Don’t Will Your Children To Me

My friend Meg recently told the rest of the Ohio 5 that, if she and her husband meet an untimely demise, she had assigned each of her children to one of us for safekeeping. She has four, so that works out, except it doesn’t work out at all because you can’t split four kids up in the event of their parents’ untimely demise.

And this past weekend confirmed that I’m not taking all four of them.

Meg and her family ventured out from Ohio to me for a Spring Break visit. And the kids, who are 5, 4, 2 and 7 months, were darling. But there are four of them. And they make noise. And one of them kept throwing up.

Seriously, though – I have lots of experience with and patience for kids. The kids were totally fine. They are very well-behaved and very well-mannered and they will eat anything (except “artificials,” because somehow my dear friend who I love has managed to feed her children nothing with artificial ingredients despite being on the dole because her boorish husband refuses to take up anything that provides steady pay…or any pay).

But, as parents everywhere but mostly who read this blog will understand, they wore my single, childless ass out.

Also, I inherited a nasty cold from my darling nephew on Easter Sunday that kicked into gear a few days ago and contributed to the exhaustion. Jesus is risen, but I’m down for the count.

The tribe arrived at my house Friday morning, bright and early, after spending the first part of their vacation somewhere else. They arrived from their hotel having not fed themselves. I wasn’t surprised; in fact, I had expected and prepared for this because one time they visited Joey (he gets the third kid) at his mom’s house in Ohio, having changed the plan from just Meg and one kid to the whole family descending, and the Boor sat on his duff and demanded lunch and dinner. But the Boor surprised me by making their breakfasts himself.

I had to go to work, of course, so they decided to make use of the day by being touristy. By the time they arrived back at my house, with keys and the alarm code, it was 10:45pm. I got home at 10:55. The kids were doing okay, but #3 was clearly in the early stages of Meltdown Mode despite having slept on the train, and #4 was getting very fussy. He has a terrible cold, too, and was hacking up a tiny little lung between wails. I knew how he felt.

Kids 1, 2 (that one’s mine) and 3 bedded down together in my basement, all in a row in the queen sized bed. #4 slept in a cushion on the floor in my room, which Meg and the Boor were using for the weekend. The grown-ups managed to toddle off to our respective beds around 1:30am. We were up at 7, with me in the kitchen making an egg bake full of veggies, because the kids love veggies.

Seriously.

I had used some professional capital to score a few free tickets to the children’s museum. I had never been there, but clearly I had to do something with these kids, and the museum wasn’t far away. So by 10:30am we were on our way to fun and adventure in the city’s largest Petri dish.

Honestly, all I could think, with my chest-rattling, throat-ripping cough and progressively stuffy head, was Germs. Germs germs germs. Snot. Poo. Germs.

I never used to think that way. But apparently in my stage of life, when I’m in a building full of howler-monkeys whose paws are all over everything, I can’t avoid it. Ironic, I know, considering I myself was a cesspool of infection. But I coughed into the crook of my arm, Purelled my hands every hour and tried not to touch anything. When I headed into a bathroom and saw myself in the mirror, a tired, watery red-eyed woman looked back. I washed my hands in hot water and used the paper towel to open the door.

When I wasn’t trying to track four kids at a time, I amused myself watching the other kids’ parents. Mostly the dads. They were all wandering around in running shoes or Tevas, high-end cameras around their necks, seemingly pretending to enjoy parental involvement on this early spring Saturday with their hover-mother wives. With newly-sprouted pot bellies and graying hair, they seemed to send up thought bubbles… “What has happened to my life? I used to sleep til noon. And then drink beer and watch basketball in my shorts.”

For a while, I sat in the tiny tot playroom with Meg and #s 3 and 4 while they ran or scooted about sock-footed and #4 gummed plush toys that I’m sure no other child had ever gummed before. Ick. Into our section came four hover mothers and their little ones. Their names were Phoenix, Mason, Morgan and Rain.

I tried not to bang my head against anything. No offense to any of you who may have kids with these names. It’s just that when they’re all in one place like that, it sort of makes me roll my eyes. I know trendy names have been cool since the 90s, but sometimes I think this generation’s parents compete with each other to find out who can fill a teacher’s classroom with the most pretentious set of monikers.

Soon Phoenix, Mason, Morgan, Rain and their hover mothers were joined by their camera-wielding fathers/husbands. Who looked at each other occasionally with glances that seemed to say, “Wanna go to the bar?”

After that, Meg and #3 and I went to another room meant for water play. Yep. Water play. #3 happily threw toys into a shallow table-pool full of pumps and sprinklers and the like, squealing and clapping and splashing around, and I obsessed over how many of the kids had put the toys in their mouths or grabbed them with grubby hands they’d just pulled out of their pants. I watched a baby nom on the edge of the table. Meg barely reacted when #3 suckled the top of a toy boat and soaked the front of her shirt. Another kid bent over and drank straight from the table’s 1.5″ of what I’m sure was super-clean and freshly filtered water.

Ew ew ew.

After hours of playing and picking up e. Coli and stuff, plus a walk around the touristy downtown spots and a very late lunch at which #3 whined until the Boor ordered her to lie down in the booth, at which time she promptly fell asleep, we piled back into the Volvo station wagon with the Jesus-related license plate. Upon approaching my neighborhood, the Boor parked the car at the park instead, and we all climbed out. The Boor ignored all hints, subtle and otherwise, about #1 needing a bathroom and me needing a couch, water and a chance to prep dinner. And this was six hours before I practically crawled upstairs to bed.

