Category Archives: KIDOME

TIME Mag Fox Newses themselves into the Grand Tradition of Sexism with its Latest Cover

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I was so disgusted when I saw the cover of TIME – meant only to shock and provoke – that it has brought me out of my semi-retirement from this blog.  Boy, kind of thought this was a thing of the past, but lo! Our grotesque patriarchal society is alive and well and seeking to repress and oppress women.  This, the same election season where (yet more hysterical) Republicans are waging a war on women, TIME decides to take a side in the parenting/breastfeeding debate.  Should you or shouldn’t you, how long should you?

Those of us who adopted the theory of Attachment Parenting, which is a way of rearing children that shuns the modern theories (all written and promoted by men, mind you, seeking to take all of the power away from women – the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world and don’t forget it) and gives everything back to the mother (and the father, if they can dig it).  That means co-sleeping, breastfeeding not just for food but for comfort  and it means holding your kid a lot more than keeping them away from you – in a crib in a dark room by themselves and left to “cry it out,” or alone in their stroller and made to cry it out.  When a baby, still mostly reptilian, reaches out to be held, it is the notion of our society that you would spoil that baby if you picked him or her up.  What could more silly?

We evolved to drink water when we were thirsty, to eat when we’re hungry, to seek out others when we’re lonely and yes, babies evolved to want to be held.  They need to be held.

Okay, so some attachment parents use child-led weaning; they allow the baby to nurse until they’re ready to let go of it – that they are secure enough so that they no longer need the COMFORT.  I stopped my child nursing after 2 1/2 years.  I’d had enough and she was fine. She transferred to water and is now a healthy, independent, thoughtful, secure 13 year-old.  Watching my daughter evolve into the truly wonderful person she is today makes me completely sold on Attachment Parenting.  For life.

But what TIME did was shake a stick at a rattle snake. They tried to gross out the American population with the notion of a “big kid” – he looks, like, 8 – still sucking on the boob.  The mom stands there with a “so what!” look on her face and society is put in the position of judging. And judge they do. The comments range from “you’re going to raise a Norman Bates” to “you’ve humiliated that kid for life.” No one looks at it and feels supportive of it – why, because TIME deliberately manipulated and misrepresented what Attachment Parenting is – and it is the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever seen them do.

And in the end it always comes back to blaming the mother.  Blame the mom because she is warping society with her sick little ways of wanting to nurse way too long. Blame the mom because she didn’t nurse long enough.

The fact is that every woman SHOULD breast feed if they can. If they can’t, so be it. It is less a “choice” as it is a necessity for the child — remember, the desire to formula feed babies was mostly born out of the need to sell formula.  Far more horrifying than the TIME magazine cover was Jennifer Lopez popping out two accessory twins and announcing that she wasn’t going to breast feed them.  That was it for her. She had to get back to becoming more famous than anyone ought to be — it’s hard to imagine why she had kids at all. Yet no one really cares about that because the patriarchy has been preserved; J. Lo exists for the pleasure of men, mostly, and for women who long to look like her.  The TIME magazine cover is a way of yet again slapping women down and robbing them of the one thing they truly do control: food for babies.

I may never pick up another issue of TIME again.

Navigating the Treacherous Waters of Sex Ed in Middle School

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“Hello, this is Mrs. So and So, your daughter’s science teacher? We need your permission for her to take home a baby.”
“A baby?”
“We sent home a permission slip but your daughter never turned it in.”
“A baby?”
“So does she have your permission?”

A frantic call from my daughter earlier that afternoon alerted me to there being something important either she had forgotten, or worse, I had forgotten, that now needed to be hastily fixed. I was pretending not to know what the “baby” was but I did know. It was a futile experiment to wart off teen pregnancy in middle school kids. What with all of the raging hormones, pop songs, sex-soaked billboard ads, and Viagra ads (“erections lasting more than four hours”) the school district was spending some of its money trying to do the jobs parents should be doing as in, “if you turn up pregnant at 14 I’ll rip your hair out.” Just kidding. Maybe not so severely but with the same end-result. Are parents doing their job? Apparently not very well. Add to that, the allure of all that attention they get, all of the TLC pregnant women get, and that TV show 16 and Pregnant. To say nothing of Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin.

“Teenagers shouldn’t be having babies,” I told my daughter and her cousin at the mall the other day. “They should just go have abortions like sensible people do.” Okay, maybe I said it and maybe I didn’t, but the point is that no one really has abortions anymore. There is a race war on, haven’t you heard? Hispanics are taking over the planet. White people better start having babies, many of them, and fast.

It’s possible I have become hysterical and am imagining things. Either way, I knew my daughter wanted to do “the baby thing,” because it was just too weird to pass up. Who wouldn’t want to try taking home a doll-baby that cried on a timer, that you had to feed, and rock, and change its diaper, and burp it? It came with a little blanket and clothes!

