Newsflash: families, like all relationships, take work to make really awesome. Just because you carried these little people inside your body and you love them more than anything doesn’t mean you will navigate the roads of life together without some bumps. That’s where the family meeting comes in.
Wait, what? Family meeting? Isn’t that like when the Brady Bunch came together to diffuse the tension created by deciding how to spend the trading stamps they saved? (spoiler: after a tense house-of-cards build-off, the boys and girls decided to give up their opposing ideas — rowboat! sewing machine! — and instead buy something the whole family could enjoy — a 13-inch color TV, w00t!)
Yeah, well, no. Family meetings are like the rainbow sprinkles of the donut world. They make everything sparklier. Tastier. More fun. Okay, maybe a food analogy doesn’t work here. But these are things you can have from holding effective family meetings:
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If I had access to a time machine, you can bet I’d go back and things things differently. I’d give Mrs. Morton a piece of my mind over that bogus D on my 8th grade English paper. I wouldn’t quit my lead in my 12th grade play even though I was cast opposite a 10th grader with bad breath and looked like a Muppet. And that summer between 10th and 11th grade? I’d do something — anything, really — other than sitting by the phone waiting for a certain boy to call and playing my Best of Bread album over and over. I’d say yes more often. I’d let people help me. I’d believe in my gifts. I’d have way more fun.
I hit a highlight of parenting last week. Or maybe it was a lowlight, I don’t know. But for her 12th birthday, I sent my kid a book on manners.
Last week 
Want your kid to have an advantage in the job market? Of course you do. I suspect few of us parents truly WANT our spawn to be in a perpetual state of 
For all the years my kids lived with me, I sucked at holidays. I did them wrong. Totally wrong.
The other day I ran across 
All my life I hated my middle name. And then a year ago I changed my name — first, middle, last, the whole shebang — and that was that. But growing up, I NEVER told anyone my middle name. Never. (It was Sue. Bleh.)
I suspect that there is nothing that ages us parents more than having kids. Oh, I don’t mean the gray hairs that appear overnight from weeks of colicky 4am wee-of-the-night “bonding” with a newborn. Nor do I mean the heartstopping moments when your toddler’s sticky little hand slips purposefully out of your grasp followed by gleeful shrieks and a short-legged dash for the open car-studded street. Nope. I mean popular culture. Explaining it to kids. That’s when you suddenly see how impossibly OLD you are, light years away from hip in any of its incarnations. Oh ell dee old.
When I was little there were a couple of dozen stories that got trotted out at different times through the year. When my mother made chocolate chip cookies my father would ask what she was procrastinating about. When she washed windows we all learned to ask who was coming over to the house. When we had beans she’d tell the story of how she got into trouble singing a bawdy song about beans one night as she hauled the garbage down the alley, thinking no one would hear. Whenever we had grapes I’d be reminded of the snapshot taken of me at age three, holding up a bunch of grapes and repeating “Gapes, gapes.” We all knew that my brother once called the hardware that holds doors onto the door jamb “Hing geese.” The stories were comfortable, familiar. They were our way of remembering our connection to one another since we lacked the courage or tools to talk about our connection and our love directly. Our family stories became our love language.
