Tag Archives: motherhood

Dreams of a mother

I don’t remember how old I was when I wore it, but it stayed in my shirt drawer long after it fit. My mother did work with other women that felt important. It stood for something. This shirt showed that I stood for something too:
She told me that she hoped that what she was doing would mean that I would grow up in a different kind of world than she had, one where what I had to offer would be welcomed and appreciated, not dismissed on account of my gender. Throughout my childhood, she did work in support of that dream. She even went to Mexico City in 1975 to help draft a plan of action for the women of the world.
When I was six years old, I adopted her maiden name as one of my own (Zollinger) – my first feminist act.

Our world is by no means yet a utopia. There are challenges that my mother’s 30-something self couldn’t have imagined. But this world is different, and better, because of her.

I also dream of a world different from this one for my own son. One that truly values his tenderness, compassion, kindness, generosity and patience. One that treasures his humanity so deeply that no one would dream of calling on him for violence.

Today, the Momocrats have drawn our attention to the original Mother’s Day Proclamation, penned by Julia Ward Howe after the Civil War. I can’t think of a better spirit for this holiday:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace. …

MOMocrats: Dreams of a Mother

Happy Mother’s Day to my precious mom and yours.

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Born in the bulge (or bull-dge)

“Mommy, I was born in the bulge of the Milky Way.”

Declan has been telling me this at random intervals for two or three months now.

Because human anatomy has become one of his secondary interests, after astronomy, he likes to snuggle up to my belly and talk about being born. And since he’s had a proclivity for saying things that make him seem like the great mystic baby from the distant planet of Zog for as long as he could speak, I chalked it up to some verbal conflation of bulging bellies and the latest galaxy wisdom from our bevy of space documentaries. (Oddly, as I was writing this, he was watching Unfolding Universe, his very first favorite space show, and we just took a computer-generated flight through the Milky Way’s “bulge” so there you have it.)

Yesterday, moment after waking, he thrust a book about constellations into my hands.

“We’re having a book about stars now,” he commanded.

I complied.

We got to Taurus, his birth sign, and he pointed at it between the eyes.

“I was born in the bulge,” he told me again. “See? It’s the bulge, where I belong.”

I used to think I knew where babies came from. I’m not so sure anymore.

And speaking of birthdays, happy 129th to the spirit of this person:

Also, to the considerably younger father of mine, as well as my dearest childhood friend, all born on this important (in my universe) day of the fishes.

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What’s funny?

I laughed at something or other I read online yesterday — some sarcastic line or political joke or wry comment — and Declan came running across the room.

“What’s funny, mommy? What’s funny?”

It wasn’t really anything I could explain to him. I told him that I just read something that made me laugh.

“But what was it, mommy?” He touched my knee and tilted his head to the side, looking me straight in the eye. I generally try to respond to any question he asks, so he’s used to an answer.

It made me think of the lifetime of small moments like this that I have behind me — the innumerable times that I did not want to miss the joke. The times I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to snuggle into the warmth of belonging you feel when you are laughing with someone else, into the safety of understanding the same thing together.

Every day, our level of conversation takes another step forward, as does his sense of independence. Like today, when he wanted to bring his starry comforter upstairs from the basement by himself.

“I can do it. I’m a very strong boy,” he told me, just like that, wrestling the thing up the steps. I didn’t stop him. I just maneuvered into a place where I thought I could catch him if he lost his balance.

He is still only two. Remarkable and hilarious and irrational and affectionate and cupcake-crazy two. For now, the answer to “what’s funny” can still be diverted with ease, no explanations necessary.

“It’s funny to have such a funny little boy,” I told him, and tickled him to the edge of wild giggles. “It’s funny and fun.”

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The dawn of compassion

“Hold Mars,” Declan told me, pressing a plastic ball into my hands.

“Now tell it you won’t hit it, push it or hurt it,” he said.

“I promise I won’t hit you, push you or hurt you,” I told the red planet replica. “You are my friend, and I will be kind and gentle with you.”

I stood up and handed it back to Declan.

“Do you understand me?” He asked. I nodded.

I may have to rename the dog Mars.

Last night, “Monster House” came on one of the family movie channels. Absentmindedly thinking it was fine for him to watch because it was animated, I left it on.

In the first moments, a scary old man grabs a tricycle away from a little girl, then breaks it and confiscates it. Declan’s face fell and his eyes welled with tears.

“He… he broke it!” He said, turned to me, his bottom lip was quivering.

“I know. That was mean, wasn’t it?” I replied.

“But what if she needs it?” He shook his head, clearly still stung by the cruelty of the scene.

