Exceptional Motherhood

Every mom, I think, must go through these periods of thinking, "Am I good enough?"  At least, I hope it's not just me who thinks that.  But you want to be great.  You want to be supermom and be the best employee at the office, the best pal, the best wife, and the best mom.  And when you evaluate yourself (when you're me, anyway), you can always find places where you fall short.

And even when you aren't nitpicking yourself, the thought creeps in that you are not giving your all.  For instance, I am sitting cross-legged on my living room sofa right now, The Cat to my left, my iPhone to my right, and my son still at daycare.  Because I got home from work a little early and I decided to have some "me" time before I went to pick The Boy up.  Nothing wrong with that.  Except that the hissy voice of Exceptional Motherhood has been whispering to me from behind my neck, "You should have picked him up.  You are being selfish sitting there on the sofa writing your navel-gazing blog post.  You should be playing with your boy, not thinking about yourself."

There is a drumbeat in the modern mothering culture that, at its root, demands constant self-sacrifice by the mommy.  You must breast feed.  If you don't breastfeed, you are depriving your child of valuable hoosiwhatsits that will protect him from disease.  You must use cloth diapers.  If you don't use cloth diapers, your child will get diaper rash up to his eyeballs and there will be an avalanche of dirty diapers at your local landfill.  You must feed your child organic baby food, preferable lovingly made by your own hands.  If you do not feed your child organic handmade baby food, you are endangering his health.  You must spend your every spare moment playing with, educating, or at least ogling your child.  If you do not do these things, you clearly do not love your child as much as you should.

It may not be stated so starkly, but the sentiments are there in the culture.  As it happens, I did breast feed to the extent I could.  (I never produced enough milk to exclusively breast feed The Boy, unless you count the first six days of his life in which I exclusively "breast fed" him insufficiently so that he was constantly starving and lost too much weight.)  I also use cloth diapers on The Boy when he is at home (but I do not impose them on his daycare).  And he gets a lot of organic food (especially the dairy foods), but it's not all organic.  It's not that I did not/do not do these "good mom" things to one degree or another, or even that I disagree that these are more-or-less good things to do (lest I wouldn't do them at all).  But there is a subtle hiss from the mother-culture that failure to live up to its standards is inadequate mothering is just false.

The time portion of this criteria is particularly wrenching for a working mom.  We really do want to spend as much time as we can with our kids.  We want to work too.  And, mentally, we need a little downtime every now and again.  But the impulse in the culture is to spend all of your spare time on the child and none of it on yourself, which, to me seems good for nobody.

Moreover, I think that working moms can't meet these standard.  Nobody can.  Indeed, I'll go out on a limb, and speak about that which I do not know, and say that it is only the most haggard drudge of a stay at home mom who can be the perfect breastfeeding, cloth diapering, baby chef and educator of a mommy.

And yet, we all love our kids.

So why does the culture guilt us about these ideals of motherhood?  And why are they ideals, anyway?  Because they're the way it was done a hundred or a thousand years ago?  Why is that per se the gold standard?

And why should I feel badly about taking an hour for myself to write this post and, literally, remove the chipped nail polish from my toes?

Is it competition?  Because we want to be "the best."  And if someone else shows inadequacies -- "Gasp!  Is that a Huggies disposable diaper on your child's bottom?" -- then the cloth diapering purists can feel secure in their anti-diaper rash and environmental perfection?

But that's not it because, frankly, I don't really know any moms who are really all that judgy about these sorts of things.  And yet, the judges are apparently out there, somewhere.  Whole books are being written about the subject, after all.

For instance, Elisabeth Badinter's new book, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women poses that modern women have submitted themselves to something she calls "ecological parenting," which involves things like doulas, breastfeeding, organic food, the non-use of epidurals, the use of cloth diapers, baby wearing, co-sleeping, constant presentation of intellectually enriching experiences etc., etc. Admittedly, I have this information from the reviews of the book.  I've not read it.  I have not had time to read it, nor am I sure that I have the inclination to read it, having fully committed all of my life to either work or family - save for this one hour.  (Plus, I'm not sure I could sustain interest in this subject for more than the approximately 500 to 750 words that I am currently committing to the blogosphere.) But, generally, she is describing a very, very naturalistic and child-centric lifestyle (again, per the reviews).

