Tag Archives: parenting

More kid musing

1 Reply

It’s kind of weird writing this stuff here because the internet is forever. How will my kids feel about so many random people being able to find so much about them? Kind of an interesting thing to think about. But, here’s more anyway. 🙂

I think that nursing is a skill and Shanna was good at it and Calli is kind of awful. Seeing as I just read a chunk of The Birth Order Book yesterday that’s kind of funny. Apparently it is completely standard for second children to go the exact opposite of the older child. Fair enough. Calli seems to have a really hard time regulating my milk flow. She has one nursing speed: full bore. (Is that the right spelling? bore? boar? Darn Noah for not being awake yet!) This means she coughs and chokes and sputters. Still. She’s six months old. She should bloody well have figured out this nursing thing by now. (said lightheartedly) She also yanks really hard as she whips her head around. She can’t lie still on my lap. At all. Ever. She is either waving her arms or her legs or rolling her head back and forth or tapping her foot or… On my best days I think this is the coolest thing in the world. She has so much energy to burn it isn’t funny. I think that is a positive thing. On the worst days I can’t stand having her on me to nurse and I contemplate supplementing with formula. This thought kind of horrifies the lactivist in me. :-\ I’m actually nervous about giving her a bottle though. Yes I know I could pump, but I kind of suspect she would love switching to a low flow bottle and never nursing again. I don’t think I am up for committing to another couple of years exclusively pumping. That is my nightmare. It’s complicated. So far I am just working constantly on nursing manners. I believe in letting kids nurse full term.

Shanna is being restricted to one nursing a day because she doesn’t seem to be able to stop biting. I think her mouth has changed and biologically she’s ready to be done. Emotionally she totally isn’t. *sigh* It’s hard because nursing is her biggest comfort in case of something awful happening or if she is feeling particularly insecure but it wicked hurts and puts me in a horrible mood. :-\ Not a great plan then. I feel like completely weaning at this time would be a bit much for her. She’s had enough adjustments lately–new bed in a new bedroom (alone by herself for the first time in her life), potty training, new sister, extra vaccines lately because of the travel, I’ve been having a hard time all on my own and she notices. I seem to have given up on complete sentences. Interesting. So I feel like I’m trying to give Shanna a bit longer before I force weaning. We are talking about it and leading up to it. I think her birthday will be the cut off. Eek. Poor baby girl. 🙁

And I really don’t have time for more. ack

And the good moments

Leave a reply

So between first nap and second nap we played together. First we played with legos in the house then we spend almost an hour in the back yard mostly playing in the sand box. The very best moment was when Shanna and I were digging together and singing songs about how awesome we all are and Calli was leaning over from her perch on my lap, laughing. It was beautiful. And later Shanna was telling me some very silly story about the scary cat running through our yard and I was holding Calli above my head and looking at her. Then I remember why I chose this life.

Where is the line where the good outweighs the bad or vice versa? I’m not sure I know. But I’m having more fun than not because the good moments are really beautiful.

Bad moment

5 Replies

Calli is sobbing her heart out on my back. She wants to be lying on my lap nursing on the couch. I just can’t do that anymore. I did that through Shanna’s babyhood and right now that will be the straw that breaks the camels back. I just cannot endure that again. So Calli cries. Crying is even an inadequate word for what she is doing. She is screaming and flailing and pounding on me. She is having a tantrum. It’s not that she is starving because she doesn’t want to nurse in any other position. She just wants to comfort nurse to sleep. Trapping me. And I just can’t do it anymore. Not with Shanna whining at me all.day.long. for food. And sometimes as I pace the house I cry. Because how could I have wanted this to be my life.

More parenting issues

12 Replies

I think it is kind of funny that most of my parenting issues involve conflict with other parents, not problems with my kids. I can’t post about them on MDC though because the women I hang out with are on it. And apparently it is actually against the User Agreement to post about issues with other members. So yeah. Y’all get to hear about it. 🙂

Disclaimers! I like the kid in question a lot. He is a wonderful little snuggle bug and I adore him. I like the mom in question a lot. She is a great match for a lot of the things I miss so much about Sarah (although dear God is she *not* Sarah… some big differences).

