February 21, 2007

ashes to ashes

Today is Ash Wednesday, so Charlie went to church this morning to get ashes. Of course, he’s never done this before, because I’m a neglectful parent and also not Catholic (any more), and last night as I was tucking him in, he said to me, “Mama, I don’t want to go to church.” Why not? I asked. “Because I’m SCARED,” he said. Hmmm, I said, what are you scared of?

“THE ASHES!” he said.

Of course.

I was telling Jen about that today, and she said, “They’re not PEOPLE ashes, are they?” I said, no, of course not, they’re the palms from Palm Sunday, and she said, “Oh, phew.” And then I started to wonder where CHARLIE thought the ashes came from.

Hmmm.

Wade and I went to a funeral yesterday, and then out for lunch, and while we were waiting for our barbecue, Wade said, “I wouldn’t choose to have a religious service for my memorial, but I can see how it would be comforting for people. And really, the memorial is for everyone else, not the person who has died.” He thought some more and then said, “You can do whatever you want when I die, just don’t have the coffin there.”

“Oh no,” I said, “I’m cremating you.”

“Good,” he said.

I’ve decided that for Lent this year, I’m going to give up multitasking. I’m going to do ONE thing at a time, as much as I can: read or write or be with my kids. Because all sorts of things–Charlie’s fear of the ashes, my friend’s father’s death–have been making me think about what I might be missing while I’m doing three other things.

For forty days, I am going to wait until after carpool to check my e-mail, turn my computer off when the kids come home, keep the kitchen table clear of all my various projects so we can eat without chaos. I’m going to count time in smaller pieces, in half hours instead of in huge blocks of work time, and do one thing at a time.

I’m tired of feeling like I’m missing half of my day doing things I can’t remember later. I don’t think it’s the things I’m doing, I think it’s the way I’m doing them–I do too many things all at once. And while this is sometimes inevitable (right now I am writing this while the laundry goes, for example) I think I can pare down and pay more attention to what I’m doing.

For forty days, at least.

February 19, 2007

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried

Guess what I did yesterday! Guess!

I spent the day in bed. With stomach flu. Yes, really!

Today I am spraying everything in my path with Lysol, including the kids. No, not really, but I have practically bathed them in Purell. Because what the hell?

Seriously.

In the hours that I wasn’t prostrated with flu, I read Babyproofing Your Marriage, by Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O’Neill, and Julia Stone. I didn’t unlike it, but I was having a hard time putting my finger on what it was that wasn’t ringing true to me. Until I got sick.

Subtitled “How to Laugh More, Argue Less, and Communicate Better as Your Family Grows,” Babyproofing Your Marriage is the “warts-and-all truth about how having children can affect your relationship.” In many places, the authors–all mothers themselves–are dead on. They talk, for example, about the tendency to keep score once we become parents, to note every time we take out the trash or get up in the night with a sick kid, and to remind our significant other just HOW DAMN MUCH we’re doing around here (implying that HE isn’t doing much at all). According to the authors, women typically feel like we are shouldering the majority of the burden in terms of caring for the children. Men, on the other hand, don’t understand why we don’t thank them when they pitch in.

I hate to admit it, but I think they’re right.

But still, as I was reading I kept wondering why I wasn’t wholeheartedly agreeing with their premise: that better communication is key to a successful marriage. I absolutely DO believe that, but something was missing.

Then I got sick.

I woke Wade up yesterday morning by saying, “You have to get up with the kids. I have the flu.” He said, “Okay, you sleep,” and then he jumped right in. I have no idea what they did all day; never once did he come to ask for directions or help. I finally arose from my sickbed at dinner time, as Wade was cheerfully making spaghetti sauce FROM SCRATCH and talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with the boys. He had not only survived the day but had a great time with his kids.

