The choices we make.

I read an article today that really got under my skin.  Published by the British paper Daily Mail, the article is entitled "Why I'd rather my daughter marry a rich man than have a brilliant career."  The author, Frances Childs, describes a "chat" she had with a group of 17-year-old girls.  Some of the girls dreamt of growing up and being lawyers or doctors but several wanted to grow up and marry rich men, and have kids.  Childs describes how at one point she would have argued against this plan and for the independence and self-sufficiency that a career provides.  However, giving birth to her own daughter and becoming (in her words) "a harassed working mother" caused a shift in her beliefs.  She goes on to talk about the fallacy of women having a high-powered career and motherhood and doing both well.  Childs actually calls it a fairy tale. 

Up to this point, I couldn't agree with her more.  I will take a brief detour here and describe, in part, the journey my family went on to deciding that me staying home would be best for us all.  I realize it will sound like a contradiction to say that it was both a very easy and very difficult choice.  On one hand, Kent and I both had no problem agreeing that me staying home would be less stressful and more satisfying for he and I and better for our child.  We are very fortunate that Kent is successful and my income was not necessary to keep our household afloat.  Finally, we were lucky that staying home was something I wanted to do, and that I garner a great deal of satisfaction taking care of my home, my husband and my son.  However.  With that said, there are times that it's difficult.  The days when the Foster has been inconsolable and unhappy for twelve hours, the house is messy, I look disgusting and I can't seem to get dinner on the table.  Those days are hard, especially when I think about many of my girlfriends that go to work everyday in cute outfits and have increasing amounts of career success.  To be perfectly honest, I get envious, particularly on the bad, frustrating, can't-do-anything-right days. 

I work hard to keep in mind that the grass is always greener and if I were in a position that I had to work I would miss my child and husband terribly, it would be almost impossible to keep the house in order and dinner would come from a box or delivery man.  I enjoy almost everything about staying home and certainly I enjoy it overall much more than I did the job I held before I got pregnant, even though I got to dress nice and made decent money.  The job I do now matters to someone, to a few someones, in fact.  When I make a good meal or get the house clean or spend an hour playing with Foster in the yard I feel good about those things and like I'm doing a good job.  I get more happiness from that than I ever did administering benefits and handling customer service calls.  As I said earlier though, it can be a little difficult to keep that in perspective on the bad days. 

So I agree with Frances Childs that the idea a woman can do everything well is a damaging, unattainable myth.  The part in her article I found to be so offensive was when she goes on to say that young women (those in early to mid-twenties) are, and SHOULD, be looking to marry men who are extremely wealthy.  In part,

...For modern girls, marrying a rich man is an indisputable announcement of success. 

...A happy life isn’t guaranteed by marriage to a wealthy man either. But isn’t it time we admitted that it certainly helps?

Perhaps it's just me, but I find this attitude disgusting and deplorable.  All Childs has done is take the offensive term "trophy wife" and put a bow on it.  It's the exact same thing but she's trying to make it sound noble instead of what it is: a mercenary move based more on greed than any real interest in building a loving family unit.  Childs goes on to describe friends who have cleaners and nannies.  One even has the audacity to say that she's a wife and mother, in between her trips to the gym and Spanish lessons which are no doubt facilitated by the cleaner and nanny she employs.   

Where do women get the entitled idea that they shouldn't have to work?  That not only do they not need to have a job outside the home but that they don't need to have one inside it either?  Woman who make this choice are not making a decision that they should stay home because it's most beneficial to their families; they're staying home because they're lazy and spoiled.  I do not believe that making the choice to be stay-at-home-mom means toiling 14 hours a day cooking, cleaning and taking care of kids.  Of course anyone needs a break occasionally to get exercise or read a book or have a child-free lunch with friends.  I'm not saying that staying home means you put all of yourself on a shelf.   But I am dying to know what these women feel they contribute to their families.  And above all, I am baffled why they think their husbands should work sixty hours a week while they hire a nanny and get manicures.  If you don't want to participate in taking care of your family then why even bother having one?