So one of the little darlings in our play group is ~15 months. We have been hanging out with him for almost a year. He is now getting to the walking and talking stage. …And the hitting stage. And thus the difficulty. And he’s a biter. He has both bitten and hit Shanna in the face. Repeatedly. Now, to be clear, it’s not like I think his mother should beat him or anything, but she’s not reacting. She says, “Ohhhh [first name]” and that’s it. She doesn’t walk up to him to redirect. She doesn’t talk to him about his behavior being unacceptable. She just kind of lets it slide. I kind of have a problem with this approach seeing as he might be 16 months younger than Shanna but he outweighs her. He is a *very* sturdy child. When he hits it *hurts*. I know. He’s walloped me and I was shocked by how much it hurt. And yesterday he clocked Shanna in the face while simultaneously screaming, “No no no” because he didn’t want her to move the toy they were both playing with. I think once you get to the point where you are actively saying that you don’t like someone else’s behavior you can understand the request to not hit. You may not follow it… but I think he would understand redirection. And the mama isn’t giving him any.

So I’m not sure what to do. She’s not doing the parenting here and my kid is suffering. I’m not sure what to do. I’m about 10% tempted to tell Shanna to knock his block off if his mother allows him to hit Shanna. But uhm, yeah. That’s not actually a great plan. He needs help with his behavior and in the moment I am usually caring for a sobbing Shanna and I feel like it shouldn’t exactly be my responsibility to talk to him about his hitting. However she isn’t doing it. How horribly inappropriate would it be for me to start talking to him/working with him on the hitting? I feel like since she isn’t willing to shadow him I need to start. He really needs more input than he’s getting from her about his behavior. One more time! I don’t think he’s a bad kid! He’s 15 months old and he’s got poor impulse control. I like his mom too! But she’s… not as instructive as I would prefer for the continued health of my kid, ya know?

As per the norm when asking for advice on the internet I am not explaining every single thing from the situation. Like, I suspect that part of the reason she is so laissez faire is because she had a very hard road to have him. Many years of fertility treatment and a previous abortion at 20 weeks because the baby wouldn’t have been able to survive anyway. Hard hard road to parenthood. I get that she is just grateful to have him. Complicated.

{milestones} and those other things

Leave a reply

I haven’t seriously babbled about my kids in a while! Such a tragedy. *cough*

Calli is awesome! But she’s awesome in that way that babies are awesome so it’s pretty generic. I think she’s an easy sleeper (certainly compared to Shanna) so that makes things easier. She is trying really hard to get more clingy and I am resisting with every fiber of my being. I was astounded throughout Shanna’s infancy that I didn’t really hit ‘touched out’. I now live in Touched Out. I would kind of like to have an asbestos suit so that no one gets too close to my skin. I do carry Calli around but when she has the days where she starts fussing the minute I lay her down for a nap I end up having a stern conversation with her then holding her hand while she fusses for a while. I’m still opposed to “Cry it Out” but I am much more ok with fuss-it-out-while-I’m-holding-your-hand. I just cannot do the 24/7 in contact with the newborn thing this time. I will lose my mind. But she eats a lot and she’s vigorous and very interested in the world around her. Since the most recent pediatrician visit (dear god do we need a new one) I am aware that she is a full pound less than Shanna was at this age and almost an inch shorter. This child will not be larger than average. Apparently she is right on the 50% line for height and weight. So in fact she is… dead average. 🙂 Despite the ped telling me to get ready to start her on iron fortified rice cereal, I don’t get the impression she is going to be the most food-ready kid at 6 months. It’s kind of weird how different she is from Shanna. 🙂 She’s rolling over, but only on soft surfaces. The floor is still too hard. The couch or the bed is super easy. Sitting up this morning was surprising. I set her down and expected her to immediately collapse but she didn’t. Yay! She sat up for quite a while as I tended to Shanna.

Shanna continues to develop at an amazing (to me) pace. I don’t have much experience with other kids so it’s kind of weird to have an intellectual understanding about child development and them come against an actual kid who isn’t following all the normal curves perfectly. I was looking at the milestone chart this morning (someone asked me when sitting up was normal… I don’t know…) and I looked at the bits for Shanna. Holy Milestones she is asynchronous. The average kid her age is mastering their second adjective?! Oh. She’s speaking in 10+ word sentences using several $2 words at a go. Her favorite right now is ‘diatomaceous earth’ because we have been using it to deal with our ant problem. If you have ever heard the word before you can understand her. If you’ve never heard of the stuff she sounds kind of muddled. 🙂 I’m pretty impressed though. She is also being increasingly helpful in the kitchen. Like this morning she helped with a large portion of breakfast. She scooped out the granola, helped cut up the apples (her little kid knife did a better job than I expected), and she helped pour out the yogurt. Yay! Simple, but she’s trying so hard. She can also almost entirely make a pbj by herself. By 3 she will be able to make herself simple meals. I’m thrilled. But her physical development is… spotty. She’s a total klutz. And she also shows very little inclinations towards artistic stuff. I’m trying pretty hard to provide access to such things, but it’s not my thing… so I kind of suck at helping her. I’ll keep trying and she’ll keep doing her thing. I don’t actually mind that she would rather spend 30 minutes cutting up a piece of paper than color. 🙂 Oh! And she’s making more progress towards potty training. At this point my approach is to just leave her alone. When she makes comments complaining about diaper changes I tell her that she can avoid them by using the potty and she often asks for panties instead of a diaper. We aren’t having many accidents in panties because when she isn’t in the mood for the potty she asks for a diaper. Although I do give her candy for using the potty. 😛 I am trying to be mellow though.

