Parenthood – Page 28

School Days

Monday is Ethan’s first day in kindergarten. I’m so worried for him that I can’t sleep.

There have been many times where I’ve had to release my son to the world in hopes that the world would receive and care for him well. This time feels different. His old school was much smaller, more intimate. Even with the troubles I’ve had there, troubles that will be alleviated with the size and nature of entering the public schools, I’m going to miss the comfort of recognizing every soul in the school.

Ethan’s father and I accompanied him to the open house on Sunday afternoon. Ethan was at first excited to finally be on the inside of the building, but once we got into the classroom and the newness of it all hit him, E became a shrinking flower.

Rick Santorum and Pitting the Working Mothers Against the “Non-Losers”

Chuck pointed out this letter to the editor in our local paper that I seem to have missed:

I’m in my own little world apparently. Every day I wake up with two happy kids, even when I go out the door for work. I work nights, my husband works days and due to the rising cost of decent child care, that won’t change any time soon. My kids are happy, healthy and well adjusted.

People have commented on this on several occasions in public. If my kids are losers, as one recent letter writer suggested, then explain to me why my oldest is an A student at a local elementary school and holds the key to the world in his hands.

If the bare necessities didn’t cost an arm and a leg, I’d tell my employer I had other plans and I’d be home seven days a week. But thanks to our wonderful elected officials and all those brilliant, non-loser corporate CEOs, I have to work. I see my kids more than I see my husband, whom I’ve been married to 13 years now; if anyone or thing suffers here it would be our time together as a married couple.

But that’s OK, we’re better than that, as long as we make it and do it together, there are no “losers” in my house.

Jennifer Voight, Lafayette

There has been a conversation about the morality of working mothers in our paper, which includes tripe such as this letter that was printed adjacent to the one above:

The Nanny Diaries

Or, why I don’t blog about my summer job.

The premise is this: a Park Slope nanny kept a personal weblog, which she showed to her employer. Her employer followed the blog “obsessively,” and was so offended by what she wrote that she eventually fired the nanny — and then wrote a piece for the New York Times calling the nanny a promiscuous pill-popping alcoholic who wants to do Tucker Carlson six ways to Sunday, has bisexual fantasies about girls in 19th century garb, and touches her breasts while reading. The last straw, apparently, was when the nanny wrote this: “I am having the type of workweek that makes me think being an evil corporate lawyer would be O.K. Seriously. Contemplated sterilizing myself yesterday.”

All right, look. Taking care of other peoples’ kids is hard work. And nannying is a whole different story than babysitting for a few hours — you’re with the kid(s) all day, almost every day. Some nannies live in-house, meaning that you always have to be “on.” Many people who employ nannies want them to be “part of the family,” and as a nanny, sometimes you feel like that’s exactly what you are — but the fact is, you’re not. You are an employee, but you’re doing a different kind of work — you’re being paid to provide intangibles, like care and love. You’re working. And just like actual parents, some days aren’t so great. I’m quite sure that there were times when I was a kid that my mom wanted to lock my in my room just to get some peace, and I’m sure there were days when she swore up and down that she would never reproduce again. I think all parents get frustrated from time to time. Well, so do nannies. Even if we love your kids — and most long-term nannies do, I think, really fall in love with the kids they’re watching — we aren’t Mary Poppins. We’re going to have bad days. Occassionally, your kids are going to be such brats that we’re going to think, “My God, I am never having children.” Other days, your kids are going to be so adorable that we’ll feel sad just knowing that the job is temporary.

What the woman who wrote the Times article was apparently so offended at — having too much “personal information” about her nanny and her nanny’s views posted online — is peanuts compared to what she did in return. The nanny leveled a few compaints on a personal blog that couldn’t have been read by more than a handful of people, and was fired. Her employer writes an article in the most widely-read newspaper in America, in which she basically says, “Ugh, my nanny is such a slut,” and presumably expects the reader to feel sorry for her.

Particularly interesting, though, is what she uses to paint her nanny as a “bad” (or at least questionable) person: She has sex with her boyfriend. She had an abortion. She made a comment about a girl being hot (which the employer translated into the idea that she was “determined she’d had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend”). She takes over-the-counter sleeping pills. She goes out for drinks with her friends. The employer mentions her irritation at the nanny for blogging at work (while the child was taking a nap — what else should she be doing? Scrubbing the floors?) and for having the nerve to get sick twice when the rest of the family only got sick once, but that doesn’t seem to be the reason that she fired her. Her sex life is, apparently, more problematic.

Get the nanny’s side of the story here.

Flip Schedule

It is midnight and I feel like doing anything but going to bed.

Ethan has been with other members of the family for the last two weeks, the first week vacationing with my immediate family while I finished up a summer class, and this past week on a vacation with his dad. My baby is at home with me for the first time in sixteen? seventeen? days. Too long.

When his dad dropped him off this evening he looked so old. His hair, amazing for being half-Asian and half-Caucasian, is undebatably strawberry blond. And man, is that kid tan. He told me about the kids he played with on vacation and being able to spend time with his other grandmother who is usually situated on the other side of the country, then he gave Doug and Pablo goodnight hugs and went to bed.

