September 23, 2005

why I should NOT have cable TV

Hey, it’s Friday! So let’s play a game! To distract me from my continuous CNN viewing!*

Are you ready? Okay, here’s the game: tell me either how you got here or what the squiggly letters are at the end of the ‘post comment’ section. Or what you ate for lunch. Anything! I don’t care if today is your first or your 200th visit (some of you are getting close, by the way)–speak up! Say something!

Come on, it’ll be fun!

And if you are looking for first-hand accounts of What It’s Currently Like To Be In Houston, go here. Then take a moment to speak with whomever it is you speak with about these things. Please tell them that I said thank you for my sister-in-law and her family’s uneventful and safe trip to OKC.

I’ll be back later to tell you about Henry’s field trip and the birthday party we’re going to this afternoon. Outside! On a day when the predicted high may be in the low 90s! Whoo hoo!

*Why I must stop watching CNN: did you know that the Governor of Louisiana has asked everyone who chooses to defy the mandatory evacuation order to write their social security number on their arm in permanent ink to make identification of the bodies easier? Yep.

September 21, 2005

random Charlieness

Charlie has been feeling a little ambivalent about school lately. He will cry halfheartedly at breakfast, until he realizes that Henry is ALSO going to school (and thus that he will not be missing anything at home); when we get to his classroom, he insists that I carry him in, and then attaches himself to my leg (there’s a bit in The Nanny Diaries about the ’spatula’ move that all the mommies use to scrape the child off their $400.00 wool trousers and deposit him on the nanny. I need to get the book out again and see if I can practice that–). Of course, his teachers are busy chatting with the mommies of the children who do NOT need to be physically removed from their parents (it is ALWAYS the mommies who hang out and visit–the daddies, so very wisely, drop and run). So EVERY SINGLE DAY I am left saying, ‘It’s okay, Charlie, you’ll have a great time! Look, no one is playing with the castle! Hey, maybe one of these friends wants to play!’ all the while wondering how long it will take a teacher to notice that I AM STILL HERE and that I have a three-year-old wrapped around my thigh. Ugh.

Last week, as I pulled in to the parking lot at Charlie’s school, he announced quite clearly, ‘You are NOT leaving me here.’

But I did! Ha ha! And, by his own accounting, he had a great day.

In other Charlie news, we are making no headway whatsoever on the potty training. But he has learned to blow his nose, which is huge since, like his brother, he is allergic to EVERYTHING that grows in our yard. And it’s not really true to say that we are making NO headway with the potty; it’s just going
V E R Y S L O W L Y. And it is still very messy.

Yesterday morning, Charlie said to Wade, as he does every morning, ‘Daddy, are you going to work today?’

‘Yes, buddy, I am.’

‘And is Henry going to school?’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘But I’m NOT going to school.’ (This was true; he only goes on Monday and Thursday.)

I asked him, ‘Are you going to work?’

‘Nooo!’ he said laughing.

‘Don’t you have a job?’ I said.

‘Nooo!’ Then he thought about it. ‘I DO have a job! My job is to use the potty!’

Apparently his mommy is not the only one around here trying to get fired.

September 20, 2005

I don’t know that ’sexy’ is the word I would use

In this morning’s New York Times (the paper we love to hate) is this article, about young women at ‘elite’ universities (read: Ivy League) who are asserting that they will leave their careers, down the road, to stay at home with their children.

My favorite moment is this: ‘Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women’s plans to stay home with their children. “A lot of the guys were like, ‘I think that’s really great,’ ” Ms. Currie said. “One of the guys was like, ‘I think that’s sexy.’ Staying at home with your children isn’t as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30’s now.”‘

What unsettles me the most (beyond the simple fact that I have no idea why this warrants a story in the New York Times) is the naivete of these young women. Will that young man still find it ’sexy’ when his wife is struggling to lose the last 15 (or 40 or 60 or . . . ) pounds she gained when she was pregnant? Will he find it sexy when he comes home from work to a wife who has not showered in two days, a refridgerator that is empty, and a house that looks like a Federal disaster site? Will he find it sexy when his wife announces that until she has empirical evidence that his vasectomy was successful, he will be sleeping on the couch?

I suspect not.

I am also unsettled by the underlying assumption that motherhood will come at just the right moment, when these bright, overachieving young women are ready to walk away from their careers, and that the delight of changing diapers and answering four million WHY questions (before breakfast!) will eclipse the intellectual triumph of any work they could possibly be doing outside the home.

My life as a stay-home mom is a lot of things, virtually all of which are good, but it is certainly not sexy. I’m not down on young women wanting to stay at home with children; I am down on the continual idealization of this choice, particularly this need to make mommying ’sexy’. I wish these girls all the success in the world, and if they can figure out how to cure Mom Ass forever or prevent my overeducated brain from seeping out of my ears during yet ANOTHER conversation about the merits of the various members of the Justice League, well, then I will stop worrying about them.

Edited to add: Go here for more discussion of this article.

September 19, 2005

it’s all good (or it will be tomorrow)

Dammit you people are nice. You are killing me with the niceness. Also? You make me think, which is so important to me I can’t even begin to tell you. Thank you to everyone who took the time to comment on the previous post.

I’ve been thinking all day about what I wanted to say here, and I have a couple of things. The first is this: all of the things we have learned about Henry in the past few months have radically changed the way I imagine myself as a parent, and that is hard. I am constantly fighting an underlying sense that his struggles in the world–and Charlie’s, too–are the result of my terrible parenting. I know that this is not true, but on many days it feels like it is. And every decision–what to feed him, how to discipline him, where to send him to school–takes on a kind of monolithic importance, when really, these are all just pieces of the puzzle. And he is a happy, healthy child, who knows that he is loved and has no idea at all that he is different. But it is still hard.