Up at 7. Pancakes and bacon. The Boor talking to me about democracy vs. fascism vs. oligarchy vs. something else I had no mental stamina to give a shit about at any time, let alone 7am. Lots and lots of questions from the kids. After eating, unable to breathe and completely lacking in energy, I sat on my couch while the Boor did the dishes and Meg repacked their bags. I did #1′s hair in a style like my own and answered more questions. Meg asked if I was tired of them yet.

The questions. Not her family.

They left at 9;30am. I had spent a total of about 39 hours with them. And I spent the next 13 on the couch, trying to recover. I reported to our friend Angie (she gets #1) on how things went with a single sentence.

“Dude, I could never hack parenthood.”

The Gift of Enough

For a long time, I’ve been kicking around the idea of a post about what women are to women. It never completely gelled, which is why I haven’t written it. And I suspect this post won’t be a full gelling of the topic, either, but it seemed a good one to explore on a day when so many other posts would be of the “Roses Are Red” variety. Understand that my thoughts here aren’t meant as blankets. They are noted patterns, and of course there are exceptions.

Of all the struggles women encounter in daily and more broadly-defined life, I think none is as challenging, heart-rending and sometimes crippling as the struggle to know what is best for them and their families when it comes to work. In the “old days,” most women stayed home and raised their children, generally regardless of whether they wanted to or not. It was expected of them. They were greeted at the end of a long day by a husband whose further expectations, be they real or perceived, were only more wearying. Some men did help. Some expectations were merely societal and not personal. And there were fewer single mothers then.

It was nearly unheard-of for a woman to say she wasn’t sure she was cut out for it. Not sure she was doing the best job. Not certain she wasn’t supposed to be doing other things that might enrich her life, make her happier. She felt, well… a little trapped, maybe. A little let down that the “dream life” turned out to be kind of banal and maddening sometimes. And she felt guilty as hell for not being completely pleased to stay home and raise the children she’d always wanted and deeply loved… even when she thought about leaving them in a store for good.

Now, things are different. A lot more moms work. They do it because they need the extra income, or they do it because they’re the only income, or because someone invested in their education and they don’t want to waste it, or because children came later, or because they know they’ll be happier women, and therefore better moms, if they get out of the house and away from their children. They tell each other and themselves that they can handle it, that they can do it all, with help from friends and supportive partners. Or without. But always, they go to bed feeling they’ve fallen short somewhere in the day. And they feel guilty as hell for not staying home all the time, or for not wanting to stay home all the time.

These are stories to which every woman can relate – even those, like me, who don’t have children. Somewhere above is at least one thought that has crossed all of our minds, that has kept us awake at night, whether because it was our reality or our considered possibility. And with all this inner conflict, with all this uncertainty, with all this fear and worry and unspoken aching, what do we women do for one another?

We pretend to support each other while we tear each other apart.

We judge each other. Stay-at-home moms are weak, less bright, less driven, more dependent, more likely to become depressed, less likely to be truly happy with motherhood because they’re not fulfilling themselves intellectually and professionally. Women who work are selfish, arrogant, controlling, unfocused. They don’t love their children enough to make a less self-glorifying choice.

In the absence of those particular judgments, there is jealousy. Those who work and don’t malign stay-at-home moms envy them instead. Those who stay home and don’t malign working moms wish they could go to work, too.

I’m not sure I’ve ever met a mother, of any persuasion, age or station in life, who was truly happy with her place. With her choice. With her options. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a mother who didn’t sometimes wonder whether she’d done the right thing.

And then there are those of us who don’t have children. Some of us can’t, and dread the moments when friends or relatives ask when we’re having babies or why we haven’t, carrying in our wombs the ache of that which we want but cannot do. Others of us choose not to have children, whether it be because we don’t feel we would be good mothers, or because we’re not solid in our partnerships, or because we don’t like children, or simply because we’re not sure it’s what’s right for us. Some of us are childless as a matter of timing and a long search for the right partner. We all listen to the clucking of our loved ones musing that time is running out. We hear people accuse us of being too focused on our careers, as if being childless and destitute would be the better option. Or we endure the supposedly inspiring cheerleading of our “empowered” friends who insist that we put aside our “fears” and believe in that which our bodies are designed to do. They urge us on and insist that we can do it, without ever asking us whether we want to do it. And if we don’t want to do it, well… there must be something wrong with us.

All the time, what I hear and read and see is a battle of women against women. I believe, by and large, it is no longer men who hold us back, be it in the workplace or the home. It is the voices of our mothers, our sisters, our friends, our envied counterparts, our own doubting selves, making us believe that whatever we are doing is not enough.

I’ve long wondered why women are so hard on each other. For all that wondering, I have come to believe that the answer is simply that we criticize in others that which we do not like within ourselves. In the end, if we strip everything away, the problem we have is not with that other woman, that other mother, who does the opposite of that which we do. The problem is that we are afraid that, after all our self-convincing, all our preaching, all our liberation, all our choices and all our acceptance of whatever comes… we were wrong.

We are afraid that we are not enough.

That the voices are right.

That she is better.

That we have failed.

Failed our partners.

Failed our children.

Failed our parents.

Failed ourselves.

This Mother’s Day, I ask every woman to shut out the voices that tell her she is not enough and listen to her own. I ask her to ignore what tells her she is not enough, and to decide for herself and her family what is best.

And I ask all the other women who are not her… to mind their own damned business.

Somet’ing Vewwy Important

This week I spent 58.5 hours with BIL 1 and Twin Nephs. Sister 1 had surgery on Monday and then went to our parents’ house to recover a little before re-entering the world of four-year-old boys, and since my days off are during the week, I was glad things worked out so that I could help on the days BIL 1 had to be in the office. Fortunately, he doesn’t own a gun, because he says he’s pretty sure he would have shot me when I let myself into the house around 12:45am after driving straight from work. He knew I was coming, and I always let myself in, but he leapt out of bed with his eyes still half-shut, yelling something that must have meant “hello?!” and then staggering head-first into the hallway in the dark. He might have tackled me if I hadn’t figured out a quiet way to say “It’s me!” while just steps from Twin Nephs’ bedroom.