Balancing the two of them is… interesting. Luckily they are both easy going and mellow so they wait their turn extremely well. It helps if I keep on a constant stream of, “I can see that you really need me to ‘x’ but right now I am doing ‘y’ for your sister. I know it is hard to wait, but please try to be patient for another ‘z’ minutes.” If I can keep that up in a patient, kind voice waiting up to 15 minutes is not a big stretch. 30 minutes can be very hard for both of them. Which uhm… is ok. They’re kind of young. 🙂

I feel like we have hit the ‘terrible twos’ and yet… if this is the worst I see we’re doing GREAT! Shanna doesn’t ‘tantrum’ much at all but she does cry a lot. She has a lot of really intense feelings and it’s hard for her to figure out what to do with them. I feel like as long as she is well rested and not hungry she does better than a lot of adults with her strong feelings. It’s kind of hard to console her if she is hungry or tired though. It gets hard. The crying sound makes me feel homicidal.

Because I’m exactly this kind of full disclosure person… I’ve lost it a couple of times. 🙁 When we were driving to Disneyland and she was really really sick of the car she started kicking the drivers seat on purpose pretty hard. I reached back and hit her feet. 🙁 I know it wasn’t the right decision and we’ve talked about it. She’s pretty happy to lecture me for a long time about how hitting is wrong and I shouldn’t do it so she enjoyed the hell out of that conversation. (so my daughter) I’ve smacked her hands a couple of times purely as a reflex when she is doing something that makes me twitch. Every time I do she begins her lecture again about how hitting is wrong. She tells me to apologize and I do. She cries and we cuddle and kiss and then feel ok again. I am trying really hard to increase my patience level but it’s hard. This is part of that ‘there are no perfect parents’ thing. I try to not spend much time feeling bad but instead put my energy towards doing better next time. It’s hard to not get into negative self-talk. Given how much stress these kids add to my life (it’s incredible in a kind of scary way) I’m aware that I am actually doing phenomenally well. It helps that I now self-medicate. The next step is to increase my exercise because that will help a lot. I informed Noah that I was going to the gym today. Period. He’s supportive. 🙂

Guess I’m willing to leave this kid before 6 months. Ha.

New and Improved Parenting! Now with Hygiene!!

6 Replies

Ok, so it’s all lame and silly and stuff but I feel kind of absurdly proud that I took a bath today with both girls and all three of us got scrubbed from head to toe. I think I feel as proud as I do because no one ended up crying. Like, “Holy Shit. I’ve arrived. I’m an honest-to-Gawd parent with skillz.”

And then I put Calli in a back carry by myself and did chores. Seriously. This is what I am now proud of. Boy howdy is life different than it used to be. And I like it.

Questionable scheduling

4 Replies

We have a doctors appointment this morning. By ‘we’ I mean both girls. Shanna is just getting a shot (Polio) and Calli is getting a well baby check and a shot (DTaP). It didn’t occur to me until last night that I am a complete fucking moron for scheduling shots for both of them in one day by myself. Ugh. I think it didn’t occur to me until last night because originally our plan had been to follow Shanna’s path and not vaccinate Calli until she was older. But you see… we are having this epidemic… Damnit! I have always said that if factors were different in Shanna’s life we would have made different vaccine choices. Well, things are different for Calli and we are going to make different choices. We spend a lot of time with the anti-vax crowd and that just wasn’t true when Shanna was little. I’m not risking many months of misery for my tiny little baby. To be clear here–I think Calli’s chance of dying of Pertussis is 0 with or without the vaccine. But I feel like it would be inhumane to risk her suffering for months. There were 257 new cases in the state in the last week and 20 of them were in my county. That’s still not that high… but it’s high enough for me to pay attention to the fact that I go out constantly with her and she doesn’t exactly have a highly developed immune system.