I happen to like being The-Boy-centric.  He's pretty much the greatest thing I've ever done, so I really like hanging out with him and I find it tremendously fun (except when he's screamy).  And I like cloth diapering.  I like the idea that not as many disposable diapers are going into the landfill.  And the breastfeeding that I was able to do, I enjoyed that too.  But the problem in trying to be a culturally perfect "ecological parent" is that it saps the joy out of being his Mom.  Strive to be perfect and I think you will find yourself perfectly unhappy.

So I am ignoring that little hiss at the back of my neck.  Shoo, be gone!

Rather than worry about whether I'm perfect according to the Exceptional Motherhood Code, I think I'll just be perfectly content to use the rest of this hour to read a New Yorker article about Kraftwerk and then go pick The Boy up at about 6:30 so that we can have a rocking good time until it's bedtime.  That seems perfectly wonderful.

The Cat

There's an important member of the family that I don't think I've written about yet.  Meet The Cat:

I know what you're thinking:  long hair, pink cat toy . . . .  What I sweet girl right?  Wrong.  The Cat is a dude.  Of course, I named The Cat a girls name after a certain song by The Police thinking that he was a she, but the vet soon set me straight.  (And anyway, with the snip-snip, he's a eunuch now, so . . . .)

The Cat is my third cat as an adult.  The Working Dad is a begrudging cat owner, but they've reached a sort of detente.  If it had been a choice between The Working Dad and The Cat, I would have chosen The Working Dad, but I would have been really sad about it.  I'm glad The Working Dad loved me enough to tolerate the inconvenience of cat hair tumbleweeds and tracked cat litter . . . and the occasional smell of a ripe cat box.  The Working Dad has, even, on rare occasions, declared The Cat to be not like other cats.  And, he's not, really.  He fetches, for instance, when he feels like it.  And he generally has more interest in your attention than your average aloof feline.  He is as doglike as a cat can be.

As luxurious as he looks, he is a mutt.  His mom was colored just like him, only with short hair.  The Cat has long and easily tangled hair, which is why, often, The Cat looks like this:

Yes, I get the cat professionally shaved, especially during warmer months, but I like to get him groomed about three times a year so that he doesn't develop horrible mats, which make him cranky and bitey.  Cranky and bitey are never good traits in a cat, but particularly not in a cat who is the unwitting best friend of a brand new little boy.

Since The Boy was very small, The Cat has been a gentle, curious observer of the little creature.  (To The Cat, we refer to The Boy as "New Cat.")  Now that The Boy is mobile, The Cat is a lot more jumpy.  I'm not sure he fancies being chased, but I know that he still likes The Boy, still wants to be around him.  Every night when we go to put The Boy to bed, The Cat wants to be in the room too.  He'll stay in the room with us until The Boy is asleep.  The Boy is his kitten too, after all.

Girls Stuff

The Boy loves to dance.  When he hears a good beat, he starts grooving, sometimes getting his whole body into it, sometimes vocalizing.  It's not just the music he loves:  he loves dance.  The other night we flipped through Dancing With the Stars on our way to the DVR'd Sesame Street and The Boy stared, rapt.  I flipped it back.  Not only did he respond to the ballroom dancing, there was a considerable amount of ballet on this episode.  He loved it.  He cried when it was over.  We played it for him again and again.  The Boy loves Dance.

So there is no question:  when he's old enough, around age 3, he will take dance.  I had already planned to enroll him in dance class because I grew up taking dance -- and so did my brother -- and we enjoyed the heck out of it.  But it's good to know that he is probably going to enjoy taking dance as much as I enjoy the idea of his taking dance.

