So apparently there’s a firstborn challenge going around so I thought that I would participate.

Per my usual, I’m going to be brutally honest here.

As many of you know, Alexa is my firstborn and in a lot of ways I would love to take complete credit for her, but I really can’t. Alexa was born with an innate sense of kindness and a sweet disposition that I can only credit to her creator. She is remarkably driven and, in my eyes, equally beautiful. She taught me how to be a mom and, trust me, that was not an easy task because I had zero experience. I don’t think I ever even babysat, save maybe one failed attempt.

I had to learn a lot of things and I made a lot of mistakes with Alexa. I don’t think that she would be quite as anxious as she is now had I been a little bit more relaxed as a mother. So many things that I look back on now that I did with Alexa that I don’t do with my third and fourth child. I thought I could take on a practical, pragmatic approach to the politics of the PTA moms, that being nice was good enough, that was a huge mistake. These moms are professional Bureaucrats and there are rules and there are hierarchies… And you better not buck the system.

Trust me being the CEO of a company does not prepare you for the PTA moms on the playground. And they will make sure you know it. Nothing against the PTA, it’s really more the helicopter moms that run it. It can be a dangerous territory fraught with political maneuvering and nepotism.

A lot of these multi-layered relationships play out in their children, making a complicated situation even worse when they arise. I’ve learned that it’s best to let your kids work out their problems on their own, navigate their own experience and provide the support they need before and after school. At the end of the day, if it gets too bad you can always move them. The philosophy that having them “tough it out” with the bullies prepares them for the real world is bullshit because there’s nothing in the real world that I’ve seen that resembles middle and high school in my opinion. If anything, I find that a lot of people in the real world are trying to “get over” their high school experience.

By the time I got to Caden, he feared telling me anything because he was afraid that I would march across the playground and knock on the principal's door asking why they are not “condemning this behavior” lol. Yes, I was “that” mom trying to deal with “those” moms. Sorry honey.

So, I’ve learned a lot, thank God I didn’t ruin this child. She turned out…well… as you can see, amazing despite me. Kids are resilient even though their parents can be a bit crazy.🤣