At the park, my daughter whines. Too hot, icky sunscreen, more juice. “Four-year-olds,” I say.
“Not mine,” another mom says, her face smug. “We parent like gravity.”
“Gravity?”
Her daughter screams, dangling by one foot off the monkey bars. “You’re fine!” the mom yells.
Never-whining girl faceplants into the woodchips.
Hadley Leggett is a writer and stay-at-home mom in Seattle, WA. When she’s not chasing after children, she’s working on the second draft of her first novel.
This poet (who has no children) enjoyed this greatly. Someone recently referred to me as “childless”; I corrected him: I am “child-free.”
Thank you for reading! I love your idea of “child-free” instead of “childless”… as a mom of three, I think I must be “child-more.”
Wonderful! It does happen, this ‘parenting like gravity’. Great phrase, by the way.