Just do it. She needs to know.

Still, Mrs. Kravitz worried that this information might ruin her friend’s vacation. She and Mr. Kravitz weighed the options and finally decided to tell their friend when she returned from her trip.

Just hours after her friend got back from her vacation, Mrs. Kravitz told her what she’d seen. And her friend, still suntanned and basking in her vacation glory, was very grateful. And very sad.

Interestingly, she already knew that her daughter was smoking, but she hadn’t brought it up with her daughter yet. She was in deep denial about it.

“I was hoping that she was just trying it out or holding a friend’s cigarette,” she told Mrs. Kravitz.

Mrs. Kravitz’s friend removed her veil of denial like too much sunscreen and vowed to have a long talk with her daughter. A good deed was done and Mrs. Kravitz felt vindicated.

Smartmom brought this up with Tabloid Dad, when she ran into him on Seventh Avenue recently. Tabloid Dad is a producer for the Geraldo Rivera show, who has a 10-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter. He takes a refreshingly honest and open approach to child rearing.

“Well, smoking cigarettes is better than smoking crack,” Tabloid Dad joked, but he quickly turned serious.

“When I was a teenager someone told my parents that he saw me drinking beer in the schoolyard. I made my mother tell me who told her. It was a guy who lived on our street. I still hate the guy,” Tabloid Dad said.

Still, he thinks it’s a good idea for parents to talk to their kids about whether they’re smoking or drinking.

“Just so they know you’re paying attention and that you’re not so absorbed in your own life that you don’t know what’s going on with them.”

Tabloid Dad did make one suggestion: If you are going to tell the parents that their kid is smoking or drinking, make sure that the parents don’t divulge your name.

That way the kid won’t hate you and you won’t humiliate your own child if anyone finds out that you’re a snitch.

Thanks for the good advice, Tabloid Dad.

Smartmom asked Tabloid Dad’s wife, Tabloid Mom, whether she would want to know if her daughter (the 3-year-old) was smoking.

“Absolutely,” she said without moment’s hesitation.

“When I was a kid, I caught my sister smoking and she told me they were candy cigarettes. When I asked her why smoke was coming out, she told me it was the sugar,” Tabloid Mom said.

Which just shows that kids will do absolutely anything to pull the wool over their parent’s eyes. Be prepared for any excuse: “I was holding my friend’s cigarette”; “That wasn’t me”; “I was just trying it out”; “I only smoke sometimes”; “I only smoke when I’m with my friends.”

The sidewalks have eyes. That’s what they say here in Park Slope, where parents routinely report on each other’s children. This is a neighborhood full of people who did crazy things when they were teenagers, so they know the score. They know all the stories, all the tricks.

Even Dumb Editor, who grew up in the suburbs, knows how to read the furtive eyes of a group of kids congregating outside Maggie Moos. He may have been born at night at Dobbs Ferry Hospital, but he wasn’t born last night at Dobbs Ferry Hospital.

All this doesn’t mean that the teenagers are any less crazy than their parents.

But around here, if someone’s parents see them doing it, chance are they’ll find out.

Knowledge is a good thing. But it’s still up to each parent to figure out how to talk to his or her children and help them steer clear of dangerous activities.

That’s the hard part and that’s the part that goes on behind the doors of this idyllic brownstone neighborhood, where life isn’t always quite as idyllic as it seems.

It’s that Ingmar Bergman time of life. Smartmom isn’t sure what’s
gotten into her, but for the past few weeks she’s been hooked on Ingmar
Bergman movies.

Not only is she in a Bergman state of mind, she’s
in a Bergman time of life. And she doesn’t mean peri-menopause. It’s
just that she wasn’t expecting her kids, or herself, to grow up quite
so fast. And she certainly wasn’t expecting her gradual dosage
reduction from the anti-depressants to make her pine so strongly for
somber, slow-moving films on deep, existential themes.

The Oh So
Feisty One’s imminent departure for sleep-away camp — and the
half-empty nest that it will precipitate — has also prompted Smartmom
to consider the meaning of life a la Bergman and spend inordinate
amounts of time in her air-conditioned bedroom watching his deep,
subtitled DVDs.

The end of the school year probably didn’t help
Smartmom’s mood either. The last couple of weeks have been a real
cry-a-thon, what with end- of-year parties, picnics and saying goodbye
to friends.

