Slate's Fix for the Pesky "Lost Productivity" of Maternal Love

Oh friends. Oh stupid, biologically-fettered friends. Let the brights at Slate show you the glorious path to the future: 

In affluent societies at least, paternity uncertainty is a thing of the past, thanks to genetic testing and the Maury Povich Show. And while men continue to dominate our economic and social lives, that dominance is being contested. Among younger cohorts, women are pulling ahead of men in educational attainment, a disparity that is already having powerful social and economic consequences. A large and growing number of women are raising children without men, for whom the drive to accumulate property to pass on to their heirs has attenuated, if not vanished entirely. Roles that had once been limited to men, by law and custom—it was not so long ago that female doctors, lawyers, engineers, and managers were vanishingly rare—are now open to women, and women are excelling in them. They are excelling in them to such an extent that the opportunity costs associated with motherhood (the foregone wages, the lost productivity) are becoming unacceptably high not just for individual mothers, but for their employers. 

These are new historical developments, and we’re still struggling to adapt to them. So, here’s a prediction: Instead of adapting our jobs to accommodate the demands of biology, we will adapt our biology to accommodate the demands of our jobs. The fact that only women can give the gift of life is an enviable distinction, yet it is also a burden that can make it harder for working mothers to reach the pinnacle of their professions. One way to ease this burden would be to move away from pregnancy as we know it and toward a reliance on artificial wombs. 

For now, artificial wombs are the stuff of science fiction. Those of you who read Brave New World in high school will recall its chilling portrayal of the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre,” where vast numbers of identical children spring from the same genetic soup. If ectogenesis, a fancy word for the use of artificial wombs, ever happens in the real world, it will be a more banal next step from the technologies that already keep premature babies alive. Ectogenesis will start out as a way to allow older women to have children or to abet pregnancy for women who would otherwise be unable to carry children. Eventually, it will be considered safer to have children via ectogenesis than the old-fashioned way, and the practice will spread far and wide.

Let's examine the terms of our discussion. Motherhood -- the bearing and rearing of the next generation, in the most practical, most desirable, most easily accomplished sense -- is "lost productivity". Carrying a child in your own womb: "lost productivity". Giving birth: "lost productivity". Keeping an infant alive, feeding it, responding to its cries, holding, nurturing, loving it: "lost productivity". Children, in short, are "lost productivity", little time sinks best outsourced to the world's indigent and uneducated, who have nothing better to do with their bodies or their lives but serve as incubators and nannies to those wealthy enough not only to buy a child, but a womb to put it in. Nothing is too good for our unborn children -- no drop of alcohol safe enough for a pregnant woman, no raw cheese healthy enough, no breath of second-hand smoke pure enough -- because the earliest intervention matters, the safety of the womb matters, unless someone really reeeeally has a good reason to buy a pregnancy, and then it's okay that some poor woman in India sell her body as a surrogate, because the person with the money just wants it so much, right?

I don’t doubt that we’ll see some of this, particularly if such shifts save employers money. Yet the most elite jobs are also the least susceptible to change. “There will always be 24/7 positions with on-call, all-the-time employees and managers, including many CEOs, trial lawyers, merger-and-acquisition bankers, surgeons, and the U.S. Secretary of State,” writes Goldin. Apple and Facebook are keen to retain female employees who can take on these 24/7 positions, which don’t lend themselves to the kind of flexibility that parenting demands. And that is why they’re taking egg freezing seriously.

Apparently the one 24/7 job that women shouldn't have to sacrifice for is that of bearing and raising a child. A job with Facebook! A job with Apple! These are positions that are so important that even a woman's biology must be molded to fit their demands. Nurturing life isn't nearly so vital as making sure that Facebook's servers don't crash. Connectivity before children! Let's remake nature in the image of Apple's corporate structure, because parenting is now an option, while the development of a new iPhone is a societal imperative.

And if we want to achieve gender equality by changing attitudes, it can’t just be male attitudes that change. Men will have to become more interested in spending time with their children, but women will also have to become less interested. If the miracle of childbirth is a central component of what bonds women to their offspring, and pregnancy envy is a force that drives men to accumulate wealth, outsourcing pregnancy might be the best solution.  

In August, Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager, touted the potential benefits of artificial wombs for women, from the most obvious (“females would no longer have to solely bear responsibility for childbirth”) to the less obvious (“ectogenesis could unchain women from the home”). Even some of the criticisms of ectogenesis—that it will reduce the intimacy between mother and child—could be a good thing if your concern is that when it comes to raising children, the attitudes of women and men are too different. 

And there you have it: women must become less interested in spending time with their children. If pregnancy has the inconvenient side effect of bonding a woman to her child, pregnancy must be discarded. If the attitudes of men and woman toward raising children are too different, the solution must be that everyone must become more detached from children. Needy little beggars, children, so oblivious to money, so ungrateful for fancy nurseries and expensive nannies and celebrity strollers, so high-maintenance that they cry for their mothers. So biologically unadvanced that they bond with the woman who bears them in her womb, so pathetically, so impractically satisfied at her breast, as if they had some kind of claim on her body, that body which so inconveniently alters to give them life! Don't babies know that adults mean well by stowing them in artificial wombs? Shouldn't they be grateful for existing at all, summoned to life like Frankenstein's monster? Don't they realize how liberating it is to women not to want to love them? Don't they realize that their mothers have more important things to do than them?

Think I'm exaggerating the Slate author's opinions? Let's have his last words:

Yet, artificial wombs still seem inevitable. The powerful, feeling-filled bond between a mother and her child is a big part of what leads working mothers to take their child-rearing responsibilities more seriously than working fathers. If this essential difference is the problem, if it is the root of gender equality in the workplace, and if our highest priority is to eliminate gender inequality, then ectogenesis offers a way forward.

Nothing must stand in the way of gender equality. No woman must be allowed to take her child-rearing responsibilities more seriously than a man, and of course child-rearing responsibilities must look exactly the same for both sexes. "If our highest priority is to eliminate gender inequality": yes, inequality must be eliminated, even to the tamping down of any impudent maternal sentiment that might rear its medieval little head. This is what contempt for women looks like: the denigration of their very biology, the devaluing of a gift they alone can give, a role they alone can fill, so that they can become more useful cogs in the wheels of industry. Women are for work, and for sex, but certainly not for mothering. We wouldn't want to treat them like objects, for God's sake.

