Better Make It A Double

phoning it in

OK - I know I've written about similar issues before, but in this interesting stage, where my boys scrutinize and comment on my every move, I cannot help but feel like my living room is a microcosm of our society. O asks if I’m going to the bathroom again, and then stands next to me wanting updates on my progress. N tells me to put on the other necklace, the pretty one. Some days, they have more of an opinion on how I dress and behave than on how they dress and behave. But my boys are three, and mostly adorable, and they are my own children.

Mothers’ choices are so often under a microscope outside of their living rooms, and she is quite rarely considered both smart and wise enough to make the right choices for her family without input or downright judgment from other people. For some reason I’ve encountered a lot of this lately. My MIL commenting yet again that she’s so glad none of her grandkids have had to use (shudder) daycare.  An article in a mainstream magazine describing today’s mothers as self-absorbed and narcissistic for daring to blog, write, and commiserate. Two sessions of an Early Childhood class that focused on “working and the family" where the otherwise very nice teacher seemed rather bent on encouraging us to focus on our families, as if the idea that our families need our time was not part of our decision making regarding whether to work. She passed out articles encouraging us to remember that “nobody ever died saying they wished they’d worked more”. Right, but some people might die wishing they’d held onto the house, been able to help their kids pay for college, or not having had to worry about money so much. Many women are happier, more patient mothers if they work at least part-time, and that didn’t come up either. The fact that women’s careers might have as much legitimate “value” in the world as men’s certainly didn’t come up. No, the myth of the sacrificial mother is alive and well.

Motherhood is capable of feeling exhilarating, utterly enjoyable, and full of wonder, and rewarding like nothing else known to you. It can also feel mind-numbingly boring, brutally relentless, and even terrifying. All in the same afternoon week .

The job description is miles long: who could you ever hire to fill the role of your average mother? You couldn’t. The hours would be too long, the details too many, the roles too varied. Cook, nanny, laundress, housekeeper, teacher, nurse, bookkeeper, grounds keeper, household manager, you get the picture. Then add chief worrier, philosopher, spiritual director, and giver of devoted, unconditional love. Could you even imagine the want ad? Or the salary? And then on top of all that, we’re supposed to play the saintly, beatific mama who clucks proudly at her brood and doesn’t complain, doesn’t need a break, and certainly doesn’t ever say, “To hell with this! I need to get the f&ck out of the house for while, by myself”.  But many of us do have those awful moments, even days and weeks, where nothing seems like it’s going right, where we’re agitated, overwhelmed, or sad – I know this from reading blogs, and memoirs, and from having real, honest conversations with other mothers that reveal that same desperation that I sometimes feel at having to fill an almost impossible role in the way that it can seem like I’m supposed to. And the pressures on today’s mothers are unbelievable –the economic pressures are far higher for our generation than they were for our parents’ generation, and we have a ton more pressure around the types of minute-to-minute interactions we have with our kids – but at least we’re a little more honest with each other some of the time. We have a lot more than Erma Bombeck (God bless her) going for us in that regard.

Still, mothers’ choices and the things they do with their children are often unjustly scrutinized, and far too often by each other.  I read a blog entry recently (by a mother) that mocked women who talk on their cell phones while pushing strollers or sitting at the playground. Quote: “Duh! You’re at the playground. With your kids.”  Then, interestingly, I heard a mom at the playground say almost the same thing to her friend, while they were both watching a mom on the other side of the playground having a chat on her phone. Um, if I’ve been caring for kids all morning, dealing with screaming and whining, wiping butts, counters and floors, putting together puzzles and fetching milk—no, not that cup! —and not having one damned moment to even sit down, God forbid I take my kids to a place where they’ll be perfectly happy without my constant direct intervention and call a friend for a few minutes. Or the bank, or the insurance lady, or whoever the hell else is on my mile-long to-do list. Where does this scrutiny, this monitoring, and this need to correct mothers, even fellow mothers, come from? I've heard the cell phone comment before over the years, this symbol of the zoned out, inattentive mom with no sense of priorities.

