Aunties

I have some wonderful aunts. The two aunts, V and C, that I have particularly in mind (the rest of them are nice, too, but they live really far away and I hardly know them) are related to me by marriage, not blood, but they've been a big part of my life, and now a big part of Dutch's life. They recommended books to me, complimented me, gave me advice, listened to me, laughed at my jokes, made me laugh, told me the truth, told me the good parts of the truth, gossiped with me, and generally made my life richer.

Adults, related or not, who are not part of the nuclear family, are really important in a kid's life. They act as role models and teachers in a way that parents are too close to do. Kids can't really hear what their parents are saying much of the time, particularly in the throes of adolescence. Having adults who cared about me and were interested in me was really important to me, and had a much bigger influence than those adults probably ever guessed.

I've joked about how I'd like to send Dutch off to Summer Bootcamp every year, to stay with various friends and family members, so she can learn lots of things we can't teach her. (How to put on makeup, how to be assertive, how to make a decent pie crust, how to play drums, how to build a composting toilet, how to speak Latin, how to play basketball, etc.) Actually, I've pretended to be joking about it, but I'm really pretty serious. I want my friends and family to be involved with her, and I want her to get that guidance into a larger world than Cook and I can provide. I want her to have aunties (auntie in the sense of an honored adult in a child's life).

Anyway, I'd like to call for a moment of appreciation for all the aunties, who give their time and attention and energy and love to one kid or another, even though they don't have to. And an extra moment of appreciation for MY two aunts, who still crack me up and amaze me with their generosity. Every one of their kindnesses to the bratty young me was received (secretly, under the veneer of sullenness) with gratitude, and cherished.

Objects I Like Right Now

1. My leopard-print pajama pants with the hot pink lace trim. I may never have loved a piece of clothing so much. They're soft and stretchy and super-comfy, and were given to me (in a stroke of genius, as I would never have gotten them for myself) by a beloved friend. (Whom I really should call!)

2. Peanut Butter Bumpers in a bowl of really cold milk. Basically, peanut butter Captain Crunch pretending to be healthy. Which is fantastic! They're crunchy and sweet and salty all at once! And then they get soggy... mmm....

3. My new office chair at work! My boss rescued it from the discard pile at a company a few blocks from our office, and it's a wonderful upgrade. It has no packing tape included in the upholstery, for one thing, and I can adjust it to sit so high that my feet dangle above the ground. I LOVE that!

4. Dutch's pink short shorts, a gift from Mrs. Big Cook. Her naked little legs (usually banged up due to playground mishaps) sticking out of the shorts just crack me up, somehow.

5. Cook's favorite t-shirt, which makes him look awfully hunky. (In a slightly nerdy skinny-guy kind of way, that is - I know he reads this, and I don't want him to get a fat head.)

6. My new swim skort, which suddenly makes me remember what it used to be like to go to the beach and actually enjoy it. I'm looking forward to running in and out of the water and squatting in the sand and making sandcastles on our upcoming beach adventure. Not scrambling to wrap myself in something as soon as I emerge from the water. My excitement is contagious - Dutch can't stop talking about all the fun we're going to have at the beach. She has no real concept of time, though, so she seems to think we're going any second now.

That's my top 6. I do love Things, though I know I shouldn't. I'll come up with another list that's more meaningful and less rooted in consumerism.

Baby Love

Dutch wants a baby. She has been talking about it and obsessively playing "baby" with all her dolls and stuffed animals. We've discussed the fact that she won't have a baby until she's a grownup, but she says she doesn't want to wait; she wants to have a baby before she turns into a grownup. I asked her what she would do with the baby, and she said "I will feed it with a bottle. I will nurse it. I will pick it up and carry it. I will make it feel better. I will give it medicine. I will take it to the hospital. I will put it in a crib. I will carry it in a sling. I will stick a pacifier in it." (An extra-unnerving part of the baby obsession is a secondary obsession with pacifiers. She never had a pacifier, but somehow she's decided it's an important part of Baby Life. She's taken to sucking on a plastic teapot lid and pretending it's a pacifier.) It's all pretty normal, I guess, but there's still something creepy about having your 2-year-old inform you that she's expecting a baby. I hadn't scheduled any kind of birth control conversation for another 10 years or so, but maybe I should rethink that. (Though, on the bright side, I think I read that teen pregnancy is protective against breast cancer!)