On the morning of the last day of school, Smartmom
went into the Community Bookstore, where she ran into a woman she knows
from years of drop-offs and pick-ups. She had a forlorn look on her
face.

“This isn’t your last day at PS 321 is it?” Smartmom asked.

“Yes it is,” she said.

“I thought you had one more child…”

“No, this is it. I get teary just thinking about it,” she said.

They hugged.

Their
interaction had Bergmanesque stillness. She could imagine huge Sven
Nyquist close-ups of their sad, tortured faces and the slow
choreography of their hug.

Even if you’re not seeing the world
through Ingmar Bergman glasses, the fact that life seems to be passing
at a breakneck speed could get you feeling that way.

When did
Smartmom’s kids grow up so quickly? The day before yesterday, Teen
Spirit was a spunky 2-year-old (and Smartmom has the pictures to prove
it) obsessed with the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History and
his Ocean Alphabet Book. Wasn’t he?

How
did this happen? More importantly, whose idea was it to fill her
Netflix queue with films like “Fanny and Alexander,” “Persona,” “Scenes
from a Marriage,” “Cries and Whispers,” etc?

She has only herself (and the passage of time) to blame.

The other day, OSFO walked in on Smartmom while she was Bergman-watching.

“Why do you keep renting these French movies?” she asked.

“They’re not French,” Smartmom answered not taking her eyes off the screen.

“What are they?”

“Swedish…”

OSFO was halfway down the hall before Smartmom even got a chance to explain the difference.

Smartmom
actually thought OSFO might enjoy “Fanny and Alexander,” Bergman’s
magical portrait of a Stockholm family that has plenty to celebrate and
much to cry about. But it got her sleeping faster than a tab of
Benydryl.

The other night, when Hepcat took OSFO to see
“Fantastic 4” at the Pavilion, Smartmom indulged in Bergman’s early
masterpiece, “Persona.” Slow, deep, penetrating, there are somber
scenes in a mental hospital and carefully composed black and white
shots of two women alone on an island their identities beginning to
merge.

It was during a neighbor’s BBQ that Smartmom found herself
upstairs watching, “Scenes from a Marriage.” Although she could hear
the kids playing Double Dutch and making S’mores, Smartmom couldn’t
drag herself away from Bergman’s slow, talky 1973 television film about
a so-called perfect marriage, which slowly unravels on the screen.

By
the time Hepcat came upstairs she was ready to kill him or at least
have a long, anguished talk about the state of their marriage.

“You
know, I feel like you’re having an affair with your new iPhone,” she
felt like telling him. “OK, so I’m not nearly as young, petite, and
well designed as that versatile little phone. But doesn’t 18 years of
marriage mean anything?”

Smartmom is pretty sure he’d rather whisper sweet nothings into its ear than hers.

Finally,
the other night Smartom watched “Cries and Whispers,” Bergman’s sad,
beautiful film about the death of a woman in a large house surrounded
by her sisters and an adoring nursemaid. The film has a striking color
palette with an emphasis on the color red. When one of the sisters cuts
her private parts with a piece of a broken wine glass Smartmom knew
she’d had enough.

That’s it, Smartmom said aloud to no one.

Smartmom
knew it was time to enter her post-Ingmar Bergman phase (quick change
the Netflix queue before “Wild Strawberries” and “The Seventh Seal”
gets here).

Smartmom was revived: she’d had enough of the meaning of life and it was time to have some fun.

When
the film was over, Smartmom packed up the DVD and put it, appropriately
enough, in its red envelope. She left the apartment and took a
life-affirming walk to Seventh Avenue passing more than one neighbor
walking their dog. She admired the pansies in a neighbor’s front
garden, eavesdropped on a young couple walking hand in hand, stared up
at the moon and into the windows of both Seventh Avenue Books and Park
Slope Books.

Smartmom felt her Bergman mood lifting. His filmic
art had definitely dovetailed with her own mid-life miasma. But she was
ready for something a bit more fun.

Enough is enough, Smartmom thought as she dropped the envelope in the mailbox at the post office.

Anyone in the mood for “Dumb and Dumber?”

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper,  The photograph is by Gilian Behar.

The girls were in their prettiest dresses with spaghetti straps and
Lycra. They looked so grown up with their hair done just right: what a
sight to behold.