BIL 1 is kind of hilarious when he’s half-asleep.

This gig meant getting up wayyyy earlier than my childless, long-commuting, night-working self usually gets up. But that’s part of the deal, and I accept it willingly. I mean, when the boys were infants, I got up and fed them in the middle of the night during frequent visits, which, while terrible for brain circuitry, was great for bonding. But when a four-year-old comes into your room sometime a few seconds after official dawn and says he has to talk to you and it’s vewwy important, you’re pretty much never going to sleep again. Invariably, what he has to talk to you about are things like socks, and going potty, and the babysitter, and the differences between the ceiling fan in this room and the one in his room, and what color the dog is, and how his brother poked him in the eye “the last day” (aka yesterday).

He will grab your face and force you to listen intently while he speaks of these things. And that’s cute and all, and I do cherish these moments because some day these darling boys will be 13-year-old punks who will barely speak to anyone, and I need them to love me so they’ll take care of me, but… Auntie is tired. This faux-mother-and-homeowner thing is pretty exhausting. I’ve always given parents props for doing the job. I am actually very patient with kids, but while I was sitting in a rocking chair in Twin Nephs’ bedroom at something like 10:20pm one night trying to get them to actually go to sleep after spending the day cooking, cleaning and doing laundry, I remembered that I would in all likelihood become the crazy, bedraggled, snippy creature I often see dragging ass around a store with toddlers in tow if I had kids.

On Thursday evening, BIL 1 and I stood in the driveway and talked with a neighbor while her daughter played with Twin Nephs, drawing with sidewalk chalk and riding tricycles. Neph 2 managed to ride his directly into a shrub three townhouses down and get stuck. All I could see were his little feet on the little pedals, and the back wheels. He kept ringing the bell on the handlebars. Here I’d thought those bells were to warn others that they were about to be mowed down. But no; apparently, it’s a cute little distress signal. He kept ringing it and calling in a little speech-impeded voice, “Help! I ththtuck!” from somewhere in the depths of branches. After the rescue (and a protracted clean-up effort), we had dinner. And after that, we walked to get dessert at the ice cream shop.

It was all very suburban yuppie. In a sweet way.

Yesterday I was awakened at 6:46am by Neph 1, informing me of Somet’ing Vewwy Important and then climbing into my bed to not-sleep with on me while complaining that I was too warm. Every minute brought a new declaration of the time according to the digital clock on the bedside table. Something like seventeen hours later (which was somehow the same morning), after a brief fit about not wanting to go to a little boy’s birthday party, Twin Nephs climbed into the car with Daddy and off they went. I finished some laundry, packed up and took the long road trip to work. Getting home at midnight, I climbed into bed and was out within minutes. Sister 1 is back home now, hopefully not getting pounced on. She’s minus a couple of organs and up a fresh supply of Percocet. It could go either way. I have a feeling that Percocet is going to be vewwy important.

Oh, Brother

This post comes with both a stern warning and a heartfelt request.

STERN WARNING: If you are a current or expectant parent, read this at your own risk.

HEARTFELT REQUEST: If you are a current or expectant parent, can you please explain this to me?

I need my child-bearing friends to stop losing their s#!%.

Before I go any further: no, I do not think I’m smarter or better than them because I don’t have kids and they do/will. In the end, in fact, I might have been the stupid one for not going that route. I do, however, think that the particular brand of Crazy that seems to beleaguer the parents at which we collectively used to roll our eyes has rained down all kinds of itself on these people I thought I knew.

I suppose that’s generally predictable.

My friend Meg is blithely progressing through her fourth pregnancy under impoverished conditions by choice. All is fine and dandy, dandy and fine in her world. She and her husband have two girls and a boy, so she says they’re kind of hoping for another boy. I can see why. It would be nice for the little guy not to be completely outnumbered. But they’d be fine if it’s a girl. She doesn’t particularly care how the delivery happens; in fact, she’s already had C-sections and isn’t terribly bothered by the likelihood of another. All that matters to her, in the end, is health.

My friend Angie, however? Totally off her head right now.

Three days ago, she found out she’s having another boy. She currently has one little round cutie who is 16 months old. He won’t yet be two when his little brother arrives (which was drama enough – it’s not the three-year span they’d planned). If his mother doesn’t give said little brother away or something.

Angie wanted a girl, so word of the newest child’s maleness came with several other words, many of which are bad. When I good-naturedly teased her that I was saving her email for the future so that her second son would know just how excited his mother was about his pending arrival, she replied, “Dude, I’m soooo sad about this not-a-girl thing. There are very few dreams in life that die so definitively. And, I suppose, the very things you have so little control over. I know it’s silly, but it’s SO disappointing. All my little keepsakes, costume jewelry– might as well throw it away.”

Angie’s been one of my best friends for 17 years, and I usually know her sarcasm. She’s not generally given to sentimentality. I thought this was a kind of Scarlett O’Hara dramatic comedy. She herself called it silly. So I replied with a terse, “Oh, please” and a smiley face, before then writing that I understood what she was saying, but that she should remember her boys may one day take women who will become her daughters.

Reply: “Um, wow. I can’t believe you’re not getting this.”

Followed by ranting about me sucking.

Uh-oh. It seems I’ve played this badly.

But wait– why would I “get this” right off? Angie hasn’t said anything about her hopes for the child’s gender other than “It better be a f—ing girl” when she made her announcement.

