The Many Faces of Mommy

One of the weirdest things about my experience of parenting is how quickly I find myself changing my mood/attitude. I will say something mean to Dutch in an Evil Cold voice ("Fine! Just sit here in your poopy diaper!") and thirty seconds later be laughing at something she said (like saying "ka" instead of "ex" - as in "My dolls are going to kasplore this barn! Did my diaper kasplode?"). Thirty seconds after that I'm angry at her again, and then at the end of the second minute of my emotional rollercoaster ride, I'm completely charmed when she pats my hand and calls me "sweety pie". I had no idea I was capable of this kind of volatility. It makes Cook a little nervous, I think - he does occasionally do the Evil Cold Voice thing, but generally is more even-keeled than I am, and when he witnesses me do my Evil Cold thing and then take a quick trip into the role of Loving Nurturer, he seems kind of taken aback. Understandably. He had no idea that I am both mean and crazy, I'm sure.

I guess, though, that it's just another fun thing I've learned about myself in the experience of parenting. For example, the alarming re-emergence of Evil Cold Me, who had been more or less in hibernation since adolescence (though she is guaranteed to make an appearance when I see my family members, luckily for them) until I entered parenthood, which often seems like my second adolescence. Hormones, mood swings, constantly changing demands on me, TERRIBLE unfairness, clothes all over the floor, anxiety about the future, etc. But this time I have (just barely) the emotional maturity not to blame my problems on my loved ones, and (best of all), I have someone in my life to call me sweety pie and pat my hand, to remind me that I am more than just Evil Cold Me. (I contain multitudes!)

Conversation at the Grocery Store Play Area Where People Leave Random Toys

Dutch: Mama, look what I did with this truck!
Me: Oh, gosh, look at the alien driving a truck full of toast!
D: Mama, what do aliens DO?
M: Ummm...
D: They come on the Earth.
M: Uh.... yeah...
D: But why is this alien surfing?

Resilience

All of my agonizing the last few months about Dutch's daycare have made me think a lot about resilience, which is the quality that protects a child from emotional damage in a bad situation. The proverbial Poor Kid Who Overcomes Great Handicaps To Become CEO is a resilient kid. Some kids are amazingly resilient, and some are amazingly not, and part of that is genetic and part is not. I have no idea how resilient Dutch may be.

It can be very hard to see the line between protecting your child adequately and overprotecting her. I go back and forth. My mom would say I read too many parenting books, and it's probably true. By leaving Dutch in the daycare where she's adequately cared for but not nurtured in the way I would like to see, am I allowing her to gain confidence from coping with a difficult situation, or am I destroying her spirit? Is she learning skills she will need to live in the real world, which can be a difficult thing to do, or is she learning that she has to be miserable every day?

It would be nice if I could get into her head and see what's going on in there... the fact that she is actually a separate person and not part of me is such a hassle. The fact that I can't foresee the future is also unfortunate. But maybe she'll call me up in 30 years and say "Mom, I just wanted to thank you for putting me in that daycare! I built a lot of character there, and here I am married to my former daycare classmate Q, who bit me once when we were both 2, and we're living this wonderful, stable, rewarding life. Thank goodness you didn't put me into that Waldorf preschool, where I would never have learned to overcome obstacles."

It could happen!

State of Mind

We went to the Oregon State Fair with the Big Cooks this weekend. I love state fairs. We saw a breakdancing/hiphop dance troupe, and lots of animals, lots of kids in western shirts, lots of happy people, and lots of farm animal bodily functions, which fascinated and appalled Dutch. I managed to eat TWO different variations on fried dough (elephant ears and funnel cakes, if you're interested). The most exciting event of the day was that Dutch took her first ever solo amusement park ride, on a ride that entailed floating in a kayak-y sort of boat around a flat circuit. She thought it was thrilling, and keeps telling us about it ("and then the boat went BUMP!!!!!"). Everybody was very tired on the ride home.

Care and Feeding Tips

So - the parenting book on introverts! It was really interesting, and has already been helpful. What it really helped me with was to underline that yes, Dutch is introverted, and that is just the way she is. Introvertedness more or less includes the following traits: needs time alone to recharge, feels drained rather than energized by social interactions, is good at listening, has a hard time with situations that require quick answers and short-term memory, gets really absorbed in projects, struggles with transitions, and wants to stay safely home all the time. (The book also pointed out that introverts are not very welcome in American culture, and would probably have an easier time in places like Japan, where they value subtlety and quiet and the ability to read people.) This is was good because it reminded me that she is who she is, and my job is to help her thrive, both by forcing the world to accomodate her and teaching her to fit into the world. She will need to learn some skills that will be hard for her (in a way that they were not hard for me), and I will need to fight for her sometimes. I will also have to pry her out of the house occasionally. (I, as the least introverted person in our small family, often have to be the prying force to get all of us out. It's easy for introverts to forget that they do enjoy doing things outside the home, and talking to friends. I tend to forget that myself, and now I have TWO people in tow who have an awful lot of inertia. God help us if we have another kid who turns out to be an introvert - we'll never leave home at all.)

