A. Marie Silver

A. Marie Silver

Dear Ellen: My Daughter is Talented

Sometimes I write letters to Ellen DeGeneres. No particular reason. Just because I can.

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with this blog post.

Dear Ellen,

Today was an adventurous day for me.  I went to the grocery store. And, because I love living on the edge – of insanity – I took my toddlers with me. Baby Boy sat in the car that’s attached to the front of the cart. Baby Girl sat up front in the shopping cart.  Baby Boy was as happy as could be, turning his steering wheel around and around. Baby Girl was not a happy camper.  She wanted to run around the store, grabbing items off of shelves and tossing them onto the floor walk beside the shopping cart. To punish me for my extreme insensitivity and cruelty, she voiced her discontent, as loud as she could.

As a parent, I’ve come to realize that the people who are the biggest eye-rollers and complainers when it comes to public temper tantrums are parents.  That’s right, Ellen.  The people who gave me dirty, judgmental looks as I pushed my kids around in the shopping cart were other parents.  Apparently their kids are special.  Somehow they managed to bypass the public temper tantrum stage completely. I think those parents should write handbooks for the rest of us.

But here’s the thing, Ellen.  My daughter is talented.  Not only was she expressing her extreme displeasure at being held captive inside the shopping cart; she was also testing out her voice, using every octave available.  To these hypocrites with kids, she was annoying and I was being a bad parent. To me, my child is a future opera singer with the ability to crack glass using her voice. That’s a hell of party trick.

Sincerely,

A. Marie

Do your kids have any special talents? If so, please share them in the comments!

15 Responses

  1. Someday, she’ll sing opera. And, you know, it would’ve never happened if you hadn’t given her that vocal cord flexibility at such an early age… 😛

  2. Eye-rolling parents are sinister; have they ‘Stepforded’ their children? After three children and now five grandchildren our response is to exude sympathy, remember our own trial & tribs and silently send a message to the child ‘One day YOU will have to deal with this too,’

  3. Haha! I too had a glass breaking child, she just turned six, but the minute she was born she let out a blood curdling scream and my husband I looked at each, with ‘oh no’ written all over our faces. She didn’t terrorize the grocery store so much as she did us and there was that one last time we tried to go out with our tiny bundle to a restaurant. She screamed for the first year of her life to be held, if she wasn’t, they’d be hell to pay. So my husband and I tag-teamed, as we, bleary-eyed, stumbled though that first year. At five kids, out of any of them I’d say she has the greatest chance at opera singer. One time my husband used an decibel recording app on his iphone on her, she registered at over a hundred decibels! Fun times, now she’s the sweetest little six year old with crazy curly hair, I think maybe her superpowers moved to her hair, only time will tell 😉

  4. Been there, done that. The supermarket ‘police parents’ I’m sure are disgruntled parents of equally gifted children. They just don’t know it. Wait till they (the gifted ones) become teenagers. Boys’ testosterone levels increase by 800% with limited executive function in the frontal lobe of the brain. That translates to a lack of ability to control one’s emotional responses. That, I am told by valid scientific research, does not kick in till about age 30. I’m eagerly waiting for that day ……..

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A. Marie Smith

Your short bio telling the story of why you are a writer and the things that you think are important.