Apparently, though, Angie wanted a girl so badly that she’s been crying since learning her new little one is male. When she had her first son, she was upset for months (if she’s not still) that the delivery didn’t go exactly as she’d hoped. She delivered naturally, but it wasn’t as planned. Her upset over this turned her into an advocate of home birth, a discussion I really try not to have with her since I think there’s a reason doctors got involved a while back, and I would hate for her to feel guilty or suffer if something went wrong that could have been attended to properly if she were at a medical facility. But it’s not my place to sit in my child-free position and decide what other people should do. Just like it’s not their place to sit in their child-raising position and tell me what I should do.

Back to the girl/boy thing. I understand that, when someone hopes for something greatly, there’s a mourning that takes place when she learns that it is not to be. It’s hard to give up on a dream, and Angie doesn’t plan to have a third child. But am I completely out of line for thinking she’s completely out of line for being so pissed off?

Did she not know, after all, that she only had a 50% shot at a girl?

One of the trends I’ve noticed in recent years is the way that expectant parents plan everything out. They plan exactly when they’ll have their baby. They plan exactly where they’ll have their baby. They plan exactly how they’ll have their baby, including positioning. They plan everything that will happen in between. And, apparently, they plan exactly how their lives will progress after the baby is born, including all the beautiful mother-daughter bonding over (I am not making this up) Anne of Green Gables and hairbrushing marathons. And then they get pissed if any of those things don’t go their way.

Angie wanted her Anne of Green Gables and hairbrushing marathons.

I suppose every woman who wants children dreams of the relationship she’ll one day have with a daughter. Those dreams are full of sweetness and light and happy days and starry nights and sugarplums and cotton candy and stories and hugs and giggles and fun.

Then they have their daughter, and realize they’re called “dreams” for a reason. They only sometimes come true, and then only partly. The rest of the time, it turns out they were completely delusional. As our mutual friend Joey put it: “Boys rock! I hope he’s a gay son!! He’ll take care of you later and not turn against you like the girls do!!”

Or, alternatively, in my mother’s tearful words: “You’re just not the daughter I thought I would have.”

(I was 16 when that came out and I might not be quoting it correctly. She might not have meant it that way, but that’s the way I internalized it. I never read or saw Anne of Green Gables.)

My point is, this generation of child-bearers (save Meg) seems to be so caught up in their own plan that they forget the old adage of what God does when you make a plan. Though it is only borne of the best intentions, they’re trying desperately to control their lives and that of their children, even as they begin, while at the same time spouting off about how it’s so much more natural if it goes the way they’re planning it.

Do they not see the irony in that?

Also factoring into this, for my consumption, is the fact that Angie is 36 and got pregnant so easily with her second child that she wishes it hadn’t been so easy. Meanwhile, in eight days, my 32-year-old Sister 1 will lose her uterus and at least one, if not two, of her ovaries after a years-long battle with fertility that, blessedly, gave me Twin Nephs, but refused to yield more, caused great physical and emotional pain, and also caused a miscarriage. Sister 2 is still dealing with the fallout from her very difficult and drawn-out miscarriage of this past fall.

So I’m supposed to feel bad for Angie… why?

Still, I won’t tell her to shut her yap and be grateful. Because she’s been my friend for half my life, and she’s hurting, and that’s valid, even if I find it incredibly selfish and shortsighted. Ultimately, she knows she’s fortunate. And someone else’s relatively worse pain does not completely negate one’s own. And I’ve got my flaws, too, she’d be quick to point out.

I just hope that Angie comes to her senses sooner than later.

Or that one of her sons ends up a cross-dresser so he can use those keepsake pieces.

Taking Shots

CNN snuck a debate in on me while I was out of town, so I didn’t get to watch it or recap it. You’re devastated, I know. But I have seen a fair amount of fallout from it, and on one subject in particular, so that’s what I’m going to focus on here: the HPV vaccine and the apparently fascist administration thereof. If you listen to Rep. Michele Bachmann, at least.

Now before I go further and alienate anyone who didn’t like the idea of a federal or state requirement that girls receive Gardasil injections, let me say that I do respect a parent’s decision on whether to opt out of that vaccination, or any other. These are careful considerations and not every parent wants to give their child every injection that’s recommended.

But if you’ll bear with me: there is a reality to face, here.

According to the National Institutes of Health, HPV, or Human Papillomavirus, is actually an umbrella term for 150 viruses, more than 40 of which can cause cancer via sexual transmission. It causes a very high percentage of cervical cancers. It does not cause all cervical cancers, and it does not always cause cervical cancer. HPV is a virus that, in most women, will clear itself from her system in about a year and not cause any further problem. For those women who are unable to clear the virus, it alarmingly often causes cervical cancer.

Here’s my question: if we’ve finally found (and by “we” I mean “people I don’t even know,

HPV vaccine. Image from highlighthealth.com

much less claim bloodline with, but with whom I share the fraternity/sorority of being human”) a way to prevent a type of cancer… why are we bitching about it?

The reality is that even if a woman is a virgin upon marriage, there’s a decent chance her husband is not. (God love him.) There’s a decent chance he’s carrying HPV. It’s a silent virus; there are no symptoms for anyone.

So if your daughter is ever going to have sex with a man (I know nobody likes to think about it, but it’s going to happen unless she’s a lesbian… and even then she might try it once with a guy just to find out for sure), this seems like a pretty good vaccine in which to invest. Because it’s going to keep her from getting cancer from a silent virus that the majority of men carry. (According to cervicalcancer.org, 60% of women contract HPV in their lifetime; the estimate is that it is the same for men, but there are no true diagnostic tests for men.)