And while we're on the subject, what the hell is so wrong about blowing your kids off for a little while every now and then, anyway?  What is wrong protecting your own sanity a little bit, and teaching their kids that they’re not the only ones in the family? What is this insane pressure to “engage” with them All. Day. Long.? Perhaps it is a side-effect of the guilt and pressure already heaped upon us. IMO there’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying “go play” to your kids every once in a while, and maybe a lot right. I’ve often thought that’s at least one thing the Erma Bombeck generation was a lot better at than this one is. Kids do need to learn to amuse themselves, even to be a little bored or frustrated sometimes in order to creatively figure out something to do. I'm not sure they are even particularly well served by our constant direct entertainment once they are past babyhood. Parents do often need a quiet moment, or just to be able to unload the dishwasher in peace for a few minutes. Granted, this is probably easier for me with twins than it is with moms that have one kid or one kid and a baby (though I’d be willing to bet your kids collaborate in performing less mischief too), but judging moms who do anything else at the playground but stare lovingly at their children or act as their besotted cheerleaders, waiting snack bags in hand? That seems crazy, and a little mean. We are, according to some lines of thinking, not capable of making good choices, managing our time, or prioritizing our kids well enough to know when it’s appropriate to make a damned phone call. Am I alone in finding that insulting?

I think that for whatever reason, people who are going through difficult times tend to choose either solidarity or alienation-and-judgment as coping mechanisms. We tend to either seek out support and band together to get through things or to find ways to say that everyone else is doing it wrong. We cling to the things we’ve learned (or think we’ve learned, till kid #2 comes along), and turn them into arrows borne of alienation because we don’t have enough support to see that those details don’t have to matter all that much, that if we just hang out and tolerate each other, we’ll probably feel less threatened and more supported by fellow moms. It’s hard sometimes, and I’ve gotten it wrong myself more than once. I've also completely misjudged who I might have something in common with (or whose company I might just really enjoy) based on first impressions. This isn't high school, but it  is a chance  not to recreate it.

I do love being a mother, thankfully much more than I hate it most days. But I love it a lot more for the frank kvetching I can do with a good friend every now and then, for the support and excellent co-parenting skills of my spouse (you’re absolutely right about your conclusions there, Lisa), for the occasional retreat, for rewarding work, for outlets like writing and blogging and gardening, and for a supportive and engaging faith community. I need every little bit of that scaffolding in order to stand upright and do this job right.  

Ultimately, when we get all judgy, give each other the once over, and come to rigid conclusions about the right way to do things, I think we’re asking the wrong questions, questions that obscure bigger, more valid and relevant issues.

We’re asking:

Should moms work, and how much?

Should moms stay at home, and for how long?

Are moms doing enough for their children?

Are moms making the correct choices as far as disciplining their children?

Can moms be trusted to pay enough attention to their children and keeping them safe?

Can she be trusted to do a good enough job?

 

We need to be asking:

 

Are moms too stressed? Why?

What kind of support do moms need in order to be patient and effective as parents?

How do we create a society that is richer in that type of support?

How could I help?

How could or do policies and programs help?

What makes for a healthy family, anyway?

What can we teach our children or expose them to that will help make the transition to parenthood easier for them than it was for us?

What’s a fair division of labor within families?

What do children actually need to thrive, and what is the community’s role in that?

Should parents and teachers be the only ones that take an interest in children’s lives?

 

restless

Goodness, N is trying my patience all of a sudden. Whiny, defiant, unreasonable and uncooperative, if not engaged in an all-out screaming fit. It had been a while since I’d seen this side of him, and now that he’s a little older and more sophisticated, it’s like living with Terrible Two Version 2.0 –louder, more persistent, and smarter than Version 1.0. Normal age-three stuff, I’m told, but man. How quickly we forget those patches of true difficulty with one developmental stage or another. I really struggled to be even civil with him at times this weekend, and didn’t always succeed. My own general mood made for some bad timing this weekend, though it had its high points. My endometriosis symptoms are thankfully quite minor compared to my pre-pregnancy days, but every now and then, like this month, my period refuses to come on time. The cramps, lower backache and crabby depression come right on time, though, and it can drag on for days. Other months, my first sign of a period is in the bathroom, which, after a decade and a half of monthly extreme pain, still comes as a grateful shock. The best parts of this weekend involved getting much work done in the garden. J and I were a good team, and he took the boys away for some Daddy-and son fun a couple of times when I was at my most frustrated. I was so very grateful. Every time I step into the garden, the smell of crabapple, red-twig dogwood, and lilacs bowl me over with their lush, clean scents. That, combined with a little dirt under my fingernails is an elixir for a restless soul. Now if it would just be over 70 degrees for a couple of days in a row, please,  so that my tomato plants quit looking even more grumpy than I am.