I’m so glad to have him home with me. I missed him so. And at the same time, I don’t know how long it will take me to get back on a regular sleeping and doing schedule, as if I was on one in the first place. I’m supposed to be up tomorrow morning at 7:30 but I’ll bet that I’m up for at least three more hours surfing the internet.

Ugh.

Another Gem From GirlMom

Yesterday I wrote briefly about the death of Allison Crews. Just an additional note to point out how she created a forum in which stories like this could be told.

When I got pregnant at 14, no one told me “How much I was throwing away.” No one tried to talk me out of carrying my pregnancy to term. Of bringing another into the world. No one talked to me about missing out on college, on high school even. The doctor didn’t bat a lash at me when he came in. He was very business like.

My teachers didn’t raise their eyebrows at the freshmen in maternity gear, my mother moaned a little but her complaints were soon lost in her joy at becoming a grandmother. My grandmother, likewise. Even my great grandmother, who at seventy three still knit my son a blanket, smiled and nodded in her quiet way, and never said a negative word.

I thought I had the most understanding people in the world around me. These people who would support me, and understood why I wasn’t going to abort this time, and why I was willing to share my twin bed with an infant. I thought wrong.

When I take my sons into the world, the mall, the zoo, filled with rich, white people, I don’t feel any more ostracized than I did going out with my own mother, or my friends. I don’t feel like people are judging me, because most of the time, the people who judge don’t see me. I am just another poor brown person, raising poor brown kids, and no one expects anything differently.

My mother didn’t expect me to go to do anything else, neither did my grandmother, or my teachers, or my doctor, or even, myself. I have been trained to accept that being a breeder is my lot in life- as was my mother. And while I see the benefit of my support, I sometimes feel shortchanged in the lack of expectation for me.

I have a friend, she is 16 and expecting her first baby in two months. She always tells me about the dirty looks she gets. She tells me about the fights her mom and she have. She complains to me about the snide look the doctor gave her, and the lectures her teacher gave her. And then, she pulls her blond hair up into a pony tail, and tells me how lucky I have it.

The essay “Outside the Radar” is featured at Allison’s website Girl-Mom.com. It is only one of many stories with critical value and personal weight for which she created a space in a world where those of us who dared to become parents at a young age are overlooked or shamed. Allison’s LJ can be found here, with many activists’, readers’ and family members’ pictures and memories in the comments.

Note: It has been brought to my attention that we still do not know the cause of Allison’s death and will not know for several weeks. I changed the language of this entry to reflect that fact.

Celebrate Father’s Day, Schlafley style

By declaring, apparently, that domestic violence doesn’t matter.

During the Clinton Administration, the feminists parlayed their hysteria that domestic violence is a national epidemic into the passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This created a gigantic gravy train of taxpayers’ money, known as feminist pork, that empowers pro-divorce, anti-male activism.

Don’t you just hate it when those man-hating feminists have the audacity to claim that women shouldn’t have to stay with men who beat them up? Here’s the kicker: “Local crimes and marital disputes should not be subjects of federal law or spending.”

Ah. So… physically attacking someone you’re wedded to is simply a “marital dispute”? I wonder, then, if it would be ok for me to beat the shit out of my boss — after all, wouldn’t that just be a little “labor dispute,” and no business of the authorities? Further, if the private domestic sphere should be no place for federal spending, then perhaps next Schlafley will write a column criticizing the Bush Administration’s spending on marriage programs.

Schlafley’s ultimate point is that a good way to celebrate Father’s Day would be to withdraw federal funding of the Violence Against Women Act. Because, apparently, it would be really good for dads and for families if dad could beat up mom without that over-reaching federal government stepping in.

And in a column with a nearly identical lead, Mark Alexander also goes after the man-haters. But he takes it a step further:

History also records the exploits of those who grew up without fathers, or with weak or abusive fathers. They became Adolf Hitler, Iosif Vissarionouich Djugashvili (Joseph Stalin), Mao Zedong and Saddam Hussein.

So, bad news for kids who grow up without dads: you’ll probably grow up to be a genocidal maniac.

And I’d just like to clear something up. Alexander writes:

The Grande Dame of the so-called “women’s movement,” Gloria Steinem, once declared, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

Though popularly attributed to Gloria Steinem, it ain’t her quote.

A father’s day must-read

Jesse at Pandagon writes an amazing piece on father’s day — and conservatives do us all a serious disservice by defining a “father’s role” along traditional gender lines. I believe that parents are important — fathers are important, and mothers are important. But as Jesse writes, the measure of a good father isn’t how well he fits a traditional “masculine” ideal. A good father isn’t measured by his simple presence, or his ability to bring home a paycheck. It’s how well he parents.

