Thanks, But No Thanks.

When you are pregnant or have a new baby, people are quick to share their minds. They hope to be helpful. But it can't be helped that their opinions are oftentimes contrary to your particular parenting philosophy. Their ideas almost always have merit. Yet the soundness of their suggestions does not mitigate the fact that most are unsolicited. Sometimes, their offerings barely hide criticism of how you have chosen to parent your child. I have found that the counsel can be divided into three categories, depending on its particular leaning:

CATEGORY ONE: BEWARE THE NANNY STATE or

“It won’t kill said child, if she”:

1) has a little sugar/salt/fried food/white bread

2) watches TV

3) has a little whiskey/wine on the gums to get through teething

4) has a little whiskey/wine/oatmeal or rice cereal in the bottle to put her to sleep

5) misses a few naps

6) goes to bed at any hour of the night

7 )sits in a car seat all day

8) sleeps in a crib

CATEGORY TWO: LIVE FREE OR DIE or

“She will be more independent if she”:

1) gets used to a babysitter

2) goes to daycare

3) hangs out in the arms of strangers/gets used to other people

4) is left to cry by herself/cry herself to sleep/learns to self-soothe

5) sleeps in a crib

CATEGORY THREE: PHRASE YOUR JUDGMENT IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION

1) Wouldn’t she sleep at night if you stopped breastfeeding at night?

2) When do you plan to stop breastfeeding?

3) Wouldn’t it be less messy if she ate jarred foods instead of table food?

4) Isn’t she going to choke on that apple/sweet potato fry/green bean?

5) Wouldn’t she sleep better in a crib?

Really, I don't mind the advice. What I do mind is the general lack of openness to my response. I have thought long and hard about all of these topics, and have reasons for my choices that I would be happy to share.

Well, actually, I take that back. There are times I mind the advice: when it is given by someone without children (unless they are or were a nanny). A child in the abstract is a lot different than one in the flesh and blood.

But the reality check of babies and parenthood is a whole nother post entirely.

Photo Source: Daquella mannera, Flickr

Pink Eye and Breast Milk: Panacea

George had some of my breast milk. He put it in his eye. Yes, you read that correctly. He was suffering from pink eye, so I googled “Homeopathic remedies and Conjunctivitis”. Breast milk was listed as a remedy, next to honey, salt and belladonna. We didn’t have any belladonna on hand; however, we were not lacking for breast milk.

So I did some more research, which gave new meaning to the word “nursing”. Evidently, moms have been treating pink eye with breast milk for centuries. Today, even doctors are recommending it. What’s more, breast milk is touted as a cure-all for all kinds of ailments, from ear infections to eczema to minor scraps and scratches. And get this; according to some provocative research out of Scandinavia, it may even cure cancer! These miraculous healing properties are due to the antibodies in breast milk that have been shown to kill bacteria and viruses.

Unfortunately, our own homespun experiment into the curative powers of my particular variety of breast milk didn’t last very long. George quickly abandoned this tactic for a trip to the dark side of Western medicine. Oh, well. I was a bit disappointed. I wasn’t surprised, though. Putting Drano in his eye would have been less complicated than his wife’s breast milk. I also realized that I’ve come as close as I ever will to having a super power! And that if breast milk can do all of those things, imagine what it’s doing for Claire? I may not be restoring George to health or saving Gotham City, but I’m content to stick with growing a healthy baby girl.

Potty City

A Puzzle: The following tale contains public nudity and sneaking through hotels, but is appropriate for a G rated sensibility.

First, some back story: When Claire was about four months old, our meal at a midtown diner was cut short by Claire’s explosive poop and a bathroom not fit for mankind. We hit the pavement with a poo-seeping baby in search of a restroom…

Slinking into the Parker Meridien hotel, I spy the ladies room just left of check-in. Opening the door, we confront an abundance of marble, but no changing table. Deflated, we turn around and run into a woman wearing a tag marked “Marketing Manager”.

“Can I help you?” she asks politely.

I think, “Nailed,”and answer, “No,"with a clip in my voice.

George asks for a bathroom with a changing table.

The woman counters with: “Are you staying in the hotel?”

“Nailed again," I think. “No," I confess.

She leans in and whispers, “Go up to the second floor. It’s quiet. Change her on a bench up there."

We nod in duplicity and head up the stairs briskly. Finding the least obtrusive area, we undress Claire quickly and expedite the damage. People walk by; I smile sheepishly.

