It's messy and weird in here.

I've been thinking a lot about pain over the last year. I haven't experienced very much pain, personally. I occasionally get headaches, of course, and I've had a few minor injuries that were painful (fireworks are BAD!!!!), including sports injuries that still occasionally hurt, decades later. I'm not like that lady in Scotland. But pain hasn't really been a feature in my life. When I was a kid, my family didn't really do over-the-counter medicine. We definitely had aspirin or ibuprofen or acetaminophen or something that was occasionally used for things like headaches. And band-aids, I guess? But I don't remember pain or discomfort being really a thing in our life. The sense was that discomfort is a symptom of something that might need to be treated, but the discomfort itself doesn't necessarily or even usually merit treatment. Pain felt (and still mostly feels) like a clear, direct and actionable communication from my physical body to my thinking. Your head hurts? Drink some water. Take a nap. Your stomach hurts? Drink some water. Rest. Wait and see what happens. For now, for me, this mostly works. (Except chest pain associated with anxiety. That's weird and confusing and unproductive.)

For the last few years, Duchess has had lots of experience with discomfort. She was a pretty robust kid who didn't get sick often and rarely complained of pain. Since adolescence rolled around, though, she complains of menstrual pain, knee pain (from ultimate frisbee) and now back pain (from rowing). She has had recurring episodes of dizziness and fatigue (we thought she was anemic, but she wasn't even close - turned out that MY iron levels were low, though). We've vacillated between telling her to just suck it up, and taking her to the doctor, where the diagnosis is always that they're not sure what's going on, but there's nothing seriously wrong. My paradigm isn't working here.

And then there the emotional pain. Duchess frequently talks about how her friends have "hurt" her or other friends. Usually by saying something casually or even accidentally mean. She is very, very upset and righteous when people hurt her. I find most of the the "hurt" she's describing to be far below my threshold for "hurt," even in 14-year-old-adjusted terms, and the grandiosity of it feels off to me. This makes me feel like she (and all her friends) put far too much weight on Being Hurt. My theory is that girls are socialized to feel that being hurt and feeling pain are legitimate emotional experiences for them. Being angry or annoyed or humiliated or indignant aren't okay, because they're more outward-facing, but being hurt and being a victim is.

Some of Duchess's friends are also engaging in self-harming activities like cutting or disordered eating, and I think this aligns with my theory - they're embracing Being Hurt as a way to focus and feel in control of the emotional chaos in which they live. I looked up self-harming on the crisis text line website recently, and was surprised to see on the list of self-harming activities something that Duchess actually does right in front of me, which is hitting herself in the head (with her hands). I've only seen her do this a few times, and never actually hard enough to do damage, but it is shocking every time. She does it when she's upset, and it does seem to be a way to channel her emotions, so I guess it makes sense that it falls into the same category as cutting.

Both my kids do a thing when they're upset that also seems similar, though less controlled - they move around the house in a way (fast, careless, flailing) that makes it inevitable that they'll bang into a doorframe or a table or fall down or hurt themselves physically in some other way. I think they're experiencing an imbalance - an inner storm and an outer calm. I believe that girls, especially girls like mine who are deeply invested in being Good, don't feel entitled to just let out that inner storm into the calm world. So they have to create an outer context that is acting on them that feels like it rationalizes the inner storm. They have to Be Hurt.

I recently listened to an interesting Invisibilia episode about girls and pain, exploring the phenomenon of people (mostly teenage girls, I think) with "amplified pain" who feel unexplained pain, and following a girl who was pursuing a treatment involving doing a lot of painful things to sort of retrain her nervous system not to respond so sensitively. (There was also a kerfuffle of angry responses to the episode, apparently, pointing out that dismissal of women's pain, and particularly girls' pain, is a long and bad tradition and should be vigorously challenged.) I guess what I'm coming to is mostly just an awareness of how little I understand. I can't tell Duchess how she should experience pain, or what she should do when she's experiencing it. It's real pain; she's feeling it. But what it is, how it should be labeled, where it comes from, and what it means, I have no idea. For now, we talk about it with her, and try to help her unpack what she's feeling. She's emotionally wise for an eighth-grader, so she can understand what we're getting at (when she's not in the throes of The Feelings). But none of us have any solutions.