The thing is, I want a baby too. That actually moves beyond creepy, into the realm of insane, since I stand by my opinion that babies pretty much suck. (Not a joke.) Dutch has no idea how awful babies can be, so her desire can be chalked up to ignorance, but I KNOW. (And she will learn very quickly, as soon as she gets her hands on one.) Dutch was not the worst baby I've ever known, but probably the second- or third-worst. She couldn't put herself to sleep (yes, I know that if we had "trained" her, our lives would have been easier - but you weren't there, so you can't criticize), she always wanted to be carried, she cried a lot (and loudly!), and she was painfully mommy-centric. I've mentioned how lazy and selfish I am. Babies, even "easy" ones (ha!), are apparently very challenging for people who tend to be lazy and selfish. Go figure.

And yet... I want another one. My genetic hardwiring is clamoring to get more offspring into the world. It's a terrible idea, as Cook and I already have inadequate income and no clue what we're doing with our collective life, but it's not really an IDEA so much as it is a craving. Periodically Cook and I semi-discuss it (he falls, predictably, on the Common Sense side of the discussion, while my side sounds more like demented raving - "Need baby! Want lunatic soggy screaming midget attached to me all day! Now! NEED BABY!!!"). I imagine we'll have another kid sometime, but not as soon as Dutch or I want.

Public Parenting

We've had a parade of friends and grandparents passing through town lately, and it's made me realize that we've moved to a new phase of Dutch's life. She's an unpredictable little person now, and says and does things in public that reflect on our parenting of her. So we're further extended now for criticism (silent or not) of our parenting, and also just plain criticism of HER. (Because, um... she's not perfect.)

Cook's parents, the Big Cooks, are not only lovely people who have been driving us around the state and treating us to meals for several days now, they are also spectacularly generous about allowing us space to parent in whatever fashion we see fit. They never communicate any kind of doubt about our parenting choices, and I really appreciate that. When Dutch was littler, I felt pretty confident about the things we did that probably seemed dubious to them and to others (like toting her around in the marvelous Ergo rather than a stroller). She was just a baby, after all, and if she was a particularly clingy and sleepless baby, that wasn't NECESSARILY my fault. But now... she's a brat. She whines. She clowns around in an embarrassingly blatant bid for attention from her beloved grandparents. She deliberately does things to piss me off. She refuses to let me wipe the crusty goop out of the corners of her eyes. Whether these are due to her flaws or mine is kind of irrelevant - I feel bad either way. I feel self-conscious about it in a way that's new. I second-guess my discipline methods, and I re-examine all my child behavior theories. I'm not coming up with anything new, of course. Just adding this to the list of Things I Feel Bad About.

The Big Cooks are leaving tomorrow, but we've got lots of family adventures coming up during which I can doubt my parenting methods. However, I've decided not to feel bad about allowing Dutch to wear almost anything she likes. If she can act like a decent human being, she's welcome to wear the long-sleeved olive green pajama shirt with the spiders and frogs pattern in combination with the hot pink short shorts. And if she can't act like a decent human being, then it's silly to expect her to dress any other way.

In other news, today Dutch asked Cook to kiss a birthmark on her leg, and then she asked him to tell her what it tasted like. Weird.

Busted

Dutch caught me dishing out icecream for myself and Cook tonight after her bedtime. Damnit, I totally jinxed myself by writing earlier that she didn't know about our late-night treats. She suddenly appeared in the doorway and said "What's that? What are you doing? I'm HUNGRY!"

I whisked her back to bed and told her I was just counting our bowls. I think she bought it.

Nature and Nurture

Dutch is a very compliant kid. She's always been pretty easy to manage. She's cautious. She never threw stuff. She rarely ran away from us. In classes, she watches the teacher raptly, and clearly wants to do things The Right Way. (She does throw a mean tantrum, though - the compliance only goes so far until it runs up against a great wall of stubbornness.)

This looks to me and Cook like... us. This worries us (because, remember, her life is all about us) - we're afraid she's going to end up suffering from our shared fear of failure. Wanting to do things The Right Way is conducive to success in school, and makes the teacher like you, but it doesn't really translate into success in the open field of life, where taking risks and embracing mistakes is a pretty important part of happiness and progress.