But gender roles, even in 2012, are tough.  One of The Working Dad's co-workers expressed concern about her son, perhaps, being the only boy in dance class.  And so she was a bit trepidatious about enrolling him.  The Working Dad, in his wonderful way, told his co-worker that her son could be in the class with The Boy and then he wouldn't be the only boy in class.

Still, 20+ years after my brother's last dance class, taking dance lesson's is still considered "girls stuff," Billy Elliot notwithstanding.

We put our girls on little league teams now, and we say that it empowers them.  But this can be empowering too (watch the whole thing, especially the guy in the orange t-shirt):  virtuoses des tours en l'air.

I'm so glad that The Boy has his uncle to look to, who will understand how hard it is to do a triple tour en l'air, and that it is as every bit an athletic endeavor as making a touchdown . . . more, even.  Mom and Dad will be cheering all the way.

I wasn't there.

Bad weather is rolling through the Dallas area tonight.  The forecast is for thunderstorms and possible damaging hail and straight-line winds.  No tornados.  Not like a couple of weeks ago when we had 12 blow through the area in the early afternoon.

I was at work in downtown Dallas.  The Boy was at School, in our hometown, approximately 23 miles away.  Downtown Dallas was under a tornado warning.  I watched a tornado from my office window go through an area south of downtown.  At points, downtown Dallas was pitch black.  We were told to move to the interior of the building, away from the windows.

This was not the scariest thing about that day.

The scariest thing was the tornado warning that included my hometown . . . the tornado warning that indicated that the storm was moving, not just in the general direction of my hometown, but directly towards my hometown.  And I was not there.  My little, little boy was at School, in the path of the storm, and I was not there to protect him, to lay my body over his like I would do if a storm hit when we were all at home together.

I think that this is the worst part of being a working mom.  You have to be away from your child, who is your heart, and you cannot protect him.  You have to trust that others will take good care of him and that he will be okay.  (And, of course, the ladies at his School were wonderful and did take excellent care of the kids during the horrible storm.)

I sat there at my desk quietly sobbing with this unbelievable urge to throw myself in front of whatever may be heading toward my boy, who was 23 miles away.  I felt completely and utterly helpless, and terrified.  I suspect that all mothers eventually have this feeling of needing to protect their children and not being able to.  I suspect that they all feel helpless and terrified.  It just maybe comes sooner for a working mommy.

In the end, a tornado did not go through my hometown.  It went south.  We got damaging winds and baseball sized hail.  Lots of cars were destroyed.  Some people lost fences, windows, sunlights.  We're going to need a new roof.  But The Boy was safe and sound.  In fact, he was his cheerful little self when I picked him up, as if he has not spent three hours of the afternoon in the daycare's saferoom.  I was relieved and glad.  I know they will always take care of The Boy when danger strikes.

Still, I'm comforted that tonight, if the weather threatens, if I need to, I will be there to hold him to my chest and lay over him as the storm passes over our house.  It will be scary, but I will be there.

Up All Night: The "You Will Have a Baby" Episode

This is timely:  The March 15, 2012 episode of Up All Night features stay-at-home-dad, Chris, having "baby fever" such that he wants his working mom wife, Reagan, to agree to have another baby.  The episode is called Baby Fever.

He approaches his wife right after she gets home from work.  She is a little tipsy from happy hour with her new boss.  She's babbling on about the drinks she's had and this mixologist who made drinks with a mortar and pestle.  Nevertheless, he says, whilst she's preparing another drink, "Babe, I was thinking that, you know what?  Let's have another baby."  She laughs derisively, and says, "Let's have six!"  Really, bad timing.  Who decides to have this kind of conversation with a drunk spouse?  But okay.  It was a bad scene, a poorly realized scene.  And really not funny.

The next we see of the husband, he is in conversation with his hockey buddy in which he says this:

"Yeah, Reagan's career is really taking off.  I'm worried that we're going to miss our chance.  Gotta get her on board now or it's gone."

His friend just says that he needs to argue his case to Reagan, talk about "tiny socks."