What I think Duchess might have, though, thanks to her ridiculous, masochistic sport, is evidence that if she keeps going, if she moves through pain, she gets through it, and sometimes she also gets something more - in this case, mighty thigh muscles, strong calloused hands, and an improved ability to make boats go fast. Rowing is pretty much entirely the practice of enduring physical discomfort. The coaches set out barf buckets next to the rowing machines. So Duchess experiences something nearly every day that I almost never experience - pushing her body to the point of pain/intense discomfort and having to keep going through that. (Note that I don't necessarily recommend this approach. I have a lot of qualms.)

Discomfort is usually associated with change. If we don't see it for what it is, if we avoid it (hi, Skipper!) or explain it by tying it to external circumstances that are unrelated (hi, Duchess!), we can miss the opportunity that change offers, whether it's physical, intellectual, or emotional. But not all change is good, either, and it's often hard to tell if it's the kind of discomfort that will tear you down or build you up. Basically, I have no idea what we're doing here.

This ad was shown at my staff meeting this morning (because it's women's history month!) and it made me cry.

Boxes

Skipper has a pretty solid wardrobe of hand-me-downs, but she prefers to wear only a small selection of things. She most likes clothes with pictures of animals, and she has asked repeatedly for shirts and sweatshirts with dinosaurs on them. She wants a swimsuit with fish on it. Or any sea creature, actually. And as all her swim suits are baggy and threadbare, I thought I'd find her a cheap new or used suit with a fish on it. And I can't find one. Flowers, yes. Fish, no. I've found a hundred boys' swimsuits with fish on them, but she wants a girls' suit. So here's a quest for you - find Skipper a swimsuit. If it has a swimming dinosaur on it, you get bonus points.

Rehashed

I'm unemployed! Hurrah! I kicked off my unemployment by getting my teeth cleaned yesterday morning.* Hurrah! The kids have two more weeks of school, and then we're all summer all the time.

Now on to today's topic: gender!  I've written here about gender and school socializing before, but it's always in the back of my mind, so I'll probably write about it a hundred more times before I'm through. I continue to be irritated by the way that every single teacher Duchess has had has embraced the same system, in which the Responsible Girls are tapped to help the teacher with chores. Duchess started out by escorting feckless classmates to the bathroom in kindergarten, and it's been all chores ever since. She LIKES the chores, of course, because they come with teacher approval and a thrilling sense of maturity and independence, and this is just the way the system works throughout school. But it really pisses me off. Boys are not expected to be Responsible. Girls who are Responsible are normal, just meeting the expectations of Girlhood, and boys are almost never even asked to do Responsible things like cleaning up the classroom unsupervised while everybody else is out at recess. Girls do extra work because they are Responsible. Boys do whatever they want, get in minor trouble (A reprimand! Sent to the office where nothing bad happens and they get to miss some class!), and never clean up. Even when everybody is supposed to be cleaning up together, guess who's doing most of the work? I was just reading somewhere** the theory that this socialization makes boys learn that failure isn't actually that big a deal - they experience first-hand, early in life, that the consequences of doing something wrong, or breaking the rules, aren't actually that bad. This leads to more risk-taking behavior in life and in work.** Girls often never get the chance to try breaking the rules, because they're steered so hard away from it, and if they DO break the rules, the social (and sometimes the disciplinary) ramifications are more unpleasant, because they're breaking social expectations as well as school rules. So they learn to follow the rules all the time, and the perceived risk of breaking them, or of failing to live up to expectations, just gets bigger and bigger in their minds. Boys can be careless, self-centered, irresponsible, and disruptive, without suffering serious immediate consequences. Girls have a lot less wiggle room. I asked Duchess what would happen if she said "No, I don't want to clean up the classroom. I want to go out to recess," and she said (understandably) that she just could not say that. She's nine, and she's already stuck not only cleaning up the classroom, but also feeling like a failure when she doesn't get 20 out of 20 on her spelling test.*** And we wonder why women don't become CEOs. (Or rather, only become CEOs when there's a mess that needs to be cleaned up.)

I understand why teachers lean so hard on the Responsible Girl model. They have a lot of shit to do, and very little time, and it probably doesn't occur to most of them that there's any problem with the time-honored Responsible Girl tradition.  There aren't any administrators I know of out there who are interested in doing the heavy culture-changing lifting it would take to break that model and try a model in which boys and girls are given the same expectations.