We don't know what to do about this. She inherited our genes, and she lives with us. We can talk all we want about how it's okay to fall down and okay to make mistakes... in the end, she'll learn more from our behavior than what we say to her, and we're too old to effectively change ourselves. SHE may be too old to effectively change herself, for that matter.

So she's pretty much screwed.

I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm trying to change myself at my job. I want to be more assertive, less paralyzed by fear of making mistakes, and better able to put my mistakes in perspective. My boss (who apparently has never suffered from fear of failure) exhorts me to be less self-deprecating and to take more confident action. It's really really hard, and I'm not making much progress. What I can do is identify when I'm wallowing in my failures, and identify how other people deal with failure (which is usually much more healthy than what I do, though I do some people going too far the opposite way and deluding themselves into thinking they did nothing wrong at all). I'm working on changing my behavior, but I suspect that I will never be able to really change, and that I will always FEEL the same, regardless of what I do.

How do I bring this into Dutch's life? I don't even know if it's appropriate - maybe she will take her innate desire for doing a good job and fly with it. Maybe it'll make her happy. Who knows.

At the moment, she's lying in bed with a bellyful of strawberries, probably dreaming about this book. She's afraid that owls are going to fly into her room and eat her, as she reported during last night's bedtime-stalling campaign, but she's not afraid of her life. My job is to try to help her stay unafraid, if I can. Anyway, she's too big for owls to eat, so she has it pretty good.

LampPost Head

Buried Alive!

Lately I've been struggling with an old fear. I lie awake at night and think in breathless despair about the fact that I'm going to die. I'm a champion anxiety-monger, but I really hate this particular one, because it's completely unsootheable. When I freak out about something like being afraid the plane is going to crash, or about the horrible work deadline I have coming up, I can reassure myself that it's okay. The odds of the plane crashing are pretty low. The work deadline, no matter how miserable the run-up, will soon be over. My odds of dying, however, are pretty freaking high.

I read a cheery self-help book that actually had a chapter addressing this fear. It suggested that you remind yourself that death is important because if we didn't die, the world would be choked with all the animals who have ever been born, stacked up hundreds of feet. And gosh, that would be awful!

Yes, but... I'd still be ALIVE. I could climb up through lots of struggling animals, no problem. And I could sit up on the writhing massand be ALIVE! Not dead. Which seems entirely preferable, to me.

Anyway, I'm just hoping that it will fade into the background again soon. I have a vivid memory of washing dishes at the kitchen sink when I was pretty little (I feel like I was maybe 7, but my memory is far from reliable) and suddenly realizing, for the first time, that I am going to die. I remember looking at my reflection in the dark window while thinking about this, and the horrible sudden hollowness in my belly. It comes and goes, though - I can go years without thinking about it more than glancingly, and then I think about it every day for months.

I wish I were religious. (I wish this often, lately, because it would give me a fantastic way to put the kibosh on Dutch's endless, senseless questions. "Why this is a flower?" "Because GOD SAYS SO.") Even a faint hope of an afterlife would save me a lot of energy and anxiety. But I'm faithless, and so I need to start looking for distractions instead. Like a hobby! A theme is emerging here - I clearly need to pick up the knitting again, so as to distract myself from death and improve my life. I'll get cracking on that next week.

No Village, Must Raise Kid

Dutch was home fulltime with me for the first two years of her life. We did yuppie stay-at-home-urban-mommy things. We went to the park. We did playdates. We went to the Mommy Group. We did errands. We had lots of wonderful times. We were frequently bored out of our skulls.

