Tag: family

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mindblowing realization

The other night, I had to run to Walgreens to pick up a prescription for Etta. I grabbed some C batteries for the baby swing and headed to the pickup window.

“I’m here to pick up a prescription for my daughter.”

Outwardly, I continued to have a typical interaction with the pharmacist, but the minute the words “my daughter” left my lips, my internal conversation went something like this: “Holy crap, I have a daughter. I have a DAUGHTER. I have TWO DAUGHTERS. Daughter, daughter, daughter daughter.” The word sort of ceased to have any meaning and began to sound sort of foreign in my head.

I mean, somehow, that phrase, “my daughter” just blows my mind. I had already kind of processed that I have babies, but realizing that they’re my daughters? Well, it gives me all kinds of visions of who these little people will grow up to be.

My DAUGHTERS. Photo by Christen Byrd.
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mom enough

I’m no attachment parent, but I have an attachment child.

The whole internet, or at least, the mom-heavy corner of it that I frequent, is abuzz over a particularly trollish TIME magazine cover and accompanying cover story that asks “Are you mom enough?” The cover depicts a model-pretty 26 year old mom breastfeeding her nearly 4 year old son, and the story it teases is a largely biographical piece about the father of attachment parenting, Dr. Sears.

This is not a post about that piece, so much as it is a post about my experience of reading that piece.

Jon went golfing this morning. I’m glad he got to go, and I’m not mad that he went. But it coincided with a difficult morning for me and the Bufflo Gals. In the 6ish hours he was gone, I swear, there were not 5 minutes during which one or the other of the girls was not crying and/or screaming. There were not 5 minutes in those 6ish hours in which I was not holding one or the other, feeding one or the other, shushing one or the other, or changing one or the other. I’m rather proud that it was not until around hour five that I send Jon a text inquiring when he might be home and suggesting that I may or may not have been losing it.

It was while balancing both of my girls on my body, intermittently shoving a pacifier in one mouth or the other, bouncing Etta on my knees while feeding Claire a bottle (of formula, which Dr. Sears would frown upon), that I read the TIME piece about Dr. Sears.

This was about hour 4 of The Screaming.

And when I read that he thinks allowing kids to cry for more than a moment damages their brains, and that he encourages parents to soothe every single cry, and attend to every single whimper, well, I wanted to punch him in his face. And then I wanted to dare him to spend 6 hours alone with my twins and try to achieve the impossible feat of never letting one or the other cry for more than 5 minutes.

At least once per day, I will be feeding one while the other sits in a Boppy, bouncer, or bassinet, screaming her head off until her little face is beet red, because she too is hungry, or in need of a change, or desiring some snuggle time. And I will have to just leave her there, because if I stop feeding the one I’m feeding, I will then have two screaming babies on my hands and not nearly enough hands to comfort both of them. This means that sometimes, by which I mean at least once a day, one or the other of my babies is crying for 10 minutes, or more. Deal with THAT, Dr. Sears.

The thing about grand theories of parenting is, they’re grand in theory. They almost never work in totality, across the board, for all parents and all children. I find many of the feminist criticisms that attachment parenting asks too much of mothers (and alienate fathers) very valid. I find the scientific criticisms of Sears’ claims that normal amounts of crying damage babies’ brains comforting, because my babies are going to cry unless I grow a second set of arms.

At the same time, I’m thankful that attachment parenting folks have popularized things like babywearing, something that has worked very well with Etta, whom I refer to as my “attachment child” because she likes to be very close to a warm body at all times. We joke that the solution to most Claire problems is to feed her, and the solution to most Etta problems is to hold her.

Bottom line: take what’s useful to you from parenting gurus, but don’t make it your religion. And don’t you dare suggest to a new mom of twins that she’s damaging her kids because they cry sometimes. Because you’ll make her cry, and then she’ll want to make YOU cry, and THAT might cause some damage.

 

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Jon Stewart and I are both uncomfortable

You may have been seeing more of Jenny Sanford, Governor Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford’s soon-to-be-ex wife, because she’s doing a lot of publicity in promotion of her new memoir, Staying True.  As I’ve written before, I like Jenny Sanford.  I respect the way she has handled herself, for the most part, with grace and dignity.  However, with the release of this book and a seeming rush to capitalize on her family’s breakup, she’s beginning to lose me as a fan.  She was on The Daily Show last night, and it wasn’t just Jon Stewart who was uncomfortable (If anyone can tell me how to embed video from TDS on my WordPress blog, let me know. Copying and pasting the embed code doesn’t work).  Stewart is a divorced kid, like me, and his joke about how after his parents’ divorce, his mom “only said bad things about my dad on the radio, not national TV” rang true for me. Continue reading “Jon Stewart and I are both uncomfortable”

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favored son

I’ve thought since the first time I brought him home that my family liked my husband more than they like me.  My mom is a feeder, loves to cook for people, and for the first time she had a BOY to feed and feed and feed.  He’s not picky, he has a ginormous appetite, and happily goes back for seconds.  And don’t even get me started on how he wowed all the women in the family by doing the dishes the first time we had him around for Thanksgiving.  And my dad? Well, much as he adores his three girls, it’s been adorable to see him with a son for the first time, geeking out about doctor stuff, playing ping pong for hours, working on projects around the house. Even my littlest sister thinks he rocks, because he’ll jump on the trampoline with her.  So you might see how I’d get the idea that he’s everyone’s favorite.  But now I have actual proof.

For Christmas this year, my Memaw gave everyone money and mittens.  My dad got $50. My mom got $50. My sister got $50. I got $50.

My husband?

He got $100.

The rest of us maintain that two $50 bills simply got stuck together, that it’s some sort of error. My husband maintains that Memaw simply likes him more than us.