Some of the boys were in suits; some sported Polo shirts, or simple T-shirts. Many wore dress shirts, ties, even hats.

The
parents, too, were dressed in their finery. They held video cameras
and, with relatives in tow, waited under the scaffolding of John Jay
High School in Park Slope for the doors to open for the PS 321
fifth-grade graduation.

“Congratulations to you,” Mr. Frank
McGarry, PS 321’s beloved music teacher, called out to Smartmom. “This
is your second graduation, right?”

Smartmom explained that she
was just getting a preview for OSFO’s graduation next year. Mr.
McGarry’s daughter is graduating this year.

“We still have one to go,” he said pointing to his son. His wife, Jacqi, also a PS 321 teacher, smiled.

“Are
you practicing for next year?” Ciao Bella, a Third Street neighbor,
asked. Dressed in a pretty dress, she looked suitably frantic.

“Just soaking in the atmosphere,” Smartmom replied as Ciao Bella ran off looking for family and friends.

Smartmom
hadn’t really planned on a being a fly on the graduation wall, but she
just happened to be nearby. Now that’s a lie: Smartmom couldn’t keep
herself away. She was feeling molto nostalgic. It must have been
the end of school party in OSFO’s fourth-grade class that put her in
the elegiac mood.

In OSFO’s classroom, the kids sang
“Wonderful World,” “This Pretty Planet,” and “Stand by Me,” while a
music teacher played an out-of-tune piano.

As you can imagine, it
was tear-city from the get-go. Even before. “You got tissues?” Tall and
Sultry whispered to Smartmom before the kids began. To make matters
even soppier, the kids devised their own cute choreography to go with
the songs. They rocked back and forth, waved their hands and linked
arms.

But it was when the group sang: “Darling, darling stand by
me,” that Smartmom felt a catch in her throat. And the need to cry
moved up her neck, tickled her head and finally released small watery
droplets in her eyes, which she quickly brushed away.

She hoped no one would notice, especially OSFO, who might be embarrassed to see her mom doing such a thing. Publicly.

And
if that wasn’t enough, the teachers presented a 15-minute slide montage
that was no casual tribute to the children of class 4-308. No, no, no.
There were soulful portraits of each and every child, as well as zany
group shots and artful documentation of class projects, trips, and
playground activities.

The beautifully composed and colorful
photographs oozed such a sense of community and camaraderie that
Smartmom knew her daughter was blessed with a special fourth-grade year.

Speaking
afterward, one of the teachers, a gifted rookie, said: “I will probably
remember each and every one of you for the rest of my life.”

This week on the last day of school,
Smartmom shed her annual tears in the backyard at PS 321. It’s
something she’s done for 10 years — ever since 1998, when Teen Spirit
finished first grade, that first year they were in PS 321.

And then in no time at all, it was time for Teen Spirit’s fifth-grade graduation one hot day in June, 2002. At the end of the
ceremony, the entire fifth-grade class sang the words: “Five hundred
twenty five thousand six hundred minutes — how do you measure a year in
a life?” That song from “Rent,” the musical, was a killer.

Smartmom wished she’d had a pair of oversized Miu Miu sunglasses back then.

Well,
in 525,600 minutes, Smartmom will be standing on line waiting to get
into OSFOs fifth-grade graduation. Hepcat will, no doubt, have his
digital camera around his neck. OSFO will be dressed to the nines. Even
Teen Spirit will don a clean white button-down shirt. Manhattan Granny,
Groovy Grandpa, MiMa Cat, Diaper Diva, Ducky and all the rest will all
be there.

Yup, in 525,600 minutes, Smartmom will attend OSFO’s
graduation, her last a parent at PS 321. She can barely stand the
thought. It will, no doubt be especially poignant.

If that 99-cent store was still on Seventh Avenue, she’d clean it out of tissue boxes, that’s for sure.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

Things haven’t been the same on Third Street since B., a beloved
neighbor, got sick in February. Sure, life goes on. The children play,
the neighbors talk, the cars speed east toward Seventh Avenue.

But
there’s a new sense of the fragility of things; the way that the thread
of life can break unexpectedly and bring pain and suffering to a family.