vegetable gardening: the anti-primer

Ok, so I am not any kind of gardening expert. I knew squat-to-little when we bought our house in 01’, but I do really, really love it. I have some OK perennial beds and a good number of raised beds for veggies, but I’ve also been somewhat limited by my back pain. This spring, I both have some good relief from that pain and no longer have boys that require lifting all the time (though, O really seems to disagree lately). I’m making better headway than I have in years. I’m currently recovering from walking pneumonia, so I’ve been a bit tired at the end of the day, when I usually put the baby monitors outside with me and get a little work done. I’ve been staring at the long grass and the weeds with a  bit of frustration, but J has promised to take the boys to their Early Childhood class on Friday morning so I can get some planting done, and I can’t wait to get all the rest of my babies (most of which were grown under lights) in the ground. A couple of weeks from now, I’ll get the cucurbits in, as well as the beans, and all the initial planting will be done. I’ll continue to do successive plantings of carrots, radishes, and lettuce. Memorial Day is considered our “frost safe” date around here in our Zone 4 clime, though certain foolhardy brave folks flaunt that advice with a becoming sauciness that my more cautious side can never seem to muster.

So anyway – not an expert, just really enthusiastic and always learning. I am never really more at complete peace than when I am in the garden, except maybe when I am writing or hiking in the woods. That’s not to say I don’t tremendously enjoy other (and more social) parts of my life, but I get the most energy from those things.

Snickollet asked for a “primer”, though, and was echoed by Clover, and I just had another friend ask me for some tips, so I’ll throw a few things out there with some links to people that know far more than I.

First off, in case you only read this far --

Some things I wish I’d done differently:

• Bought more than one of each perennial and less variety overall.
• Paid more attention to what’s in bloom when.
• Spaced  things out more and waited for them to fill in, rather than creating an “instant garden”. Trust me; I’m still paying for that mistake.
  
• Built all my raised beds in cedar or with landscaping pavers so they don’t fall apart in a few years.
  
• 'Made sure all my raised beds were accessible from all sides.

Vegetable gardening: starting small

If you want to grow a few veggies and start simple, you can do a few just in pots on your deck or patio. I recommend an organic approach. You’ll need:

•  Some good-sized pots (8-12 gallons or so).
• A big bag of potting soil ( not the kind with chemical fertilizer in it).
• Some organic liquid or pelleted fertilizer labeled for veggies (kelp or fish, usually).
• A garden trowel.
• Some light-duty gardening gloves (or a really good nail brush).
• Tomato trellises or cages (one per plant)

Go to a decent nursery (not Home Despot) and buy starts of tomatoes (just one plant per pot), Swiss Chard, lettuce, and herbs. Tomatoes should be determinate (the kind that stop growing after a while instead of vining on indefinitely – not practical in a pot).

If you have some chards of terracotta (like from a broken terracotta pot) it is helpful to put one over the hole in the bottom of your pots, round side up, so that the hole never gets packed with dirt or roots. That way, water can always drain properly, and your plants won’t drown after a good rain. Some gravel at the bottom works too (chicken grit is quite cheap, if you can get your hands on some).

In any case, pack your soil loosely around the plants. IMO, you can put about 4 lettuces or chard in a pot that is about 12 inches across the top. Chard is so beautiful (especially rainbow chard), and just keeps coming when you cut it. 2 chard and 2 lettuce per pot would look especially lovely.

Make sure you cut down your lettuce before it bolts (goes to seed), or it will be bitter and inedible. Chard really doesn’t bolt. You could put in a few lettuce seeds just as you plant your starts for a successive planting. A few radish seeds tucked here and there is another option.

For herbs, I’d say about 3 per pot will work for most. Chives and thyme are perennial, so you may want to plant those in the ground or they’ll likely freeze over the winter if you’re in a cold climate. Dill is probably too big for most containers, but basil, parsley, oregano, rosemary, sage, marjoram, and cilantro are all good options. If you do them in several smaller pots, you can try extending the season on some of them (not cilantro) by moving to a sunny windowsill when it gets cold.

For this late in the Spring, and if you’ve never done it before, I’d say that might be a good way to start. See how you like it – if you don’t mind the attention if requires, if you like poking around the nurseries, getting your hands dirty, seeing your kids enjoy a leaf of basil. See how it feels to put your very own tomato and basil on that mozzarella, to pop outside and grab a sprig of rosemary for those summer potatoes. If you start looking at your backyard and your vision gets all foggy and you suddenly envision a thriving vegetable bed in that corner instead of what’s already there, you’ll know you’re done for.