Now Dutch is in daycare 4 days a week, at a fairly big local daycare that has sliding-scale tuition. It's diverse (in Portland - no alias necessary, I decided - I'm not going to call it "New York"- "diverse" mostly means "not all white kids," but this daycare is actually mostly non-white kids) and reasonably clean and friendly. Dutch is stuck in with the little kids, due to their waitlist system. We got off the waitlist for the class she had outgrown in the time we'd been waiting, and they told us that our only chance of getting into the next one up was to take this opening and they would "promote" her internally. It's like working at a corporation, I guess. Actually, maybe a lot like working at a corporation, with lots of grabbing and jockeying for position . She's the biggest and oldest kid in the class, and one of the few who actually talk. She's developing a comical fear of smaller children, because the littler, nonverbal kids tend to just grab and push rather than discuss and negotiate. She talks a lot about how the "babies want to knock me down." When we open the door in the morning, she gets swarmed by the other kids - they grab and pet and hug her, and it seems to overwhelm her. Cook says when he dropped her off one morning last week he turned away to talk to a teacher for a few moments, and when he looked back over at her, several kids were stripping off her sweatshirt while she stood there looking bemused.

Anyway, she will hopefully be Promoted soon, and that will improve the situation, since she's definitely frustrated by the "babies". But it's turning out to be a decent enough place, as far as we can tell. She seems happy to go there in the morning, and she talks about it when she's at home. The teachers like her, since she's tractable. She gets to play outside a lot, and she actually takes a short nap (something she can't be bribed or forced or tricked into doing at home) every day. She's learning about getting along in the world of school - she's learning to stand in line and take turns and follow a routine and listen to teachers. At the moment, my biggest hangup about it is that they have a dreadful school-lunch-type menu, so she eats lots of white/yellow/beige/pink food. Macaroni and cheese, and tuna sandwiches, and applejuice. Lots of grease and refined flour and sugars and depressed/mercury-laden meat. She loves it - the teachers tell me enthusiastically how well she's eating, and I just smile and nod. Of COURSE she eats it!!!

Setting the food issue aside, I have no qualms about leaving her there. She's only there about 7 hours a day, and I think it's entirely positive so far. (Though she has had some sort of cold pretty much continuously since she started there. I'd never seen snot come out somebody's tear ducts before.) Daycare is controversial in the world of Privileged Mommies Who Have a Choice Whether Or Not To Work, but I am entirely pro at the moment.

Separation of church and state

On the topic of disentangling my child from myself, I would like to take a moment to describe how much I love going to work. I was a fulltime parent for two years (as if parenting is ever less than fulltime), and now I work parttime and she's in daycare about 30 hours a week. (Daycare is another post.) I love working. I've been working 5 months now, and I've got a god-awful deadline coming up that's stressing me out to the point where I dreamed i shattered a tooth by grinding (and there's another post, there!), and I STILL love it. I'm lazy, and working is pretty much the only way that I ever produce anything. Without external pressure, I would probably lie in bed all day reading books and eating chocolate and buttered bread until I died and had to be removed from the house with a crane and driven to the morgue in one of those special ambulances for mountainously obese people.

For some reason, though, I need the satisfaction of producing something, and I need to define myself at least partly based on my production. I spent my many years of education and then working producing things - papers, homework assignments, reports, analysis, meeting agendas, whatever - and getting evaluated based on my output. And then I had a baby and for two years produced nothing that could be evaluated. I did lots of WORK, but I had nothing to show for it that I could say was mine. What I have to show for my time is Dutch, and I certainly can't evaluate myself based on her; she is her own product, not mine.

So now I get to go to work. I get to talk to grownups all day, read a book in peace on the bus, be evaluated and respected based on what I can do and write and say and deliver, and do it all without interruption, if I choose. It's fantastic. It's far from my dream job, and it's STILL fantastic. Even at its worst, it's still vastly easier than fulltime nonstop parenting, for me. (A disclaimer: I know some people who seem to thrive on fulltime parenting, but I've noticed that they all seem to have much richer inner lives than I do, and also have interesting hobbies they do at home that can help them keep track of who they are. They are NOT special-ambulance people.) Even the least interesting and pleasant jobs I've had ("human services" temping at homes for developmental disabled adults, serving bagels, serving coffee) have been a thousand times easier than parenting. When you're wiping a grown person's ass or making espresso for the guy who tries to identify the source of the coffee bean, you may be feeling bored and disgusted and annoyed, but you can be inside your own head, and you can be selfish. (I am selfish as well as lazy. So I would lie in bed and eat chocolate and I WOULDN'T SHARE IT.)