I felt like I was dealing drugs or something. I started wondering why babies in public cause such a stir. I often find myself feeling apologetic when Claire is breastfeeding or is just plain loud in the public realm. Babies spend much of their lives sleeping, eating, pooping and screaming. Everyone finds a sleeping baby cute; pretty much everything else seems up for grabs. Come on, even Kim Kardashian got into the mix with her tweet opposing public breastfeeding.

Babies seem to remind us of our impulses, of baser needs and desires that we all wish to remain hidden. I remember reading somewhere that many theaters in the 1900’s were built without ladies’ room. It was considered unseemly that women peed!

The 21st century attitude towards babies is similar. If you ask me, this mind-set is our problem not a baby’s. I wish that Claire and her kind could be who they are in all their glory with no added eyebrow-raisings.

But then again, Claire is my child. And her poop smells like roses to me. Well, not really, but you get the point.

Zardoz on Parenting

I send George one or two links a week to articles that, in my humble opinion, offer sound parenting advice. In return, I receive links from him to things like the trailer from the 1974 Science Fiction movie, Zardoz, starring Sean Connery. So it seemed novel to me to get an email from him with the subject, “Important article on parenting”.

I clicked on the link and found an article from The Onion. “Hmm, The Onion”, I thought, “Not exactly La Leche League or The American Academy of Pediatrics, but I’m game. It’s better than YouTube videos of laughing puppies or burping children”. I read on. The article states that the California Parenting Institute did a study and found that, regardless of parenting style employed, it’s a child’s fate to become a maladjusted adult.

Wow, that big claim could pretty much rock my world. I needed details. Like the informed parent that I pride myself on being, I looked for the study at the California Parenting Institutes’ website. Evidently, I was not alone. The California Parents Institute was inundated with calls from nervous mothers like me. These queries were much to the organization’s dismay; however, since the article was a hoax.

“Oh, right, The Onion. Silly me,” I thought. “What a relief. I can go back to being puppet master of Claire’s destiny!”

But then I started thinking some more...“Was George trying to tell me something? Maybe, he thinks I need to lighten up a bit. Perhaps, I should just let Claire be. He’s pretty good at that.”

So I haven’t sent him a link in awhile…a day or two, maybe. And for good measure, I checked out the link to Zardoz. You should too; it's pretty hilarious.

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Fair Use Rationale: The image is used as the primary means of visual identification of the article topic. Source: Unknown

Guitar Heroes

I asked a mother at Claire’s music class today to share her baby’s name. She curtly replied, “Annabelle” and then ignored me. My non-starter of a conversation starter is an example of why I never seem to enjoy music class with Claire. Each class has had an unnerving vibe, and I’ve been struggling to figure out why.

Yes, competitive mothers who eye you and your baby up and down make for a frosty 45 minutes together. And the mom who thinks it’s cute when her unruly child head butts a much younger baby is worthy of an eye roll or two. Of course, the nanny who doesn’t give a crap when her charge hurls a maraca across the room over and over again is unbalancing at best. But these things seem rather expected. What I hadn’t counted on was the creepiness of the people who run the classes.

It does make sense really. No one ever grows up saying, “I want to make a nominal living leading children in song.” It’s kind of like saying you want to be clown. These jobs are surely a detour from much grander ambitions -- especially in a place like New York City, where Julliard graduates are a dime a dozen. So it should come as no surprise that, along our musical journey together, Claire and I have encountered several distinct types of ersatz song leaders.

The first is the singer/songwriter who takes the kiddy job because, while his singing and songwriting worked like a charm at getting the ladies, now that he has a lady, he needs to feed a family and that’s not happening with the singer/songwriter career. Each week, he’s way too happy to see you, like “thou dost protest too much” happy. When he sings “The Potty Song”, his crooning is a little too good and reminds you that he is in fact a singing/songwriting ladies’ man. You find it embarrassing, although it’s clear from all the mommy groupies flocking around that you’re the only one cringing. He flirts with them just enough to reassure himself that he’s still got it, and to keep the mommies coming back for more. Between songs, he strums chords from rock and roll songs without looking at his fingers, because that’s just what he does when he has a guitar in hand. Oh, and did I mention he’s a singer/songwriter?

There’s another singer/songwriter, but she’s of a different ilk. She’s twenty-five and this job is not a detour for her but, rather, a way station before she really hits it big, or so she believes. She’s not much different from a waitress or an au pair with a thinly veiled disdain for a job that’s beneath her. You become paranoid that she’s stoned, drunk or hungover, because she’s really not very present. Perhaps, she’s dreaming of her big break at the Knitting Factory. She scares you the most of all the various song leader types. Her classes hardly have order at all. She doesn’t care if the child hits your baby with a maraca. She’s just a gun for hire. If you don’t come back, there are fewer children for her to deal with. Unlike singer/songwriter number one, she doesn’t need to tell you a damn thing about herself, because who the hell are you? You’re just a mom with a brat who surely can’t help her with her career.