I was overwhelmed today not because anyone hurt my feelings or made me angry but because sometimes I get worn out with the work of being the mommy. Last night, for no particular reason, I snapped out of a sound sleep and my first thought was, dammit I need to spend more TIME with the boys, one on one, and then I laid there trying to think about what the hell I could do with each of them, craft projects or phonics worksheets or planting a tree or . . . I don’t know. And I don’t know why I do that to myself, but there it is. And the half of my brain that isn’t planning an elaborate lesson on the various sounds made by the letter U is thinking, jesus all I want to do is BE ALONE for a day or an hour or my god for the length of one hot cup of tea. And so I started my day feeling like I was underwater and sinking fast.

And you all offered such thoughtful advice and kind words of support and it just made me feel more overwhelmed. But that’s not about you all, really, it’s about me. And I do thank all of you for taking the time to respond and respond again.

I feel fortunate to have found such nice people on the Interweb. Please keep coming back. I plan to wade back into the shallow water soon and write about really entertaining stuff like How I Stumped the Victoria’s Secret Bra Size Calculator! and My Free Haircut! and Funny Things Charlie Has Said Recently! I promise.

September 18, 2005

the real reason we don’t go to church

This afternoon, while the boys were having their lunch, we started talking about where they would go to school next year. They are ‘on the list’ at three Catholic schools, including the school that Wade and his siblings went to, which is our first choice, as it is right around the corner and has a good academic program (that should really go in the opposite order, shouldn’t it?). Wade and I were both raised Catholic, but we have both ‘lapsed’ and have NO intention of returning to the Catholic church. But Catholic school for the kids? Sure, why not!

Anyway, Charlie has never been to church (come to think of it, he’s never even been IN a church), and Henry has been exactly three times: my brother’s wedding (he was 12 weeks old), his own baptism (in an Episcopal church, don’t even ask), and one memorable Christmas day, when he was two and a half. He skipped in with my mother, stood up in the pew, and asked, ‘Is this the restaurant?’ Then, at the end of the processional hymn, he clapped and said, ‘Hooray! Now let’s go. I want to eat.’

So it has occured to us that maybe, in the next year or so, he should actually GO to Mass with, well, someone who is not Wade or me, just to get the idea before he starts school. Today I said, ‘If you go to school at St. Right Down the Road’s, you will have to go to church. Would you like to go sometime before then with Mimi?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t want to go to church.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, thinking oh, no, what have I gotten myself into?

‘Because you have to sit STILL. And then it’s all stand up sit down stand up sit down. It’s boring.’

Wade looked at me and said, ‘HOW DOES HE KNOW THAT?’

I don’t know, but he’s got a point.

Edited to add: When I wrote this, as I said in the comments, I was just being funny (because, honestly, I am from a long line of people who make jokes to counter stress. And ha ha ha, this school thing has been WAY stressfull! And not funny at all!). But I was not trying to belittle anyone’s faith or express any ambivalence about our school choice. Moving Henry from his wonderful Montessori school has been heartbreaking, in so many ways. I feel like I have somehow failed him–and Charlie, too–by so terribly misreading what he needed. And now I am struggling to balance my own beliefs with his needs. And I end up making jokes, because I don’t really know how else to talk about this.

I think that this has been the most difficult parent thing I have done so far. Harder than the NICU and the reflux and all those days when someone cried and clung to my leg at school drop-off (like Charlie did! Today, even!). I thought that if I knew what I believed in, I could pass that on to my children, but it’s not that simple. What I DO know, though, is that I love my sons and I want them to have the best educational experience possible. And I am trying to make peace with what that means.

And I am thankful for all of the input, and particularly for everyone’s kindness here. Because this is so very hard for me, and making jokes doesn’t really make it any better.

That’s all.

September 15, 2005

those must be some NICE capri pants

This morning, before my first cup of coffee, I came across this article about Fashion Week in the New York Times. You all DID know that it was fashion week, yes? You ARE keeping up with the new collections, aren’t you? Yeah, me neither.

So why am I writing about this article? Because of this sentence, which has stuck in my head all day: “Sometimes the day dresses look like nightgowns and the evening wear looks like school uniforms and the flapper dresses in the front row provoke visual arguments with the cashmere sweater sets and the $10,000 couture versions of something one would expect to see on a soccer mom.”

Ten grand for soccer mom wear? Really?

I found myself doing the math on my outfit du jour: jean jacket, black v-neck tee, chinos in ‘pool green’, black beaded flip-flops. Except for the shoes, which I stole from my mother, everything else is prete-a-porter from Old Navy (which, I believe, is French for ‘from the clearance rack’). I think the whole outfit would have cost less than $50.00, had I paid full price for any of it, which I didn’t, of course. Because I have two children and no job and I have tuition to pay and college funds to fund and organic milk to buy and . . . and because if I’m going to spend TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS on an outfit, I certainly hope not to look like–well, like the Mommy.

But since then I’ve been thinking–how DO you spend ten grand on ’something one would expect to see on a soccer mom’? And what is it that the NY Times fashion critic thinks ’soccer moms’ are wearing these days? And aren’t the fashionistas offended by the term ’soccer mom’ (seeing as so many moms are)? And flapper dresses are back? As daywear? Really?

Tomorrow I will have my coffee before I read the Times.