As I’m worrying about it this morning Shanna is narrating to her doll what the process of getting a shot is like. It’s so interesting listening to her thought processes about things. I feel blessed by how verbal she is because I get to know what she is thinking. It’s amazing seeing how much blind faith she has in me and in the things I tell her. If I tell her that this shot is necessary to keep her healthy she believes me. She will pass that on to whomever she talks to as if it the gospel truth. It’s humbling. I feel like I have to try extra hard to have integrity in my words because to her there is no one in the world who has more authority than me. Anything and everything I do is what I am supposed to do. Scary. That’s a lot of pressure. I need to get a handle on my frustration with life because I don’t want to model this kind of behavior. Not to someone who trusts me so much.

This parenting gig is intense. Sometimes I feel so strongly about my kids that I feel like I am going to choke on the feelings. It’s amazing.

Parenting interactions

Leave a reply

So I’ve been hanging out with these lovely ladies for a while now. I like them. I like their kids. I like the overall dynamic quite a bit. Yesterday there was an interaction where one of the moms yelled at Shanna for watching her change her son’s diaper. “This is not a spectator sport!” This wouldn’t have bugged me much except all of the moms in the room were watching and discussing the horrible sores on the little boy’s bottom and possible treatments and what could be causing them… so all the kids were looking too. It felt like she was singling Shanna out in a way that wasn’t cool. So I felt fussy at the time and we left soon after. It was late in the day and all the kids were getting cranky anyway so the timing was an incidental as anything else.

Me being me, I called the mom last night to talk about it. I was pretty polite but I said I felt like she was picking on Shanna and I’m not ok with that. We discussed that her real problem is that Shanna was leaning on her while she was watching and this woman is also fussy about her personal space bubble. I’m not one to complain about having that kind of issue. 😀 I told her that I am completely ok with her defending her personal space, but please try to remember that even though Shanna talks like a five year old she’s only two. Give her a break and please try to be a bit kinder and more direct. If you want her to not lean on you, say that. Don’t yell at her for doing what every single other person in the room is doing. She took it well and we had a pleasant rest of the conversation. I thought that was all fine and dandy.

I have since had email conversations with the other moms in the group because they are all upset with how that mom treats Shanna. They think this mom picks on Shanna all the time and is constantly yelling at her and treating her differently. I find it kind of interesting that a)they are as upset as they are b) that they are so much more sensitive to the behavior and c)that they are bringing it up kind of as behind-her-back gossip. I think the mother in question has a sharper tone of voice than the rest of us and that she does correct Shanna more than the other boys… but that’s because she interacts more with Shanna. This mom just doesn’t interact with the other boys in the group almost at all. I suspect the boys avoid her because of her tone of voice, actually. Shanna constantly crawls all over her and seems to love her so I’m not worried about it.

It’s interesting to me how things are working out with this group. It’s been a long time since I got to know people solely in real life without the crutch of them reading my journal so learning a lot about me quickly. I feel… more anonymous. Very strange.

Empowered mother?

1 Reply

So I was reading a blog post over at Ph.D. in Parenting about Empowered mothering vs. Feminist mothering. She asks folks about what kind of mothers they are. I’ll wait while you get an idea what she means….

….

Done?

Ok. 🙂 So that was a really interesting thought provoking blog for me. I’m fresh back into the I-have-no-identity-cause-I-have-a-newborn stage. Yeah. I’m not feeling very empowered right this minute. But, one of the awesome things about this being my second time through this gig is that I feel rather Zen about the fact that this will pass (PPD and all). Seriously. This too shall change. Right this minute my needs are getting ignored left and right and I am totally subsuming myself into the role of Mother. I’m not doing it because I am oppressed by the Patriarchy. I’m doing it because after doing a lot of research on child/human development it is what I believe is the right thing to do when you have a kid. Newborns need this kind of dominance of place. But she’s not going to be a newborn forever (Halle-fucking-lujah) and behaving like this with regards to her needs and my needs… not going to be healthy forever.

So! This is a blip in the life of my kid so I’m going to pretend that this is not really indicative of my ‘parenting’ for the rest of this conversation. The thing that struck me the most about that blog post was how the difference seems to be “Am I more concerned about myself or society?” which seems to be one more go round about how women are not supposed to be selfish. “Well… if you are serving your own needs above your child’s it should only be if you are really serving these larger social/political goals.” Well, uhm… fuck that. (I don’t think that the blogger in question is saying that in the slightest. It’s just how I read the difference between Empowered Mothering and Feminist Mothering in the descriptions.) Let me take a moment to say hell-to-the-no. I bloody well matter. ME ME ME MEMEMEMEMEME. I matter. I am absolutely not going to sign on to some passive aggressive bullshit that says I can only meet my needs if I can justify them as really serving something ‘larger than myself’. Hell no. I think that ultimately that is not good for my kids. I think that is really continuing the bullshit the patriarchy/kyriarchy/whatever bullshit societal ideal that individual women don’t matter much and I am not teaching my daughters that.

