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I’m a big, fat liar. An inadvertent one, to be fair, but five year-olds don’t make these subtle distinctions. My son thinks I’m a big, fat liar because I promised him a tornado would never hit New York and shortly thereafter we watched one whirl past his bedroom window. I can explain the concept of freak meteorological phenomena ‘til I’m blue in the face but it doesn’t change the fact that I now have about as much credibility as those wackos who still argue the earth is flat.

The Brooklyn cyclone, as wild as it was, wouldn’t have been that big a deal for our family except for one thing. My son just so happens to be terrified of tornadoes. It’s not the most common fear for a city kid, but then again, it’s not the least common either. Everybody’s scared of something, I like to tell him. Some kids are scared of dogs, others are scared of fire; some kids are scared of freight elevators and men with mustaches and those hand-dryers in bathrooms that blow air at you like they’re trying to rip your epidermis off.

“Everybody’s scared of something,” I reminded Giovanni, “And the great thing about what you’re scared of is that it’ll never happen in New York.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, his brow furrowed.

“I’m positive,” I replied, “You get tornados in flat places, like Kansas or — “ I actually didn’t know where else you get tornados since the totality of my information was derived from The Wizard of Oz, “Or places like Kansas, “ I ventured, “Arkansas? No, maybe I’m thinking of Oklahoma.”

Giovanni looked skeptical.

“Places with prairies,” I continued assertively, “New York is neither flat nor does it boast many prairies, ergo, it cannot have a tornado.”

Now, if you’re either some sort of meteorological savant, or from the Mid-West, you’ll probably be quick to point out how flawed my theory is. But remember please, I’m a native New Yorker, with a self-obsessed sense of geography and this is the best I can do. It’s not particularly a point of pride for me to speak authoritatively about things I’ve only been exposed to through fictional movies from seventy-five years ago, but I’ve got a kid that asks a lot of questions and my response has got to work according to a “best guess” strategy, otherwise I’d be glued to Wikipedia.

“You promise?” Giovanni asked.

Like most modern parents, I am concerned with earning the trust of my kids, so I try not to make promises I can’t keep. But this one seemed pretty safe, like promising that the Boogieman wasn’t real.

“I promise.”

Just goes to show how much my word of honor counts for, because despite my promise, Giovanni kept right on worrying about the possibility of a twister in Park Slope. He’d bring it up almost every time there was a rainstorm: so it was not surprising when I picked him up from school one gray afternoon in late September and he asked, “Is there going to be a tornado today?”

I raised my eyebrows and said, “We’ve been over and over this, honey. There are no such things are tornados in New York. It’s just a little overcast.”

By the time we walked home, after my daughter’s ballet class, the sky had graduated from a little overcast to a foreboding gray. Still, it’d been threatening to rain all day with nary a drop and, as I reassured Giovanni, a little rain did not a thunderstorm make, so instead of heading straight home, we stopped at a playground close to home, where I instructed the children to exhaust themselves.

Giovanni consented to the fun begrudgingly but kept looking at the sky like a workaholic who won’t stop checking his Blackberry during dinner. And, just as he’d worried, the sky kept getting darker and darker until it was positively apocalyptic and Giovanni had to put his foot down:

“The sky is too dark,” he said, “We have to go home now.”

I sighed and went to find his sister who was bounding across the playground, throwing herself down the spiral slide headfirst, as unconcerned with the state of the sky as her brother was fixated on it. The only question she had about the lightening was, “Can I ride it?”

“Let’s just give it a few more minutes ‘til your sister’s tired out a bit,” I reasoned. “Look, we’re a block away from home, It’s not even raining yet.”

As if on cue, a clap of thunder sounded, followed by a flash of lightening. It was as if the sky was announcing “This is the final boarding call for flight MORON, to ANYWHERE BUT HERE.”

“I want to go home NOW!” Giovanni yelled,

Getting my hands on Stella required that I mount the playground apparatus and suffer the indignity of running up the slide and leaping across the shaky drawbridge, always ten steps behind her, because she is a speed demon, with particular emphasis on the demon part.

“This is NOT GOOD LISTENING!” I shrieked at her, over the thunder.

Meanwhile Giovanni was yelling prophecies like Nostradamus: “LISTEN TO ME! THERE IS GOING TO BE A TORNADO!”

“For the last time,” I yelled, ”There are NO TORNADOES IN PARK SLOPE!”

I finally caught Stella, stuffed her in the stroller and speed-walked home, just as it started to rain. As we rushed through our front door, I patted Giovanni on the head and said, patronizingly, “See that? Safe and sound.”

But Giovanni had already run to the window

“Mommy,” he said, his voice breathless, “come look.”

The sky was no longer a charming shade of Gotham-City-Gray, it was Crap-Is-Going-Seriously-Wrong Black. Flashes of lightening split the darkness over and over and a spectacular surround-sound thunder boomed.