 

The Christmas Spirit...

Apparently that would be greed.  I had a different topic in mind when I sat down to blog tonight but then I saw a commercial and it triggered something that's been nagging me since before Thanksgiving.  I realize that I'm not making any Earth-shattering observation when I say that the meaning of Christmas has been bastardized into buying as much stuff for as little money as possible.  But it seems like the consumerism is worse this year than last year, or maybe I'm just getting more sensitive to it.

My ire was first provoked before Thanksgiving when businesses started advertising hours for Black Friday.  I found it excessive that Kohl's opened at 3:00 AM.  Question: Who needs to be shopping at 3:00 AM?  Answer: No one.  And underpaid, harassed clerks don't need to be arriving at work at midnight to get the store ready for hordes of shoppers eager to save $20 on a sweater.

Then my anger was further provoked by Toys R Us, which opened at 10:00 PM on Thanksgiving Day.  It's bad enough that people would wait for hours in the dark and cold, but once again my thoughts are with the sales associates who have to give up time with their families to get the store ready for people who are buying crap for their kids that will be forgotten by New Year's Day.  That definitely seems more important than enjoying time with loved ones.

Finally, I hit my absolute boiling point when I learned that Gap and Old Navy would be open all day on Thanksgiving so people could get a jump start on Christmas shopping.  Really?  What the hell does anyone need at Gap or Old Navy on Thanksgiving Day?  Again, it's really great for you that you can spend an hour buying cut-rate jeans but what about the people working there?  They have to give up their day to ring up your seamless t-shirts and impulse buy socks.

Now before you protest and say, "Well that's what you get when you work retail!  What do you expect!" let me say this.  If you work retail, especially during the holidays, you accept that certain things will happen.  You will work crappy hours.  You will deal with people who are unreasonable in every way.  You will refold that same stack of sweaters 47 times during your six hour shift.  Those things are given.  But you also expect that you will not have to work on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day.  Forcing employees to work on Thanksgiving Day is a new low in corporate and consumer greed.  That the dollar is more important than people spending ONE DAY with their families is so depressing I can hardly contemplate it.  I guess for some of you this insight isn't new, but for me this is an unfamiliar level of cynicism.

My disgust runs deeper than stores simply being open Thanksgiving Day.  To me this represents a further loss of the values of the season.  You don't have to be a Christian, or celebrate Christmas, to appreciate that the foremost reason for the season ARE Christian values and the Christian belief in the birth of Jesus.  Most people in America, regardless of belief, can appreciate for most of country's population this is a significant event.  I know it's hard to believe but buying as much stuff for as cheap as possible is actually NOT the original point of Christmas.  If you aren't a Christian and you don't celebrate Christmas maybe you enjoy spending time with family and friends and the feeling of good cheer that usually accompanies the month of December.  My point is that no matter what you believe, most people WANT to spend time with their families and friends, and consumer greed overshadows that.

Please don't misunderstand me.  I love Christmas.  I love to buy and I love to receive (hey, I'll admit it).  It's fun to go out pick gifts for people.  But clamoring for the least expensive item, the best sale, the longest store hours, is depressing and it saps all my cheer and goodwill toward fellow man.  In fact, it makes me hate my fellow man, their nasty attitudes and their inability to safely navigate a mall parking lot, and that's even worse then the greed.

I hope you all take a minute and remember what's important this month.  Spending time with family and friends, the birth of Jesus (if you are so inclined to believe), eating good food, and eggnog.  I hope that you will pause just a little before greed gets the better of you.  And most of all I wish you a happy, healthy holiday.