That said, yeah it’s a balance. I am not going to fuck my kids over. They didn’t choose to be born and they are real people with real needs and they deserve to have their needs met. I think one of the most important things I will teach my kids (hopefully–if I do my job right) is the difference between their wants and their needs. Yeah, my kids absolutely deserve to have their needs met and I am going to work hard at doing that. But their wants are not the most important thing ever and that’s just the breaks. And just because their needs have to be met doesn’t mean I have to meet them every time. That’s a lot of why I am working so hard to cultivate community, oh and let’s be sure to mention they have a rockstar father.

I guess that makes me an Empowered Mother. However, being empowered (by this definition) does not mean you have to be an asshole. 😛

Flying solo

2 Replies

So Noah is gone on jury duty. He was gone yesterday too. Instead of asking for people to come here I have made plans to leave the house. The morning yesterday was… awful. Oh man awful. I am now even more firmly of the opinion that I could have benefited from Noah being home for the full six weeks and that’s just not happening.

But life, she does not do what I want and I have to suck it up. No one’s dead yet and children are resilient so I guess things will work out.

Privilege

2 Replies

Privilege is one of my favorite words. I like looking at the ways in which people take for granted the good things in their life that just happen. Rarely I drop into the nighttime parenting/sleep issues area at MDC. I don’t go there much because I just can’t wrap my head around the problems. I think that a lot of my inability to grok what they are going through is because of my privilege in being a stay at home mom. My kid ‘slept through the night’ early because I learned how to stay asleep while she nursed all night long. My kid went to sleep when and where she wanted to and I didn’t particularly care if it was in bed at 7pm. I don’t particularly see the value in ensuring that my kid is in bed from 7pm-6am with no more than one night waking. I mean, I can see the help in that if you have older children who need to be functional during the day… but for a three month old? Enh, they sleep when they sleep.

Privilege is an interesting thing. If I had a whole bunch of older kids and/or I *had* to sleep during particular hours because I had a demanding job it would be a whole different matter when it comes to sleep. So yeah, I don’t volunteer my opinions on sleep much because boy-howdy do I have a lot of privilege in this area. 🙂

Differences

1 Reply

I could totally be wrong about these impressions. My memory is never the sharpest and it is especially cloudy lately.

It is interesting to me how my mindset is different this pregnancy. I feel a lot more confident about the early parenting stuff so I just don’t need to do much research at this point. I keep doing my gradual stuff for Shanna’s development, but overall I don’t feel like there is much that is super pressing RIGHT NOW. So my mind is wandering a lot. I’m spending a lot more time thinking about sex (my lack of interest and how much that pisses me off); non-monogamy (both how that will work out in my life over time and how I feel about it as an abstract concept;, feminism (My Fault, I’m Female has been a big part of this); adoption/fostering issues (this is an ongoing thing in the back of my mind. I don’t know that I will ever go back to teaching, but it is still important to me that I do some kind of work with children at some point); how to balance this crunchy shit (I’m feeling more and more like the fanaticism approach just isn’t one that works for me); lots of time thinking about abuse stuff–a lot of this is because I have been hanging out in the Surviving Abuse forum on MDC a lot. Other people have very different experiences than me and that’s interesting. (Uhm, not interesting in a bad way, more like

I feel like there is a lot more ‘me’ in this pregnancy. I am not just in this haze of hormonal love for the fetus and obsessed with all things baby. I have everything I need for the homebirth (I uhhh didn’t actually get that far last time–oops). I feel like I have done sufficient preparation of the house for incoming child, but I’m not actually all that focused on it. I’m sick to death of being held back by pregnancy. I want to hurry up and get birth over with so I can move on with my life. I know the first few months will be challenging, but I can’t help but think that I will actually have way more energy than I do right now. I feel like Shanna will get out of the house more. That’ll be good.

I didn’t start looking at me as a separate entity until Shanna was over a year old. Then I started getting really antsy. I wonder if I will get the hormone rush with birth again and be completely immersed in “Mommy” being my whole world. I might not. If I don’t get that rush, am I going to feel more resentful of the extreme dependence early on? Hm. Interesting.