He then show up at her office with his iPad with videos of their daughter.  He refers to himself as the "baby maker" and his wife as the "baby grower."  And that's about the only acknowledgement he gives of the relative burdens of pregnancy during the entire episode.

And he continues in this vein through the episode.  He demands she agree to get pregnant and she demurs, in part, because her job is just taking off and their child is only just one year old.  He never actually wants to talk about her address her concerns.  His desire to have this baby is paramount.  But her concerns about her job and the age of their daughter are not unreasonable considerations.  They do actually warrant consideration and discussion.

I am sure that the writers and producers of Up All Night did not anticipate that the airing of this episode would be timed so perfectly with the renewed debate about contraception.  But here we have an episode in which a man is demanding that his wife put her body at risk for 40 weeks -- indeed, possibly her life at risk -- because he wants another child.  He is not asking her to have a discussion about whether they want more children and when.  That would be perfectly reasonable.  He is demanding that she do it.  And that sounds a lot like shades of Rick Santorum's pronouncement that it is "not right" to use contraceptives.

I know that this is supposed to be a comedy show, but I didn't laugh once.  Whether or not to submit your body to the condition of pregnancy is a serious decision for a woman.  Having spent literally years trying to get pregnant, and then experiencing some health problems with that pregnancy, I know a little bit about how serious a decision that is.

In the last scene, we see him in a bubble bath wearing a Frank Sinatra hat saying, "It's time, Reagan.  We're having another baby.  Case closed."  Aside from just being oogy, is that really supposed to be funny?  She says she can't deal with this right now because of everything that's going on at work.  And he gets angry:  "That's what you love.  Little Baby Work."

There it is.

Here's the thing:  every demand by the male lead of his wife to get pregnant was code for "don't be professionally ambitious."  It's okay if you want to have a job and all, but don't try to advance.  And if you do try to advance, then you're putting your job over your family.  And that's bad.  (P.S.  I happen to agree that it is bad to put your job over your family.  But queary, why is it culturally acceptable for the multitude of ambitious men to put job over family, but not the ladies?  Tradition?)

The entire episode fails to recognize, in the voice of the male lead, that pregnancy is a significant medical condition for women.  It fails to recognize that women should have some say in whether they get pregnant.  In the voice of the male lead, he only must demand that she get pregnant, and then she should agree.  Her feelings, her fears, her professional ambitions, they are secondary to his desire to have another baby.  Maybe the problem isn't that this show is a reflection of our culture at large . . . maybe it's yet another sign that this show is just really not funny.  But if the episode is a reflection of our cultural attitudes about pregnancy, it disturbs me.  I thought we were past the days when men made demands of women like that.

Slut

Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut because she made the unremarkable admission that she is a single woman who uses birth control.  He ought notta done it.

But he reminded me of something I've been meaning to write about:  the so-called effort among certain lady-circles to "reclaim" the word slut . . . like gay guys have reclaimed "queer" or like the colloquial use of the N-word by some in the African American community.  In reclaiming such epithets, the argument goes, the community strips them of their power.  Does that really work?  Eh . . . .


Look.  I am a feminist.  I am a feminist.  I am a feminist.

We can go to good ol’ m-w.com for the definition of feminism:  “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.”

I ascribe to this theory.  So I am a feminist.  I believe in female agency: all of it.  We can be stay at home moms; we can be doctors; we can be lawyers; we can be heads of state; we can be heads of households; we can be CEOs.  We can choose to marry.   We can choose to be single.  We can choose to be mothers.  We can choose to be childless.  We can be biochemists and biology teachers.

And I also believe in female dignity.

And so, I just can’t get behind this idea that if only all of us gals would start calling each other slut, it would strip the term of its power.  Nope, I swear to you that if Rush Limbaugh started calling Barney Frank a queer or used the N-word to describe Barack Obama, those words would be just as powerfully insulting, despite their in-the-clubhouse use by some.  So you can't really "reclaim" words and strip them of their power.  You can use them ironically within your community, but you can't make them not insulting when used by an outsider.