I first set eyes on the thing when I went to pick her up at a friend’s house. All of these 13 year-olds had babies to tend to. Really, I felt like I’d flown to Utah and was visiting a plural marriage home in the FLDS. They were frantically throwing their babies around, rocking them violently back and forth and when the baby finally got quiet because they’d done something right, they would simply prop it up on a chair as one would do to a doll or a half-read novel. Of course, I did not hesitate to tell them, any time you set a baby down like that they’re going to fall right over onto the tops of their egg shell heads!

By the annoyed looks flicked back at me by them I figured they wanted us moms to stop clucking about. We couldn’t help it, though. As soon as one of the babies started wailing it thrust us backwards in time, to the dark ages of panic — where you’re up in the middle of the night and all you want to do is make the baby stop crying. Not in a way that would put you on the nightly news, of course, but in the normal, motherly way. You know, feed it, rock it, burp it. All of these reactions, by the way, are recorded in the thing. This is how the student is graded. Can they react properly to a crying baby? Wait, is the point of it to TEACH them how to be mothers at 13 or is the point of it to annoy them so much they want to put off being mothers as long as possible.

It’s hard to know. But from the reports my daughter gives me about sex ed in public schools the only time she’s seen an actual penis, apparently, was “in a cartoon” drawing of one (egads) or one riddles with sores. They also saw a video of childbirth. They are doing what they can, I figure, to deter the tweens from their predestined roles as young mothers. Good luck with that. Nature has a way of shoving all of the particulars on the backburner when we’re talking about LOVE and SEX.

But maybe, just maybe, they’ve freaked my daughter out enough that she’ll stay a virgin until she’s at least 25. You know, why is it the business of public schools to teach kids about sex and pregnancy and all of that? Are parents really that out of it that they don’t fill their kids in on this stuff?

Either way, by the time four AM rolled around, that baby started wailing and there was my poor Emma rocking it, feeding it, shaking it (no, she didn’t shake it) as it wailed and howled into the night, sending adults within hearing distance to stir awake and wonder what the fuck was going on in our apartment. Emma started to whine to her mom, “oh god, I can’t do this. It’s broken! It’s broken!” She’d been complaining that the baby was broken because it wouldn’t stop crying. “It’s not broken,” I reassured her. Just keep rocking it.

About fifteen minutes of solid wailing later, to the point where I almost whipped out a breast and started feeding the thing (no, I didn’t), it finally silenced itself.

In the morning, my poor daughter said as she carried the quiet baby out into the living room as if she were carrying a too-full glass of water, careful not to spill a drop, “I’m not having a baby until I’m at least 30.”

In the end, she was given an “F” for the assignment. Apparently her friends had been throwing the baby on the floor to make it stop crying because, they said, it was “broken.” Yeehaw.

You know, it isn’t even really that good of an indicator of what it’s like to have a newborn. Not in the good ways and not in the bad ways. But I think it did sort of put the idea in my daughter’s head of the kind of responsibility it entails. Not that she is ever going to end up a teen mom. I love kids, I love babies — I wish her nothing but happiness and I know she’ll be a great mom. Just not at 13. Or 16. Or even 18.

This is the part where I say I am a single, unmarried mother who went into it with no shame. But I don’t wish that on my daughter. I don’t know what it is like to have a man around to help raise a child. I’m sure there is nothing better than that, even if they want to sleep through the whole thing. Even if the marriage doesn’t last. There isn’t really a way for schools to teach that part of mothering – so they do what they think they can get away with. Preventing teen pregnancy, they feel, is a good place to start. Oh, my friends, if life were only that simple.

 

 

 

Turning 13 – A Happy Birthday to My Teenage Daughter

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When a friend said to me the other day “the next four years are going to fly by.” He said that one day you’re dropping them off at high school and the next day they’re gone. I can’t pretend that I’m prepared for this. We measure our time by our children growing up. We don’t notice each other getting older, particularly, because once you hit 30 it is all basically shades of the same person. But a kid grows up. They turn into a teenager. And they become adults. Out in the world. You know, actual human beings with drivers licenses and taxes they have to pay. The basics just to survive. And then you get into the whole other complicated layers of happiness. Love, marriage maybe, careers, money, acceptance, fulfillment – and then the other part of life – when you feel dissatisfied and unhappy and how that manifests itself. It’s called a mid-life crisis but it really is is that moment when you stare down the barrel of the gun: this is my life. This is what my life is going to be until the day I die.

So we went from 13 to death in twenty seconds flat. We measure time by our children growing up. My daughter was just the best thing that ever happened to me. No other life experience, no relationship, no job has ever matched the importance of raising her. And being her mom has been the BEST thing in my life. The rest of it feels like stitched up skin made to look like a normal person. The stuffs that went into making me seemed to have been collected from junkyards and the backlots of movie studios, trunks full of old costumes – a junk drawer that maybe amounts to something and maybe doesn’t. You dig through it and you find useful things. But you also dig through it and feel the urge to clean it up. But the mom thing – it has been the only wave of reality for me. I knew what I was made to do when she was born: take care of her. Make sure she was fed, well rested, educated, entertained, clean — and I made sure she was read to, every morning, noon and night. I can’t take credit for her love of reading now, though I’d like to. She seems to have just grown into it. Okay, so I’ll take credit for it (I don’t deserve it).