Lost

I know that for a lot of you this is going to be a weird, extremely anal-retentive post.  But that's ok.  I have a problem with losing things.  My problem isn't that I lose things often, my problem is that when I do lose something it bothers me endlessly.  Seriously, endlessly.  Three years later I'll still be checking under cushions just in case I didn't see the item the first 781 times I checked.  My latest crusade, if you will, is missing toys.  Bear has a few toys that I try very hard to keep track of each and every piece.  In particular, some puzzles, and blocks that fit into shapes cut into a box.  They're the kinds of toys that, if the pieces aren't looked after, will disappear forever and the toy will have to be thrown out.  So I try very hard to track down every piece at the end of the day when I clean up.  I did an excellent job for a long time, then we moved and I got out of the habit.  I've recently gotten back into the routine and somewhere along the way during our move one of the blocks went missing.  This bugs me daily and it's made worse by the fact that I have no idea where it might be.  Actually, considering the fact it was strewn among three different toy boxes that it's missing only one piece out of twelve isn't bad, but nevertheless it drives me crazy.  I keep thinking that as soon as I complete the other three organization projects I have left, it's bound to turn up.  Today though, I was given a new frustration.  ANOTHER piece went missing.  Since I knew this one had been around within the last two days I checked all of the usual places that might be: toy boxes, under the couch, under the dress, under the crib, all to no avail.  I can't find that damn thing.  So now TWO pieces are missing and it's like this little irritant I can't get rid of.  Obviously I know that there are things that are much more important in the world and much bigger issues.

Please tell me that someone, anyone, has this same affliction.  You don't have to be a mom.  Just please assure me that I'm not the only compulsive person out there.

Don't say that.

I have a friend from high school that has a little girl just a few months older than Bear.  Not long ago he posted that his little girl figured out how to take off her diaper.  I thought, "Oh man.  That sucks!  But luckily that will never happen to me!"  Why did I figure it would never happen to me?  Who knows.  Overconfidence, most likely.

Today I put Bear down for a nap.  He was quiet for about twenty minutes and then started making noise.  He wasn't upset or distressed so I decided to let him hang out in the hope he'd go back to sleep.  After about ten minutes he was still making noise so I went in to get him.  Now if you know me AT ALL you should have the punchline all figured out.  There was Bear in his crib, his diaper on the floor, poo all over his hands and on the carpet and happy as a little, poopy clam.  As it turns out, Bear figured out how to take off his diaper!  Oh rejoice!  Actually, I was mostly happy that for the first time in several days waking up didn't involve a temper tantrum.  In a situation like this I believe you have only one choice: you better laugh, and you better mean it.  Bear got a bath and a new outfit and I got a story for my blog so all the better. 

The moral of the story: your kid will learn to take off his or her diaper.  Oh, and never say your kid won't do something but they probably will.

Shh.

I'm going to tell you something that no mother in her right mind should ever say to anyone, let alone the World Wide Web.  I have a lot of fear telling you all this.  I worry about what the fallout will be.

*Deep breath*

OK.  Here it goes.  At 18-month-old Bear will finally go to sleep without a bottle and without crying.  He sleeps through the night most night, until 7:00AM.  He doesn't need a bottle, he stays in his crib instead of coming in with me and he seems no worse for the wear.  It's amazing and wonderful and I fear I've now ruined it.  I fear that since I've blogged about it, beginning tonight he will once again wake up two or three times a night demanding a bottle, throw a tantrum when I lay him down and wake up for the day before 6:00AM.

Sleep.

Is there anything else that a new (or newish) mother thinks about more?  Fantasizes about more?  Wishes for more?  One of the things new mothers don't hear enough is that, no matter what, you will constantly feel like you aren't doing a good job, at least in some area.  For me that area was sleeping.  I have friends with babies that slept through the night with no problem at four months and hearing those stories inevitably threw me into a tailspin.  Why wasn't Bear sleeping through the night?  Why did he cry so much when I laid him down?  What was I doing wrong?  I consider myself a follower of the attachment parenting philosophy but I couldn't get past the idea that I was somehow failing because he wasn't sleeping.  Attachment parenting looks at night waking as normal but I couldn't stop beating myself up over it.  My anguish was amplified by my lack of sleep.