Consumerism

13 Replies

Shanna is starting to get to the point where she is asking me to buy her stuff other than food. (She has been asking for food stuff for a long time, but I really don’t have any issue with her constant requests for fruit. That’s a-ok in my book.)

This morning she was looking through the Hanna Andersson catalog. She asked for a couple of things in the catalog. I told her we could put it on her Christmas list. She thought that was a pretty awesome idea even after I clarified that stuff being on her Christmas list does not guarantee that she will be getting it. It’s a possibility not a promise.

This is slightly weird for me. My Christmas lists were treated as wholly irrelevant. My mom bought what was on sale. I didn’t get the stuff I wanted the most (beyond books–I did get the books I wanted most of the time) and I think I have that poor kid issue of, “Well my kids won’t have to suffer through the constant disappointment I did!” But uhm… I’m finding myself struggling with a balance. I also don’t want to do what so many poor kids turned middle class parents do–namely spoiling the shit out of my kids so they have a horrible entitlement complex. No thanks. I sincerely feel like one of the best things teaching did for me was show me the end result of a lot of parenting strategies and help me learn which ones to avoid. (Teaching 16/17 year olds was perfect.)

It’s hard for me because we totally could afford to just go buy her the like 5 things she currently wants. It wouldn’t be a blip in our budget. But… no. I need to find the happy medium there. She has plenty of stuff. Much of it hand-me-downs. She has really nice stuff by and large. And that’s good enough. She doesn’t need tons more stuff. I think it is going to be a long-term struggle for me to deal with my own baggage around stuff in a way that is healthy for her. There is nothing wrong with her saying, “Oh that’s neat; I would like to have that.” It is not a guilt trip on me that I should provide it. It’s not a demand. It’s a statement of fact–she thinks she would like to have it. It’s ok for her to think that. It’s also ok for me as the parent to say, “I can understand why you would like to have that, but I don’t think we will buy it right now.” That’s ok too. I am not being mean. I am not denying her in some terrible way. It’s ok for me to set these kinds of boundaries because she is not yet capable of doing it herself. It’s ok. Really.

Thinking about judgment

2 Replies

So everyone has times when their behavior doesn’t exactly match up with their stated positions/world views. It’s a normal thing. There are a few ways this can be dealt with. Someone can more or less subconsciously refuse to look at the discrepancy and continue on their merry hypocritical way–I think this is the majority reaction really; it is certainly the easiest. You can examine your world view more closely and decide that it no longer works for you and you should change it to align with your behavior. You can examine your behavior more closely and decide that it is inappropriate and you need to change it to align with your world view. Or, as Noah points out, you can look at your world view and behavior and decide they both kind of suck and change both. I think this last one is uncommon and maybe a bit drastic. 😉

This got really really long. Continue reading →

What’s going on in my head lately.

5 Replies

I haven’t been posting much of substance lately. This is largely because my laptop screen is dead and I am trapped in the office and Shanna only gives me short periods of time where she is ok with me being in here. Challenging. I can read in short bursts but I can’t write like that. Thus I have been posting lots of banal one or two sentence things on facebook.

What I am mulling over and trying to figure out how to talk/think about is the next step of processing abuse I am working on. I have spent almost the entirety of my adult life dealing with the large scale sexual assaults in my childhood. That took a lot of work. That was a big deal. What I have never really gotten around to is truly examining and processing all of the small scale abuse and day-in-day-out neglect and awful that I experienced. Thing is, now that I am doing this parenting gig that is seeming much more important. When I talk about not wanting to pass on the cycles of abuse I am not worried about sexually assaulting my kids. I’m just not. That’s just not something that will ever be much of a temptation for me. (I’m kind of repulsed by people who are two years younger than me.) What I need to worry about is how to not tear down her sense of self. I need to worry about how to create a positive atmosphere where Shanna (and TBD) are free to become any person they want to become without my baggage being dragged along behind them. As we are getting deeper into toddler-hood I am noticing more and more of my baggage that way and I need to deal with it now. This can’t wait. Part of the problem is, I don’t really have the time or mental space to work through this stuff. I have to create it. I can’t just float through and ignore this. This is mandatory.