And then it hit me: the authors of Babyproofing Your Marriage don’t really think men are able do that. Despite the fact that their book is about learning to communicate better, they advocate a “training weekend” for husbands, to show them just how hard your job is. They describe the “training weekend” as a “48-hour Navy SEALS-type experience for Dads. Mom takes off and Dad is left, unassisted, to man the kid and house ropes for the weekend. If done correctly, (i.e., Dad has absolutely no backup) a reinvigorated Mom is likely to return to an enormously appreciative and surprisingly helpful husband, and newly confident Dad.”

I have a problem with this. I don’t think that abandoning your husband with the kids for a weekend is the first step to better communication in your marriage. I think, in fact, that it’s just the opposite: it’s a good way to foster resentment, or quite possibly to give your husband MORE ammunition to think that you’re not doing a very good job. Because for the most part, I imagine that men WILL be able to get through the weekend without losing or maiming one of the children. Sure, the house may be a pit and the kids may have eaten take-out for two days, but still.

He will end up convinced that your job is a piece of cake.

This morning, while I was making lunches for the kids and digging around in my wallet for milk money, Wade ate his cereal and logged on to the computer to check his schedule. “I wonder if I need to wear a tie today,” he said. And I started to think about how unfair it is to expect anyone to be able to step into a job on a moment’s notice, no matter what the job is.

In couples where one parent works and the other stays home, there will always be an unbalance of information about the kids. My full-time job is to know how much milk costs at each child’s school (twenty five cents for Henry, thirty five for Charlie), when class pictures are (Charlie’s is tomorrow), and what everyone eats for lunch (Henry has two peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches, cut into four triangles and packed in a plastic box every day). Wade doesn’t know any of that, not because he doesn’t care but because he’s busy with his own full-time job. If he calls in sick, I can’t step in and do what he does; why should I just expect him to be able to do the same here? Why do I need for him to do things EXACTLY like I would?

Answer: I don’t.

I also made a little face of disagreement about the “training weekend” specification that the Dad have NO HELP AT ALL. My friend Christa’s husband is away for the long weekend and her girls are out of school, so she had a babysitter two afternoons. She also had her housekeeper on Friday. Why not? Why SHOULDN’T a parent who is home alone for more than two days have help? To say that Dad has to do it on his own implies that MOM should do the same. And sister, let me tell you, that ain’t going to happen around here.

I think my underlying discontent with this book is that it relies too heavily on a kind of double standard about men and women. The authors claim that men are not as emotionally attached to their infants, for example, as women are, and that women are biologically programmed to worry about every little thing while men just take care of problems. I don’t buy this; my experience has been that men are just as attached to their babies as women, and that women are SOCIALLY programmed to over think and over worry.

I think that the authors of Babyproofing Your Marriage make some interesting and important points about communication issues that come with being parents, and I think that most of us will find something to relate to in this book. But I want you to question their underlying assumptions about men and women and the way we naturally fall into gendered roles when we bring the baby home. Because I just don’t think it’s true.

This review is part of the BlogHer Virtual Book Tour; you can find links to more reviews here, in the comments.

February 17, 2007

1 in 166

It’s Saturday night and I’m watching The Parent Trap for the three hundredth time (Linday Lohan was much cuter ten years ago, and also significantly less slutty). Fortunately for you, I have a new piece up at mamazine.com:

Diagnosing mental disorders, including autism, in children is tricky work. Bipolar disorder will often present as ADHD; Asperger’s and NLD share a long list of specific traits; giftedness often mirrors autism. We need better diagnostic criteria, in order to clearly establish what it is that makes kids like John and Rebecca and Henry different from their peers. We need better strategies for helping those kids, better structures in our school systems and better support for families. We need to know more about the medications that are being prescribed to help these kids, and we need to be certain that the medication is used for the benefit of the CHILD and not to make things easier for the adults who are raising them.

Beats the hell out of The Parent Trap, although Dennis Quaid is kind of hot.

February 16, 2007

transition free, much like my day

Charlie woke up at three am with a fever, despite the fact that he had JUST FINISHED a ten day course of antibiotics for last week’s ear infection. Literally–he had his last serving of Omnicef (guaranteed to kill all germs within ten feet of your child!*) right before bed time.