Anyway, this reminded me also to be sad and then proactive about Dutch's daycare, where they have hardly any toys for imaginative/dramatic play, very little time for such pursuits, no hideaways for quiet retreat, and teachers who specialize in calming and entertaining rowdy extroverts rather than encouraging introverts to feel good about their abilities to listen and concentrate. So I have to gird my loins and go in and talk to the teachers and the daycare director, to point out that Dutch is not going to change, and everyone will be happier if they can just remember that she is not a rowdy extrovert.

The final thing the book clarified for me that Cook is at the far end of the introversion scale. The jury is still out on Dutch's place on the continuum, but I think we can wrap up Cook's personality label and put it on the shelf. Maybe we should all move to Japan.

Not Quite

Apparently while I was gone (at a conference in Denver for three days), Dutch told her daycare teacher that I had gone to Japan (due to repeated reading of this book), and left the teacher with the strong impression that I was never coming back. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Mish Mash

I'm in Denver, at a conference for work. I have been PowerPointed to exhaustion, but I did have the opportunity to spend a night at the home of my friend CM, her husband Emergency Man (as in Fixing Of, not as in Creating), and their amazingly independent and adorable kid, the BookYanker. It was wonderful to see them all (especially poor CM, who managed to be warm, funny and hostessy after one of a long string of 12-hour days - may I say how much we should all appreciate the pain of medical residents, and thank them for their labors on our behalf?), and I even got to see downtown Denver, which shocked me by being pedestrian-friendly, attractive, and stocked with some nice old buildings and some nice new buildings. Also, my hosts had an inspiring quote on their fridge about the importance of committing to whatever you're doing, which I really liked.

Other things I've experienced:
1. A gorgous Midwestern thunderstorm, which caught up with me as I was hiking the 2 miles back to my hotel after today's PowerPointing - I saw a real double rainbow! Also, the smell of rain on dry ground, which is high on the infinitely long list of things I will miss when I'm dead.

2. A hotel full of middle-aged Swedes. Motorcycling Swedes, on a tour of the Western United States. Let me repeat this - A POSSE OF MOTORCYCLING SWEDES. I saw them by the pool, sunbathing, and then later saw them outside in the parking lot during the FIRST fire alarm, and they were all wearing black socks and sandals. I was delighted, and tried some Swedish on them. They were terribly polite about it, as one would expect from motorcycling Swedes, but I don't think they actually understood anything I said.

3. Learning something that I thought was really interesting (and probably should have known already) - the best predictor of health in an American person is literacy skills. Not age, not race, not income - literacy! (I'm not sure of how accurate this is, but it's interesting even if it's not quite true.) And that 1 in 4 Americans did not read even a single book last year. That was depressing.

4. On the plane, I read a book about parenting an introverted child, and it was super-interesting. More on that later, as I'm approaching the end of my time limit on the Jurassic-era computers in the "Business Center."

5. I have now had two evenings of being able to decompress in peace after a long day. Nobody to feed, nobody to wash, no tantrums. Nobody to be nice to, even - all I have to do is find myself some food, check my email, take a bath, and watch bad TV! But I can't wait to get home.

Feelings

Yesterday Dutch saw a guy making balloon animals (at the farmers market) and decided that she HAD TO HAVE ONE, even if that meant that she couldn't have a food treat. She also decided that she HAD TO HAVE a snake balloon. The balloon guy actually managed to produce a reasonably snakey balloon creation, and she was really pleased. She made the snake bite me and Cook many times, which she thought was completely hilarious. She was having a wonderful time with it, and then, while running down a path with her snake, she fell. She scraped her knees, the snake popped, a guy behind us said sympathetically "ooooooooohh..." and she started to wail. It was such a hurricane of emotions - shock, pain, confusion, humiliation, and loss, all bundled up in one terrible experience. She bawled for a good five minutes, and then we convinced her that it had been an exciting adventure (part of the "mistakes and failures and disappointments are an interesting and educational element of life" program we've instituted to help her grow up to be less like us) and that was that. On to the next emotion.