Expanding your options with raised-bed gardening

In that case, I’d recommend building a raised bed if you live in the city. Lead and other pollution in the soil is a real issue, and raised beds are the best protection against that. As mentioned earlier, it’s best to use a durable material. Green-treated wood is still somewhat controversial for veggies (it no longer contains arsenic), but do not use railroad ties. I am kind if liking the concrete pavers I’m slowly replacing the pine sides of two of my raised beds with, and of all the options I’m familiar with, that’s probably the most environmentally friendly. Cedar is ideal as far as it’s attractiveness and durability, but quite expensive, and I’m not sure if cedar is such a readily-renewable resource. Leave a comment if you know more about this.

My beds are about a foot high all around. As for dimensions, ideally, you should be able to reach any part of them with your hands when you are kneeling. Here are some primers on ways to build them. May I just say that there was so much less information on the web about stuff like this back when I was starting? I personally recommend square foot gardening – an intensive approach that’s ideal for raised beds and cuts down on weeding. I’ll let you research that on your own –the book is widely available.

Now what?

Let’s say that you spent a summer doing pots, liked it, and built a couple of 4x4 raised beds. You could square them off (use bamboo sticks or string to make the squares, then follow the book’s directions as to how much to plant per square) and do lettuce, radishes, carrots, cukes, and zucchini from seed. You could buy starts of tomatoes, some herbs, maybe some more chard and lettuce to get an earlier start on things.

 See how that goes. If you think you’ve really got the gardening bug, you could add another couple of beds and invest in some lights. You could start poring over seed catalogs in December and get your own starts going in the basement as early as February. You could add a couple of apple trees the next Fall. You could notice that chickens would provide excellent slug control as well as a free source of good fertilizer. You could consider turning your gravel driveway over to several more raised beds, adding another bay to your compost pile, and planting a “Food Shelf” bed of lettuce and broccoli in the boulevard. God help you then.

 You could then find yourself with something resembling the following To Do List:

• Seed more flower seeds indoors
• Get pots ready for zinnias
• Plant tomatoes, etc.
• Weed back beds and raised beds
• Re-seed carrots
• Seed more lettuce, radishes
• Pull dandelions and crab-grass
• Mow lawn
• Water trees while gardening
• Seed lawn
• Check on front perennials
• Put up peony rings or string
• Clean out peony bed
• Plant hostas in back area
• Figure out way to mark off bed for squash
• Move rosebush to back area
• Update gardening journal (lilacs bloomed 3^rd week of April)

 
Some of my favorite gardening/local eating sites and blogs:

Mary Jane's Farmgirl Connection

Garden Rant

Garden Blogs by Region (from Sustainable Gardening)

You Grow Girl

 Locavore Nation (NPR)

Garden Works (local to MN)

Metro Blooms (local to MN)

Some interesting articles:

Dharma In the Dirt (NYT)

Urban Farmers' Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market (NYT)

The Gospel of Consumption (Orion)

(OK this last one really doesn't have much to do with gardening, but it's very much about related concepts about sustainable living. A must-read, IMHO.)

Some more How-to’s:

Seed Starting (about.com)

Essentials of Organic Gardening (about.com)

WikiHow on Gardening

Some of my favorite books:

World Community Cookbooks

This series of cookbooks (by Mennonites) are a great resource for helping you figure out how to stretch your food dollar, make more sustainable and ethical food choices, and figure out what to do with all that CSA/Farmer's Market or kitchen garden produce.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver

Micheal Pollan's books (I'm currently reading In Defense of Food.)

The All-New Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew (you can also get an overview here).

The Frugal Gardener, by Catronia Tudor Erler

Coming Home To Eat: The Pleasure and Politics of Local Foods, by Gardy Paul Nabhan


--Happy gardening!

 

lean

What’s harder to talk about, do you think: money, or sex? I find it interesting that even as people have a hard time being frank about both of these topics, we are literally surrounded by media blather about them. Sex sells, and money will make you happy, or so go the messages most of us are bombarded with every day, from billboards, magazines, TV, even ads staring at us while we pee in public bathrooms. Both topics also involve a lot of secrecy. People are, in most middle-class circles anyway, probably about as likely to talk about how much they make as they are likely to spill what they do (or don’t do) in the bedroom.

But, this is a blog, and it’s what’s on my mind, and I know that I’m not alone in struggling with the issue of money even if it feels like I am. As I’ve said, money has been tight. This fact has been extremely stressful and preoccupying for me lately. It has been very difficult for me to relax since our savings account got as low as it has. We have made some pretty major changes, cutting out everything from the Y membership to babysitters. Doing the Compact is helping some. Basically, we don’t spend money on anything we don’t have to right now. J is down a few piano students, and it’s a tough time of year to find new ones. Our property taxes are up (though our house value is significantly down), the cost of health care and prescriptions has gone up tremendously to over $600 a month, we’re paying off an assessment, and the cost of food is way up. The cost of both natural gas and gasoline are also way up. All at the same time. Sound familiar, America?