Empty Heads

I had so many things to write about. I could have told you about my fabulous family vacation, a week with my mom and my five siblings and their families in a big rustic house in the Poconos. I could have told you about how living for a week with my two pregnant sisters, one in the deepest throes of morning sickness, gave me an outside awareness of just how hard it is to nurture new life. I could have told you about my insight into the passage of Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well and what that has to do with the upcoming Synod. Heck, I could have just written my novel.

But no. All of that is out of my head right now, because today I'm pulling things out of other people's heads. Things like this.

That's a piece of foam that had been stuck in my four-year-old's nose. For more than a month, probably.  During that month, we put a lot of time into combatting the strange head funk she'd developed. It wasn't her hair. We'd washed it and cut it and made sure she couldn't chew it. It wasn't her teeth. She'd been to the dentist and received a clean bill of health. We made her stop licking her hands and sucking her fingers. And still, the odor persisted. It seemed to come right from her forehead.

Fearing she had a sinus infection, I moved her check-up up a week, but I was still uneasy. She wasn't complaining of pain until I asked her if her nose hurt, and suddenly, yes it did, right up here, Mommy. And then, in a stellar example of why I'll never shut down my Facebook account, I put out a query, and a nurse friend suggested a foreign body in the nose, and I held the four-year-old's head up to look, and there was something huge and gray in her nose.

Let me tell you that it is a delicate operation to stick a pair of tweezers up a four-year-old's nose. It requires the right blend of reassurance and gentle words and dire threats about what the doctor will do if I have to take you into the emergency room to have them pull this out, and then they'll strap you to a board, and how about you just let Mommy get it right now HOLD YOUR HEAD STILL FOR FIVE SECONDS. And then we both stared at the gooshy wad of stinking, moldering foam at the end of the tweezers, as blood dripped gently out of her nostril. And I did not faint and I did not throw up (both of which seemed like very viable options), but I washed off the little girl and asked her blow her nose, and sent her off to play. And then I sat on a stool in the kitchen with my head in my hands, wishing it would all just go away, until a distant shrieking informed me that the big sister who was supposed to hold the sleeping baby had put him on the bed, and he'd just rolled off and fallen on his head.

One day I'd like to have deep thoughts again. One day I'd like to have some energy. One day I'd like a good night's sleep, the kind from which you wake up refreshed, without aching joints and a stiff neck. But today, I'm going to settle for defunking sinus cavities, which should really feel like a more worthwhile, fulfilling, productive activity than it does.

Remote Cooperation

Our current foray into British costume drama of the literary variety is North and South, the 2004 adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel about the conflict between the pastoral South of England and the newly-industrialized North. Although the first episode didn't have enough fist fights or sword action to satisfy Son, a five-year-old madman, the ladies watched avidly and were able to discuss the plot and themes with satisfactory understanding.

So we were all looking forward to watching the second episode last night after dance classes and dinner. We assembled in the living room, already (mostly) cleaned in anticipation of the evening's viewage, we popped in the disc, and we set about searching for the remote control. This is not because we are too lazy to walk across the room and push buttons. On our DVD player, at least, there's no way to select an option down the menu without having the remote. And of course, the remote, last seen on the arm of the couch, had gone missing again.

Back in acting class, the professor told us that all drama starts either with "You never did that before!" or "You always...!" Drama was starting, and it was of the "always" variety. The remote is lost almost every day, because people never put it back in the big armoire that houses the TV, and so one is forced to search between the couch cushions and under the radiators almost every time one wants to watch something. And the longer the search goes on, the more intensive the finger pointing.

Everyone's mood comes out in moments of remote stress. I, who felt this an object lesson to all the children, proclaimed matter-of-factly that this was what happens, and if people wouldn't put things back then the innocent would suffer as well as the guilty, and let this be a lesson. Darwin, who had been particularly looking forward to relaxing and seeing what happens next, kept his cool in a clenched-jaw paternal sort of way as in the course of his search he kicked over the bin of tiny beads that some lady had been using to make bracelets. The oldest, 11, immediately went slack-jawed as she stood in the middle of the floor trying to retrace everywhere she'd seen the remote that day (without expending the energy to actually look in any of those places). The second, 10, felt she was being unfairly blamed when she is the hardest worker in the family, and was growing increasingly resentful and shrill. The 7-year-old was on her tummy on the rug, demanding tweezers to pick up the smallest beads from the carpet, and playing detective with the 11-year-old. 5- and 3-year-old were packed off to bed, and baby nursed loudly through it all.

The remote refused to be found, our evening show was canceled, and all children went to bed in a huff. I began to feel remorse for my role in agitating everyone by pontificating at them, and said so to Darwin when he came downstairs after putting everyone away and doing evening chores. He laughed and reported the tenor of the discussions among the big girls. The 10-year-old's outraged sense of justice had finally brought her to the conclusion that parents were always blaming people, but what if this time the parents had actually lost the remote? It was probably Mom and Dad's fault anyway.

"Don't you agree that Mom and Dad really lost the remote?" she demanded to the other girls.
"Yes, yes," said the 11-year-old impatiently as she and the 7-year-old hunched over a notebook. "Now can we make a list of everyone's alibis throughout the day?"

At intervals over the next hour, we could still hear the Magistrate holding forth while the armchair Sherlocks assembled their clues and tuned her out.

The remote was finally found this morning, tucked far back under a bookshelf where it had no business being, and the 10-year-old was finally satisfied.

"So, we're all agreed," she said. "Mom knocked it off the couch while she was nursing, so it's all her fault."

"Let's have a jump-rope contest!" said the 7-year-old.

The 11-year-old gazed fondly at the remote. "Mom, can we watch TV now?"

Should We Teach Our Girls Not To Be Nice?

A couple weeks ago I ran into this NY Times column on parenting which struck a very discordant note in my mental ear. The author announces that her daughter isn't "nice", and he's trying to make sure she stays that way.

My 10-year-old daughter, Birdy, is not nice, not exactly. She is deeply kind, profoundly compassionate and, probably, the most ethical person I know — but she will not smile at you unless either she is genuinely glad to see you or you’re telling her a joke that has something scatological for a punch line.