Some
neighbors knew more than others, but it was obvious to just about
everyone on the north side of Third Street between Sixth and Seventh
avenues that a beautiful and devoted mother of two, a woman who was
often out in the spacious cement beach of her Third Street apartment
building, was missing in action.

No one wanted to intrude by
asking too many invasive questions. The code of privacy was main­tained
as a way to show love and respect to the husband and children of this
brilliant woman who was struck down in the prime of her life.

Smartmom
remembers meeting B., a statuesque woman with penetrating eyes, when her family moved to Third Street from
Washington Heights in 2003. Ever the Third Street ambassador, Smartmom
wanted them to know that they’d moved to a great block; that they would
not regret crossing the river.

She could tell that B. was smart;
a licensed Gestalt psychoanalyst, B. received her doctorate in
philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specialized in
contemporary philosophy of language, logic and philosophy of mind.

Over
time, B.’s family ad­apted to Third Street’s sidewalk rhythms and
became active participants in the raucous playtimes, the BBQs, and the
stoop sales.

An attentive neighbor and friend, B. never passed
without a warm hello and a smile. One Third Street neighbor, whose
child was in a class with B.’s son, remembers B. as a kind, empathic
friend “who was above all a mother. One of the best.”

B. didn’t
allow her children to stay out quite as late as some of the other Third
Street parents; Smartmom noticed that. There was a gentle order to her
household that Smartmom envied. She never served an impromptu supper on
the stoop or let her kids run wild after 9 pm.

But in the warmer
months, B. was often outside with her husband and their flock joining
in on the Third Street banter, the harmless gossip, the endless
discussions about children and school.

But as she talked, B.’s
eyes rarely strayed from her son or daughter as they played in the
yard. Fiercely protective and vigilant, B. never neglected her role as
mother/protector of those beautiful children, especially her son who
has diabetes.

Learning that B. was ill was an unforgettable blow
for the mothers on Third Street. It seemed deeply unfair to hurt
someone so young and talented and to deprive two children of the years
they deserved with their mom.

As the reality sunk in, they struggled to come up
with appropriate ways to express their love and concern. Some sent
notes, some visited, one brought bread on Fridays. Others exercised
discretion as a way to honor the family. Smartmom noticed plants and
flowers on the inside of B.’s front window. Window boxes were planted
with red geraniums and Black-Eyed-Susan’s in late May.

It was
obvious that B. was well cared for in her last months by a tremendously
devoted group of relatives and friends, as well as hospice workers whom
Smartmom watched as they changed shifts.

In recent weeks,
Smartmom noticed that B. was often sitting in her front window.
Smartmom couldn’t help but look for her there as she walked by many
times a day. Some days she waved at B., some days she just smiled.

A
few weeks ago, B. waved back and Smartmom was ecstatic. A few days
later, B. spent short periods of time out in the yard, sitting in a
wheelchair and meeting with friends.

Magical thinking and denial
are powerful. Smartmom hoped that B.’s illness was in remission, that
the experts were wrong, that she would overcome the predicted outcome.

But it wasn’t to be.

Over
the months of B’s illness, Smartmom thought about B. dozens of times a
day. Though they were warm neighbors rather than intimate friends,
Smartmom felt a real sense of love and protection toward her. She never
once pitied this woman who died as she’d lived with a gentle strength,
a deep intelligence, and unyielding connection with the husband and
children she loved.

So how has Third Street changed? Someone’s
missing and it hurts. But Smartmom believes that B. is looking out for
her kids, her husband, her friends and neighbors on the street she
called home.

Dedicated to Beth Hassrick, 1961–2007

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper.

Smartmom has always been a strong believer in public schools — so it’s no wonder that she feels angry, confused, and bitter when her friends, even those who are zoned for a good public school, send their kids to private school. For Buddha’s sake, one of the reasons that Smartmom and Hepcat moved to Park Slope in 1991 was because of PS 321.

Her pregnant belly bulging with Teen Spirit, Smartmom would randomly stop people on the street during their months of apartment hunting and ask:

“Is this street in PS 321?”

Even then, Smartmom felt like the cliché of the over-determined New York parent. She even wondered if they’d still be living in Brooklyn by the time Teen Spirit hit kindergarten. Maybe their ship would come in and they’d be able to move back to Manhattan.

That’s right. In the old days, Brooklyn was the booby prize, the place you had to move because you’d been priced out of Manhattan.