On a related note, Cook alerted me to this amazing piece of news: people take hurricanes with female names less seriously than hurricanes with male names. More people get killed by storms with female names than by those with male names because they can't be bothered to evacuate for a frivolous girly storm. This is disturbing in a lot of ways.

I feel overwhelmed by the way the world just beats down girls.  And don't even give me the statistics about how girls are over-represented in college. Whatever - that's just an advanced education in Being a Responsible Girl. (Also, being Responsible Girl means being diligent in avoiding being raped. Because that's your job, just like keeping the classroom clean and getting good grades.) What matters is all the rest of life, and I don't see any progress happening there.

And yes, there are many Responsible Boys and Men**** out there, and Irresponsible Girls and Women, too. And this is all pretty much just anecdotal. So there are all kinds of caveats on my repetitive ranting. But it feels very real to to me, and when I see Skipper busily picking up trash off the floor of her preschool classroom while the boys are coloring, my heart sinks a little more.


*I have had a crummy six months of dental visits, in which I've gotten a ton of fillings, including several along the gumline, which is extra-awful because the drilling for these, unlike the sort of top-down fillings to which I had been accustomed, somehow feels like it's rattling your ENTIRE SKULL. So just getting my teeth cleaned seemed like a cheerful fun adventure.

** And no, I can't be bothered tracking it down at the moment. I'm busy being unemployed!

*** Last week a boy in her class pointed at her 19 out of 20 score and said mockingly "Wow, Duchess, looks like you need to get a new brain." She cried. 

**** I'm married to a Responsible Man! So there's just no way that our kids are going to avoid being excessively responsible, given their genetics. 

I guess this shouldn't have surprised me.

Ugh.

Money, verbing, pink things, and tomatoes

In light of our Austerity Budget, and my stay-at-home status three days a week, I've been poking around in the recesses of the part of the internet dedicated to saving money. I have learned a lot. I subscribed to a blog devoted to Frugal Living, which includes posts several times a day about deals you can get at Walgreens or Safeway or whatever. Many of these deals require something called "couponing" which is something I don't really think should be a verb. Couponing apparently requires not only obsessive pursuit of newspaper inserts and store flyers, but also making multiple small transactions (due to restrictions on the coupons). Couponers (is this language weirdness making you as uncomfortable as it makes me?) will go to a store, buy three things, then go back around and get in line again to buy four more things, then go to another store and buy two things, etc. The author has been posting a bit about how she manages the logistics of this, and it involves a LOT of time and driving* and stockpiling of random crap. And a lot of the things you can buy with these deals are kind of ... well... gross. There aren't a lot of coupons for fresh produce, for example, or bulk bulghur or stuff like that. There are a lot of great deals on Shampoo That's Full of Nasty Chemicals or on Snacks That Are Full of White Flour And Chemicals. I think the creepiest thing about it, though, is that it's not about saving money. It's about buying stuff, for cheap. You would save more money by replacing your shampoo with baking soda. It's not about thrift at all - it's about consumption, and the thrill of the consumption hunt.**

So... I'm not going to become a couponer. I have bought some things, though, like maple syrup, off tips from that blog. And I have signed up for Groupon. And Ebates. I am trying not to define myself by what I buy. I think I need a hobby (other than worrying about my tomato plants).

I am reading*** a book called Cinderella Ate My Daughter, which is about the whole girlie-girl/princess/pretty thing and how it's ... um... eating our daughters. It's a sort of a long-form blog, so it's not exactly introducing new research or ideas, but it's a nice mulling-over of some of the stuff that all the parents of girls I know are wrestling with. ****

My tomatoes are still alive! I am following a rigorous schedule of bringing the three mobile ones inside the garage and wrapping the three immobile ones in plastic in the evening, and liberating them all in the morning. Hopefully, my efforts will pay off with actual tomatoes, maybe in early September, but I have doubts. Portland is not prime tomato-growing territory, even when the spring isn't greyer, colder, and wetter than usual.

*Which, given my job and my personal feelings, is a little upsetting. I spend a lot of time myself trying to encourage people to consolidate their trips in order to reduce driving, and the idea of pursuing a behavior that makes you drive MORE just seems crazy to me.

** Also, all the couponing/frugality blogs I've come across have emphasized to a creepy extent the importance of making your husband happy. One thrifty lady specifically mentioned that she buys a specific snack for her husband that he likes, and NOBODY ELSE CAN HAVE ANY. She doesn't buy treats for the rest of the family. He gets privileges he is the man, and he is supporting the family, and it is her job to make him happy. Another one specifically identified that her housekeeping goal is to make her husband happy, because it is his home that she is making.