The Independent Women’s Forum declares that women don’t need independence, they need princes. Again, whose fault is all of this? Feminists. Feminists were the ones who declared that there was more to female sexuality than baby production, who declared that women were more than mothers. And that, in the end, is the key to all this – women’s empowerment made the specter of fatherhood more challenging, but not in a bad way. It simply meant that the father wasn’t a paycheck with a disciplinarian’s aura around him, but instead that he and his wife/the mother would have to share in previously (and needlessly) gendered responsibilities. Fatherhood has been and will continue to be redefined – but rather than asking fathers to bow out, it’s demanding more of fathers. You can teach little Timmy how to throw a ball, but you also have to be willing to listen to him when he’s having problems, to cook for him, to care for him. The “feminist” challenge isn’t to destroy any sense of masculinity, but to have men realize that whatever masculinity means, it has to mean taking a full sense of responsibility for your children.

From someone who learned what a father is through not having one, I say to any conservative who believes this: you are destroying everything fatherhood is supposed to mean.

Read the whole thing. And check out the comments, too. Incredibly powerful. This one in particular got me:

My father committed suicide when I was two, unfortnately I found him dead.

My mother, an immigrant, raised my sister, my brother and I alone (with the help of the community we lived in and Social Security) until I was six, when she married an abusive asshole who liked to beat her and us.

Tonight my son, ten, asked if he could take me to McDonalds for dinner on Father’s Day. He had thirteen dollars he’d somehow saved from his birthday two weeks ago…

Tonight I had the best meal I’ve ever had and I’m a vegan.

I’m going to cry for years thinking about the joy in my son’s eyes when I said I would love McDonalds, and when he paid for his Dad’s supper. My supper.

Nothing means more to me than the love that little boy has for HIS Dad. Father’s Day?

It’s a wonderful thing.

Allison Crews Dead At 22

This week, my mom wished me a happy Father’s Day, justifying that I am a mom and a dad to my boy. It made me wonder whether I should also wish E’s dad a happy Mother’s Day. Six years ago, pregnant and virtually homeless, I never would have thought that I would be so committed to my little family, as odd as we are, and as politically and emotionally motivated to make us work.

From Bitch Ph.D. I found out this morning that activist Allison Crews is dead at the age of 22.

You probably haven’t heard of her before, but this women’s thoughts were integral to me as a young single mother. She began girl-mom.com, a radical website for young single mothers, and worked in alliance with Hip Mama. Her essay, When I Was Garbage, is an articulate account of the marginalization we young mothers experience as we emerge in the world as parents before society says it is prudent.

I found this message board four years ago when I was looking for support, advice, and camraderie. The women there are very much responsible for my political parenthood. Thanks to these women and their stories, I recast my views of parenthood and rethought what a good parent looks like. I shed all my previous inhibitions and decided to parent being me, flawed but caring me.

I didn’t know Allison, but I am very much saddened with this news. Thanks to her hard work and dedication to living radically, I know that I am no less a mother for having become a parent in my teens. As she succinctly said, we are not a burden to society and my son is not a burden to me. Contrary to those who believe we are disadvantaged by the obstacles put in our way, we have security, connection, and love.

If it weren’t for Ms. Crews, I would not be so confident in that fact. Bless.

Lactivists take to the streets

Really, what is the big deal about breastfeeding in public? Good for these “lactivists” — a public display of breastfeeding is just what we need. Babies need to eat, and breastmilk is whats best for them. People need to get over whatever sqeamishness or fears they have toward a lactating breast.

“We’re all told that breast-feeding is the best, healthiest thing you can do for your child,” said Lorig Charkoudian, 32, who started the Web site www.nurseatstarbucks.com after being asked to use the bathroom to nurse at her local Starbucks. “And then we’re made to feel ashamed to do it without being locked in our homes.”

Most of the nay-sayers, it seems, are people who will never have the option to breastfeed themselves, and will never be banished to the bathroom or put behind closed doors just because their child is hungry:

“It’s nothing against breast-feeding, it’s about exposing yourself for people who don’t want to see it,” said Scotty Stroup, the owner of a restaurant in Round Rock, Tex., where a nursing mother was refused service last fall.

Ah yes… “exposing yourself,” as if breastfeeding women were walking around en masse flashing innocent onlookers, like an episode of Moms Gone Wild. The whole American fear/intense sexualization of the breast is really odd. The fact that things like breastfeeding in public or even tanning topless are regulated and debated is pretty strange. Whats the big fuss?

According to the New York Times article, the shame surrounding public breastfeeding is having profoundly negative effects:

Whether to breast-feed in public, many nursing mothers say, is not simply a matter of being respectful of another person’s sensibilities. They cite research by the Food and Drug Administration showing that the degree of embarrassment a mother feels about breast-feeding plays a bigger role in determining whether she is likely to do so than household income, length of maternity leave or employment status.

The American Academy of Pediatrics urges women to feed their babies only breast milk for the first six months, and continue breast-feeding for at least an additional six months. If its recommendations were followed, the group estimates that Americans would save $3.6 billion in annual health care costs because breast-fed babies tend to require less medical care. But while more women are breast-feeding for the first few weeks, fewer than one-third are still nursing after six months. Some doctors attribute the decline to self-consciousness and the difficulties of finding spaces where nursing seems acceptable.

The final quote of the article, though, was the best:

“Are there people who are against breast-feeding?” asked Rich Flisher, 39, a neighborhood resident passing by the nurse-in. “I do prefer it if you’re discreet, but hey, I’m behind you. Go go go.”

Tag: Parenthood

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