This makes her different from me. Sure, I spent the first half of the ’90s wearing a thrifted suede jacket that I had accessorized with a neon-green sticker across the back, expressing a somewhat negative attitude regarding the patriarchy (let’s just say it’s unprintable here). But even then, I smiled at everyone. Because I wanted everyone to like me. Everyone!
...
My mostly pleasant way might get me more freelance work. And friendliness tends to put people at ease — loved ones, neighbors, waitresses — which is a good thing. Plus, smiling probably makes me feel happier, according to all those studies about self-fulfilling emotional prophesies. I know that our sweet-hearted son, who is 13, has always had the experience of niceness being its own reward. What can I do to help? he asks. Please, take mine, he insists, and smiles, and everyone says, “Oh, aren’t you nice!” and “What a lovely young man!” ... But, if I can speak frankly here, you really don’t worry about boys being too nice, do you? He still has the power and privilege of masculinity on his side, so, as far as I’m concerned, the nicer the better.

Birdy is polite in a “Can you please help me find my rain boots?” and “Thank you, I’d love another deviled egg” kind of way. But when strangers talk to her, she is like, “Whatever.” She looks away, scowling. She does not smile or encourage.

I bite my tongue so that I won’t hiss at her to be nice. I tell you this confessionally. Because do I think it is a good idea for girls to engage with zealously leering men, like the creepy guy in the hardware store who is telling her how pretty she is? I do not. “Say thank you to the nice man who wolf-whistled!” “Smile at the frat boy who’s date-raping you!” I want my daughter to be tough, to say no, to waste exactly zero of her God-given energy on the sexual, emotional and psychological demands of lame men — of lame anybodies. I don’t want her to accommodate and please. I don’t want her to wear her good nature like a gemstone, her body like an ornament.

As with so many problems, part of Ms. Newman's problem appears to have to do with faulty categorization. She seems to think that if you are polite and friendly in your interactions with people, that you won't be able to turn it off when people treat you badly. Thus, she seems to think that she needs to decide between encouraging her daughter to treat everyone with an unspoken "whatever" and encouraging her to eagerly accept bad treatment. However, this is a fundamental misunderstanding about what friendliness and manners consist of. Being friendly and polite does not mean being a doormat for bad behavior. It means being pleasant during normal and acceptable social interactions. When people behave badly to you, a whole other set of rules applies, with the correct response depending on whether the affront is a matter or rudeness (in which case one may make clear that the behavior is unacceptable, but one should try to do so within the bounds of politeness) or of actual threat (in which case the gloves are off.)

That is, after all, why the traditional advice is "speak softly and carry a big stick", because if someone assaults you, you cease speaking softly and pound him with the big stick. To my knowledge, "surliness is the best defense" is not a similarly hallowed piece of advice.

However, rather than making this rather basic distinction, Ms. Newman instead decides that a defensive sullenness is the best approach to life. And yet, within her own piece she acknowledges that friendliness has been a tactic which has been both fulfilling and useful for both herself and her son.

The problem is, Ms. Newman is replacing one tactic dangerously simplistic social tactic (be accommodating towards everyone whether good or bad) with another (be sullen and standoffish towards everyone.) Neither of these will serve one well, and I'm not clear why girls in particular should be relegated to one or the other. Her son is apparently to be trusted to know when to be accommodating and when not to be. Why not her daughter?

The Birds and the Bees

I found myself tonight having a conversation which I hadn't exactly planned to have.

How does one get into these things? I was sitting at the foot of the twin bed in which Eleanor and Julia were snuggled (the other bed, across the room, has become, through neglect, a repository for stuffed animals and clean laundry). We had just said prayers. The discussion traced a meandering, but more and more inevitable course -- from praying for vocations, to praying for your future spouse, to Eleanor proclaiming that she didn't want to get married because she wanted to work at the zoo and when you got married you had to stay home with your babies (and here I reminded her that she knew some mothers who had childcare or worked part-time), to Julia pointing out that some people had babies when they weren't married, to my telling her that every child deserved to have a mother and father who were married to each other and who had promised to live together forever and give their child a loving home. Having babies before you were married was a grave sin against the baby, and that's why people needed to wait until they were married to show the kind of love that made babies. And being children themselves and seeing it from that point of view, Eleanor and Julia agreed that this was best.

"But then how do people have babies when they're not married?" Julia objected.

Well, having babies is a physical act that doesn't depend on whether you're married. That's why we prayed for purity so that they would always make the right choices and keep their minds and bodies holy. And the act of making babies was a kind of love that was only proper for married people, even if people who weren't married could behave that way, because babies deserve to have married parents who have promised to live together and make a family for that baby, remember? (Here I was starting to squirm.)

I can't retrace the conversational drift that led to discussing how fathers were necessary because humans needed both men and women for reproduction, nor how we got to eggs in women's bodies, but inwardly I was dying. "Just look confident and don't pause or stammer," I told myself, "and then they won't get wise to the fact that this is an Important Conversation." And finally we came to the rock on which I foundered.

"Well," I said, "boys and girls are different, you know. How is Jack different from you?"

"He's crazy!" Julia proclaimed.

I remember how moving it was when John McCain spoke at the 2008 RNC about how he had been tortured by the Vietnamese, and how he finally broke. Reader, I broke. I howled for ten whole seconds, which is a long time to laugh without interruption. The girls laughed because I was laughing, because what was so funny about making such an obvious statement?

"No," I was finally able to say, "how is his body different from yours?"

"He has that dangly thing, " one of them said with scorn.

"Yes," I said. "That's his penis." And this was followed with the briefest and least-involved account of how eggs were fertilized.

"I don't get it," said Julia. "How does the pen-nis touch the eggs?"

"It doesn't," I said. "It... what did you call it?"

"That thing."

"It's a penis."

"Well, I didn't know the name."

"Julia, haven't you ever heard Jack talk about his penis?" I asked incredulously. Jack will be four on Tuesday. We are in the throes of potty-training. There is a lot of discussion about penises here.

Julia dismissed the thought that she would ever pay attention to anything Jack said. "He's crazy."

"He is peanuts," I said thoughtfully. This was the kind of wordplay that the girls could appreciate.

Feeling an ever-strengthening desire to extricate myself from this conversation, I corrected biological misapprehensions with the least amount of detail necessary, and emphasized that these were not things that little girls needed to worry about.

"I don't want to think about it," said Eleanor, preparatory to putting her head under the pillow.

"Good," I said, with more enthusiasm than was seemly. "You don't have to think about it right now. At all. These are things for adults to think about. That's why right now we just pray for purity so that our minds and bodies will be clean and fresh. And that's why you should pray that if it's God's will that you get married, that your husband will be pure and holy as well."

"I'm not getting married," came Eleanor's muffled voice. "It's too much bother to have babies and be sick and get those wrinkly lines on your tummy."

I left the room with my dignity intact. Then, as I started down the stairs, I was seized with a sudden panic.