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maybe NOT baby…

Image via BL1961s Flickr.
Image via BL1961's Flickr.

So it’s been about a week or two since I wrote my “Maybe Baby” post about starting to think about having kids.  Today I picked up the September issue of Skirt! magazine and read a piece by Valerie Weaver-Zercher, and now I’m pretty sure having kids, while still definitely something that will happen some day, is back in the not SO soon pile.  The piece, called “Mentor or Mom” is about Weaver-Zercher’s experience as a mother of 3 who has a lot of 20 year old college girls in her life.  She sees herself in them, and she seems to have a fantasy about shattering their illusions of what their lives will be.  She imagines:

I pull the college women aside, fix them with a steady gaze and whisper in a conspiratorial voice: I was once like you.  I baked bread in Germany and walked through streams in Nicaragua.  I worked for a magazine and had a company credit card and wrote editorials that shocked people.  I got married to a man willing to clean bathrooms and we lived in a city and walked to market and protested the death penalty.
And then I had a baby. Here I pause, then raise my eyebrows.
And two years later, another. Another significant pause.
And two years later, yet another.
I stop for awhile, until they think I’ve made my point and begin to sidle away. Then I begin again: Each child is like an earthquake that hurls your identity off the shelf, I say. You will spend years picking yourself off the floor, along with everyone else’s socks and Play-Doh. You will no longer know who really wins: the one who goes to the office all day, or the one who stays home with the kids. You will feel guilty about each choice that takes you away from your children, and resentful of each choice that takes you away from your calling. And here I grab them by their scrawny elbows and bring it home: And you will never, ever judge a housewife again!

Yikes! I may not be a college woman, but that’s enough to send me heading for the hills, or at least the birth control pills. But Weaver-Zercher continues:

Young women don’t need phony assurances about how easy it is to be both a mother and an individual, to maintain both a family and a career, to win in both the office and the house. Such platitudes can only lead to disillusionment and anger– unless the next decade brings about sane maternity leaves, affordable childcare, universal health insurance, and family-friendly work environments. (I’m not holding my breath.) Or maybe, if they have children, they and their partners will find better ways to navigate these days of early parenthood– some way to change the world, change gendered patterns and still change diapers. I’ll be the first to cheer them on (provided I’m not too jealous).

On the other hand, maybe some college women will end up like me: bewildered, exhausted, not sure whether they’ve won or not, or whether they even trust the society that’s keeping the score. Indeed, maybe college women need me a little bit like I need them: as a prompt to reexamine how we calibrate wins and losses, and as a reminder that when it comes to motherhood and work, winning and losing are categories that no longer make an iota of sense.

I hope to be one of the ones to change gendered patterns and still change diapers. To read bedtime stories but still find the time to write for myself. But then I read things like this and wonder if I’m not just a hopelessly naive no-longer-in-college woman.

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the wrestler and the dollhouse: a smackdown

I was just clicking through a friend’s Facebook photos of his three daughters and it got me thinking about my own daddy, who also has three daughters, and couldn’t be happier.  It reminded me of a funny story about something my dad used to loooooove to do when we were kids.  Mind if I tell you a story about when I was a kid?

See, my sister and I (at the time there were only two of us, our third sister was adopted later), had an elaborate Victorian dollhouse that my parents had built for us one Christmas.  More than we played with any other toy, we spent hours playing with that dollhouse.  All the people and furniture were Playmobil.  So they were sorta like overgrown Legos.  Like this: We didn’t just have the traditional dollhouse figures, either.  There was an entire “school” set up in the “attic,” a hospital complete with surgery unit on the lower porch, a police station on the upper porch, an ambulance, and EVEN A HOT DOG STAND:My dad, of course, loved more than anything to make us giggle and squeal.  Usually this was related to telling us that the Belle, a riverboat in the town where we lived, had sunk, which was a guaranteed way to elicit squeals; or good old fashioned “tickle torture.”  But when it came to the dollhouse, he had a secret weapon.  Macho Man Randy Savage: Macho Man would regularly show up to “visit” the dollhouse and basically wreck the place, while my sister and I howled “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO MACHO MAN! NOOOOOOOOOO!” In our little minds, we could SEE this wreslter man, stomping his feet, kicking over furniture, punching the dollhouse people.  My dad would just laugh an evil laugh as we tried to pull Macho Man out of his hands and push Dad away from the dollhouse.  I have a feeling it was the only way this “boy” knew to play dollhouse with us.  And really, we secretly loved it.  We’d exact our revenge by finding Macho Man around the house and hiding him, so dad couldn’t find him and make him “come visit.”  Of course, this all ended the day we “hid” Macho Man in the trash and forgot about him until after trash day.  Whoops!

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jon and kate disintegrate

I’m about to write something that may seem a little radical to many I know.   So consider yourself warned.

On the one hand, the whole world has Jon & Kate + 8 fever, and it seems that their big announcement tonight is that they’re getting divorced, as People Magazine reports that papers have already been filed in Pennsylvania.  I firmly believe that being on TV is not a good thing for families, but I don’t think it’s just the quest for the spotlight that doomed this family.  Even from early episodes, it was apparent from the way they spoke to each other that Jon and Kate did not respect each other.  And though Kate often goes on church speaking tours, I did not see a lot of Christian love and grace between them.  Of course I’m just an armchair quarterback, but I calls ’em like I sees ’em.

And so, I’m faced with a sort of bipolar response to this, as a committed, happily married woman, and also as a child of divorce.  You see, I believe that divorce is sad and tragic and to be avoided whenever possible.  MY Jon and I both  agree that it is simply not on the table for us.  Based on the experiences of family and friends, I do believe that any marriage can be healed with love and grace by the power of God.

But. Continue reading “jon and kate disintegrate”