Then, suddenly, we couldn’t see the neon lights of the stores across the street anymore, or the cars down below or anything. The very air in front of the window grew dense and dark. I’m no meteorologist or anything but when it looks like you can scoop a handful of air into your hands and made a ball of doom with it, it’s probably a pretty bad sign. Then, the black cloud which consumed the street began to howl so loudly that I got flat-out freaked-out. I closed the blinds, took the kids in the other room and distracted them with an impromptu tea party.

About a half hour later, David came home from work and told us that on his walk from the train he’d seen trees that had been uprooted, crushing cars, and that a man was blown down the stairs of the subway and was carried out on a stretcher.

“What was it?” I asked.

“T-o-r-n-a-d-o,” he spelled out.

“No. Freaking. Way.” I replied.

“What does that spell?” Giovanni asked.

“Are you kidding me?” I said, laughing at the insanity of it all.

“Taaar,” Giovanni ventured, “taar-ney-doo? What’s a tarneydoo?”

Then his eyes grew big, “Tornado? Does it spell tornado?”

“Umm.” I stammered, “Ummm.”

“That was really a tornado? Really?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure,” I answered, “I mean, I think they have to analyze the high-velocity …“

But he was not about to be dazzled and disoriented by my invented jibber-jabber, “You lied, Mommy,” he said, very matter-of-factly, “You said we can’t have tornadoes in New York.”

“I know I did, honey, but . . . but . . .” For once, I was at a loss for words.

“Mommy didn’t lie,” came David to the rescue, “There never had been a tornado in New York before. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing. And, you know what else? Sometimes even Mommies make mistakes.”

But Giovanni didn’t look upset. In fact, he looked relieved.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he reassured us, “I feel better. I saw a real live tornado and it wasn’t so bad after all. Nobody’s house got picked up and blown away.”

“This is true,” I said, shooting David the “are-you-getting-this?” look.

We had a pleasant evening and the kids were A-OK, no problems going to sleep or off to school the next day. But when I went to tuck Giovanni in the next night, he said he had a question.

“Sure,” I said, “Shoot.”

“Are there volcanoes in New York?”

“That is a very good question,” I replied, flipping through my brain’s exceedingly slim volcano index – Vesuvius, Bali Ha-i, was Mount Fuji volcanic or was it just a regular mountain? — Then I took a deep breath and said: “I’m gonna have to get back to you on that.”

To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, visit her blog A Mom Amok at http://amomamok.blogspot.com.

I used to complain constantly about what a pain it was to live in a walk-up with two small children. But since moving into an elevator building, I have come to see that the pain in my behind was from the kids and not the stairs. As it turns out, it’s still a three-ring circus whenever we enter or exit our house, although for entirely different reasons. In fact, the elevator, which I’d counted on as a cure-all, has created problems of its own.

Don’t get me wrong: I love our elevator more than it is reasonable to love a steel box. But while it has liberated me from the physical burden of being a pack mule, it has saddled me with a mental strain. Walking up stairs is simple, one foot in front of the other, but riding an elevator, like any other situation in which you must share a confined space with strangers, requires your behavior to adhere to certain unspoken rules. Of course, there are always individuals who shrug off these conventions: on the subway these are the people that eat stinky, messy food or tell detailed stories about their sexual exploits or sing to the music on their headphones at full voice   On the elevator, these people are my children.

It works like this: as soon as the doors close on the elevator, a signal is released in my 3 and 5 year-old’s brains to say something odd, inappropriate or just really god-awful loud.

This might just be the uncouth sound of a bodily function, or the announcement of future body functions, as in, “I NEED TO DO A HUMONGOS POOP!”

But usually the off-putting words are spoken directly to our fellow passengers. The best case scenario is that Giovanni, my sociable son, will be friendly, super-friendly, so friendly it is almost an assault, like the time we stumbled upon a pretty middle-school girl in the elevator after-school.

“What’s your name?” Giovanni asked, instantly interested.

She was busy looking at her cell phone and didn’t hear him.

“What’s your name? What’s your name?” he repeated.

“GIRL!” shouted Stella, “Say your name, girl!” My kids have a serious good cop/ bad cop thing going on.

“Lauren,” she mumbled, staring at the elevator doors.

With this, Giovanni fired forth a barrage of questions, leaving nary an opportunity for her to answer: “How old are you? What school do you go to? Where’s your mother? What’s the number you live in?”

This last question, it was clear, was the most pressing, and he asked her again “What’s your number?”

“SAY YOUR NUMBER GIRL!” Stella shrieked.  .

Lauren, clearly wishing she’d taken the stairs, asked me, the official Crazy-English translator: “What do they mean?”

“What apartment number do you live in?’ I explained.

“Oh,” she answered as she stepped out on the 3rd floor:”3B.”

The doors closed again and Giovanni announced: “I am going to write that girl a letter and bring it to her house!”