*** Dear Multnomah County Library, I love you SO MUCH!!! I want to MARRY YOU!!!!!!! OMG, I LOOOOOOOOVE YOU!!!!!!!

**** I signed Dutch up for the following activities over the next four months: T-ball, soccer, swimming, and "Outdoor Living" day camp. This is nice and gender-neutral, but after reading half of this book, I think I need to find a good engineering day camp for her, too.

mindful parenting in three days

My three days of zen parenting are over. It wasn't so zen. Dutch and I had several arguments, and I've ignored her a lot. We've also done some nice reading together, and had some nice conversations, and she's demonstrated some emotional maturity and perceptiveness that I thought was kind of impressive. It rained a lot, and we spent most of the time in the apartment together. We cleaned a whole herd of dustbunnies out of the big bedroom, and washed the walls and baseboards in there, too. Baby X is going to be sleeping with us, and I feel a certain responsibility to at least do the kind of basic cleaning that I suspect most people do weekly.* Dutch liked that a lot; she pretended to be Snow White laboring cheerfully away, dressed in rags, and I was the Evil Queen (yay!). I gave her a small piece of hardbread to carry around in a bag to nibble on and pretend it was her only food of the day.

We've also done a bunch of thrift shopping, which we both enjoy, but which also brings us to confrontations about how she wishes to spend her allowance money. She spent $6 this weekend, on a Barbie doll,** an ugly little purse, and two books of Disney movie stories. These are very unappealing things, in my opinion, but way better than some of the other things she wished to buy - shabby and grubby stuffed animals, a white polyester dress, a vinyl stuffed car, a Flintstones movie. I  spent some time dissuading her from buying awful things - my position is that she is allowed to buy what she wants, but I can express my disapproval, and I can also limit her purchases to, say two items. I'm also soon going to have to start enforcing some kind of "buy one item, dispose of another" rule, in order to keep our apartment from overflowing. We've been rearranging furniture, in an attempt to achieve a configuration that allows us to move freely from room to room. We're not there yet.

Anyway, all I wanted to say was that we're not zen yet, either. I think I achieved approximately 48 seconds of mindfulness this week with Dutch. I'll shoot for a minute and a half over the three months of summer.

*Luckily, we've got a few more weeks left to build up a healthy layer of dust to give the new immune system a work out. 

**She now owns two, and the only way I can reconcile myself to this turned out to be by leading her into a plotline in which Barbie One and Barbie Two are married to eachother (they live in Canada). Their names are Hanna Barbie Orange and White Flower Petal.

Equine enthusiasm and body image

Dutch is officially an American girl. She loves horses and ballet.

I'm definitely for the horse thing, because she gallops everywhere, which both exercises her and makes our trips go much quicker. Also, she generates a lot of good will, because it's a pretty hard-hearted person who isn't moved to smile by the sight of a little girl (usually wearing an outfit along these lines: flowered dress, striped knee socks, and a polka-dotted long-sleeved shirt) galloping down the sidewalk with her arms extended in front of her, braids flopping behind. Actually, it's almost entirely women who smile, probably remembering their own galloping years.*

She's agitating to own a horse (which will live out in the courtyard), and to have riding lessons. She seems, however, to accept that she will never own a horse, and that riding lessons may materialize only in a distant theoretical future in which our income is much, much greater. So for now she's cool with just galloping herself everywhere.

The ballet thing skeeves me out a little, though. It's so... body-fixated. All the mirrors, and the rules, and the requirement for a perfect ballet body. For now, Dutch is having a lot of fun with it, but at some point she's going to realize either that she's not having fun any more, or that ballet won't tolerate her imperfections any more. I think I'd be much happier if she was interested really in any other kind of dancing - tap dancing? Modern dance? African dance? Square dancing? Belly dancing? Really, anything. Cook is even more skeeved than I am. Luckily, we can't really afford to keep the ballet lessons going after The Big Show in June, so hopefully this fad will fade soon.