Now, Rep. Bachmann is making some serious political hay with this argument. And frankly, if she wants to gain ground against Texas Gov. Rick Perry, she has to. It’s the one thing she can beat him down on. He issued an executive order requiring girls (as young as 11) to get the vaccine. The recommended age was because of two things: trying to get to the girls before they became sexually active, and using the most effective window for their immune systems to absorb and process the vaccine. Perry included an opt-out plan, allowing parents to choose not to have their daughters inoculated. He has said, politically, he would like to go back and change the way he did it so that it would go through the state legislature. But I don’t see anything wrong with requiring girls to get a vaccine that will prevent cancer, and, by extension, help suppress the cost of healthcare diagnosis and treatment. It’s a win-win for girls, women, parents, and the healthcare industry. And again: parents were able to choose not to participate.

I don’t understand what the problem is.

I, for one, wish the HPV vaccine existed when I was young. It would be great to know that I don’t have to worry about cancer on top of everything else that every woman has to worry about once she becomes an adult, regardless of her risk factors. Even if she uses a condom (they break sometimes); even if she’s a virgin when she gets married. My mother is as Catholic as they come, and she and my father agreed that my baby sister should get the shot when it first came out. Maybe it was a year later; either way, she was a teenager. My parents would never give their daughters birth control, even if they knew we were sexually active (and we weren’t) because they believed it would encourage – by way of less discouragement – sexual activity. I’m now 34 and I’m pretty sure they still think that. But they got my little sister vaccinated as a teenager. Because my uber-Catholic mother, who once told me that French kissing is a mortal sin (ruh-roh Rorge), understood that this vaccine is not about sex. 

It’s about CANCER.

Fine. It’s a type of cancer we can get from sex. So what? It’s cancer.

And there’s a vaccine for it.

How is this NOT a “glory, hallelujah” no-brainer?!

The reason Rep. Bachmann can make hay from this argument is trifold:

1) It implies sex, even if it’s not really about sex. A sure win with Evangelicals, Tea Partiers and others who base their political votes on religious views.

2) It’s about big government. Any time any member of the government requires you to do something (besides pay taxes or obey laws), that’s a violation of Tea Party standards.

3) It’s about campaign/political contributions. And nobody likes a sell-out.

Rep. Bachmann has claimed that Gov. Perry got money from Merck, the manufacturers of Gardasil, and that’s why he pushed through an executive order requiring girls to be vaccinated against HPV.  Gov. Perry says they gave him $5,000. Other sources show he got more like $30,000.

You know what? That’s one lobby I’m happy to have around. Whatever lobby there is that says, “We’ll pay you if you make people get a shot that will prevent cancer” — I’m on-board.

And in terms of political interest, I can’t help but take issue with the way Rep. Bachmann framed her attack on Gov. Perry. “And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat-out wrong. That should never be done. That’s a violation of a liberty interest. That’s– little girls who have a negative reaction to this potentially dangerous drug don’t get a Mulligan. They don’t get a do-over. The parents don’t get a do-over.”

“Innocent little 12-year-old girls.” “Government injection.”  How does that not sound like a scare tactic on a grand scale?

Rep. Bachmann claimed, after the newest CNN debate, that she met a woman whose daughter became mentally handicapped after receiving the vaccine. If that’s true, I’m heartbroken for that family. But according to the American Association of Pediatrics, it’s not true. They say there have been 35,000,000 HPV vaccinations given out and the drug has an excellent safety record, and there is zero evidence that Gardasil has caused mental handicaps. I’m not saying vaccines are perfect and I’m not saying manufacturers don’t hide things, but if you’ll give your kids shots for diphtheria, pertussis, tuberculosis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and myriad other illnesses, what is so different about one for HPV?

Odds are, it’s going to prevent cervical cancer. And that’s all it will do to your daughter.

Again, I respect it if you choose not to immunize your daughter. You have your reasons. My youngest nephew is 18 months old and has had no vaccines, and as much as that scares me, I respect his parents’ decision. But let’s remember: the government requires children to be vaccinated against several contagious viruses and/or bacteria by school age. How is this vaccine different, in a government overreach sense? If not inoculating your young daughter against HPV is your decision, I may not agree, but I’m not her mother, and that’s that. But if, God forbid, she ever gets the virus and winds up with cervical cancer, she might have a problem with the fact that you refused to let her get the shot. And you might regret it, too.

I would – truly respectfully  - ask you: is your decision because you’re afraid your daughter will have sex? Or is it because you’re worried about the potential medical side-effects of the vaccine? If it’s the former, I guarantee you: she will have sex one day. And it won’t be about her. It will be about her partner. Who you did not raise, whose morals you did not shape. And he, unwillingly, regretfully, could expose your daughter to HPV that may develop into cervical cancer. He won’t mean to. He won’t want to. He won’t even know he’s doing it. He will love your daughter and never want to hurt her. But it could happen.

If your reason is the side effects, I remind you that all the evidence thus far shows that the vaccine is very safe.

Politics are one thing. Life and death are another. If Rep. Bachmann wants to pander to Tea Party Religious Right extremists, that’s where the votes are for her, and that’s what she needs to do. But I hope Americans see it for what it is, and I hope Rick Perry never apologizes for wanting girls to be protected.

It’s not about sex. It’s about cancer. And there is something Rep. Bachmann was right about. Innocent girls don’t get a do-over. And neither do their parents.

Storm Warning

So apparently we’re letting babies decide what gender they want to be these days.

Gee, can’t wait to see how this trend turns out.