After almost a year and half though, it seems a corner has been turned.  I don't know exactly what happened but I suspect a change in routine for the better has played a large part.  When I still worked it was difficult to stay on a consistent bedtime routine.  There was simply too much to do and not enough hours in the day.  I think my being gone was very disruptive for Bear too.  When I got home Kent was almost literally walking out the door.  The atmosphere was very chaotic and, I think, upsetting for a little baby who didn't understand why one of his parents was almost always gone.  For parents that don't have another choice but to both work, or parents that are single, they have my admiration.  Doing this with a spouse who earns a good living so I can stay home makes our lives immeasurably easier and I am so grateful.

I'm hoping the good sleep continues so that for the next five months of my pregnancy I can get some decent rest.  Modify that to read: as good a night's sleep as a pregnant woman can get.  I can still sleep on my stomach (my preferred sleep position), but at 19 weeks those days are numbered in a serious way.  If I make it to 22 weeks I'll be very surprised.  Then there's the issue of waking to, um, go...you know and the restless legs.  I swear that happened because I spent years making fun of restless legs as a made up disease.  Whoops!  Make sure your words are sweet because you might have to eat them, as the saying goes.

If any other moms out there are reading this in a sleep-deprived haze I want to promise you that things should get better.  Your baby will sleep through the night eventually.  Even though I said that we follow an attachment-parenting philosophy we found that sleep improved when we began to do some of the practices outlined in Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.  The hardest thing, undoubtedly, was getting Bear to stay in his crib.  Even though I love him in bed next to me he (and I) sleep better when he's not there.  It's bittersweet.  I miss him during the night but I know that it's not healthy for him to wake up numerous times of me and it doesn't do me any favors as a mom either.

So here I am, at 10:00PM getting ready for sleep after laying down my sweet baby at 7:30.  Maybe it's no coincidence that I was able to think about blogging again when sleep returned to our lives.  If that's the case you can look for another long-hiatus beginning in mid-April (although I sincerely hope not).  *g*

How do I...?

I don't know how to do anything.  OK, that's far from true.  But the things I don't know how to do have been a surprise.  When my mom grew up my grandma stayed home, had four kids spanning almost ten years, made (really made, not from-boxes made) at least three meals a day AND hand washed all the dishes, kept a meticulous house and was involved in several volunteer activities.  Plus, she sewed clothes for Barbies, baby dolls, kids and possibly my grandpa.  She gardened, helped care for her ill mother-in-law and smoked cigarettes while maintaining a nice complexion.  In a word, she was a Ginger Rogers to my Fred Astaire, vacuuming backwards in high heels.  She was a consummate domestic diva without the benefits of modern convenience that I enjoy (shout out to my dishwasher!).  Apparently the only thing she wasn't very good at was cooking eggs; in light of all the other things she did I think that can be overlooked. 

Like most women of her generation my grandmother was trained, most likely from birth, that she would stay home and take care of her kids, husband and house.  Unusually for a women in the 1940s she finished college.  Up until she got married she taught home economics.  In order to finish her program she had to invent several recipes.  INVENT.  Recipes.  FOR BAKING.  It took me over  a year to figure out that my Toll House cookies were getting flat because I needed to add a quarter cup of flour. 

I was not raised from an early age to think that I would stay home and take care of a family.  I believed that I would go to college (which I did), get a degree in four years or less (BA in Psychology in three and a half years...let's not debate the usefulness of this particular program), maybe go onto Master's work and then get a job and be very successful.  Nowhere in there did I learn any skill that might be useful in a domestic sense.  We did have a department in my high school that was essentially a home economics department.  I think it was Family Studies or something like that.  I just checked my high school's website and it doesn't look like that department even exists anymore.  Anyway, I digress.  What I'm about to say might sound disrespectful and I do NOT mean it as such AT ALL.  But, the kids that took classes in that department were, to be tactful, not kids that seemed to be college bound.  Students like me were not really encouraged to take those types of classes.  Family Studies students might have learned how to cook or make a budget but what I mainly remember is they had to carry around these stupid babies that were supposed to show them how time consuming it is to be a parent.  Only you couldn't actually cause harm to these things and you got to give them back after three days.  So, maybe not the most realistic exercise.  (As an aside, my summers spent babysitting were more effective birth control than anything I could have possibly learned in three days spent with a baby doll.)

