LAUREN…It’s been great to see the word spreading about the new book People magazine featured it as a “great read” for parents.  Ladies Home Journal called it “hilarious and insightful.”  The Seattle Times said it was “painfully funny, occasionally shocking, tender, wry.”   And I love the enthusiasm of the “mommybloggers” — in the trenches mothers like me — who see the truth, both funny and harrowing, of the story I tell.

One question I am getting from just about everyone who reads or hears about (or reviews or blogs about) the book  is:  How in the world did you get your daughter to agree to this? “This” being my 18-month immersion in her life — from middle school classrooms to summer camp, online chat groups to the mall.

Good question.

Let me state for the record that there was no coercion, and no money changed hands.  (I do pay her for her blog posts, however.  I want to teach her that writers CAN make a living…She can discover the hard truth for herself later.)  read the rest of this entry… »

LAUREN…My mother was an extraordinary cook.  I don’t mean just very good.  I don’t mean just better than any of my friends’ mothers or my aunts or, for that matter, most of the restaurants we went to.  I mean extraordinary.  She learned boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin from Julia Child – and improved on Julia.  Really.  She occasionally spent all day pounding veal into paper thin scaloppini which she then wrapped around chopped proscuitto into individual rolls sewn closed with needle and thread before being braised in Marsala.  She was intimidatingly good.  Plus, she was a perfectionist and a crank.  She did not want help in the kitchen.  She did not want anyone in the kitchen.

Which is to say, I did not learn to cook from my mother. When I was a teen, around Lizzie’s age, my kitchen expertise was limited to cutting up a banana to put in my Rice Krispies.  Baking was not my forte either.  One Sunday when my parents were out doing something, I thought I’d make Tollhouse cookies.  The recipe was right n the back on the bag of chocolate chips.  No problem.  The problem was the oven. We had a gas range which you had to light by waving a match under the pilot light.  I had never done this before.  It took about two months for my eyebrows and eyelashes to grow back.

Slowly, over the years, I taught myself to cook.  I’m pretty good at it now.  Not anywhere as good as my mother was, but at least I don’t guard the kitchen like a fortress. Lizzie has free rein.  She makes omelettes and quesadillas, waffles and pancakes, scones and cookies.  We’ve baked bread together.  She’s planning to make pretzels this afternoon.  Pretzels! From scratch!  She feels at home in the kitchen, she experiments, she takes delight in her own creativity.  And so do I.  I also take delight in her snickerdoodles.  A little too much, in fact.

LIZZIE…Just in case anyone was wondering…yes! I can cook! In fact, yesterday I invented an omelette with green onions, yellow pepper and our own hens’ eggs with cheese and a bit of breadcrumbs sprinkled on top. Not sure why I thought of the breadcrumbs, but it worked out great. In fact, it was a perfect looking omelette, and my mom ran off to get her camera but I ate it before she could take a good picture.

Mostly, though, I bake. It started when my mom got me an Easy Bake Oven when I was 6. It’s this little plastic toy oven that makes one cookie at a time from a mix that requires a tablespoon of water. It took like an hour to bake. I think the “oven” was just a light bulb or something. Later, when I was older, like 10, I graduated to making brownies and cakes from boxes. This required new knowledge, like how to crack an egg and how to use measuring cups. Pretty soon, this was no longer challenging.

Now, and really for quite a while, I’ve been baking from scratch. My aunts gave me this old Betty Crocker cookie recipe book that used to be my grandma’s and there’s an excellent snickerdoodles recipe in it that I’ve made even better. There’s also this chocolate crinkles cookie that looks, and is, amazing. You know how some people have a sweet tooth? Well, I have sweet teeth. Like a whole mouth of them. I would bake every day, I think, but my mom hates having brownies and cookies in the house all the time. “They’re so good, they’re deadly,” is what she says.

LAUREN…Seventeen magazine, that infuriatingly addictive publication that, since 1944, has been bombarding teen girls with images of the teen girls they will never ever be….Lizzie has a subscription, and I had a subscription when I was Lizzie’s age.  I didn’t want to admit it back when I was 15, and it’s even more embarrassing to admit it now that I am…um, much older than 15.  What is harder to admit is that these many decades later, I grab Lizzie’s copy off her bedroom floor (in the mix of wet towels, crusty socks, old notebooks and Luna bar wrappers) and read it.

I read about how to get Your Best Body Ever (way harder now than before), have Shiny Hair, Perfect Makeup and Cute Clothes.   Boots.  Leggings.  Gell bras.  Mega-lashes.  Shimmery base coats.  Bronze blushes.  Who doesn’t want to be Bold and Trendy or Fresh and Playful?  Fun and Flirty or Cool and Confident?  Reading the magazine is like taking a trip to this foreign land, a bizarre, exotic place populated by a tribe of outlandish females who exist only in that particular environment.  It is riveting.

I have changed so much since I was teen, yet today I feel the same way about the magazine (which I don’t think has changed much at all) as I did those many years ago.  It makes me feel inferior, and it makes me feel superior.  At the same time.  read the rest of this entry… »

LIZZIE…Ah yes, nothing like looking at girls prettier and skinnier than me with flawless smiles and an actual sense of fashion!  Wow…doesn’t that sound depressing?  To be completely honest, I can’t look through Seventeen magazine without feeling terrible.  Yet I look through every issue.

There are four sections in the magazine:  ads (lots and lots and lots), clothes and make-up features, love advice and then always one serious story about suicide or rape.  It’s everything a teen girl wants to know!  Well, not this teen girl.

