Category Archives: Motherhood

Name change

I’m finally happy with the name of my blog!

Here are some of the tiny mantras that currently rule my world:

“Galaxies fade away, all stars merge.”

“Just the right speed! Just the right angle!”

“Mommy! Daddy! Baby! Arrow!”

“Saturn has rings.”

“Jupiter’s going ’round the spot’s going round Jupiter’s going round the spot, Jupiter.”

The last one is a pretty apt description of Jupiter’s atmosphere, as I understand it. It also reminds me of my favorite Lewis Carroll quote: “Be what you would seem to be – or, if you’d like it put more simply – never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

Happy Comfest.

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He wants pink

Every parenting newsletter I get tells me that it will help build my son’s confidence if I let him start making little choices. I usually give him two options: Broccoli or edamame? Goodnight Moon or My Many Colored Days? The playground or the library? Edwards or Obama?

Lately, the color of bath water is one of his favorite daily decisions. He went through a brief and surprising anti-bath period a few weeks back, so I got those red, yellow and blue bath tablets in hopes that the excitement of orange water would bring him back to what had been one of his favorite rituals. It’s worked almost too well. He wants a bath in the morning after he had one just before bed and he hates to get out. I’ve taken to draining the water while he’s still in the tub, so he can flop down his belly, watch the water swirl down the drain and say “bye bye green bath.”

Pink is a favorite. Purple too.

I don’t have any hang-ups about boys and pink, although I have caught myself accommodating other people’s hang-ups on occasion. As a baby, unless he was wearing some kind of sports-related outfit (which was rare – I don’t like inflicting an athletic destiny on him any more than I would want to inflict a pageant destiny on a daughter), Declan was often mistaken for a girl. I always stumbled over whether or not to correct people, and felt dopey when I did. Honestly, he wasn’t even aware that he was an individual yet, he was a sweet ball of rosy cheeks and big eyes, why project an identity crisis onto him? Still, it usually prompted dramatic apologies, as though they had emotionally scarred my son by implying he looked like he could be the same, apparently inferior, gender that I am.

He once joyfully picked up a pink ball at Target and started carrying it with him, and a strange grown man lauded the sporty interest but questioned the color choice. When we told him we didn’t see the problem, he suggested “well that’s fine for now.” Implication: An affinity for pink will destroy him once he is old enough for preschool. My husband gets indignant: “It will always be fine!” he told the pink-phobe.

When I ask Declan what color shirt he wants to wear today, the answer is often pink. I’ve scoured the piles and piles of hand-me-downs we have for a shirt that had the slightest trace of pink on it – maybe a sunset or a flamingo. No luck. I’ve scanned the racks at Target, Old Navy and Kohl’s for a plain pink t-shirt, a pink oxford, maybe a golf shirt with a pink stripe… there is nothing. Meanwhile, in the girls’ section, where the racks look like a massive strawberry confection exploded, everything has a hoochie-mama vibe — spandex fabrics, low necklines, capped sleeves, cheap ribbons and sparkles. Does anyone make gender-neutral clothing for little ones?

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Truths

For the most part, I’m a strong believer that telling my son the truth is usually not only morally correct, it tends to be practical. Unless he’s sleeping or having too much fun to pay attention to me, I always tell Declan when I’m leaving the house without him. Sometimes there are tears, but I find out that he almost always recovers in under two minutes. For reassurance, he looks to my husband between 10 and 50 times while I’m out and says, “Mommy: She’ll be right back.”

He now sometimes sings “she’ll be right back” to himself while I’m away.

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Deceptions

About a year and a half ago, my five-year-old niece was bouncing her entire body off a Fitness Ball in my living room, flopping herself onto the floor and then making sudden, armless leaps back over it like a suicidal dolphin.

“Could you help me keep my daughter from killing herself?” my sister-in-law implored.
My husband sprung into action.

“Uh-oh. It’s six o’clock,” he said. “The purple ball has to be put away at six o’clock.”

The rest of us nodded solemnly.

My mother watched the episode and uttered, “wow, parents are devious.”

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Preschool woes

We took our first mom and baby yoga class when I was still counting my son’s age in weeks. Because the instructor was also a preschool teacher, the small talk on the very first day revolved around the process of enrolling kids in preschool. Her main message was that we not wait – we should get our babies on wait-lists months, if not years, before we wanted them to start school.

This is a bewildering situation, given how mysterious children can be, and how long it may be before their personalities, abilities and learning styles come to light. I’ve looked and asked around casually, comfortable that he’s probably best off at home. But in the past three months, Declan has revealed his incredible ability to memorize and retain information. As the year began, he mastered his shapes in one week, colors in another, the next he was counting to twenty and identifying numbers up to nine pretty handily. He forms sentences about subjects that I don’t remember talking to him about in the first place. Yesterday, we took a walk in a park. As we started up an incline, he repeated “walk up hill!” over and over. He’s blowing my mind.