We talked with a financial adviser recently who convinced me that while our budget is quite lean, we’re not in crisis, and we should be OK if we increase our income a little. We’re working on it – doing a little advertising, looking at various options for J’s musical talents. We’re going to have to do it with no childcare, and that’ll always be hard. There are a few other factors playing into my stress, though; factors that are easier to ignore when the savings account is more flush. I come from an upper-middle-class background, and while I certainly don’t expect to live that kind of lifestyle on our income, it is always staring me in the face. I spoke with my mom the other day, and she asked me how things were. I told her about our recent calamities involving a couple of thousand dollars we do not have to spare, and she told me that she had a crappy day too, because the lawn chair cushions she had ordered custom from a tailor came out wrong and needed to be re-done. At no charge, mind you, but the chairs look so bare. On the veranda of their 2^nd home. Conversations like that make me resentful and somehow a little ashamed –a fact that I’m not proud of. The expectations that I was raised with: that I would either get a job that pays very well or at least marry well, die hard. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, I was raised with the idea that hard work = money, and that a responsible person has a flush savings account, maxes out their retirement inputs, and has money left over to save for their kids’ college funds.

In the abstract, I do know that people with less money most often do not work less hard, and that people can be “responsible” and still struggle. Furthermore, many of the people I personally know that don’t make much money are in that situation because of their values –because they are committing their lives to working with kids, or doing nonprofit work. J and I work very hard, with no childcare:  me half-time at a nonprofit working with community benefit programs and hospital patient families and J teaching piano and playing piano for church. I could work more at a different job, but the cost of daycare would likely offset any increase in income. We don’t spend excessively; right now we don’t even buy anything new. We’ve never just put things we want on credit cards, taken vacations we can’t afford, or started January with massive holiday bills. Doing the Compact has been fairly easy for us because we were already pretty frugal.

Lately, though, it hasn’t been enough. We’re still spending more than we take in, and the changes we’ve had to make have been a bit more painful, involved a bit more humility. One of those changes involves going back on WIC. We had WIC when the boys were babies, and I was off work for a few months after months of bed rest. I recently figured out that we still qualify, and we can get vouchers for all of our milk, cheese, peanut butter, and beans until the boys are 5. I knew that would help quite a bit, but to be honest,  I cringed at the thought of going back into that office. Two years ago, my “worker” was a 22-year old fresh out of a rural college, full of pep and passion for educating the disadvantaged about nutrition and literacy. Her assumption seemed to be that you’d only breastfeed, feed your kids real food and read them books with her chirpy enthusiasm as your guide, and she had a complete lack of understanding that the sooner she quit giving me a breast-is-best pep talk (not that I’d ever indicated I was thinking of stopping), the sooner I could get home and feed the babies that were squawking next to me. It was an exercise in tolerant humility—which is undoubtedly a good thing for me to have endured—but it didn’t make me look forward to going back.

Thankfully, the “lesson” I was to learn this time was not the same one. If last time I learned a little about how it feels to have one’s lower income conflated with not reading to one’s children or giving them proper nutrition, this time I learned a little more about my own assumptions. As I was buzzed in the entrance door, the first person I saw was another church member with her own two kids. She smiled warmly and we greeted each other, though she was called up right then and we didn’t get a chance to talk. The boys played sweetly with the other kids in the waiting area until we were called up by our worker, a 30-something Somali woman. We joked easily as she weighed, measured, and finger-pricked my boys, and when we went over the options for our food “package” (you can make different choices based on your family’s preference), she shared some helpful tips based on what she did for her family with her WIC package. Of course, I thought. Anyone in her position with more than one kid probably qualifies for WIC – as will my old chirpy 22-year-old worker someday, unless she marries someone who makes a lot more than she does. My own values – or rather, my ability to live up to them –were staring me in the face. I work with the “disadvantaged” myself. How are my assumptions affecting those interactions?