Part of our icky feeling is enhanced by a recent unpleasant development in Dutch's daycare classroom, which is that some of the kids have started talking about how fat other kids are,** using it as a put-down. This is really hard to handle, from a parenting perspective. What are we supposed to say? My first response to her about this went more or less like this: "Kid X is not fat. And even if she is, it doesn't matter. And it can hurt people's feelings if you say they're fat. And even though it's not very good for your body to be very fat, it's not something you should talk about. And it doesn't matter what people's bodies look like. And AAAAAAGGGGHHH I can't handle this! Ask me about the economy or death or something!"

Dutch is not skinny. She's not fat, but she's got a potbelly and is by no means waifish. And she loves to eat fattening food. Given my genetic and behavioral legacy, plus the reality of modern life, she will probably never be skinny, and will struggle with her weight all her life.*** How on earth are we supposed to equip her to think about weight? How are we supposed to communicate the extremely difficult balance that it's not okay to use people's physical characteristics as a point of leverage to hurt their feelings, and Appearance Is Not Important, but that we should strive not to be fat ourselves? Since I don't think many (any?) adults are able to balance those ideas, how are we supposed to express that to a 4-year-old? Any ideas? Anyone?

This all goes along with parenting a modern American kid, I guess. But sheesh. It seems so complicated.



* I don't think men are hard-hearted, as a rule. Just not interested in galloping.
** There are a couple of kids in her class who are (very) slightly plump, but due to the demographics, it's really a very slim class, compared to the American average.
***Unless society collapses and she has to spend her days avoiding armed thugs and foraging for bugs to eat, in which case we won't have to worry about body image.

It's a...

???

The fetus kept its legs demurely crossed for the ultrasound, making it impossible to see if I should be investing in pink lacy wraps or plain navy-colored ones. The tech and the doctor both leaned toward girl, but cautioned me not to "invest any emotional or financial resources" in its femininity. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and all that.

So it could be a girl, could be a boy, could be... something in between! Fortunately, even Dutch doesn't have a preference, though we would have liked to know. Also, we don't mind dressing a boy baby in pink. Most importantly, s/he appears to have all the important body parts, and is exactly the right size. And hey, look, isn't s/he adorable?

Hot!

It has been HOT here. Our apartment windows face south and west, and we dressed them (actually, the wonderfully efficient and high-energy Big Cooks dressed them) when we moved in during the winter, so they are wearing white gauzy curtains designed to let as much sunlight in as possible. In the late afternoon, the apartment is ablaze with sunshine, and the temperature reaches what feels like a good 20 degrees above the temperature outside. We've been preparing food in advance, in order to avoid cooking in the kitchen during the Hot Zone, and we had one picnic dinner in the park, with fountain-romping. Portland has lots of fantastic interactive-type fountains, and Dutch loves them. She was wearing swimtrunks and sandals, and I was amazed by how powerful gender conventions are - whenever I saw her, I had to remind myself that she's not a boy. She has longish hair, and of course I am the world expert on her nether regions (a title I will be happy to relinquish) and am pretty clear on her gender, but the fact that she was wearing swimshorts and not a girl swimsuit nearly counterbalanced that knowledge.

Anyway, it's been hot. Horribly, can't-sleep, wish-I-had-air-conditioning-screw-global-warming hot. But it's getting better - today was in the mid-90s and we all felt cool and relaxed. And just now we had a mini-thunder-storm with actual rain!

More About Art

Cook is the one who does art with the kid. It's funny, since I would have said I was more artistically oriented than Cook, but I'm not. He loves it. He paints and paints and paints and is enormously patient with her crazy demands ("draw a little tiny baby sitting in a tree sucking on a pacifier!"). They do fingerpainting and tempera and watercolors and watercolor pencils. I always try to con her into just crayons, since it's easier. (I'm LAZY!)

We were very fortunate to pick up a cheesy free coloring book at Bonneville Dam, courtesy of the (eeeeviiiiiiiil) Army Corps of Engineers. The book features Bobber the Water Safety Dog, and the hapless Sinker, who fails to wear a lifejacket. There are also some foolish cats who drink beer while boating. (The weirdness of seeing a cartoon character drinking beer in a coloring book is somehow counteracted by the fact that it's a cat.) This kicked off the Coloring Book Era in Dutch's life, and we have to take one with us everywhere. We've since picked up a few more free ones, including (at the Pride Festival) some fantastic copies of pages from The Gender Coloring Book, featuring captions like "sometimes the princess gets rescued by the girl next door" and "don't let gender box you in!" which hopefully won't get conflated with Bobber the Water Safety Dog and screw up Dutch's future species identity.