"You know, girls," I said, opening the door, "these aren't things we talk about with friends. These are only things for children to discuss with their families -- with their parents, okay?"

There was a murmur from the bed, from which I gathered that some people couldn't understand why anyone would want to discuss this subject with anyone, let alone friends.

And I thanked God that, at least for now, no one had cared to take the few logical steps to connect how babies were made with anything that their specific parents had ever done.

The Sharp Teeth of Time

I underwent a profound shift in my perception of myself recently: I am now the parent of a child old enough to need orthodontic treatment.

Here's my big girl and her pretty smile, a bit strained from the new stresses of her expander but still game.

I feel like my life is one broad continuum, over which I can look back and see my current self in each situation. But her glasses and her braces are startling external reminders that time is slipping away. Everything is changing and moving. She isn't growing away from me, but her mind is expanding and broadening, like the universe, and I'm catching more glimpses of a rich interior life and a new adolescent sensitivity. At the same time, she still has a child-like trust in me. This is such a time of wonder: when understanding is still unjaded; when parents are still propellers, not anchors; when she still sees the world through my eyes as much as through hers. I want to always maintain this sweet and easy relationship we have now.

And I want her to keep track of the key for turning the expander, which we only got three days ago, for Pete's sake, and how can it already be lost? 

Sick Day

This Thing has been going around. It is the Thing That Has No Name, to be identified only by its symptoms: fever, chills, mild nausea, lethargy, the ineluctable urge that drives children to pad through the night to hover beside their parents' bed. And the parents let them in, because parents are suckers and just want to get some sleep. I say parents, but the children always seem to materialize on my side of the bed and lay their flushed and germy faces on my pillow. It's a form of love, I think.

Today was declared a Sick Day. Two have the fever, two are recovering, and one of the convalescents has poison ivy. The happy exception to the fevered masses is Eleanor, whose 10th birthday looms ominously on Thursday, as if to provide a convenient target for an incubating ailment to suddenly irrupt. But today Eleanor was content, because sick children get to lay on the loveseat in the library and watch videos on Netflix, and when sick children hit a critical mass, even their healthy sister gets to veg. The children arranged themselves neatly on the couch, sans the kicking that usually accompanies too many bodies jockeying for position on a small sofa, for there was much anticipation: we are working our way through The Adventures of Tintin.

Tintin! The intrepid boy reporter! We never see him research anything or take any notes, nor yet send any reports in to his editor or bureau chief, and yet his reporter status confers on him a thrilling intrepid quality that can only be described as Intrepidity! He is brave and daring, even if he's a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. ("What's going on here?" he demands of a bad guy waiting for him with scimitar unsheathed.) That's okay, because between Tintin and Snowy, his little dog, the day will always be saved after plenty of adventures have ensued. The kids are absolutely hooked by the mysteriously adventurous theme music and the non-stop action.

The first fictional character on whom I had a crush was Encyclopedia Brown; I think Eleanor's will be Tintin. This sums up something fundamental about our personalities: Eleanor is drawn to derring-do and swashbuckling. When she is considering a book, her question is, "Is the whole world in danger?" (She prefers it to be saved by teenagers, but with No Kissing.) Whereas I have always liked the smart guy, and looking back to when I was circa Eleanor's age, I can see the roots of this preference. I was a small and mousy child in elementary school, neither popular nor pariah. The smart boys at school tended to be nice. One could have intelligent conversation with them on the playground. One could have swing races and shout out grandiose terms like "Altitude!" and "Longitude!" (even if one was shaky on the definitions of these fine bits of vocabulary). These boys knew how to be kind as well as witty. The handsome swashbuckling boys, by contrast, were brash, loud, overconfident, and not particularly inclined to civility or erudition. They could be mean, and they could be crude, and they teased knowingly, if ignorantly, about sex. I shrank from them, and despised them.

Eleanor, however, does not go to school, and she does not know any mean boys with their playground ways. All the boys of her acquaintance are basically good eggs, whether they like sports or science or board games. She doesn't know any jokes about sex. I'm in the happy position of raising a child who is more innocent at her age than I was at mine. In such innocence does real personality have a chance to flourish. It makes me wonder, would I like Brad Pitt more now if he didn't somehow remind me of the jerks in third grade?

Eleanor may get plenty more chances to bestow innocent admiration on Our Hero's prowess. I'm trying my best to ignore the achy sensation threatening to radiate from my spine and the subtle tightening of my skull. Oh well. If I have to spend tomorrow in bed, I'm not really worried -- I know Tintin will keep my girl safe.

Further reflections on home and work

Everyone's heard by now about Hilary Rosen's comment that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life". Romney, who stayed at home and raised five boys, quickly answered this lazy charge, but this surely won't be the last time that a woman who stays at home will hear this accusation.

What grows personally wearisome is that this line of thought -- that staying home to raise children and keep house is not "work" -- suggests that these things are not because *I* am doing them. The maintenance of children would be work if I were paying someone else to do it; the education of children would be work if I were paying someone else to do it; the business of cleaning and cooking and generally managing a household would attain the status of "work" if I employed a butler, laundress, maid, and cook, but loses this distinction because I perform these activities in my own home for my own benefit and that of my family.

This raises the question of what, exactly, is work. Activity that receives financial compensation? Activity that takes one away from family? Activity done outside the home? Activity requiring management, external accountability, or special training?

Perhaps one of the reasons for the perception of stay-at-home mothers as non-working members of society is that they do things that have to be done even by people who work. Everyone's laundry has to be done; everyone needs groceries. All children need care and education. It's hardly surprising that a woman who, after a long day at work, drags herself to the store and feeds the kids and puts them to bed, might think, "Boy, women who stay at home really have it easy. Why should they complain when I do everything they do, and still put in a full day of work?"

This is a question that deserves to be answered, even if it's not an accurate description of the life of stay-at-home mothers (especially if they teach their children at home as well). The value of what women who stay at home do is not primarily monetary, though there is a large financial advantage in having an adult in a family whose time is dedicated to making the family and household run smoothly. But the stay-at-home mother is able to tailor her work to fit the family's specific needs and style. I know exactly where the stains in all the laundry are, because I'm here when the baby spills something on herself or the boy goes rolling down the grassy hill. I have the time to make meals that cost-efficient, nutritious, and personalized to my family's taste. All these are benefits that it would be very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to replace were I not at home most of the day.