I find it extremely difficult to be in my own head when I'm the parent on duty. There's always another demand being placed on me to which I have to measure up. I have to switch gears constantly and GIVE constantly, with no feedback, no pat on the head. I've read definitions of parenting that more or less equated it to the Peace Corps - your job is to provide huge amounts of support while working to make yourself unnecessary. The lovely moments of parenting are absolutely lovely, but they do not come because I've done a good job. They just come, and being receptive to them is yet another thing I have to do. (Phew, that sounds bleak. I really do love the kid, and I think I'm a reasonably decent parent, in case this is making anybody feel like turning me in. Ha! That's why I'm using aliases!)

Working lets me be selfish. I unexpectedly find that I don't feel guilty about it, either. I gave Dutch two good years of fulltime (if frequently low-quality) parenting, and she's more than ready to start carving out a place for herself in the world. I am happier in every way since I started working, and she (hopefully) reaps the benefit of my new sunny persona.

Tip me over

A few weeks ago we were all eating icecream (a rare occurrence in Dutch's experience, since she hasn't yet caught on to our habit of eating treats after she goes to bed), and she ate all hers with the deep concentration that I really envy - she is a master of mindfulness. Then she looked up, noted that we were still eating, pushed her bowl away, and announced authoritatively "Mama, my dessert.... um.... left. I need to have some of yours."

Being a fat lady and parenting a girl is kind of scary. I don't want her to be fat. I want her to be thin and fit (particularly since she'll already be socially handicapped by her dreadful haircuts). It seems pretty clear that this is largely genetic, as my brother can eat half of something he thinks is delicious, announce "I'm full!" and leave the rest of it on his plate, while I can't leave a crumb of stale bread on the plate, so I'm not sure what I can do to change anything. But I struggle every day with my feelings about food and my weight, and now I struggle every day with feelings about her weight. I suspect I will handle whatever food issues she may have very poorly. Do I encourage her to feel happy with her body, no matter what? Do I force her to eat watercress? Do I try to pretend to her that I'm happy with my body? Do I make a reservation now for family therapy in a few years?

I probably would be able to postpone all these anxieties, but Dutch (a lean baby who turned into a juggernaut of a toddler) is shaped like the fabled little teapot, and girlish little size-2T pants squeeze painfully around her barrel-belly. It's certainly no predictor of future bodyshape, but it's still distressing to me. Because, of course, her life is ALL ABOUT ME.

How private can narcissism really be?

I've been trying to finesse the whole question of privacy/identity/whatever by not mentioning the names of anybody, but it's getting too awkward, so I have to address the question of what to call the people in my life. I know it's pretty irrelevant, since it's not like I'm going to attract a stalker by writing about potty training. But it'd be weird, posting our names up here in public. Semi-public. Anyway, I can't bring myself to do it, so I'm going with aliases. I will henceforth refer to my offspring as Dutch, because I just gave her a haircut (she refuses to wear any sort of hair-restraint accessories, rarely lets me brush her hair, and has fly-away, slow-growing hair anyway, so she looked like a dandelion gone to seed) and now she looks like, yes, that little lead-paint-poisoned Dutch boy. My husband can be... Cook, because he's having this passionate relationship with Captain Cook, based on the book "Blue Latitudes" by Tony Horwitz. (Captain Cook, by the way, IS pretty cool. Read the book.) So now I can write about my adventures with Cook and Dutch, which feels like a wholesome book about boys in 1952. Or miners in 1862.

Annoying parenting post

Things the kid can do by herself, at the advanced age of almost exactly 2.5 years old:

1. Unscrew the lid of the water bottle.
2. Climb out of the bathtub, retrieve the towel, dry herself semi-adequately.
3. Answer the phone (but not politely).
4. Talk confidently to strangers.
5. Turn on the stereo, take out the CD, put it carelessly on the floor, put in another CD, play the CD.
6. Take all her clothes off, including diaper, and put her clothes back on, omitting the diaper.
7. Not hit the kid who's hitting her or pulling her hair. She says "stop pulling my hair; it's hurting me!" (Unfortunately, this does not actually work to stop the undesirable behavior - she's a little like the UN. I'm thinking hitting would be substantially more effective.)
8. Get her toothbrush and toothpaste, unscrew the lid of the toothpaste, put some toothpaste on the toothbrush, put the lid back on the toothpaste.
9. Play weird games by herself for over an hour at a time while I ignore her.