The upshot to all this is that I've had to figure out on my own how to cook, run a straight hem, take care of a toddler, keep a clean house, organize a budget, plan meals, and keep laundry from raging out of control in the span of about three weeks.  However I can tell you a lot about bipolar disorder, autistic spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.  So that's useful. 

I thought all this would be relatively simple but it hasn't been.  I'm lucky to have rudimentary organizational skills and I've found that things keeping things clean and tidy are much easier when I put them on a four week schedule and post that on my fridge.  It's much easier when I think about weekly meals and plan them before I go to the store.  And everything is better if I have a sense of humor.  This is me as I figure out how to be successful in this new role.  I have every confidence I can do as well as my grandma, except that under no circumstances will I give up my dishwasher.

What's that smell?

The other day Bear woke up at 7:00 as usual. Without my begging or asking or anything, Kent woke up so I could sleep in. I was feeling very lucky. Within five minutes though, he was back in the bedroom.

"Um, babe? I kind of need you to get up."

Those are never words that excite a sleeping, pregnant woman.

"Bear threw up and I kind of need two hands to take care of all this."

These are words that excite a sleeping, pregnant woman even less.

Why did he throw up? Who knows. He didn't seem too bothered by it. We stripped his crib and his jammies and threw him in the bath (we didn't literally throw him, in case any agents for Child Protective Services are reading).

Why am I sharing a barf story with you? Because I can't think of a good reason not to.

Snippets

I'm still having a hard time thinking about how to properly compose thoughts that are more than 160 words and grammatically correct. I guess that what I've learned from the evening news and Facebook is how to think in soundbites instead of real thoughts. Continue to bear with me as I relearn this skill.

There is so much that I have on my mind; funny anecdotes, things I've learned; things I need help with and techniques that have helped me as I transition to a stay-at-home-mom. For some reason though I'm having a hard time organizing my thoughts. I think (as I mentioned above) it stems from Facebook. When all else fails I hope the lesson you learn is: you can always blame Facebook.

It's been an interesting change to go from balancing a part-time job to being home full-time. Even though my days are long and busy they are also much, much less stressful. Almost everyday I make all three meals, mostly from scratch; clean whatever is on the schedule for the day; and play with or otherwise attend to Bear's needs. I have very little time to relax. Kent works hard so that I can stay home and in return I think it's my job to make his life at home as easy as possible. In my opinion, if someone is working almost 50 hours a week they shouldn't have to come home and unload the dishwasher. Before I quit work we split household tasks pretty evenly, even though Kent was at the job for more hours, in case you're curious.

I know that this post still isn't nearly as funny as my older posts and doesn't flow as well. I hope you will all continue to bear with me as I get back into the swing of writing. xx

A fresh start

I'm not sure where to begin, since it's been such a long time since I last posted and there have been many changes in my life. First of all, we are no longer a family of three but a family of almost-four. We're expecting another baby in April. Last time I wrote I was a new mom that was pausing before returning to work. I quit the job I was at when I had Bear, stayed home for almost a year and then got back in the game. The game didn't last long. I worked for six months as a Child Treatment Counselor at a residential facility before the stress of being away from home, the job itself, and my pregnancy made me seriously rethink what I was doing. As a family we decided it would be best for me to stay home indefinitely. Now I'm trying to figure out how to efficiently and effectively run a household. Needless to say it's been a learning curve, and my experiences will make up a large part of my blog. For some of you these will be topics that aren't interested so it's OK if you don't want to read. Unless you're family. Then you better be checking in everyday.

Also, I know this post doesn't read as smoothly as some of my earlier posts from two years ago. You'll have to bear with me as I get my writing ability back. I'm very out of practice. Doing nothing but writing status updates on Facebook will have that effect.