More Gorgeous Produce

Today we went to the farmers market again, and loaded up on all sorts of lovely things. I made and froze some pesto (and was astonished by how little pesto comes from bushels of basil). We're having lemony green beans for supper, and peach-blackberry crisp, and pizza (another way to combine starch with tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella). Dutch met yeast for the first time.

Everyone's secret wish

Today I was in the kitchen, and Dutch was in our bedroom, watching a movie. I heard her suddenly trot down the hall to her bedroom, and a moment later I looked out into the hall in time to see her trot back down the hall to the TV, holding her potty in outstretched hands. When I looked into the bedroom, this is what I saw:

Daycare Blues

We're still sad about Dutch's daycare. The teachers don't even say hi to her in the morning half the time. Tomorrow I'm pointlessly going to visit a couple of swanky limited-hours preschools, apparently just to torture myself, since we can't afford it AND we need more hours than they offer. I don't know why I'm doing it. Maybe to remind myself that there is better childcare out there, so I can be more aggressive about demanding better from the current place. Dutch is much happier there than she used to be, but she's still not happy, and we don't like what we see in our limited experience with these teachers. I also read an article that made a deep impression on me that said that kids whine because they are sad and brimming with feelings. Dutch became such a whiny mess because her daycare situation was making her sad, and that made her teachers angry, which made her whinier... ick. There's nothing wrong with the daycare itself, but the teachers in her class are a bad combination with her and with eachother. Anyway, the fact is that we cannot afford anything better, so it's pointless to think about all the lovely places where she could be spending her time learning to weave and to cook organic strudel. The situation underlines some of the cruelties of the American childcare nonsystem - Dutch is being punished for her parents' failures (to get rich, mostly) by getting crappy care. She is vastly better off than most kids being punished for their parents' failures, because she reaps the benefits of all the advantages her parents have had (and her childcare is really not THAT bad), and it's still bumming me out. Kids are such gorgeous little explosions of sensation and discovery, and the fact that so many of them are crushed by the weight of their inheritance before they even learn to walk is unconscionable. I used to volunteer at Head Start, and the odds stacked against those extremely small people made me dizzy. (And then I read some Jonathan Kozol books and felt even worse.)

So all of you should support the federal Family and Workplace Balancing Act of 2007 (H.R.2392), which aims "to improve the lives of working families by providing family and medical need assistance, child care assistance, in-school and afterschool assistance, family care assistance, and encouraging the establishment of family-friendly workplaces. " Go to the Thomas webpage and check to see if your reps are on the list of cosponsors. If they're not, give them a call and ask them to cosponsor this bill, because it's important. (Even if you don't have kids, and even if you don't even LIKE kids, it's important. Somebody's going to have to take care of you when you get old, after all, and it would be nice if it was somebody who had decent social support when they were a kid, wouldn't it?) I'd like to see every kid in high-quality childcare that doesn't bankrupt their parents. I'd really like to see that in my lifetime in this country, even if not everybody gets organic strudel.

Progress

I'm surprised every time I look at her and see that she has her own face on, not a mushy little baby face. (Yes, it's still mushy. But she's come a long way.) I thought we were unusually able to admit that ours was not an adorable baby, but when I look back at her baby photos I am astonished by how completely weird she looked. Though she wasn't actually always bathed in yellow light... that's a photographic glitch.

In case you were wondering, that's her paternal grandmother's coloring and body, her maternal grandmother's eyes, and her maternal grandfather's chin. The nose remains unclaimed.

Speaking of Food

I've been thinking a lot about produce lately, what with it being August and all. Our farm share is inexplicably yielding no tomatoes, which is a weekly source of irritation. We did get a giant bag of amaranth greens, of all things, this week. Also squash blossoms, which are very pretty but do not inspire my taste buds. We've been taking Dutch to farmers markets galore, too, to indulge her insatiable appetite for corn, and she's very clear on the wondrous potential of samples. I think she ate her weight in samples (peaches, bread, nectarines, plums, goatcheese, hazelnuts, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, tomatoes...) at the market today, and also had her first donut (maple, with icing), which she referred to later as a "candy bagel" when she requested more. Today we're having summer squash casserole, cucumbers vinaigrette, and corn for dinner. Very yellow, but the blueberries for dessert will balance it out, and we can have amaranth greens tomorrow.