The plot shifted to another character. I convinced Declan that the new boy on the screen was going to help the girl get her bike back, then I distracted him into hugs and storybooks and turned the TV off.

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Someone to watch over me

My son has been busting out with mad sweetness for the past 24 hours. Although he asserted his masculinity by roaring along with some despairing OSU football fans last night for the first half of the game, when we came home, he sweetly decided he should brush my hair before bedtime. Then he kissed me on the forehead and said “Good night, mommy.”

This morning, he noticed the tiniest cut on my finger.

“Is this a boo-boo, mommy?”

“Yes. Just a little one. It doesn’t hurt,” I said.

“I’ll go and get you a bandage.”

And off he went to the bathroom, foraging for the band-aids, which were stored in a high cabinet that he had no prayer of reaching on his own. I tried to tell him that I didn’t need one, but he insisted until I brought down the box, pulled one out and helped him curl it around my pinky.

“There you go. Is that better now?” He asked.

Seeing his desire to be a caretaker, to be useful and kind, my heart lurched a little.

“It’s so much better now, thank you Declan,” I said, hugging him tightly, kissing his forehead.

“You’re welcome,” he answered.

Do I really have to subject him to (or share him with) the rest of the world?

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This is a galaxy

Photo by Sufi Nawaz.
That’s what Declan told me this week.

It is a disk, like our Milky Way.

He’s been collecting them.

“Can I have another galaxy, mom?”

“Can you find me another galaxy?”

We have a galaxy bank.

We are far richer than we imagined.

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The specter of cousin Eugene, part two

Continued from this post.
I’ve subscribed to a variety of developmental newsletters ever since the week I found out I was going to be a mother. During my pregnancy, I enjoyed seeing what food item they would compare my baby’s size with each week (shrimp, lime, coconut) and which parts of his body were forming.

For the first year of Declan’s life, the weekly email missives let me know the scope of abilities that he could have, and told me which ones he definitely should have. They reassured me that I had some idea what I was doing as I got the inevitable questions from the many many expert strangers that a baby’s presence in the world invites. They reinforced certain notions I had been given about parenting that might make you look crazy, particularly to the non-parenting world, like my sister-in-law’s suggestion that I talk to Declan about the daily things we did to help his language skills develop. It’s somehow easier to justify the loony look of talking to your six-month-old about a Diane Arbus photograph at MOMA or the uses for red cabbage at the grocery store when you know that what you can point to the effectiveness of your actions underneath an “expert” heading somewhere.

These days, the newsletters appear monthly. The last one came on Declan’s two and half year birthday. It suggested that at his age, he should know a few colors, body parts and people, and be speaking in two-word sentences.


“You can help her improve her verbal skills by giving her details,” writes the cheerful email. “If she says, ‘Dog sleep,’ for example, you might say, ‘Yes, Spot is curled up and fast asleep on the chair.’ She can’t imitate your complex language patterns just yet, but she’s learning more all the time.”


This visited my inbox during a week when Declan has repeatedly been reciting the following (his shorthand of a part of the narrative from the documentary 95 Worlds and Counting):


You go down into the holes, if you dare, re-verberating, supersonic gas rushing out.
A pool of liquid nitrogen boiling fervently.
When nitrogen boils, intense pressure builds, until the geyser finally ends.


While visiting my brother’s farm over Thanksgiving, I tried to settle him down after a full day of cousin playtime. The usual lullabies, like “Hush Little Baby” (known to us as “Baby in Town”), weren’t very effective.


“Can you sing about liquid nitrogen?” He asked me sweetly.


I tried. I really did.


And that, like dozens of other stories about the things that occur in our daily life, can be related with innocent intentions and still end up making me feel like Cousin Eugene’s mom.
The divide between celebrating his appetite for learning and being perceived as a braggart is a hairline. Some look at me as though I must be one of those Olympic coach parents who insists on putting him through wicked daily mental gymnastics, rather than a person who simply tries to open the channels to the things he shows interest in. Fortunately, others, sometimes strangers, take in his qualities and marvel at him with me.

Declan’s
own actions in public can have a similar effect – sometimes his interests can completely throw people who don’t expect that his answers to ordinary questions will be quite so complicated. And while some people react beautifully, others look at him like a mutant (particularly seven-year-old boys).


I do see every child as brilliant in their own right – in ways that manifest differently, and certainly with widely varying degrees, including some that aren’t so obvious. Yet culturally, we are so prone to compare individuals, to see confidence and the celebration of accomplishment as things that make us somehow personally deficient, not healthy and happy and learning. I try to see these things in Declan’s peers and appreciate the things that they can offer each other.