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Cannes Day One

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Traveling to foreign countries is always a mind-altering experience. You know? Seriously? Forget lighting up, tuning in and tuning out or turning on or whatever they called it in the Sixties. If you live in America, traveling outside of this country will blow your mind.

Because it all happened in a blurry dream state, I barely remember the past 24 hours. I know that we woke up at 3am in Los Angeles and drove to LAX, parked in a reliable airport parking spot which shuttles you to the airport. I know that they dropped us off at the Delta terminal but that it was the wrong terminal and so we had to roll our baggage half way around the airport (“It’s just about a five to seven walk. I do it on my lunch break every day.”) to Alaska Air, which partners with Delta. I know we waited about 45 minutes to check-in and get on board. This, because of heightened security measures which did not let you check things in automatically.

An instragram shot of Alaska Air's check-in line

 

I know that we then flew to Seattle, where we had about a four layover. We wandered around that giant airport — which has its own subway system — and I know, at some point, I used their free wi-fi. I know that we got on the plane there, Air France this time, and flew seven hours to Paris. I know that we had our neck pillows and our eye covers and our blankets. I know I tried to sleep that whole time but really just laid there, with my eyes closed.

Emma looking like a prisoner of war

I know that, at some point, they began serving breakfast. Somehow we would get to Paris, wait in two more very long lines before finally getting on a plane to beautiful, peaceful, extraordinary Nice. And we would rent a car and get lost driving around the hills behind Nice. We would drive a long time before realizing we were lost. We would find ourselves on toll roads with no euro, having to use the intercom to speak to the workers to explain in English (which none of them speak) why we had no euros. What morons they must have thought we were. One guy just let us through without paying. An alarm went off. I hope I don’t get charged a fine.

But through all of this, a running dialogue is going on in my head as I explain to my daughter yet again why I am making yet another stupid person mistake: “This is how you learn things,” I said. “You make a mistake and you learn something.” And it’s true. We keep learning things as if we’re headed for some kind of plateau of knowledge – because THEN, maybe then we will have figured it all out. Only to then die. Yes, life. Ah, life.

Painted nails and nearly black hair - ready for Cannes

She looked at me like she felt sorry for me. Poor mom. Someday she’ll realize how cool I am. Right? Right? Kids are funny when they travel. They always want to come until they actually start realizing what a hassle it is. Things are made so comfortable for Americans. We really are like those soft, chubby passengers on that giant cruiser in the sky in Wall-E. Just hook us up and take our money.

But when you travel to other countries you see that it’s so not about you, especially here in France in parts that don’t cater to American tourists. I keep saying “je suis Americaine!” as if it’s some excuse as to why I’m so clueless. They just blink back at me: “And I’m supposed to care because…?” In America we are mostly raised to respect the almighty dollar. That’s really what customer service is all about. You know they can’t really treat you that badly because it will cost them in the end. In France and Italy, the two foreign countries I’ve traveled in most, they don’t give a crap about that. They appreciate your politeness more. It’s hard to get your mind around. In America, it’s backwards: the customer is always right. Here, it’s more like, the nicer you are the better service you will get. Act like an entitled American and be prepared to have people treat you poorly.

It is surreal.

Today is officially the first day here. We will drive from Juan Les Pins, where we ended up staying, to Cannes proper, where I will fight the crowds for a parking spot, then walk into the Palais du Festival. The South of France, the coast near Cannes, has many beautiful villages. Like Italy, there are those the tourists flock to and those the tourists don’t yet know about. All up and down the coast — except Cannes and places that everyone already knows — you can find the prettiest, quietest, sweetest little French towns. And those are really what France is all about, I dare say. I am acting as though I’m an expert when in fact, this is my third visit to France and two out of three of those times I was only in the tourist areas. Now we’re staying in Juan Les Pins, which really doesn’t have many Americans. The reason being, most people who comes to the Cannes Film Fest prefer to stay within walking distance. Now that I’ve rented a car, I know the reason why: it’s god-awfully expensive.

For the amount of money the car cost, plus the hotel, we could have stayed in one of the expensive hotels close to La Croisette. Oh well: live and learn. Make mistakes, lots of them, and then learn more.

Onward and upward. Day One.

 

Frowning Girl Speaks for a Generation

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I love the Frowning Girl meme. It is the gift that keeps on giving. Here is the latest one, sent via Dave Itzkoff’s twitter:

Frowning Girl seems to be always saying: make it stop, make it stop, make it stop. She shot to fame by photo bombing the royal kiss between Kate Middleton and Prince William. Since many of us out there were already sick to death of the royal wedding — I am embarrassed to be a woman the way women fawn all over weddings — the Frowning Girl seemed to say it all, with one expression: STFU.

Here are more Frowning Girl photos.