But these are all things that could be done competently by a live-in housekeeper, and even lovingly by a relative. The true value of being at home with my children is that I am the one who is raising them. At every point, whether we're doing schoolwork or cleaning or reading or just hanging around, they're absorbing my values and culture, not that of the daycare staff or the nanny or the neighbor down the street. They're also absorbing my flaws -- any child who takes after me will be a mediocre housekeeper and an inveterate procrastinator -- but it's fine with me that my children have a safe and loving environment in which to encounter the idea that adults aren't perfect. If children are a gift from God, then I see it as my job to be a gift back to them, in the most personalized and effective way possible.

Not every mother is able to stay at home with her children, and not every woman wants that lifestyle, but it's absurd for anyone to denigrate the work of a stay-at-home mother, as if the inherent desire of a woman to raise and care for her own children was the height of decadence and luxury.

UPDATE: Apropos of the discussion of what stay-at-home mothers add to the economy,Rebecca Ryskind Teti reiterates the point she made in her chapter of Style, Sex, and Substance.

The economy exists to be sure each household has what it needs. What that requires may look different for each household (does it make more sense for us to outsource childcare or provide it ourselves?), but it’s the flourishing of the human person that is the point. Is someone sneering at you for not working outside the home? Smile. They work for you!



...The human person is of course not reducible to a mere “worker.” Still, in strictly economic terms, people are our most valuable economic resource and the family is not a nostalgic religious notion, but also the most essential engine of the economy. Stay-at-home moms are not outside the economy, they’re at the heart of it.

Hell on Earth

Pity, oh pity, good souls, the poor suffering child whose parents pay exorbitant sums so she can be forced to take ballet class at the region's most prestigious schools. Consider, if you can bear the thought, the agony of the young girl betrayed by her own talent, leading her parents to conspire how best to torture her: "Let's sign her up for lessons because it will be so fun for us to drive 45 minutes each way every Saturday morning for a 90-minute class! And the best part is that our child will yell at us every Friday night!" Shed tears with this innocent maiden as she sobs, "Prestigious School is no fun! Mom and Dad are so mean! My class is hell!"

Ah, hell. Do you really want to tell me that doing drills at ballet class is comparable to eternal separation from God? You mean to say that you have the worst life in the whole world because your loving parents try to nurture your talent at a dance school that insists on a ballet bun? Let's talk, dear, about true suffering. Let's discuss the children whose parents beat them, the children who are starving, the children who are freezing on this cold cold night. Listen to Daddy tell the story of the man he knows whose father was a boy in Belgium when the Germans invaded, whose sister was shot dead on the morning of the invasion as she was walking to church with her family. Mommy assures you that you are so fortunate to grow up in a family with parents who love each other. My darling, there is suffering out there that is beyond your capacity to imagine right now. There are children whose life is almost literally hell on earth, who can only dream of the happy warm existence you have with your sisters and brother in this big house. Do not ever tell me again, please, that ballet class is "hell".

A pause, and fresh tears start. "I don't want to go to class! And why do I have to take a shower every Friday night?"

Time for bed.

So Baby Has A Skull Fracture

The drama, though not, as it proved, the events, started when I got home from work on the Tuesday night before Christmas, scooped up eighteen-month-old Pidge, and noticed that she had a soft, squishy lump on her head, slightly above her right ear. She had just started to walk consistently the weekend before -- by far the latest walker of the five -- and with five boisterous children in a house with hardwood floors the occasional lump is not unexpected, but I'd never encountered a soft lump before, except with the post-partum hemotoma our oldest had had. The lump didn't seem to bother her, however, and she had not had any notable accidents since taking a dive off the changing table the week before, so we decided to take the "wait and see" approach.

The lump remained for the next few days, and seemed like it was perhaps growing slightly, and so like the typical modern parent in times of nervousness, I began to consult Google. Soft lumps on toddler heads, I found, are usually associated with skull fractures. However, skull fractures are generally associated with vomitting, loss of balance, partial paralysis, loss of consciousness, etc., and Pidge seemed more healthy and full of personality than ever as she walked around the house talking to herself and others.

By Friday, however, with the lump no smaller and the prospect of the weekend and Christmas making doctors particularly hard to get hold of, we got nervous and took her in for an appointment at our doctor's office. Her usual doctor was on vacation, and the doctor who saw her pretty much echoed what I'd found in my online research: normally this kind of soft lump would be associated with a skull factor, but since she wasn't showing any symptoms at all, we should keep an eye on her and head straight to the emergency room if she showed any neurological symptoms. He advised we bring her on Tuesday for a followup with her usual doctor.

Pidge continued to seem as healthy as ever, but as the lump seemed to go down a little it seemed, to our nervous parental fingers and those of various visitting relatives as if there were lumps and depressions underneath. In the very center, it seemed like you couldn't feel the skull beneath it. By the time that Tuesday rolled around, we were well ready to get her usual doctor's advice.

Again, he confirmed that this kind of lump is usually only found with skull fractures, but that the total lack of symptoms seemed to make a skull fracture unlikely. However, to be sure, he sent her across the street to the hospital to get an x-ray. On the x-ray it turned out that she did indeed have a skull fracture. As best as we could figure out, it must have resulted from the fall off the changing table, at this point a week and a half in the past.

This left open the question of what, if anything, to do next. It turns out that there's not much that can be done about a skull fracture itself, other than giving the body time to heal itself. The danger comes in if the brain underneath is damaged -- either by the initial trauma itself, by a piece of bone pressing in on the brain, or by blood or other fluids building up inside the skull and putting pressure on the brain. The lack of symptoms seemed to suggest that none of these we going on, but the doctor wanted confirmation from someone with more experience dealing with toddler skull fractures, so he sent us down to Children's Hospital downtown to have them look at the x-rays and determine if a CAT scan was needed.

The specialist at Children's was able to fill in some basic questions that had built up:

- A skull fracture can result from a comparatively minor fall, one of his sons had also had a skull fracture from falling off a changing table.

- Even if it is a simple linear fracture (meaning there's a line of fracture but neither piece of bone is depressed) as the blood built up under the scalp (which is what forms the soft lump) drains and clots it can feel as if there are dips and bumps under the lump.

Once the radiologists finished looking at the x-rays that had already been taken, they were concerned that it looked like the two sides of the fracture were slightly out of alignment, which if it was causing pressure or bleeding on the brain could necessitate some kind of surgery to realign the bones. They wanted to do a CAT scan. Knowing that by this point we were going to have passed our deductible on the insurance anyway, we agreed to the CAT scan, but were seriously hesitant about the idea of signing up for skull surgergy on an apparently healthy child. If it came to that, we were going to have a lot of questions first.