She has learned SO much already - social, academic, technological, and emotional skills in vast quantities. I feel amazed by how much she and her peers have already figured out, and paralyzed by how much they still have to learn, like the capitals of all the states, and when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. I've been teaching her "lefty loosey, righty tighty" (hence those amazing unscrewing skills), so I think that's a good start. Tomorrow we might tackle "i before e except after c."

Parenting failures

The other day I called the county and had them send us a lead test for our water. I did the test yesterday (a very low-tech process involving several plastic waterbottles), and dropped it in the mail. I'm pretty sure there's at least some lead in our water and paint; the building is elderly, and poorly maintained. The paint is peeling, the doors stick. (Though the windows are vinyl, which is aesthetically tragic, but good for reducing lead exposure.) I think I'll also get the the kid's blood lead tested at a free clinic soon.

Thinking about all the toxics to which she's been exposed in her short life makes me feel really sad. By the time I finished downloading a substantial portion of my own body burden of poisons into her body through breastmilk, she'd already gotten a hefty dose of air pollution, courtesy of our residence in the badly polluted Bay Area. Her future health is already compromised to a significant but unmeasurable degree. I'll never be able to go to a policymaker and make them pay for her cancer/immune system problems/reproductive problems/respiratory problems/cardiac problems/obesity/whatever, and I'll never know what I could have prevented myself. Like all parents, I wish I could protect her from all grief and pain, could give her the absolute best chance at having a wonderful life. But not only am I unable to protect her from things over which I have no power, I'm failing to protect her from everything I COULD protect her from. I'm not keeping the apartment immaculately wet-wiped to prevent her from getting leadpoisoned. And I'm not calling legislators every day to make them take toxics out of consumer products.

Sometimes I feel like parenting is this crazy cascade of failures building on failures - I've been failing her from even before she was conceived. Every time I let her eat a cookie or don't yell at somebody smoking at the bus stop or ignore her when she says "mama please will you play with me?", I'm letting her down again.

Yesterday she was following another (older) kid around at a playground. The other little girl said "why are you following me?" and my kid said happily, "because I like you! I want to play with you!" and the other girl said "But I don't want to play with YOU."

Crushing. Her face crumpled in confusion and disappointment. I almost cried, myself. Of course, two minutes later, she was cheerfully climbing around like nothing had happened. After a while the other kid (who did seem to feel guilty for bumming out my kid) came over and said "now I will play with you a little" and everything was fine with the kids. But it was too late for me - the door to a whole school career of social rejections had been opened in my mind. Ugh.

The thing is, I know that this is all part of life. I even have a strong opinion that it shouldn't be the parents' responsibility to ensure that consumer society doesn't poison their kids. I still feel guilty. Though, apparently, not guilty enough to go wet-wipe her bedroom instead of typing up an exploration of self-indulgent angst.

Squeezing Thoughts

My husband is gone on a trip, and the kid misses him. We've been having an orgy (low-budget-lazy-people-style) in his absence, with lots of snacks and videos. I suggested that we watch a video, because I was tired of thinking (actually I was freaking tired of building three-story fire stations with swimming pools and dentist's offices and ladders and elevators, all out of blocks), and she said "DADDY likes thinking! He squeezes thoughts out of my brain!"

Which rang true for me - daddy DOES like thinking. And he does squeeze thoughts of my brain, though it hurts sometimes. I guess we've turned into one of those couples that uses eachother as reference points, rather than outside friends - having him absent (and largely out of touch) makes me feel a bit unmoored. I don't think that's a great strategy for mental health in the long run, but it seems okay at the moment. Though I also realize how much I depend on him, and should his plane crash on the way home (is it even okay to write that? am I jinxing him? is there some etiquette on writing about theoretical disasters?), I would be utterly unmoored. I apparently need to extend my support system.

My point was, though, that I miss him, too. I also miss the way he pushes me to think a little more. He, like his child, loves to chat, and I spend a fair amount of time only pretending to listen to both of them. When I listen to him, though, I usually get excellent value for my investment, and it makes the rusty cogs of my brain move a little. A little.

Anyway, I look forward to his return, so he can take over the elevator-construction detail. Maybe we can talk about it later.