Tips from the Trenches: A Guide to Practical Parenting

Over the past couple of weeks, I picked up one of my periodic past times of climbing the proverbial family tree. I tend to get really wrapped up in it for a few weeks and then reach a wall through which I cannot break and give up for a while until I'm moved to pick it up again and the cycle continues. Every time I get a bit further or have a new piece of information to add.

This time has been no different and I'm preparing to put it all away again, but not before I had one last poke around Ancestry dot com. (Yeah, I just think it's funny that we're not starting to write out "dot com". Hee hee.) I stumbled upon a gimmick feature that allows people to search for "famous relatives" and I was sucked right in.

I thought the most efficient way to search the entire family tree for "famous relative" was to search for the "famous relatives" of my kids. So I clicked on my son and clicked "Find famous relatives". Of course, we come from a stellar line of genetic prowess and a lengthy (and eclectic) list of famous relatives spews forth onto the screen.

The list included:

• 2 prime ministers
• 1 first lady
• 3 presidents (including Nixon, unfortunately!)
• a Mayflower passenger
• a financier and banker
• a physicist
• the founder of General Motors
• several inventors
• "Wild Bill" Hickock
• John Steinbeck
• Robert Frost
• John Glenn
• Amelia Earhart
• Samuel Morse (of Morse Code fame)
• Elizabeth Browning
• Aldous Huxley
• Audrey Hepburn
• A quite a few more

As you can probably imagine, I'm feeling pretty well-connected at this point. I'm pulling out the old address book and working on adding some new contacts. Then, I thought, hmmmm. I wonder which people belong to which side of the family. 

So, I click on my name and click "Find famous relatives" and guess what? I'm not even related to the British people on the list. What?!?! Maybe I picked the wrong person, I thought to myself. So I clicked again. Again, nothing! None of them. I'm not related to anyone famous. In fact, the screen pointed this fact out with brutal honesty..."You have no famous relatives." Thanks a lot.

I guess this means that my husband married beneath him and my kids are just too good for me. In fact, I guess this means I've just polluted the family gene pool. Great. Just what I needed to hear.

My new guilty pleasure is the HBO soap-drama Big Love about a polygamist family trying to live secretly in the mainstream Mormon culture of Sandy, Utah (near Salt Lake). Not only is the show unexpectedly addictive, but I think I'm learning a lot and I really think the polygamists might be on to something.

After all, despite the fact that they have nearly a million children (each wife tries to have a baby once a year-ish), they are still able to have 3 really nice houses with a community yard (and a pool to boot). They share child rearing responsibilities, they share the husband (1/3 of the good, but also 1/3 of the bad), they share the money, and they get to have lots of sex. (For all you parents out there, that is what got you in this position in the first place, but you've probably just about forgotten about it by now.)

Also, parenting en masse really seems like a much better option than what we monogamists have to do. For example, each mother/wife can have a different parenting responsibility. Kind of like good cop, bad cop. One mother/wife gets to say "yes"; one gets to say "no"; and the other gets to have the swing vote. (This is the wife with all the power, you see. She's the favorite and always gets her way.) If I had the swing vote, I'd be sure that I voted in such a way that I would be able to leave the kids with my sister wives, get a paid job, and set myself up with a little private flop house on the other side of town.

So, you ask, what's the downside? None! None that I can see based on the extensive research I've done through watching this very realistic show. My only question is can I have 3 husbands? That way we'd get thrice as much done in a third of the time, have lots of sex, and....oh, wait....I'd still be the one doing all the laundry.