November 30, 2005

Charlie has a new favorite word

It’s ‘hooker.’

Last night he and Wade were hanging out in his room (which means that Wade was half asleep on the bed and Charlie was taking EVERY SINGLE THING out of his closet and piling it all in the middle of the floor). He came hopping out of the closet and said happily, ‘Daddy, look what I have!’

Without opening his eyes, Wade said, ‘What is it, buddy?’

‘It’s a HOOKER!’ Charlie announced, waving a hanger in the air. ‘I found it in my closet!’

Wade said, ‘Go show Mommy. And be sure you tell her what it is.’

He came running into Henry’s room, waving the hanger and yelling, ‘Mommy! I found a hooker in my closet! I have a whole bunch of them in there!’

And I said, ‘Can you say, “This sure is a purty hooker?”‘

Then Wade got him to say, ‘This is my favorite hooker!’

I’m pretty sure there was something about it costing ten dollars, too. It went on like that all evening.

This morning at breakfast, he said to me, ‘Where’s my hooker?’ And when we left for school, he said, ‘Can I take my hooker to Starbucks with me?’ At that point it just got wierd (he was carrying a red, child-size hanger around with him!) so I made myself stop laughing and talked him in to taking some superheros in the car. And that was the end of the hooker.

November 29, 2005

WARNING: this post includes talk of severed body parts (well, not completely severed, but close enough)

Because Whiffleboy asked:

People are always asking me how I stay in shape; I like to say, ‘You’ve not spent much time with my kids, have you?’ We are constantly one good thunk away from the emergency room, particularly with Henry, who is, uh, energetic AND has an INCREDIBLY high pain tolerance (seriously, it makes me nervous. Someday he’s going to break a bone and not realize it until its too late, whatever that means). We have a very nice after-hours triage line at Children’s Hospital, where you can talk to a nurse at, say, three am when your child has croup (done that!) or at six pm when he slams head first into a door frame (done THAT!) or on a Sunday when he informs you that he has cut his finger on what may or may not have been a rusty nail (you all remember that, yes?). I’ve called the help line so many times that two of the nurses REMEMBER me and will ask how the last call turned out. It’s embarassing.

But somehow (touch wood) we’ve only been to the ER once. Well, okay, we’ve TECHNICALLY had two ER-type emergencies, but the first time, when Henry fell and hit his head on the diving board of a friend’s pool and had to have stitches, we didn’t actually GO to the ER, since our host was a doctor; we just zipped out to his office and voila! Stiches in the back of my three-year-old’s head.

But the ER–right. A year ago March, one early early morning, I was trying to make coffee; the clock on the microwave said 6:14. Wade and the boys were in the family room; the boys wanted him to read to them and were bringing him books. I could hear them jockying for position (’My book first! MY BOOK FIRST!’) and then there was a thunk, and Henry started screaming. Wade said, in that exaggeratedly calm voice adults use when ALL HELL HAS BROKEN LOOSE but they are trying not to scare the children, ‘I think you should come look at this.’ And I though, jesus, all I want is some COFFEE.

Wade was on the hardwood floor holding Henry, who was bleeding EVERYWHERE. It was like a horror movie. A lovely Ikea sidetable had fallen over and sliced the tip off his big toe. I don’t mean scraped the surface of the skin–I mean SLICED THE TIP OFF HIS TOE (the hunk of skin was still stuck to the underside of the table). I said, in my Overly Calm Adult Voice, ‘Okay, I think we should go to the emergency room.’ Wade said, ‘Yes, I think so too. I need to get dressed.’ I said, ‘That’s a good idea.’ Meanwhile, Henry is SCREAMING and Charlie is peeking out from behind a chair.

Henry, who doesn’t seem to understand that Mommy doesn’t do well with blood, is INSISTING that I hold him, so I plunk him in my lap and try to look at the ceiling as much as possible. Wade calls his parents (because I’m not taking Charlie with me to the ER, no way) and when my father-in-law answers the phone, he says, ‘We’re taking Henry to the emergency room and we’re bringing Charlie to your house.’ And he hangs up. We load everyone in the car; Henry is still bleeding and is alternating between yelling, ‘MOMMY! I’M SCARED!’ and howling, ‘WHY DID CHARLIE KNOCK THE TABLE OVER ON MY FOOT?’ Wade asks me, ‘Do you want to drive?’

