Humorous Insight Author Shares Her Parenting Experiences At Annual Fammily A Fair Conference

In the book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” a boy named Alexander has just that.

He wakes up with gum in his hair, he gets no dessert in his lunch. Later, he has to wear his railroad-train pajamas. He hates his railroad-train pajamas.

It’s vintage Judith Viorst: a gentle, funny children’s tale wrapped around a valuable adult concept, that tomorrow things will be better.

The real Alexander is 29 now and a loan officer in Chicago. His brother Nick is an editor in New York; brother Anthony’s a public defender in Denver.

And their mother, Judith Viorst, who brought them to life and into libraries around the country, is still probing the areas within and between people with gentle humor and deeper insights.

On April 19, she’ll speak in Spokane on “Parenting Our Children from Newborn to 30-years-old and Beyond.”

Racing around her Washington, D.C. home last week, Viorst was making chicken soup and matzo balls for Passover while trying to borrow a high chair for a first grandchild’s visit.

Parenthood, Viorst said, is not something you ever retire from.

“The challenge is readjusting your stance to your children as they get older. So even though you know exactly how they should live, you learn to keep your mouth shut and tolerate their mistakes and the risks they take.”

She’ll speak of those challenges when she delivers the annual Family a Fair Spring Lecture sponsored by Holy Family Hospital.

A New Jersey native who began writing stories and poems when she was 7, Viorst was not published until she was a middle-class mother of three writing about her own life.

“I wrote about it in the pediatrician’s office, at home, at Disney movies. I was very lucky to be able to write about the life I was living,” she said.

Such began a body of work that grew to six poetry books, 11 children’s books, a New York Times best seller, a novel and a play. She’s won an Emmy for an Anne Bancroft television special and has been a columnist at Redbook magazine for nearly two decades.

When her sons became older, she went back to school and studied six years at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute.

She then spent three years writing a book on her work and her lifetime of reading. The book, “Necessary Losses,” was a far stretch from her earlier work. It was on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year and was translated into several languages. Since then, she’s continued to stretch, publishing her first novel in 1994 and seeing her musical “Love and Shrimp” open in Los Angeles and New York.

But she always returns to exploring people and relationships.

Married since 1960 to author Milton Viorst, she speaks frequently about families and relationships to librarians, parents and hospitals with women’s health programs. She also loves to visit her three sons, who she says “can run but they can’t hide.”

The family remains the center of her work and life.

“My father once said my kids are the best books I ever wrote,” she says. “I would agree with him, and my husband would say the same.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: PARENTING Judith Viorst will talk about “Parenting Our Children from Newborn to 30-years-old and Beyond” at 7 p.m. Friday, April 19, in the Empire Ballroom of the Ridpath Hotel. Cost is $6. For information, call 482-2477.