Sadly, Smartmom and Hepcat moved to the wrong side of Fifth Street. They didn’t know it at the time but only the north side of the street is “in the zone.”

Luckily, when Teen Spirit turned 3, Smartmom found an apartment in the zone and grabbed it as fast as you can say, “I love those limestones on Third Street.”

At the time, Teen Spirit was enrolled in a wonderful Montessori school called The Children’s House. It cost $11,000 and Teen Spirit had a great, if expensive, year. But, boy, were Smartmom and Hepcat thrilled to drop Teen Spirit off on his first day of first grade at his excellent — and by excellent, she means free — public school the following fall.

Almost immediately, Smartmom worried that she’d made a mistake. Compared to the hushed atmosphere at the Children’s House, Teen Spirit’s first public school classroom seemed chaotic.

Smartmom even wondered if the teacher knew how to control the class.

Hah. That teacher, who is now an assistant principal at PS 321, was smart, organized, imaginative, and compassionate: a real winner.

So much for public school misgivings.

That’s why when a friend recently told Smartmom that she’s choosing private over public, her first reaction was a little snarky: That’ll just make room for some kid whose parents can’t shell out $20,000 for kindergarten.

But then the dread set in: Is the Oh So Feisty One getting a good education in public school? Will she be prepared for the hyper-competitive world out there?

Then, when the apocalyptic dread wore off, she went ballistic.

Over the years, Smartmom has heard all kinds of reasons for writing the big private school checks. One friend, whose daughter went to pre-school with OSFO, once told Smartmom, “My kid is too sensitive for public school. She’s too delicate. She’ll get lost.”

That made Smartmom think: What, my kid isn’t sensitive and delicate?

Yeah, right. Your kid is so delicate, she needs to be handled with boxing gloves.

Another friend who went private offered this rationale: “My kid is very smart, you see, and I’m worried that he won’t get the attention and level of instruction he deserves.”

This made Smartmom livid: So, your kid is too smart to go to school with my kid. Got it.

Another friend told her that public school is too diverse. “You know, bad influences, too many levels of intelligence, too many learning styles.”

It doesn’t take a private school graduate to see that comments like that contain some subtle and not so subtle hints of racism and classism. Sorry, your kid needs to be around kids who spend spring vacations in Gstaad and have beach houses in East Hampton. Hope they don’t get sunburned.

Some of the excuses make Smartmom laugh: “We only have one child and can splurge,” one friend told her. “We want him to have a special experience.”

Oh, your only son is more special than either of Smartmom’s kids.

Sure, some kids do need special school settings. But Brooklyn certainly has some excellent small public schools, like the Children’s School, which only has 450 kids (compared to 1,300 at PS 321); PS 39; the Brooklyn New School; or PS 107, where Dumb Editor sends his kid.

Smartmom knows there is a difference between public and private school. She herself went to progressive private schools after spending three years at public school.

She felt the difference as a child. The kids at the private school were richer, whiter and more likely to have a country house.

Smartmom does admit that middle school is a whole ’nother kettle of stinky fish. As there are no zoned middle schools, students must apply and it’s a harrowing process.

In preparation for next year, when OSFO will apply to middle school, Smartmom is getting pre-emptive shock treatments and is planning to start a Middle School Stress Meditation Circle for herself and other parents on weekday morning.

Ommmm.

Who can blame anyone who wants to opt out of that? Of course, getting into private middle school is no piece of cake either. But once you’re in, you’re in — and you can keep your kids there until they graduate from high school.

So, the other day, when a neighbor told her that she was sending her daughter to a private middle school, Smartmom had a very civilized reaction.

Lucky you, she said with not a trace of envy (hah). Now you don’t have to worry about high school. What a break.

She did feel a pang of snark: What, all of the new middle schools aren’t good enough for you?

Later that same day, OSFO, who barely understands the difference between public and private, told Smartmom that she wants to go to the Berkeley Carroll School because one of her best friends may be going there.

Smartmom almost fell over. But then she gave it some thought.

You know, OSFO is such a sensitive child, a delicate one. Very smart. Very special…

Then, Smartmom remembered that Teen Spirit would be going to college in two years.

College and private school tuition? Simultaneously?

Like she said, Smartmom has always been a strong believer in public schools.