Alright, I’m overstating. But there is this couple somewhere who named their kid Storm and aren’t telling anyone – anyone - what the kid’s gender is. Storm’s grandparents don’t know. Storm’s brothers do, and they’re not allowed to tell. They’re five and two, so we’ll see how that goes. Their names are Jazz and Kio. I’m not making it up; there’s a blog about it in the New York Times, so it must be true.

Baby Storm with a brother (pic from thestar.com)

It seems to me that a line needs to be drawn, here.

You want to name your kid something ridiculous, fine. You let your children decide when to get their hair cut or not, and let them choose what to wear… I’m going to have a tough time with that to some degree, but it’s your morning, so if you don’t mind that it takes two hours and 23 shirts before your kid settles on an outfit for the day, fine. But you want to keep the kid’s gender a secret from the world so that the kid can choose what to be for itself… I think you need your head examined.

Here’s why:

I get that there are types of people who believe that gender identification can sometimes force a child into a role that the child doesn’t necessarily naturally want to embody (no awkwardness intended with that choice of words). Personally, I think we’re a little oversensitive about that stuff. But agreed: if a girl wants to play with trucks and a boy wants to play with dolls, don’t yank the toys out of their hands. Girls don’t always have to wear pink and boys don’t always have to wear blue. But to go so far as to not identify the child by his or her gender?

We don’t think this is actually going to screw the kid up?

I’m pretty sure it’s going to screw the kid up.

Let’s play this out a bit: Storm isn’t going to go to school, because Storm’s parents practice “off-schooling,” which is a variation of “home-schooling.” In other words: no classes. The kids just learn about that which they are curious, when such curiosity strikes. (I find this infuriatingly irresponsible, if charming.) But let’s assume Storm is at least allowed to play with other kids. Some kids just sort of assume Storm’s gender. Storm apparently has no idea whether Storm is a boy or a girl, so maybe Storm doesn’t resist any kind of label. But with half the kids thinking Storm is a boy and the other half thinking Storm is a girl, the kids will get confused. And so will Storm.

It doesn’t take much to get kids to mock another child. A cowlick will do just fine; a non-specific gender is a freaking gold mine. Which means Storm is going to get tortured with the whole “You don’t even know if you’re a boy or a girl!” thing. They’ll run through the physical identifiers of how to tell. This makes Storm uncomfortable with physical features. Fast-forward to college when Storm can’t develop a healthy romantic relationship with another person (regardless of whether Storm is heterosexual or homosexual) because Storm can’t really deal with what’s going on down there, because Storm’s parents made gender identification taboo, which meant they made genital identification taboo. You can’t learn how to have healthy sexual relationships without learning about your own genitals, which you can’t learn without figuring out your gender.

No Mother’s and Father’s Day cards for you two.

Or maybe it doesn’t get that far. Maybe other kids try to identify Storm’s gender before they’re school-aged. Once Storm realizes that Storm doesn’t know whether Storm is a boy or a girl, but that there’s this handy little way of figuring it out, Storm is dropping trou all over the place, trying to get someone to tell Storm which category Storm belongs in.

I’m sure that won’t cause any problems.

I guess Storm’s parents think it shouldn’t matter. Storm’s mother wants to know when people will stop categorizing other people by their gender. She lets her other two sons wear whatever they want, which often results in a lot of pink and sparkly things. She apparently thinks that’s a product of the children freely associating with whatever they want.

I think it’s a product of them being bright and shiny, which kids just tend to like. Girly clothes are more likely to be bright and shiny. So kids like girly clothes.

Come to think of it, I suppose I shouldn’t refer to her as Storm’s mother. Storm’s XX-chromosomed parent, then.

Storm’s parents are selfish idiots.

Of course your kids’ gender matters, you numbskulls. Kids need an identity. More than anything, they need a solid foundation on which to learn who they are. If you don’t even allow the kid to know whether he or she is a boy or a girl, it’s going to put everything else about the kid squarely in the “I’m Not Sure” category.  And not because the world assigns appropriate behaviors to the kid and then stands up-in-arms when the kid doesn’t adhere. It’s because there are fundamental truths in life, and you just have to deal with it.

I was born a girl. I remain a girl. I’m straight, but I don’t think I’m straight because the world told me I’m a girl. When I was little, you know who every single one of my playmates were? Boys. Every one of them, until I was six. That’s all we had on our block, and my sisters were too young to play outside with us, and so I dealt with being around boys. Taught me how to stand up for myself.

Except for how I was always getting tied up and left on someone’s front stoop because being the only girl apparently meant I was the one who got tied up in Cops and Robbers/Good Guys-Bad Guys/Cowboys and Indians. (Yes, yes, I know, those were all horrifically stereotypical games.) The point is not that I was the girl so I got tied up. Here’s the point: the rope was invisible. I sat there believing the boys had tied me up with invisible rope.

It was my own damned fault I didn’t have the sense to get up off the stoop.

I can tell you unquestionably that the gender differential never entered my mind. Mostly I was just happy to have a moment of peace, with two little sisters at home and five mean, rowdy, rough boys as my friends, who pushed me, hit me, and (once) stabbed me in the arm with a pencil.

I learned how to fight back.

Storm’s parents are using Storm to make a stupid sociological statement. I hate parents who do that. I hate parents who take their little kids to political rallies and make them hold signs expressing an opinion they can’t possibly have. I hate parents who decide that their children are their own miniaturized adorable pawns to promote whatever agenda or opinion they harbor.

It’s a kid. You idiot. A child. Not a posterboard.

These parents are the types of people who will wax poetic about how lovely it is that children so soon develop the ability to express themselves and form thoughts and values. But first they use them as a media-grab to make a point. And then what happens when Storm does identify with a gender? Do the parents allow Storm to do so? Or do they insist on making Storm explain why Storm is identifying with this gender? “Well, are you making that selection based on your genitalia?”