Parenting magazines constantly tell us that all kids learn at their own rate, and remind us that we shouldn’t read too much into a child’s abilities at a young age. After all, Albert Einstein had early speech delays. Neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing had dyslexia, as do novelist John Irving, artist Robert Rauschenberg and billionaire Richard Branson. The same publications, along with other, more experienced moms also remind me regularly that Declan’s esoteric interests in space may just evaporate one day, and that it would be completely normal for him to forget many of the things that he knows so well right now.


I try and keep my own opinion – and expectations – of him in check, for both of our sakes. But when he gets as excited about science and scientists as he would if Steve from Blue’s Clues walked into the house for dinner tonight, it’s hard not to bask in the glow all that he is becoming and feel proud.

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Blinding me with science

Negotiations over things like bathtime and meals with my terrible two-year-old keep getting stranger and stranger. On some days, I must serve soy nuggets in flower formation with a pile of ketchup in the center to make food appetizing, or sing the same songs or read the same books 364 times in a row.

Today Declan wouldn’t put on a sweater before he had to go out into the cold with his father. He wanted to watch episode three of Elegant Universe for the second time. (My favorite thing he has said to me while watching this show – which I am still struggling to understand – is “Look, mom! It’s Ed Witten!”) Mind you, we do love Blue’s Clues, Elmo and prominent theoretical physicists around here.

I grabbed a kelly green thermal shirt and said “look, it’s a Brian Greene shirt.” That worked well. He wore it until bathtime tonight, when, after insisting that I draw Saturn in the water and spiral galaxies on the bath tile with pink foam soap several times over, he finally surrendered to the desire to get into the warm water and told me “I need to take my Brian Greene shirt off.”

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What I am grateful for

With Thanksgiving almost here, I’ve been enjoying a lot of posts about gratitude, like this one, this one, these and these.

I feel like this blog is already full to brimming with reasons that I am thankful to be a mom. But another one occurred to me this afternoon as I looked at Declan napping in his car seat. There were dark little circles under his eyes and the flaky evidence of an oncoming cold under his nose. He has been extra fussy the past 24 hours or so, feeling slightly feverish, waking in the wee hours of the morning to wail, for unknown reasons, “I need a bath!” over and over, inconsolable for twenty exhausting minutes.

He yelled at me in Neander-toddler more than once today: “Unh! Unh!” his arms outstretched, his feet stomping, his needs or desires completely unclear. And more than once my voice strained in frustration as I told him “I can’t understand you! Please take a breath and try and tell me what you want!”

But then there was a time today when I just held him, felt him collapse into me and recognized the obvious — that “unh!” was simply grunt-speak for “comfort me.” There was also a moment when I almost snapped and yelled, but didn’t because I looked in his watery eyes and remembered that my yelling today would likely mean his yelling tomorrow.

I am grateful for all of the moments when he has reminded me to be a kinder person. I am grateful for the moments when I remember that telling him about the kind of person I’d like him to be doesn’t compare at all to showing him.

Life soundtrack: Velvet Underground with Nico, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” Launch

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Boys are from Ganymede

There are few creatures on earth that seem as alien to me these days as a teenage boy. I haven’t considered much about them, probably since I was a teenage girl.

Now that I am mother to a son, I pay more attention, particularly to interactions between parents and boys. A couple of months ago, I watched a mother smiling ear to ear as she pushed her shirtless seven- or eight-year-old around in a grocery cart. His hair was buzzed down to golden fuzz and his front teeth looked big and new to his face. The boy and his mother seemed to be enjoying each other’s company immensely and for no discernible reason. She nodded at me, I think because I had my own, considerably smaller boy in a shopping cart. Being mothers of boys connected us somehow.

I notice the awkwardness of skinny boys walking down the street with haircuts that are supposed to look like they aren’t haircuts hiding their eyes. I picture Declan becoming this kind of teenager, although it’s just as likely he’ll become a stocky athlete. With our long-haired ways, a buzz haircut could be his form of rebellion.

Yesterday, as I was scanning a clearance rack at Target, I saw a teenage boy lumbering from aisle to aisle with a silver mesh garbage can over his head like a space helmet. He stopped at the end of two or three aisles with his hands open expectantly, waiting for a response. He finally found his father, who paused a cell phone conversation just long enough to give him a quick, amused smile. I saw them in the store a couple more times before I checked out. The garbage can was still on the boy’s head as they perused products in the shampoo aisle.

I found myself thinking that if Declan has that kind of sense of humor about himself when he’s a teenager, we will have done alright as parents.

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