(page 48) JANUARY 2014
LITTLE PARENT ON THE PRAIRIE by Tracy Kirby
I tried all the things my flowery discipline books told me to do. But it was hopeless.
bio: Tracy Kirby’s roots and heart are in the Hawaiian Islands, but destiny has led her to the prairie. She is a wandering traveler, a wife to a dashing Sioux Falls native, a mother to a 2-year-old daughter and 145-pound bear puppy, a freelance writer, and a lover of souls.
THE DAY THE SUGAR BAN WAS LIFTED Before I was a mom, there was a lot of things I said I would never do when or if I ever had kids. All you pre-parents out there, you know what I’m talking about. You see a mom in the grocery store looking like a hot mess (or cold mess considering we live in negative-500-degrees) and she is scolding a little human for hurling a grocer item out of the cart. And even after the clenched-teeth scolding, wouldn’t you know it, that little human looks that mom straight in the eye and does it again. And you think to yourself, “Yah, I will never allow that to happen. I will rule with an iron fist!” Or, you see a
Illustration by Liz Long.
mom at the coffee shop with a girlfriend having coffee, and whirling around on the floor beneath her is a hyper, disheveled child chewing on a stroller tire. The mom, seeing the chomping out of the corner of her eye, breezily ignores it. And you think to yourself, “How could she ignore such an unsanitary activity? And more importantly, why is that child so messy?” And finally, you encounter a mom with three children who are wailing incessantly because they were denied a cookie. With a roll of your eyes, you say mightily in your head, “Kids shouldn’t be eating sugar anyway. I will never feed my kids sugar.”
Now, I must confess. These are real stories. And at the time, it was me. I was the judging pre-parent in the corner eating bon-bons and tweeting on my super clean iPhone screen. Then, I became a parent. I no longer tweet (ridiculous use of time), my iPhone screen is practically a biohazard, and I tell you what; I rue the day that I ever judged any mom. Especially about the sugar topic. I did, really and truly, say to myself that I would never allow my children to consume anything where the top ingredient was sugar. And for awhile, I stuck with it. I made all my daughter’s baby