Before you have kids, it’s possible to live life quite circumspectly. If you listen to Britney Spears in your car, or consider Ben and Jerry’s your main source of calcium, it’s entirely your own business.
You can present yourself as a svelte alt-rock listener with good bones, and no-one needs to know any different. Not so post-kids, or at least once your kids begin to form sentences that other adults can actually understand. Here are just some of the ways my kids blow my cover:
1. If I happen to agree when a fellow parent says her children watch only educational videos with no commercials, my three year-old will probably ask her if she is “Kmart Smart.”
2. How can I claim I don’t know who Ke$ha is when my kids run around the park singing “DJ turn it up, dup dup dup Dup DUP”?
3. When I say in my public good mother voice, “now, sweetheart, you know we don’t have ice cream in the morning,” my three-year old looks at me suspiciously and says, “Yes, Mommy, WE do.”
4. Whenever I leave a store with my five-year old, he will invariably yell as we’re going out the door, “Mommy, are you sure you paid for that??” [To be clear it’s not that I shoplift. But I do have my own built-in anti-theft device.]
5. If I suggest to one of my dirt splotched boys that he’ll need a bath tonight, he’ll likely say “but Mommy – I had a bath last week!” And he did.
6. My accident prone self is now public knowledge – whenever I say “ouch,” one of the boys will ask “Oh, Mommy, did you burn yourself on the stove again?”
7. No matter how good my Spanx are, when you see that I’ve produced two of them, you just know you can probably french braid my stomach.
What embarrassing secrets have your kids revealed? C’mon, if you don’t tell me, they will.