Just a few months ago, the periodic visits with kids at library reading hour, COSI and the park seemed like enough outside stimulation. Today, I’m having a hard time finding any preschool with programming for children under three – I was hoping there might be one that just does a half day or two a week for that age nearby, but no luck.

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The thin grey hairline

I am suspicious of Starbucks. And I have more than the usual suspicions about which ingredient makes their coffee especially addictive, or whether or not cashiers have been genetically enhanced in pods to be extra pleasant to caffeine junkies, babies and dogs.

I want to see their employee handbook and find out whether or not they are instructing young male employees to flirt with married, middle-aged women. Here in America, we are one of the most highly courted consumer groups, after all. Just the other day, I pulled into the drive-thru for a quick cup in between stops. After all of the usual niceties seemed to be complete and I had pulled the gear back into drive, the young man leaned out the window with a flirty grin. “Hey,” he said, “I hope you have an amazing day.”

If this had been an isolated incident, I wouldn’t have thought much of it. But this is just one of several events where I’ve been subjected to attention that seemed too oddly flattering. They ask superfluous questions about how I am doing, accompanied by meaningful arm-folding and head-tilting – like they’ve all studied John Corbett’s Aiden character on Sex in the City for tips about how to appear more concerned and sensitive.

Either that, or there is something about getting your first few grey hairs and a layer of mommy fat that makes you wildly attractive to a certain breed of men, many of whom apparently work retail. I heard the entire marital history of a man selling me office supplies on Tuesday for no discernible reason. I left wondering whether my wedding ring, modest though it may be, might have become invisible.

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Andy Wormhole

One of the great joys of the DVR is the fact that I can catch up on all of the old episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that I missed when I had a social life. (I managed to pull off watching all of The Next Generation episodes I hadn’t seen before during those first few months of napping and nursing.)

As a result Declan has two requests that he makes daily: “space show watch?” and “wormhole watch?” These are usually code for “lie down and snuggle with me after I jump up and down while looking at images of space.”

But it’s more than a TV/snuggling fixation. His vocabulary expands daily: rocketship, Earth, meteor, planet. Space toys, outside of Twilight Turtle aren’t very easy to find at his developmental level. I stapled cosmic felt onto a board for the playroom last week, threw velcro backing on some glow in the dark stars and made a few planets and spaceships for him to stick on there. I think he would prefer that the whole room was covered in felt so he could stick these things wherever he wished, but at least it’s getting a little use.

When I went to a craft store to get some things for this project the other day, I also spotted a small reproduction of Andy Warhol’s painting, “Space ship” on sale for $2.50. I snagged it and handed it to Declan as soon as I walked in the door. “Space ship!” his father trumpeted.

“Oooooh! Space ship,” Declan repeated.

“It’s Andy Warhol,” I told them.

“Andy Wormhole!” said Declan, wandering into the living room, holding it in his hands. “Space ship wormhole!”

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Sympathy for the revel

After the past couple of weeks of mockery and scorn over her endless bender, I was actually relieved to see some traces of compassion for Britney Spears in the media this week. Being a sometimes music critic, my views of her popness have not always been flattering ones. But something about having your own toddler makes you extra sensitive to the cathode crows pecking away at a new, young mother, particularly one who seems to be coming undone in front of the world.

Most moms know that the very act of living with a newborn can make you feel ferociously inadequate, even if your strongest postpartum symptom is that diet diagnosis parenting magazines and books call the “baby blues.” Whether you are a pert little jezebel or comfortably frumptastic, your relationship to your own body and the outside world fundamentally changes with a pregnancy.

Every pregnant woman and new mom, famous or no, automatically becomes a little bit of public property. People touch you, bless you, look at you in disgust and pray for you in the cracker aisle of the grocery store. If you nurse in public, some people congratulate you and others openly gag. When your child cries, you can be eyed with suspicion, scorn or sympathy, depending on your karma. And when you look to those who can be your greatest salvation – other mommies – you sometimes find exactly what you need, but other times, they can sting you more deeply than you imagined possible.

I can’t imagine living through this period of life as a sexual icon surrounded by cameras, sycophants and gossip feeders. And I really can’t imagine what the hormonal effect of consecutive births, combined with the babyweight shedding at the frenzied pace of an image-conscious celebrity could be. Blogger Heather Armstrong of Dooce may be the first person that I’ve seen publicly suggest the taboo possibility of postpartum depression, even though it’s hard for many moms I know to imagine that it doesn’t have something to do with this. Rebecca Traister of Salon has the measure of what Spears culturally represents.

And then there is this heartfelt, little soliloquy from Craig Ferguson. I’m never up late enough to watch him, but after seeing this and last week’s appearance on Bill Maher’s show, he has impressed me as a truly decent man:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bbaRyDLMvA]

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