Fortunately, Pidge was eminently calm as they wrapped her up like a papoose for her CAT scan. Her little face peering out of the restraints, with her yellow pacifier quietly bobbing up and down, was so incongruous in the room full of technology that I wished I could take a picture of her, but it was a "no cell phones" room.

The result of this was, thankfully, anti-climax. The CAT scan revealed that the bones of her skull were aligned enough that no intervention was necessary, and it made clear that there were no buildups of blood or fluid inside the skull. We had a very healthy (if thoroughly scanned) girl with a skull fracture, and were enjoined once again to watch out for vomitting, loss of balance, loss of consciousness, etc.

So:

- A comparatively minor fall can in fact cause a skull fracture.
- A soft lump does indeed often indicate a skull fracture beneath.
- But, a skull fracture can turn out to require essentially no treatment, so long as the brain isn't being put under pressure and the bones are aligned to heal properly.
- As the lump over even such a harmless fracture goes down, it can feel like are all sorts of depressions or lumps on the skull, but as the blood continues to clear away these go away.

Pidge continues to toddle around happily, unconcerned by it all.

In the Toilet

"Mom!" shrieked my oldest, age nine. "Your iPhone is in the toilet!"

And sure enough. Even as I stood staring down at the sleek rectangle nestled at the bottom of the pot, the finger pointing began. No one -- but no one! -- had touched it! No one had moved it off the counter to a height where baby could reach it. No one had noticed it was missing. The oldest had, apparently, flushed the toilet before she realized the phone was in there. Sure enough.

I am not overly attached to my material possessions. I am aware that many people in the world do not have a cell phone, let alone a spiffy technological wonder with a touch screen, and I have lived without a phone before. It's not the loss of the phone I mind. But some young person took my phone into the bathroom, and lied about it. Someone moved it to where baby could reach it, perhaps, and won't be honest. Someone left the bathroom door open so baby could get in. Someone was trying to sneak in a game of solitaire or watch videos, even when people have been busted and punished for such behavior in the past. It's the carelessness and the dishonesty that rankle and make me doubt my own parenting abilities, that these kinds of actions should persist even after numerous corrections.

Somehow the idea that we should tiptoe around Mother when she is angry has taken no root in my children, which I suppose I should take as a positive indicator that my children are not afraid of me. Even as I sat speechless, not so much with fury but in an attempt to quell my rising irritation, I was peppered with questions about trick-or-treating, costumes, and brilliant ideas from the amateur Sherlocks on how the phone could possibly have ended up in the toilet. The effort it took not to crush the noisy little souls around me makes my molars ache, even now. No one doubts my love for them, it seems, and it's good to have the reminder when I'm ready to give them some reason to doubt it.

And now, what? I can't punish all four older children on the theory that since I don't know who the culprit is, everyone will share the consequences. I could rant in general and hope that the intended target is impressed, but it's my experience that children only tune out scolding. I could sullenly refuse to get a new phone since there's no point in having anything around these kids, but even in my current state of dudgeon that sounds sulky and peevish. I have no carrot or stick to prevent this from happening again, only the dubious assurance that as kids get older, certain types of stupid behaviors become less common. Unfortunately, a bit of Googling informs me that dropping phones in toilets is not one of those behaviors.

"Mom!" shrieks my oldest. "Isabel just dropped a bunch of glasses all over the counter and they all broke!"  Time to clench my jaw and go love my kids again.

Catholic Parenting Fail

Yes, folks, I think it's probably time that we just close up shop and go home. We've failed.

Tonight, at the homeschool blessing mass here in Columbus it was our daughter who raised her hand after mass when the bishop offered to answer children's questions and asked, "When are you going to retire and get a wife?"

Yep. That was us.

I asked her afterwards, "Why did you ask that? Did you really not know the answer or was it a joke?"

"I wanted to know," she asserted.

"But you know that priests don't get married."

"But if they retire," she suggested, "They're not priests anymore. Can't they get married then?"

MrsDarwin interjected, "Even when priests retire from everyday duties, they're still priests. They take a vow of life-long celibacy when they're ordained."

Oldest daughter was sure she had facts on her side. "Oh yeah?" she asked. "What did St. Francis do when retired?"

"He got the stigmata and then died," replied Daddy the spoil-sport.

"Oh. Well, I didn't know that part."

Sigh...

Strengths and Weaknesses

There is a sheet of writing here on the desk, at which I've been staring.

frist pasin
Ariabask Ariabask
tern with your tow on your naee
forth pasisan
Peaca Peaca
Ariabask
leep and land in frist posison
Plea frist posisan

What keeps this from being complete gibberish is that I know it is the handiwork of Julia, age 7, who is a notorious speller. And an accomplished dancer. Interpreted, it reads:

First position
Arabesque Arabesque
Turn with your toe on your knee
Fourth position
Passe Passe
Arabesque
Leap and land in first position
Plie first position

It never fails to amaze me when I watch Julia dance. All three big girls have taken dance lessons from time immemorial, simply because I have no interest in hauling kids to soccer or taekwondo. Eleanor likes tap better than ballet, and I grant that she taps vigorously and with a certain aplomb. But Julia has a lithe elegance and grace that transcends her heritage from either parent.

Watching one's child excel at something, particularly in some unique discipline, is a fearful and wonderful thing. I choke up watching my pretty girl whirl and extend and leap. I envy her careless ease in movement. I worry both that I push her too hard because I see so much potential in her, and that I don't provide her with enough opportunity to train that talent. Should I be driving her in to take classes at the BalletMet? Does it really matter at age 7, anyway?

These mental gyrations will remain only thought exercises because it so happens that we live within walking distance of the local arts center, which has a perfectly acceptable dance studio. For now, it seems my time and effort would be better spent in imparting to the young ballerina something that comes easily to me: the rudiments of spelling. Even a naturally talented dancer is going to have trouble leeping and landing in frist posison.

My graceful girl

A Shot of Grace

Odd how it is that when things are going so pleasantly, I have nothing to say. Betty Duffy once wrote a post about right now being the golden age (which I'm not going to look up and link to at this moment, as that's one of the things that bogs me down and keeps me from posting; you can go search her archives yourself, which will be a fruitful and fascinating endeavor). That's how I feel: right now is the golden age, the time I'll look back on and think, "Everything was perfect then." I have the minor stupid frustrations of the parent of a bunch of energetic young children; I have the constant nagging suspicion that my house is full of piles of carefully sorted junk; I have an increasing awareness of my own sinfulness and tendency toward petty and pathetic sins. And yet. I am happy and productive and at peace.