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘I do NOT want to drive.’

We pull into my in-laws’ driveway and fling Charlie at them. He’s still in his pyjamas and hasn’t had a clean diaper. ‘We’ll call you!’ Wade yells and we peel out.

At the hospital, I try to talk Henry into letting Daddy take him in to the ER, as he is STILL bleeding, but he sobs ‘No, I want MOMMY! YOU take me in! Please, Mommy!’ The waiting room is completely deserted and there is no one at the desk. Finally the receptionist appears, summoned I’m sure by Henry’s wails, and says, ‘Can I help you?’

Henry yells, ‘Charlie knocked a table over on my foot and I’m SCARED!’

The receptionist says, ‘Go right through that door.’ I realize later that not only is Henry bleeding and crying, but I am also covered in blood. I’m sure that expedited things. At the least, it seemed to have startled the receptionist a little.

The thing about the ER is this: if you go on a Saturday night, it’s busy. Gunshots, stabbings, sick kids, you name it. (At least that’s what it was like the night we took my grandmother.) Go on a Wednesday morning, and you’ve got the whole place to yourself. Two nurses cleaned Henry’s foot up, another took our insurance information, and a fourth (god bless her) brought me coffee. Henry was fascinated by the cleaning and examining and bandaging part of the experience; he stopped crying and asked all sorts of questions about what the nurse was doing, and told everyone who asked that Charlie had knocked a table over on his toe. To distract him, Wade told him about the time that he (Wade) broke his brother’s leg. They were playing Skateboard Joust, which involved knocking each other off the skateboards (duh). My brother-in-law still swears that Wade ruined his NCAA basketball career, although I think some of the blame needs to go to the doctor who misdiagnosed the broken leg until it really WAS too late and they had to re-break it, which is a very bad thing. ‘Was Uncle Wes mad at you?’ Henry asked. ‘Sure,’ Wade told him, ‘but it was an accident.’ Henry stared at him. ‘Is Uncle Wes STILL mad at you?’ ‘No,’ Wade said, ‘that was a long time ago.’

Henry thought about this. ‘Well, I’m still mad at Charlie, but when we grow up, I won’t be.’

The doctor came to look at his foot and told us he wanted it X rayed, although he didn’t think it was broken, and he asked AGAIN what had happened. ‘My brother knocked a table over on it,’ Henry said, ‘and I’m mad at him. But Daddy broke Uncle Wes’s leg, and he’s not mad any more, so I won’t be mad at Charlie forever. It was an accident.’ The doctor just laughed.

There were no broken bones, and nothing to stitch up (since the table had CUT THE TIP OF HIS TOE COMPLETELY OFF) so they bandaged him up and sent us home with a prescription for some Vicodan. We loaded him up with that and he was like a drunk fraternity pledge. He kept patting me on the face and saying, ‘I LUUUUUVE you Mommy. I luuuuvve you.’ It was pretty funny.

And for DAYS afterwards, every time he thought of it, he would say, ‘Charlie, I’m mad at you for knocking the table over on my toe, but when we grow up I won’t be mad any more.’ But the best part? Wade swears, to this day, that it was HENRY who bumped the table and sent it crashing over. On to his own foot. Silly boy.

November 28, 2005

the butter people

Yesterday, during the boys’ Enforced Rest Time, I was surfing the Interwebs, trying to get a handle on my Christmas shopping (okay, no I wasn’t; I was reading blogs. I am in deep denial that Christmas is only WEEKS away, as I have purchased NOTHING and am overly aggravated by grandmotherly type people asking what the boys need–they don’t need anything). Anyway, via Mamazine, I came across Linda Hirschman’s provocative essay about the feminist politics of the opt-out “revolution,” and I found myself thinking OH MY GOD SHE’S RIGHT. And it was killing me.