I don’t think I am being a bad mother, but I can see bad habits starting to pop up. I am not ok with Shanna crying unless I can see a direct reason for it (that I approve of). That’s not ok. When Shanna expresses an opinion I don’t like (dude, she’s a toddler) I come down really fast and harder than necessary. I need to stop thinking/talking about how I would like to hit her when she is frustrating. That’s completely unacceptable. I’ve smacked her hand a couple of times out of pure reflex and I don’t like it, but I don’t feel like that is a huge problem long-term. What is a problem is that I talk about wanting to hit her pretty frequently. That’s unacceptable. That is using the threat of physical control and it’s not really much better than a judicious spanking occasionally for serious problems. It’s probably actually worse. It’s trying to instill fear. I have to stop. That’s not ok. I don’t want my daughter fearing me. At this point she doesn’t really understand and it’s very clear that she doesn’t fear me. I want it to stay that way.

Something else I’m thinking about

6 Replies

I’ve noticed that with a couple of friends I have a particular issue. So my friends are eldest children and they were assigned a lot of child-minding duties growing up. They very automatically step in and start doing what feels like parenting my kid. I have mostly bit my tongue about this but I’ve felt kind of butt-hurt. Recently I started talking to one of the people in particular and I think that I’m having the feelings I’m having because I have so many issues with my own sister and her attitudes around doing the same thing. But I don’t like that I’m feeling this way about my friends. They aren’t my sister and they don’t behave like her at all. Even if there are some surface similarities in ‘caring for nearby children’ it’s just not the same.

Ok. I’m going to make a resolution for myself. I’m going to work on my butt-hurt feelings. In all seriousness these friends who take these kinds of self-imposed caretaking roles are going to be the closest my children have to family experiences. I really want my children to feel what it is like to have people other than me who love them and take care of them. That means I need to get comfortable with it and not fuck it up for them because of my issues. I really wish that the list of ‘shit to work on’ was getting smaller instead of longer.

(Shanna asked to watch videos so I got to type again. 😛 )

Not.The.Problem.

23 Replies

I’m not currently feeling massively pissy about this topic so this is probably a good time to write this post. Let me state emphatically, for the record, that being a stay at home mom is not the problem no matter which problem it is that you (general you) think I should fix. Let me explain why.

When I was teaching I worked 60-70 hours a week. I was chronically underslept. I was rather unhealthy because I had no time to exercise and we ate out constantly because when in the hell was I going to cook? My house was a disaster and keeping up with laundry was a nightmare. I was lonely (doesn’t anyone remember my angsty whiny posts from that time period?!) because I never got to see my friends and students don’t count as personal time. I loved my job, please don’t get me wrong. It was wonderful. It was deeply fulfilling for me on a personal and spiritual level. But it had a very high cost to my health, social life, and sleep schedule. Granted, I quit after only three years of teaching and everyone says it gets easier. But when they say it gets easier they mean it goes down to 50-60 hours of work per week. Grading papers takes a lot of time. In addition to the mandatory 35 hours/week of your contract time of which most of that is teaching/passing periods/breaks during which you have to deal with students you have very little time for prep work or grading. It pretty much entirely has to happen outside your contracted hours. And that’s not including commute time.

So, for those of you who believe I would suddenly have more ‘personal balance’ if I had a job–exactly when in the day do you think that would happen? When on top of an already stressful job I had to also take care of getting two children ready in the morning and try to add their needs on top of grading in the evening? What, you think I would have more time for myself on the weekends when I was trying to frantically do laundry, clean house, and pay attention to the kids who missed me all week? That’s fucking mental.

And between daycare costs and the increased amount of eating out and commuting costs and needing a better wardrobe for work and buying my own school supplies… I think our noticeable income would go up by about $400/month. Well that sounds like a bloody stupid ass trade to me.