There’s also another gentleman with a family to feed. He went to conservatory but an injury ended an illustrious career that was on the fast track to Carnegie Hall, or that’s how he likes to remember it. You know this fact about him because he shares his life story with you. He thinks that you spent your hard earned money on the class to listen to all his problems, particularly his different weekly physical ailment. He takes himself way too seriously and spends a lot of time explaining to you why his class is superior to the other music classes out there. One reason is the weird, esoteric Israeli bodywork that is incorporated into a music class for six month olds (complete with lots of homework for you and your baby).

The last type takes singing to kids way too seriously too. It’s because she’s the only one who actually wants to be singing to kids for a living. She derives way too much of her self-esteem from being a self-described expert at singing to kids. She gives you a lot of orders about how to sing to your kid. You end up wanting to say, “Can you just let me sing to my kid?” Other than that, she’s not too demanding. She’s just happy if you continue to show up from week to week to sing to your kid.

Intellectually, I know I should feel for these people, and shame on me for roasting them in this blog. But I can’t seem to drum up either patience or sympathy. I know why and George will concur. I’m cheap. These classes range from $15-$25 a pop. I think that’s expensive and I want to get what I paid for and get out. What I didn’t bargain for was the added subtext. But Claire seems to enjoy herself, so we’ll keep going. I’ll just have to content myself with complaining about it to George. And writing about it. Thanks for listening!

Photo Source: Figurative, Deviant Art

In the Scheme of Things

I told George that our baby Claire was born carrying all her eggs inside her tiny body. He asked in amazement, “So you’re telling me she has our grandchildren inside her already?” I said, “Well, if she has children, yes”.

Right now, it’s all beautiful potential.

Claire was a promise for me for a long time as well. Nine months in my belly, yet the possibility of her has been with me my whole life. That must say something about the psychic bond between mother and child. For Claire and me, it’s been a long journey together. Forty-four years together, then George joined the mix and she became her own separate person. I like to believe that she was born wiser than the rest, because she lived a half a lifetime as part of me before started her own lifetime.

It’s a wonder she or any of us are born at all. Remember when they used to give a prize to the thousandth customer to walk through the department store doors? It’s kind of like that. One lucky somebody gets to be the thousandth customer, but many, many more need to make up the nine hundred ninety-nine who go before.

And that’s just the half of it, literally. You get one shot to swim better than 300 million others.

Right from the start, the male and female impulse seems so contrary – on the feminine side, hanging out patiently and waiting for just the right moment to take the plunge, on the male, jumping from the gate and enduring the race. With each, there’s an indefinable measure of grace.

As I look at her sleeping, she is so substantially her, so uniquely Claire. The seeming randomness of it all makes me shiver.

The Farm System

Claire's been reading propaganda lately. Or, more accurately, we've been reading it to her: Animals living happily on the farm, lovingly tucking their babies into bed, greeting each other with moo’s and baa’s, rolling in the mud or frolicking in the meadow. This pastoral vision has past. Corporate farming has squashed it.

But I’m conflicted. Do I really want to Claire to know the real picture? Like most people, I cringe  thinking about the realities of farming myself. Plus, there's plenty of time for Claire to learn about the cold, harsh world. The book with the truth would be sure to rip the rose colored glasses off at such a tender age: Page one, “Oh look, Claire, the hens are fighting, because they live on top of each other." Page two, “Here their beaks are being sliced off, so they don’t kill each other.” Page three would show dark boxes enclosing baby calves their entire short life; “We call them ‘veal’, Claire, so we don’t have to think about eating babies." The book would be long.

I don’t want to be holier than thou, either. I have my own set of blinders on. I’m blissfully oblivious to which of my clothes were made by little hands in third world sweatshops. Obviously, my sensitivity to this particular issue is influenced by my own vegetarianism. I don’t want to force my belief system on my daughter. She should be able to make her own decisions. I do plan on educating her about why sugar is for special occasions and why she should eat her vegetables. But these issues just seem a lot more straightforward. The truth about the dark side of corporate farming is a lot harder to swallow. That doesn’t make it any less true.

Photo Source: Dave, Rip the Skull, Flickr