A month ago, Darwin and I went out on a long-overdue date night. We poured out our frustrations to each other, and were surprised and relieved to find that we were both feeling exactly the same way: that we were at the end of our reserves. All these years we've benefited from good early training, from the constant prayers of our parents, and from basic good choices we've made along the way. Yet it seemed like we were depleting these reservoirs of grace, as it were, and had nothing of our own to keep filling them. The thread running through our whole discussion was one of weakness and discouragement, as if we needed a real shot of grace to pick us up off the floor before we could begin to take even the most halting of baby steps toward making life changes. I knew I needed to pray more, and yet I felt like I needed a infusion of grace (that word again; everything comes back to grace) before I could even say a rosary.

By ourselves, we were not enough.

After chewing on the situation from all angles, we decided to make one change, and make it permanent. We get up early, together, and get completely ready for the day. Then we go downstairs and say Morning Prayer. This sounds ridiculous even as I write it. For ten years of marriage we've not had a set morning routine, nor a shared prayer life. We never felt like we needed it, and when we did need it, there was nothing there.

There's an epitaph for you: We didn't do anything we didn't need to do. And suddenly we were in need, and there was no was no there there.


This has been great for the old perspective. Knowing that one is a fallen creature and actually realizing that fact are two different things. My own inadequacy has been borne in on me, and I'm glad. Here's an example: I've been talking for a month about my new-found awareness of the importance of the rosary. There are so many people to pray for, so many needs to bring to God, and I can't take all of them on my shoulders. I want to give them to Mary. Yet the first time I've said a full rosary in ages was this weekend.

So now: we get up, and we pray together. There's still not much order to our lives, though that's mitigated by the happy, lazy days of summer. Our long-term planning problems are not solved; the next school year is still a hazy blur in the distance; once again, I need to cut out the late-night snack. But I am at peace. I'm trying a new thing: begging God to supply what I lack and provide my husband, my children, my family, my friends, everyone, with what I can't give. And I'll keep tossing back those shots of grace as quickly as He pours 'em.

The Grace Period

Betty's working up a great series on childhood nostalgia and the great outdoors. Here's Part 1 and Part 2, with more to come. I'm enjoying reading it as my older three girls are down the street, playing with the neighbors on the corner (and the younger two are napping, A.M.D.G). Our current neighborhood is very conducive to children charging down the sidewalks or popping in at friends' houses, and you can bet I work it to the hilt. This is easy, though -- we live in a fairly middle-class neighborhood in which kids near us (all those we've met, anyway) all come from the same basic class and educational background as we do. And as we're newer in town, we haven't had the chance to meet many people who would challenge our comfy sheltered existence.

I remember when I was young, being befriended by a girl in my second-grade class named Marcie who was, perhaps, developmentally disabled. She was probably lonely and the butt of jokes, and if I wasn't agape itself, I wasn't unkind to her. She latched onto me, even calling my house several evenings. This made me apprehensive, especially as I had a hard time understanding her thick country slur, and I recall that I begged my parents not to let me talk anymore. And they agreed that a seven-year-old was too young to be getting calls. I felt a great relief at not having to bear the solitary burden of Marcie's social life, with a tinge of guilt that I didn't want to be more compassionate.

In fourth grade, the last year before we started homeschooling, I played with a girl named April. I was uncomfortable around her, for she seemed rough and coarse, but she seemed so genuinely to want me as a friend that I pitied her. I guess I must have liked her well enough, because at some point I invited her over for a sleepover. She in her turn must have liked me well enough, because she came.

We played dolls, lining them up and setting tasks for them. One of the dollies didn't behave to April's satisfaction.

"That's it -- I'm going to have to spank you!" she announced, and began to beat away at the doll.

"Stop!" I cried. But April wouldn't leave off spanking the doll. It had been bad, she explained, and deserved it. She seemed amused by my agitation.

I ran for my mother, who seemed taken aback by the vehemence of the doll's punishment but calmly explained that we didn't play spanking games at our house. April desisted, the sleepover ended, and I didn't see her after we started homeschooling. I didn't mind not seeing her anymore, as she always made me uneasy, but I wondered who would play with her now I was gone.

My children, on the other hand, have always had a very homogenous set of friends. I don't stir far out of my comfort zone these days. We don't volunteer at soup kitchens or protest outside abortion mills or go to mass in the inner city. Come to that, we don't even know any broken families. I want to preserve this idyllic enclave for them, to keep the evils of the world at bay just a bit longer. I'm less worried about injured bodies than injured souls. We're living in the grace period now, and I know it can't last forever.

The Kids Are Alright -- Or Are They?

A couple months ago we found ourselves in possession of a teenager for a few days, along with instruction to make sure that the subject "stayed out of trouble." So we set a few basic rules such as, "You don't have to go to bed at any particular time, but you need to turn in your cell phone and get off the computer by 10:30 every night."

The experience got me thinking about my own experiences as a teenager and the prospect that we will have a house full of teenage girls in less than a decade. Restrictions didn't play a major part in my own teenage experience, in part because I was reassuringly out of the social scene. In return for being generally quiet and responsible, my few outlets (flying up on my own to visit family friends in Washington state for a few weeks every summer, a series of increasingly powerful air rifles and eventually trips to the "real" shooting range, monopolization of the computer when I went into a writing frenzy) were tolerated with equanimity. I tried once to stage an argument about dating privileges, but since I didn't actually have anyone who had consented to date me at the time, it was an exercise mostly put on for show. My experience was one of not having many rules, but in great part this was because I wasn't trying to do anything that would cause me to bump up against rules. (There was no curfew because I was never out at night, etc.)

As a result, what I tend to think of as my period of dealing with teenage issues is in fact the first half of my college career -- a key difference as although I went to a college which was intent on enforcing a lot of rules, from a parental perspective I was off on my own as an adult.

When I think of that period, though, I'm seeing it through the prism of having known that the to-be-MrsDarwin and I were kids with certain principles that we weren't going to violate no matter how much opportunity we were given. Given that we didn't see having extra time together and privacy as a moral danger, we naturally wanted as much as we could get for the obvious reason that we preferred being together to anything else.

Thinking about this from the parent's perspective, though, it occurs to me that there wasn't really anyone who was in a position to know this absolutely other than us. To us it may have been clear that if we were allowed to hang out, alone together, till all hours that "nothing would happen", but however much faith our parents might have had in us if we had still been living at home at the time, they could never have known it absolutely because they weren't us.