Hirschman’s theory is essentially this (yes, I think you should read the whole essay, but it’s long and you are busy so I will summarize): “while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home.” What does this mean? It means, as Judith Warner argues, that the “choice” to stay home is not a choice per se, but a default acquiescence to generations of gender stereotyping. It is a fall into the model where the half of a couple with the uterus gestates and births and feeds the baby–and, while she’s at it, feeds the rest of the family and cleans the bathrooms and drives to doctor appointments and plans craft projects and . . . you get the idea. While the half of the couple with the penis conquers the world.

Yes, I exaggerate, and no, this isn’t (exactly) how it works at my house. I do not have gainful employment (unless you are counting this web site, and that won’t be “gainful” until you people CLICK THOSE GOOGLE ADS a few more times). But I am one of the women that Hirschman talks about, whether I like it or not. I am able to stay home because we do not, honestly, need my income, and I am aware how fortunate I am to be in that position. Yet Hirschman argues that this kind of rhetoric is a large part of the problem–discussing the “choice” to stay home in terms of economic “need” ignores the intellectual and social needs of women. She writes about “the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family — with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks — is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust.”

While I agree with Hirschman, I still like to think of myself as a feminist, as someone who did not buy into the Father Knows Best narrative of domesticity (really, who vacuums in a dress and heels?). I kept my own name when I got married, despite the fact that it confuses the insurance company. And while I really DID choose to stay home when Henry was born, I did not necessarily chose to be a “housewife” (a term I despise even more than “SAHM”).

I am, in fact, a complete failure at the “housewife” part of this job. I don’t cook, I pay someone else to clean, and my motivation in doing laundry is entirely selfish (I am particular about the laundry–get over it). I love my children, and for all kinds of reasons I am thankful that I do not “have” to work, but my god there are days when I crave the company of adults–not just other mommies, but people who have read the New York Times recently or have actually FINISHED a novel or seen a movie BEFORE it comes to the dollar theater. My friends and I talk about how much we wish we could do these things, but we’re not actually doing them–we’re too busy scraping Playdough off the hardwood floors or loading the dishwasher or making doctors appointments. Or whatever it is we do all day with the kids. Because often, at the end of the day, I wonder–what DID I do today?

Hirschman, however, sees a way out: “The home-economics trap involves superior female knowledge and superior female sanitation. The solutions are ignorance and dust. Never figure out where the butter is. ‘Where’s the butter?’ Nora Ephron’s legendary riff on marriage begins. In it, a man asks the question when looking directly at the butter container in the refrigerator. ‘Where’s the butter?’ actually means butter my toast, buy the butter, remember when we’re out of butter. Next thing you know you’re quitting your job at the law firm because you’re so busy managing the butter. If women never start playing the household-manager role, the house will be dirty, but the realities of the physical world will trump the pull of gender ideology. Either the other adult in the family will take a hand or the children will grow up with robust immune systems.”

I have never managed the butter at our house, and I think it’s the only thing that keeps me sane. I struggle with the mommy thing, not so much because my children are not who I expected them to be, or even because I am not the mommy I imagined I would be, but because I don’t want to do the “housewife” things. I would rather spend my child-free time reading long essays about the failure of third-wave feminism, because that makes me a better wife and mother and member of society. And one could argue that I took all this on–the kids, the housework, the butter–when I decided to leave my job and “stay home.” One could argue that Wade goes to work and doesn’t get to choose what he does and does not do there. But I think that misses the point. Wade’s job does not define him as a person; mine does. And Hirschman is right, the mommy job defines us not by our intellect or our social activism but by our gender, and heaps on us the gender expectations of a century ago.

For the longest time, Charlie went around yelling, “You’re supposed to help the butter people!” We were baffled by this, until we realized that it was his mis-hearing of a line from The Incredibles (”You’re supposed to help OUR people!”). I don’t want to be one of the butter people; I don’t want to be the mommy all the time. And I am torn between knowing that for my family, having me “at home,” making doctors appointments and playing soccer and reading Harry Potter aloud is the best possible thing and feeling like I have somehow compromised both myself and my family by conforming to (and thus confirming) the gender stereotypes.

And you wonder why it takes so much coffee to get through my day.