Besides feeling inferior and self-conscious while looking through the endless pages of clothes and make-up and photos of girls who look so different than me that we’re like not even the same species, read the rest of this entry… »

You have to watch this video.  You will see (in fast-motion) a plain young woman transformed into a glamorous model.  Her beauty — courtesy of a team of professional make-up artists, hairdressers, lighting engineers, photographers and digital manipulators – is as astonishing as it is unattainable.  She doesn’t look like anyone you know, anyone you’ll ever see walking down the street – or anyone you (or your daughter) could ever look like.  She doesn’t even look like herself!  Yet she’s out there, on billboards, in magazines, a representation of beauty.  She, and all the other models, define beauty in our culture.  They set the standard or, if not the “standard,” the goal:  We want to look like that.  Our girls want to look like that.  Men want women to look like that.

But look like what? Like the product of…well, a shelf full of products?  Like a manufactured object?  Like a cgi?  Much talk (although it seems to have produced little action) about the Dachau-level emaciation of models.  But I wonder how many of us – especially how many young teens – understand that these models owe more to Photoshop than they do to lucky genes.   This is unattainable, distorted, fabricated, contrived, counterfeit “beauty.”  And I am finished ranting now.

The book is here…officially published, in stores, online!  I mean, of course, My Teenage Werewolf, the book.  The book that is responsible for — that precipitated — this blog.

I started working on the book back when Lizzie was 12.  That was the year I toppled from my throne.  No longer Queen Mommy, no longer the font of all things fun, I was, all of a sudden, the enemy.  The Arch Enemy.  The one to whom icy stares were directed.  The one on the other side of the slammed bedroom door.  What happened?  Where was my sweet little girl?

I didn’t want my 12-year-old back.  I knew she had to grow up, and I knew that a big part of growing up was finding her own identity.  But I needed to maintain a bit of sanity while this happened…and some measure of peace in the household.  Things were getting pretty dicey.  Lizzie and I were locking horns most days, fighting about chores, homework, screen-time, clothing, food, friends, wet towels on the floor.  We were fighting about everything…and nothing.  Most mornings we eyed each other warily, wanting to see who would cast the first stone – neither of us free of sin, both of us well armed.

And so I did what I had to do – what any crazed mother who also happened to be an immersion reporter would do:  I launched myself on an 18-month mission, read the rest of this entry… »

LIZZIE…Chores are definitely not by fav thing to do, but it’s part of growing up and learning responsibilities (or so my mom tells me).  Currently my chores consist of setting and clearing the dinner table.  I do other things like wash my dad’s and mom’s cars and sometimes clean the bathrooms, but I get paid extra for those, so I don’t think I can count them as my regular chores.

To be honest, I think maybe I do the table setting thing 4 out of 7 nights.  That’s because I am usually very very busy at this time of day…busy playing my video games, like right in the middle of a level or quest.  In our house we have this “system” when we need someone to do something.  We constantly bug that person! I mean, before dinner a parent tells me to set the table like SO many times, and it distracts me from my game!!!  After dinner, it’s another issue.  I usually eat much faster than anyone else and get out of the Dragon’s Lair (aka family sit-down meal) asap.  So when the clearing needs to be done, I’m long gone…and back at my very important game.  Sometimes a parent will just bug and bug me until I come back and do the clearing.  Sometimes, not!! (That is, they don’t bug me, and I don’t do it!)

This has been going on for as long as I can remember.  I figure if the system isn’t fixed yet, it’s not likely to be.  I can’t wait until I can actually get a job!  I’d much rather be yelled at by a boss than a parent any day.

LAUREN…When I was a teenager, I did a lot more chores around the house than Lizzie does.  It wasn’t like I was getting up at dawn to milk the cows and gather the eggs and chop the kindling — my suburban teen life was pretty cushy — but still, I had my responsibilities.  And I was no angel about this, no eager beaver.  I was a normal recalcitrant teen – which is to say, I was moody, disagreeable  and a pain in the ass, and anything my parents asked me to do was met with exasperated sighs and much eye-rolling.  But dammit, I did my chores.   (Unlike some other teen around here…)

Every morning, I made my bed.  (No comforter that just needed to be fluffed up, like Lizzie has on her bed – which, incidentally, she never ever makes — but rather sheets and a blanket to be smoothed and re-tucked with, yes, hospital corners.)

Every night I set the dinner table.  Easy. Hardly worth mentioning.  On Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday nights – generally after multiple reminders and thinly veiled threats about the withholding of allowance – I went through the house, room by room, and emptied the wastebaskets into a plastic bag, added the kitchen garbage, deposited everything into the can at the side of the house and then took the can out to the curb.  (Yes, back in those halcyon days of extravagant municipal services, our garbage was collected three times a week.)

My least favorite chore  was raking the lawn after my father mowed it.   read the rest of this entry… »

LAUREN…It’s summer time – those lazy hazy days of summer – and I just came in from my version of a leisurely lunch eaten out on the back deck.  I would like to tell you that I basked in the sun as I ate my black bean, quinoa and pico de gallo salad, that I relaxed into the afternoon, breathing deeply, my mind at rest, my spirit floating like a puffy white cloud in the cerulean sky.

But that ain’t me, babe.

What I did was eat while alternately reading the New York Times, scribbling a grocery shopping list in the margin of the op-ed page and thinking about what I want to write in this post.  I was interrupted by the crowing of Mr. T, our rooster, and that reminded me that I hadn’t checked the chicken water yet, so I ran out to coop and did that.  But on the way back, I noticed that the cucumbers in the first garden bed were being overrun by weeds, so grabbed a hoe.  The sun was hot and high in the sky, which reminded me that I hadn’t put sunblock on since my early morning run, so I ran upstairs to do that.  The sunblock was sitting next to my contact lens solution, which reminded me that I had yet to make an appointment for a three-month overdue eye exam.  I did that, then went back out on the back deck to finish that salad – and the Times. read the rest of this entry… »