I'm pretty thrilled with the swell of interest in local fresh produce. I love going to a farmers market packed with people buying mountains of peaches that have traveled 30 miles from their picking place. I read a provocative article the other day (from Above the Fold, which I recommend to all) which said that walking rather than driving actually PROMOTES global warming, because our food system is so oil-dependent that the calories you have to eat to fuel your walk actually cost more gas than driving your car, if you eat in a conventional developed-world way. The message is that we need to turn our attention to our food systems, and make them more sustainable. (Not that we should all stop walking.)

I do have good intentions; I try to buy locally and seasonally. Mostly, though, I'm motivated to shop locally because I love good tomatoes in season, especially the expensive and gorgeous heirloom tomatoes, and most especially heirloom black tomatoes. I have a visceral thrill of pleasure every time I pick one of those things up, warm from the sun, thin-skinned, heavy as a guinea pig. Every summer, Cook and I end up eating a lot of meals that involve a big bowl of raw tomatoes, olive oil, basil, and mozzarella, usually with pasta and parmesan, and maybe a side dish if we can remind ourselves that there are other produce items we should be eating. Also, I love orange cherry tomatoes. And blueberries. Having a toddler around gave me an excuse last summer to buy huge quantities of blueberries (she needs to learn about healthy treats!), something I'd never done before, due to the expense. I can't think of many domestic experiences more luxurious than having a ton of fresh blueberries in your kitchen waiting to be eaten.

Anyway. I've got squash to cook, and blueberries to wash. May you all have nice produce in your kitchens.

Taste Buds

News! Kids like any food more if it's wrapped in McDonald's packaging. I have my doubts about what exactly that means (particularly since I'm sure I'd choose something wrapped in attractive red and yellow paper rather than something unwrapped), but it's probably not good. For the moment, we're exploiting Dutch's unholy passion for fresh corn on the cob ("Honey, if you don't wash your hands and get ready for dinner, you CAN'T HAVE ANY CORN!!!!"), but I can't imagine that she will retain her junkfood/marketing innocence much longer.

Not Always On Duty

I am spending five nights this month away from home, ALONE. I had two of them this weekend, and I'll be off on a three-night trip in a few weeks (this one for family, that one for work). I've spent five nights away from Dutch in her entire life up to last week, so this is awfully exciting.

Having survived my first wrenching separation from the parasite, I can report that it was great. The trip was pretty stressful, but I had the wonderful luxury of not having to meet anybody's needs (beyond reasonably emotional interactions, I mean - I tried not to get too selfish). I didn't have to pay attention; I could shut down that part of my brain that's constantly keeping tabs on Dutch. I never knew, before, how wonderful waiting in the airport alone with a bag of candy and a book could be. I am so mobile! I am so polite! I am able to adapt my behavior appropriately as circumstances require! I do not whine very much! I am fantastic company! I consistently use the bathroom! Three cheers for me on my own!

I missed her, though. She missed me - she's still pretty excited to have me back, 24 hours later. I'm also pretty sure that she passed through a developmental hop this weekend, since she seems to be suddenly talking very fluently and extensively, though she is still unable to maintain a conversational focus longer than 12 seconds. (Talking to her on the phone from afar was pretty weird. Sample conversation: "Mama, my pants are like a suit!" "Really?" "Daddy pulled my pants up to my waist, so they're like a suit!" "Yeah?" "Yeah, my pants are like a SUIT!!!!")

Romancing the Library

I'm writing without any sort of inspiration or motivation other than a kind of dogged determination to KEEP WRITING. I started this and I'm going to KEEP DOING IT. Even if it's very low quality.

Dutch is participating in the library Summer Reading Program. She collects credits for increments of time spent being read to, and gets prizes for reaching stages along the way. I don't know why they don't reward parents for this, since we're the ones doing the reading. They should have little airplane-serving-size liquor bottles as prizes. Because I felt gypped, I signed up for the Adult Summer Reading Program, which allows you to enter for a drawing for some grownup-style prizes if you submit a list of six books you read over the summer. Six books in three months. Those of you who are acquainted with my reading style know that I can account for six books in three days, mostly because I skim most of what I "read" and because I read exceptionally trashy books, many of which aren't even worth skimming. I'm not ashamed to read my trashy books on public transit, but somehow I find that I am ashamed to tell the library that I'm reading them. Obviously, the librarians know I read trashy books, because I check them out and even put them on hold, but somehow it's more embarrassing to record them. So far I've managed to identify only two books I'm not ashamed of having read this summer - "On Beauty," by Zadie Smith (recommended by my friend The Lawyer Lady) and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," by Michael Chabon. That's it, out of all the books I've read in the last two months. So now I have to make a reading list of Actual Literature and get down to business, so I can finish up my list in good faith. Any recommendations?