I tried to dissuade him. I tried to distract him. But at the end of the day I walked him over to 3B and helped him slide an anonymous letter which read “her is a pictr av the sun. you r nis,” under her door, if that was, in fact, her real apartment number.

As elevator behavior goes, friendly advances from a five year-old, no matter how persistent, are generally beyond reproof. Where I get into trouble is with my daughter.

Stella looks like she just stepped off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: pale yellow hair, rosy cheeks – the whole nine yards. But when she opens her mouth, it’s a different story.

“What beautiful eyes!” people on the elevator often exclaim.

“I don’t like you!” she snaps back with venom, “Go away!”

This response usually works to paralyze her appreciators, but if they persist in making conversation, she’ll pull out the big guns: “You can’t talk to me!” “This is my elevator and you can’t be in it!” “You’re annoying!”

It’s not that she’s cranky or upset. In fact, she’s at her happiest when she is berating and scolding others in a small box from which there is no escape. I know this because of the grin which spreads over her impish face afterwards.

I’ve come to accept the fact that my daughter is, at present, just really, regularly unfriendly.  Ok, hostile. Ok, more belligerent than a drunk who’s been cut off.

This is shocking to me because I’m a people person. When I board an elevator (and I’m not doing damage control for Stella) I make light, palatable, diverting small talk, the conversational equivalent of muzak. I’m as amiable as a Southerner except I know when to stop talking. Yet, as with so much in parenting, this friendliness has caused a backlash in my daughter.

I’ve grown so accustomed to Stella’s gnarly, snarly elevator bit that when I see children who are perfectly nice to others for no reason whatsoever, I can’t help but conclude that they are either cuckoo for cocoa puffs or under the influence of Children’s Benadryl or a similar mind-altering substance.

One morning last week, I was rushing Stel off to school and we got on a crowded elevator. Among the many riders was a brother and sister, about Stella’s age, with their pregnant mother. I smiled at the children. The children smiled at me. The children smiled at Stella. Stella growled at them like a rabid dog. Then she informed me, “Betsy doesn’t like them!”

Betsy is Stella’s imaginary sister, and frankly she’s a bad influence. Where Stella is mischievous, Betsy is nefarious. Betsy has a lot of opinions about things and they all fall under the “I hate it” category. I am currently filing paperwork to have Betsy excommunicated from the family.

The little girl on the elevator had a nicely-maintained black bob and was wearing an adorable flower-print sundress, making me have second thoughts about how I’d allowed Stella to dress herself for school in pink penguin pajamas. She had been wearing a fetching frock this morning, but only because she’d put that on to sleep. She’s like an infant with her days and nights switched, only with wardrobe. But I’ve learned to pick my battles with this iron-willed child, and the battle at hand was over Stella’s habit of saying “Go away! I hate you!” to each and every person she encountered. She was under strict instructions not to direct the word “hate’ at anyone, period.

So now, I stood in the elevator, holding my breath and hoping we could make it to the lobby without an incident. But Stella said nothing, Instead it was the girl who spoke, turning to her brother and saying: “I love you, Jack.”

And little Jack said, “I love you too, Pearl.”

Everyone on the elevator, including me, oohed and ahhed. Who wouldn’t? It made your uterus hurt, it was so cute.

Encouraged by the response, Pearl went on: “I love Jack and I love my Daddy and I love my Mama!” she said, flinging her arms around her mother’s legs. Then she put her hand on her mother’s pregnant midsection and said, “Hello little baby! Hello! I’m your sister!”

Stella squinted her eyes and cocked her head, which I knew from experience did not bode well.

“Do you have a baby in your belly?” she asked the mother, innocently enough.

“Yes, I do,” the moms replied with a smile.

“Oh,” Stel answered thoughtfully: “I hate that baby.”

Every passenger on the elevator, including but not limited to Pearl, Jack, the mother, me, and probably the in-utero baby – gasped audibly.

“Stella!” I exclaimed.

To make matters worse, my daughter broke into a huge grin which stretched from one blond pigtail to the other.

Thankfully, at just that moment, the doors of the elevator opened and I bounded through them, exclaiming, “Sorry! So sorry!” over my shoulder.

Wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last time I have to make a hasty exit after a doozie like that. Though I’m inclined to make a big show of being shocked and aghast – you know the show I mean, where you exclaim loudly, “I don’t know WHERE you learned to talk like THAT! You know BETTER!” in defense of your parenting skills — I’ve learned it only fans the flame of bad behavior, so I try, whenever possible, to just let the mortification roll over me and subside, before reminding my daughter that it is not kind to tell a mother that you despise her fetus.

But it does make me remember fondly the days when we lived in a walk-up, where the only people who suffered in the freak-show of my family getting in and out of the house, was me. And so I’ve decided that until the reigning Mean Queen of the Elevator can soften that razor-sharp tongue of hers, we’re hoofing it up the stairs. Not only it is rehabilitating, it’s good for the glutes.

To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland – in and out of the elevator – visit her blog at amomamok.blogspot.com