It's all very well to say that the parents of "good kids" should have faith in their kids' virtue (which would have been my thought at the time: "You know I'm not going to get into trouble so why have rules?") But the parent can hope, but never be quite sure, whether he is the parent of the "good kid" who stays out of trouble or is that easily mocked creature, the parent who thought his kid as "the good kid" right up until the kid got into trouble and everyone started saying, "If only they'd kept a better watch on their kids."

I'm not one for before-the-fact, absolute rules, so this doesn't lead me to any "The rule in our house will be X" conclusions. (There are those who announce things such as, "My daughter won't be allowed to date until she's eighteen," around the time said daughter is born. From my point of view, that will depend a lot more on the daughter and the prospective date than the age.) But it does certainly give me a lot more sympathy with the parent who imposes certain rules on their "good kids", despite the protests of the kids that they can be trusted to stay out of trouble. Sometimes virtue can use time some and space to lets its roots sink in.

Not Our Own

It's been a rougher than average weekend, perhaps in great part because MrsDarwin and I had been away house-hunting for the last three days. We don't feel particularly like we just had a three day vacation, because it was a pretty hectic three days, with work hours spent apart, and most of the time spent in a real estate agent's car. But regardless of whether we felt rested, the children felt like they'd been with relatives and off-routine for the last three days, and although grandparents and aunts and uncles are more fun than Mom and Dad, deviations in routine and personnel seem always to create extra anxiety (or at least misbehavior) in the young.

Thus it was with a sort of resigned frustration (and after having already navigated explosions related to mass and fashion) that we realized both that we would need to go get the week's groceries for the Cinceinnati household before making dinner, and that it was necessary to take the baby (who might cry if left with non-nursers), the two-year-old (who was feeling clingy after being without parents for three days), and the four-year-old (who had been blameless all day and felt that she had lacked attention as a result). Needless to say, we would much rather have spent the hour at the grocery store along together, or with only the comparatively inert baby, and our fears were justified when behavior at the store was just as antic as we had feared it would be from the two older of our three companions. They, of course, had a blast. It was just we who would have rather forgone the opportunity to spend an hour chasing small children in and out of carts and putting back things young helpers believed should be in our cart.

As we were checking out, I was thinking to myself, "We should have just left them, even if they would have been upset about it. this is madness. One of our last hours together for a week, and it's been completely frustrating."

When I realized: As parents, we are not our own. It would have been a lot easier and pleasanter for us to have taken only the baby, and faster too. But as parents, we gave that up a while ago. Sometimes we need to go the less satisfying route when it's the one which the kids need.

It certainly won't be the last time I learn that lesson. It doesn't come naturally. But although it's often most important to come up with the most efficient and low stress ways of parenting, at others it is important to do things that aren't the most efficient, or that are actively frustrating at the time, and to do them with good grace, because we are no longer our own.

Tantrums and Control

There was a little girl
With a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.

And when she was good
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.

I have this child (minus the curl). She throws tantrums. Most children do, I guess. And most parents don't see how other people's children behave in private and so can't gauge their own child's tantrum behavior. Still, I think my daughter ranks up there with the greats in terms of attitude and anger and rage. I'd like to be wrong on this.

Parents often tell their children, "I hope one day you have a child like yourself." That would be easy: when I see my own traits (good or bad) pop up in my children, I know how to deal with them. But neither Darwin or I threw screaming tantrums, so we're in unfamiliar territory here, and we're still trying to devise coping strategies.

Spanking usually isn't the answer. It doesn't "break" her out of her mood, and she fights so hard against it that by the time one gets her held still enough to spank, one is tempted to hit way too hard. Isolation (with a parent holding tight to the doorknob of the room) at least keeps her off the scene, but she rages in her room and throws things and says stuff that I would have been horrified to say to my parents.

It's finally become clear to me that my daughter throws tantrums because she hates feeling powerless. The tantrum is a way of controlling the scene, making everyone dance to her tune. As a result, any action on our part is escalation, even trying to isolate her, and she escalates harder. She resists, sometimes violently, to being carried up to her room, and her rages are such that I fear one day she'll hurt someone -- she has enough self-interest not to hurt herself, but not enough foresight not to hurt someone else, such as her parents holding her down. Some evenings and I Darwin just stare wearily at each other across the doorknob of her room, wondering what it is we're supposed to be doing.

Heading off the tantrums at the pass seems the best option, and so we've begun counteracting our own natural tendencies by trying to stick to a schedule. That way she knows what goes on when, and bedtimes and lessons don't seem like draconian parental measures designed to punish, but just what happens when. And it works, mostly. I also spend a quantity of time reminding myself, "I'm the parent. I'm the parent." I don't shy off correcting her when she gets fresh, because I don't want to tolerate sass. But I do try to give her choices when possible so that she feels like she has a modicum of control. And when we see her building up a head of steam we remind her not to "lose her mind", which sometimes brings her back from the brink.

Perhaps this sounds a bit desperate. It's not, really. These huge tantrums don't occur all that often, and usually she's a fairly well-behaved, if strong-willed child -- far more helpful and organized than her sisters, most of the time. But when she does tantrum, it's memorable. And coming off the easy days of summer into the more structured school year is making Miss Control a bit manic. Her sister, on the other hand, deals with the change by becoming very lazy. I don't like that, but at least I recognize it.

Forget Diamonds

Another one for the "Why I don't post that often" file (I write this stuff down not because it's interesting but to maintain my sanity):

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but when you're a mother you need sturdier companions. Here are my two best buddies:




And here's the wild thing who's much to blame:



Here's the tally: in the sugar while the midwife was here, in the flour while lunch was being made, in the flour again while I was writing a shopping list. (I thought it was too quiet to be true.) Maybe it's time to put the chain on the pantry door, I thought, but I'd forgotten that the chain had been wrenched out of the wall in some earlier incident.

How Not to Act

Some unsolicited advice for the mother in the store Tuesday afternoon: If a woman suddenly starts making a scene in the grocery store, and it turns out that her child is lost, and she wanders frantically down the aisles calling for him and almost crying, and the employees get involved and start searching for the boy, and finally someone finds and brings forward a Down's Syndrome child of about six:

You will squander all the goodwill and sympathy that any onlookers have built up for your if immediately you start scolding the child harshly for wandering off, and continue berating him until you've paid for your groceries and left the store.

That is all.