I hope Storm figures out who Storm is… and then figures out who Storm’s parents are… and then finds new ones.

The Creepster Bunny

Ah, spring… the air is fresh, flowers are blooming, bunnies are hopping, birds are singing, April showers are… well, they kind of suck, but only because my birthday is in April and it always rains on my birthday.

But back to our happy vision… it’s finally no longer winter. That means hippity hoppity Easter is on its way. Thoughts turn to children in their best dresses or suits, little girls in bonnets, and eggs of pretty colors decorating baskets. And, of course, the Easter Bunny.

Or, as I’ve taken to calling him: the Creepster Bunny.

It is my belief that there is no childhood fantasy deliverer-of-goodies creepier than this guy.

Come ON.

Santa Claus is magical and brings tidings of comfort and joy and goodwill and childhood wonder and lessons of what it means to give, as God gave the world His Son out of love. The Tooth Fairy is also magical, comes to take our nasty fallen-out teeth, because who wants those laying around?, and leaves cold, hard cash under the pillow. Total score. Also, she’s probably kind of hot, or at least she is in my head, and though I’m straight, it’s always better when they’re pretty. Pretty = fairy. Ugly = witch. Fact.

Pretty.

Ugly. (Photo from the Tennessee Theater Company)

 

The Cree– uh, Easter Bunny is a six-foot tall furry animal with huge ears and giant buck teeth, fundamentally unrelated to anything religious but using Easter as an excuse to show up. Nobody knows how he gets into your house, and he leaves you unwrapped candy and unrefrigerated eggs.

Really? We allow this?

Which of these is the most likely to be a total perv? The Creepster Bunny. You know it. Because even though Santa lets you sit on his lap and tug on his beard and whisper in his ear, and even though the Tooth Fairy flies into your bedroom and gets super-close to you while you sleep, the Creepster Bunny is worse. He isn’t so much as marginally human. He’s not even necessary. He’s a feverish nightmare. Where do we come up with this stuff?

And why does he bring candy and eggs? Bunnies can’t eat candy and they don’t eat eggs. They don’t even lay eggs.

WTF is up with this guy?

Highly suspicious, I tell you.

So I looked it up. Rabbits are symbols of fertility. Eggs are also symbols of fertility. Spring is the time when everything comes to life, so okay, fine, that’s lovely. I get the premise there. I still argue that rabbits don’t lay eggs, so we’re confusing the children with that whole thing. Where the candy comes from I have not been able to ascertain, although there is the argument that chocolate is an aphrodisiac and that, too, is about fertility. But I made up that argument.

There is no explanation of how he gets into your house. No coming down the chimney, or having a magic key (which is what Santa has for people who don’t have chimneys, FYI). There’s no way the thing can flutter in on gossamer wings. You never hear stories about how this thing hops around the world to every (Christian) kid’s house in one night without the aid of flight.

It’s all wrong, and I’m having none of it.

I asked my sister, who is the mother of a 13-month-old, whether she and her husband are taking the kid to see the Creepster Bunny. She said, “Good Lord, no.” She and I agree on the Bunny. We remember the photo of our twin nephews, at four months old, lying in the arms of a giant, disproportionate rabbit at a mall. We discussed the photo when it came in the mail. We both thought it was so terrifying that we cringed every time we looked at it.

Now, those twins are three, and one of them is actually skeeved out by the idea of an old dude sneaking into his house in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, even if he does bring presents.

Smart kid. I’m worried about what will happen when he finds the picture of him and his brother with the Creepster Bunny.

Womb With A View: Why Target Is Excellent Birth Control

I’m about to tell you something shocking about myself. Something my family and even some of my closest friends don’t know. Something I’m sure I’ll be judged for, and even possibly ex-communicated from the Catholic Church (as if this would be the only thing that would do it).

I don’t think I want children.

You're not getting grandkids from me!

 

There, I said it.

My biological clock is digital. It does not tick.

Now, for most total strangers, this isn’t necessarily a monumental revelation, so maybe I oversold it a bit in the lead. But make no mistake: women of childbearing age who choose not to have children are judged, by loved ones and total strangers alike.

When I was in my early 20s, I told my father I was leasing a four-door car partly because I figured I might be married with a kid by the time the lease was up. It is possibly the most ridiculous thing I have ever said. And when I think about it, I wonder why I even thought that. Did I really think about having children at all? Sure, I thought about babies. And names. But that was probably pretty much it.

My theory is that most people really don’t think about it. They fantasize about it, but they don’t really think about it. I’m not saying I’m smarter than them because I have thought about it. For some people, children are the ultimate consummation of their lives. It’s their whole raison d’etre.

But boy, do they go through hell having them.

I’m not just talking about the sleepless nights or the messes made right after you get things cleaned up, the fevers and runny noses and whining and potty training and testing of limits, and then the growing up and testing of limits even more. When I talk about not really wanting children, I’m not talking about what children are like.

I’m talking about what mothers are like.

The best illustration I can give is Target on a Saturday. Target on a Saturday is the best birth control ever.

One Saturday, as I was perusing the greeting card aisle, a young mother was admonishing her son. “Grayson. Grayson, stop. Grayson, STOP IT. GRAYSON!”

Well, first of all, you named him Grayson, so that’s problem number one.

But this kid wasn’t doing anything wrong. You know what he was doing? He was singing. Not at the top of his lungs. Not a song about poop or farts. He was just singing. He was probably about four years old, and he was happy.

His mother, however, was not.

She was frazzled and exhausted, probably hadn’t had a shower yet that day, and was yelling at her child who was not pulling things off shelves and throwing them all over the floor or drawing on display cases with lipsticks. He was just singing.