One of the reclamation methods used by certain segments of the lady-sphere is the Slut Walk.  Slut Walks were originally organized in Toronto about a year ago to protest sexual assault in reaction to a statement by a police officer that if women wanted to avoid rape, they shouldn't dress like sluts.  But some of these events have morphed into a more in-your-face sort of assertion of female pride, generally.  As if by parading around in the worst Frederick's of Hollywood has to offer will win us our due respect in society and the workplace....  Behind these boobs lies economic independence!  

I mean, don't get me wrong, a woman's sexy attire does not mean she's asking for a sexual assault.  But I just can't get from, "My short skirt is not a rape invitation," to total female empowerment.  I guess the point is that we can be what we want to be.  We are free women.  We can get our boobs out any time we want.  Slutty, empowered, independent me!  As an expression of outrage, I totally get the Slut Walks.  As an expression of female power, I really don't.

Because we can't – we shouldn't – get our boobs out any time we want.  We live in a society in which people are judged by their looks, men and women.  I’ve touched on this issue before, the fine line between sexy and powerful that women seem to walk.  And I firmly believe that if you want to be respected by your peers – and that includes your female peers – you have to dress and act and talk in a way that commands that respect.  And that means sometimes, you have to put your boobs away when circumstances dictate.  I am not empowered because I have some powerful cleavage.  I am empowered because I am well-educated, articulate, professional, intelligent, witty and quick.  My powerful cleavage may have turned a few heads in its day, but it has never stood up to oral argument in court like my gray, old, wrinkly brain has.  Maybe I just don't get it, but the attempt to reclaim the word slut as a feminist power-word seem so retrograde.  Honestly, it feels juvenile, even fatuous.  These are not two adjectives I wish to be affixed to my sex.


So, frankly, I don’t want to take slut back.  Rush Limbaugh can keep it.  I want that word to continue to have the sort of negative power and the negative implication that it has always had.  I want for Rush Limbaugh to be excoriated every time he says it.  I want people to be embarrassed when they say it and I want others to be shocked when they hear it.  I want for the word not to shut women up, but to inspire women to stand tall and fight back in the face of that ugliness.  Let’s not make that word easy on our ears by being all post-modern about it.  Please.

Nate

I may have mentioned this before:  I love Nate Berkus.

His show will not be renewed for the 2012-2013 season.  This is an epic tragedy in my life.

Nate and I started our budding one-sided romance in February 2011, when I was put on bedrest for gestational hypertension.  Nate was always there for me twice a day:  at 11 a.m. in rerun and at 3 p.m. as a first-run show.  Nate is always warm, always cheerful, always polite, and often quite funny.  Nate definitely does not take Nate too seriously, and that's what's great about Nate.

Nate has taught me about many useful things:  Spanx, Not Your Daughter's Jeans, fashion on a budget, repurposing old stuff to make it seem cool and new, decorating on a budget, ruffles, pops of color.

Nate would love my new shoes:

His show is, fundamentally, a simple, standard daytime TV talk show aimed at the ladies:  a little cooking, a little decorating, a little fashion, a little home maintenance . . . occasionally, some health topic or a celebrity interview.

And, of course, the surprise home makeovers.  My favorite!

Did you know that Nate survived the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004?  (Tragically, his boyfriend was lost.)

But I think that what makes Nate's show so special is, it goes without saying, Nate.  Nate is self-effacing, savvy, stylish, and smart.  And for this, I love him so much that I record the show while I am at work so that I can watch it in my gobs of spare time at home.

He was Oprah's designer, you know, and she gave him is start in TV.  In fact, she (well, Harpo Productions) produced his show.

I love him in spite of his connection to this, honestly, very weird seeming rich lady.

I will miss you, Nate.  Others may not have appreciated you, but I always did.  You helped me get through a very frustrating four weeks.  I hope that our paths cross again via some other small-screened medium very soon.  But for now, adieu, my sweet daytime prince.