On the way in to my parent-teacher conference at Charlie’s school, as I was patting myself on the back for being on time even though I hadn’t slept or showered, I slipped on some ice and fell on my ass. And my ankle. Smooth. Also, painful!

At lunch, in between the ordering of the food and the actual arrival of the food, Charlie put his head in my lap and moaned, “Mama, my EARS HURT.” I think I ate my sandwich; I brought Charlie’s entire pizza home.

Wade called me at 2:00 to say “I’ve been in meetings since seven thirty this morning,” and I said “ASK ME WHERE I AM. GO AHEAD! ASK ME! I’M AT THE PEDIATRICIAN’S OFFICE! AGAIN!!!” He was thrilled.

Charlie doesn’t have an ear infection OR strep throat OR the flu; he just has a virus. I promised Christa that if either of her girls wakes up at three am with a fever, I will PERSONALLY come and take care of them. At three am. I’m turning our phones off when I go to bed, just in case.

As we were sitting in the pediatrician’s office, in between the strep culture (Q-tip in throat) and the flu culture (Q-tip in nose) I realized that we’d had almost the exact same trip to the doctor two years ago. Except that time, I wrote coherent sentences at the end of the day.

I stopped to pick up coffee on my way back to Christa’s, because it seemed like the least I could do to thank her for keeping my germ-infested kid. On the way to the car, I spilled my coffee on my hand. I wiped it up with my sleeve, because OF COURSE I was going home to shower and get dressed. That was eleven hours ago. I’m still wearing the same fleece pullover. With the coffee on it.

*No, not really.

Saturday Morning update: HENRY HAS IT TOO! He woke up this morning running a fever.

Dammit.

February 15, 2007

can you feel the love?

Wade: People at work kept asking what I was getting you for Valentine’s Day.

Me: Did you say NEW BRAKES?

Wade: No, I said, “I just give her my credit card number and say ‘Buy yourself something nice at J. Crew, honey.’” Oh wait, you ALREADY DO THAT.

Me: HEY! I use my own credit card for that!

Wade: Uh huh.

Me: And I pay the bill myself, too!

Wade: Uh huh.

Me: Mostly.

Wade: Uh huh.

Me: You should have said, “I got her new brakes! And a new battery!” Because THAT’S romantic.

Wade: Sure. “Here you go, honey, five hundred dollars worth of car repair!”

Me: It wasn’t that much.

Wade: How much was it?

Me: Less than that.

Wade: Eh, whatever. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Me: You too, sweetie.

February 14, 2007

Happy Valentine’s Day! I think I’m dying!

I’m sick. You can’t really be too surprised to hear that, after last week’s germ festival, but still, it’s annoying. I desperately want to lie down and sleep, but unfortunately those pesky children have other ideas.

I did sleep for a couple of hours while the boys were at school; when the alarm went off, I snapped up and couldn’t figure out for the life of me where I was or what was going on. That’s always fun.

Tonight we’re going out for a romantic family dinner at Panera, after the boys and I pick Wade up at work. I have his car today because mine is in the shop, getting an oil change. And new rear brakes. And a new battery, because this morning when the mechanic went to move it from the parking lot to the garage bay, it wouldn’t start. At least it had the decency to die AT the garage and not in MY garage. Which would really have sucked.

I wish I could describe for you what exactly my sickness consists of (because I know you’re dying to hear), but it’s really just a persistent sense of malaise. And sleepiness. And my skin hurts, which is incredibly irritating. Molly called today, about something else, and when I moaned, “I’m SIIIIIICK,” she said, “Are your eyes goopy? Does your ear hurt?” And then she laughed.

Fortunately, no, that’s not what I have. Because that’s gross. Also, I don’t have the stomach flu, which is REALLY gross. I just have some boring generic sickness that makes my skin hurt.

Charlie came home from school with a huge bag of Valentine-related treats, which on any other day I would have totally raided. I’m sure Henry has something stashed in his school bag, too, and he doesn’t like candy, so he’s a good source for snacks. But I feel too crappy for chocolate even.

God that’s sad. I feel too sick to eat chocolate.