Let him sing. He’s happy. You’re not. You are the problem here.

Now, lest a bunch of mothers jump on me, let me say this: I get it as much as a childless woman can get it. I know that kids can wear on you and wear on you until your last nerve is in danger of spazzing out completely at the smallest of irritations. Being a mother is, without question, the hardest thing on Earth to do. I have nephews, and I watch my sisters struggle with discipline and snotty noses and time-outs and neediness and Robert Mapplethorpe-esque outcomes of potty training attempts. They love their children more than anything in the world, and it’s sometimes not enough to keep them from sending me a message that says, “Come and get your nephew before I kill him.”

I live two hours away, so that’s a serious request.

My nephews are the best little guys ever, and I relish the chances I get to spend days (yes, days, not hours) with them. But I know in my heart I could never raise them without losing my mind.

I know women who wanted children desperately – or at least thought they did – and went through all kinds of very expensive and highly unpleasant medical procedures and marital strain to have them. And then they did have them, and a few years later they realized they hadn’t really thought it through, didn’t realize what it would entail. Turned out, reality was not the romantic notion they held in their heads and hearts. They don’t really want to be mothers. What a devastating and self-hatred inducing conclusion to come to. There are some women who might be able to barrel through this realization and be good moms. And I’m not saying the people I know don’t love their children. They do. You know who they don’t like? Themselves.

Being a mother comes with plenty of guilt and second-guessing, even when your children could not be better behaved and your relationship with your partner is thriving and you have it as together as is humanly possible. But being a mother when you don’t like yourself? That’s going to hurt you, and it’s going to hurt your kids.

I don’t hate myself, but I think I would if I had children. I would constantly be worried about whether I was doing enough, giving enough, loving enough, sacrificing enough, trying enough, showing enough, teaching enough, pleasing enough. I would constantly be worrying whether I was enough. I would find myself often wishing they would just go away. I might lose out on moments of joy because I was wrapped up in the anguish and exhaustion. There is precious little validation for these worries in a mother’s life, and I’m just not sure I’m wired to handle that kind of lifelong self-doubt and sacrifice, let alone protect my children from sensing it.

I have a sister who was born when my parents were 39. She was  not an accident; rather, she was a last-ditch effort. My parents knew that, if they wanted another child, it was now or never. And so she came to be. And that meant my parents would be 57 by the time that little girl turned 18. She has kept them young and up on the kid lingo of the day, but having her at 39 had a pretty significant impact for my mother.

My mom didn’t go to college, and her working life has always been as a secretary. There is nothing wrong with that. She worked hard, and she did it so that her kids could have a few extras in life. My  mother was the kind of mom who believed that she had to give everything over to being a mom. She criticized herself for every impulse or desire that seemed selfish, and told herself she couldn’t have any of the things she wanted if she wanted to be a good mother.

The problem is, I don’t think she was happy. And she felt guilty that her children didn’t make her happy, that we were not enough to fill her life and satisfy her. (And of course we weren’t. We were loud and annoying and messy and germy and constantly complaining about what she was making for dinner.) And her unhappiness – her fatigue and isolation and frustration and dissatisfaction – came out to her children in a lot of criticism and judgment and negativity. I’ve realized that this is exactly why she and I have always had a tense relationship. I was her oldest child, the one who made her realize that children are not little balls of personality Play-Doh that she could shape into being exactly what she wanted them to be. I was not the first daughter she had dreamed of. She told me as much once. And she has watched all of her girls grow up and go to college and have careers and do everything she might have wanted to do. And she resents it.

A few years ago, she uttered a sentence that told me more about who she was than all the years I had been her daughter: “I always thought that I’d start my life when my kids were grown.”

Oh, Mom.

If she had only known how beautifully wrong that thinking was, she wouldn’t have put it off for so long that she no longer had a dream of what to do. She robbed herself of happiness, and, in turn, set an example for her daughters that the way to raise children is to try to give them everything, keep nothing for yourself, and then be jealous of them.

I would never say my mom was a bad mother. She was not. But she was not a happy woman, and this is why. And happy women make better mothers. I find it an immutable fact. So much so that every time one of my friends or sisters got pregnant with their first child, I told them not to forget the women they were before they had children. It seems that can be easy to do. And when all you’ve ever wanted since you were three years old was to be a mom, well… then you never knew the woman you were before becoming a mom. Like my mother.

One day all your kids are out of the house, and you are a stranger to yourself.

Researchers have found that childless adults are happier and less stressed out than parents. (You can read a super-telegraphed article with links to the studies here.)  One woman has written a book about how, in the midst of a divorce, she realized she did not want to be a full-time mom, and she gave custody of her children to her ex-husband. What a gut-wrenching realization… and how brave of her to share that story.  I don’t know for sure if it’s true that childless people are happier, though I’m a sucker for empirical data that back up my suspicions. But I can see plenty of reasons that it might be true, even if it’s just that none of our clothes have vomit stains on them and we can take a shower whenever we want. I’m not being flip; those little things are a big deal.

And yes, I know that not having children might set me up for loneliness and sadness in my old age. But I don’t think that having someone to wipe my drool when I’m 85 is a good reason to have children now. There’s an awful lot that goes on in the 50 or 60 years before you get there that could make your kids want to smother you with a pillow as soon as look at you when you’re an old lady.

So I go to Target on a Saturday and I see these women, who are yelling at their happy little ones and telling them not to sing, and it breaks my heart. I feel terrible for a woman who is so worn out that she doesn’t see the pure beauty in a child who just wants to sing. And I think, “It’s not that I don’t want children. It’s that I don’t want to be her.” And I wheel my purchases out to my 2-door car, and head on home.