Why being a stay at home mom is a good decision for me personally:
-I get plenty of sleep. Without sleep I am not a pleasant person for anyone to deal with. I went through the whole first year of Shanna’s life very well rested despite the fact that she woke up to nurse a lot at night because I could go to bed whenever I wanted and sleep in as much as I wanted. There were no constraints on my time.
-I have a better diet than I have ever had in my life. (Ok, pregnancy is kind of making this one harder but it will come back.) I eat a wider variety of vegetables than I even knew existed I shit you not. I had never heard of many of the vegetables I’ve eaten this year. And I am mostly eating a local, seasonal, organic, humanely raised diet. I feel really good about that both from a personal health point of view and from the point of view of my impact on the planet. That is just awesome.
-I really believe in Attachment Parenting and it is pretty fucking difficult to do if you are away from your kid 55+ hours/week. I believe strongly in nursing on demand and child led weaning and I am a shitty pumper. I honestly would not be able to keep up pumping at work for years so that my supply stayed present. I know this about myself.
-I believe very strongly in homeschooling. I have done the research. I have worked in education. I have 5,000 reasons that I will not ever put my kids in public school and private school isn’t much better. Kind of hard to do with two working parents.
-I get a lot of downtime to do shit I want to do. I do house remodeling projects (which while stressful also make me very happy) and read and get more exercise than I have gotten in years. I have had a blast baking. I love learning how to cook more interesting foods. I really love my weird hippie quirks and they are rather time consuming.
-I see friends during the day quite a bit and I still get to devote tons of time to my family. I really enjoy spending time with Noah. He’s my best friend. He’s funny and fun and interesting to me. I really appreciate that our time as a family together involves very little stress about cooking and cleaning. (Ok, pregnancy and the first six months of a kids life are more stressful but that would be 5,000% worse with a job.)
-I like the challenge to meet our financial goals within restraints. That is totally how my mind works. I feel very good about the many ways in which I am frugal. It’s like a game. I don’t do this in the ways that other people often do–I’m not trying to find name brand purses for cheap or anything like that. I’m trying to pay off our mortgage as quick as humanly possible while still having a really high quality of life. Given that we were able to decide to go to The French Laundry and up and go in less than a week means that I am succeeding really flippin well.

Every life choice carries with it challenges. I whine more about the hard things than I post about the things that make me happy. This is true of a great many people who journal online–it doesn’t mean awesome stuff isn’t going on offstage. If you (generic you) have an ounce of respect for me, my ability to make reasoned choices, and the best interests of my family you will never again tell me to get a job because it will cure what ails me. You are just fucking wrong and I’m getting really fucking sick of that stupid lecture.

Identity

18 Replies

I noticed something today that I consider interesting. When I glance around at the profiles of mothers I know in various social networking sites almost all of the mothers with young children have pictures of themselves with their children as their primary picture and sometimes their partner/husband is in the picture. It is very rare for a father to have a picture of himself and his child as his primary picture. Once parents have teenagers it is fairly uncommon to have pictures of the kids in a primary profile picture at all. In fact, for most fathers of young children you have to spend some time hunting to find mention of their kids/pictures of them. And once you find pictures you notice that the father has 1-5 pictures of his kids (out of dozens or hundreds of photos) whereas the mother in the same relationship has the kid(s) in almost all pictures up.

I hear a lot about how women give up too much of their identity to their children. I wonder if this attitude comes about because men don’t give up enough of their identity to having children and in our society the default ‘personhood’ is being a man and women are wrong for where and how they deviate from that norm. If you think about it, that is very much how (at least American) society works. Women are shafted in the work place because they need maternity leave/sick leave to care for children/time off during the day to take care of appointments for children. This is all left to the sole providence of women in the vast majority of cases. Yes, there are some exceptions but they are exceedingly rare. I believe that companies get away with their nasty anti-woman policies because the default is that everyone should behave like a man therefore women are bad/wrong for when they need something different.

Back to my original point about parents. I’ve been thinking about this kind of stuff a lot. Women are told not to give themselves up to being a mother. I hear it. I’m told to go out and have a separate identity. The thing is, there are only so many hours in the day. Having a toddler is a shitload of work and I really don’t see how I could do much more than I am doing lately and still be as present as I am with my daughter. I’m not willing to put my daughter in daycare for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is I’d have to get a job to pay for it and then I would be gone all the time working and I would have even less time for myself than I get now. 😛 My job was brutal on me for having a separate identity anyway.

My point being that I think that it is crap that women are told they should be less invested in their identity as a parent when men are not told they should be more invested in their identity as a parent. Yes, there needs to be a balance but I don’t think men are doing better than women they are just fucking up in the opposite direction. There has to be some meeting in the middle and I’m not exactly sure where it is.

Reading about race

1 Reply

Given that I’m so white I glow in the dark I spend a noticeable amount of time thinking about what I can and should do to raise a child who has a good understanding of race issues and who isn’t a twat. That’s an important bit. Some of the good stuff I’ve been reading lately include:

http://loveisntenough.com/2009/08/05/white-noise-white-adults-raising-white-children-to-resist-white-supremacy/

http://nerdsevolving.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-black-women-were-white-women.html

There are others, of course, but I closed some tabs too quickly.

Really intense.

12 Replies

My spanking experiences weren’t anything like this, but this is what I think of when people tell me that spanking is right for some children: http://www.drmomma.org/2010/01/how-spanking-changed-my-life.html Anyone who believes that *they* would be a better judge of necessary spanking than this woman’s family are probably lying to themselves.