Really, I need an attitude adjustment about as much as we need a bit more money coming in. I need to remember that whatever my background, I am in solidarity with people who struggle in all kinds of ways, and that solidarity is often borne of direct familiarity with that struggle. I also need to remember that we’re doing our best. We’re not spend-thrifts, we’re not trying to keep up with the Joneses, and we’re certainly not lazy. We’re just part of the struggling lower-middle-class, like millions of Americans are, especially in this ailing economy. And really, we’re doing a lot of things right. We get to spend a lot of time with our kids, even if the four of us are rarely together all at once.  Our boys eat really well, and they’ll be going to a great preschool. We may get all our clothing used, but they have nice, neat clothing to wear. We may not have money for fancy Lego sets, but used blocks, books from the library, toys given as gifts and even chickens provide plenty of entertainment. We live in a culture of tremendous excess, and in some ways it is our lean budget that helps shelter the boys from that. It is connected to our decision to grow some of our own food, to go camping for a vacation, to explore some of the wonderful free events around town that the boys enjoy as much as they’d enjoy a trip to ChuckECheese or a bouncy house warehouse. It is also connected to teaching them about institutions that promote interdependence: libraries, parks and playgrounds, public transportation, even seeing their Sunday School buddies in our local WIC office. I’m all for these things, and not just for “other” people, not just in theory. Usually, that’s not too hard to remember, but I admit that it is frustrating sometimes to be around people who assume everyone enjoys their standard of living, who invites you to lunch at a place you can’t afford, refers to off-brand clothes as “cheap-looking”, or ropes you into a group gift that’s beyond your means.

I also know that, responsible or not, many Americans are heading into real financial crisis. Many hard-working people are losing their homes, their savings, or their retirement funds. I doubt the economy has bottomed out – in fact, as we’re moving into a real global energy crisis, I’m not sure that concept even has meaning in the same way is used to. Peak oil is happening (or has happened), with no real solution in sight, and the economy of the last 60 years has been built on the availability of cheap oil. I think it’s quite likely that we’re looking at a rapidly changing world, a major restructuring of the world’s economy*. It’s scary.

This is a time when we really need to be looking at things like frugality, growing food closer to home, using fewer resources, and less energy. It is also, as I have been reminded lately, a time when solidarity and interdependence will even more important than they've always been. Skills like cooking from scratch and growing and putting up food are again becoming important as the cost of fuel and food rise. A lot of these skills have been lost over the last couple of generations, but at least where I live, there has been an explosion in community gardening, Farmer’s Markets, cooking classes and the like. Our local light rail is hugely popular and packed to the gills, and even our Republican governor couldn’t resist the vocal demand for an expansion of its lines. Garage sales are doing a brisk business, as are bulletin boards like Craig’s List, as people get better and finding each other to reuse and re-sell all the junk they’ve accumulated. The re-sale value of cars with better MPG are going up, and used SUV’s are getting harder to unload. Lean times have a way of teaching us better habits, and I’m personally amazed at how possible it is to live well on less money.  It seems like I have all kinds of lessons to learn.

It isn’t living like this that’s making it hard for me to relax – it’s not having enough of a buffer against unforeseen events. I'd take the Scandinavian trade-off of really high taxes and a real safety net any day, but we don't have that option in this country. If we could get our savings account back up to where it needs to be, I think I could live like this indefinitely without feeling so stressed by it. Meanwhile, I guess I will have to accept that our buffer is not our savings account, it’s our community and the institutions that help make it possible to live well on less actual money. People who live and grew up in true poverty are probably much better at this than I am, but I’m learning, and we do at least have a fair bit of “social capital”. And while I would absolutely hate to resort to it, I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit that we could get help from family in a true emergency.

I really hope these rather lean times pass someday, but at least I will always have the skills and perspective I’ve gained from them. My treasure is not in my bank account.

What have you done to survive lean times?

*For more information about this, consider renting The End of Suburbia.

fledglings

I’m always grateful for the Ames & Ilg frankness about the fact that older toddlers and younger preschoolers are often most poorly behaved with their mothers. I think that’s very true at our house right now, and it does make me feel better to think that this may have a developmental explanation. Our Early Childhood teacher explained it well by drawing circles on the chalkboard. The first set of circles is a set of one quite large and the other small – the young toddler thinks of himself as huge, the center of the universe, with everything around him just sort of peripheral, there only for him. The second set of circles, one small, the other much bigger, represent the older toddler/preschooler, who is starting, somewhat painfully, to realize that the world is huge and that they are only a small part of it.  They lose a bit of confidence during this time, and cling to what they know, but as they're growing more sophisticated and competent, they're naturally conflicted about that.  This is a helpful perspective. The intensity with which my boys pull me to them and push me away these days (Friend or Enemy, indeed) would otherwise be rather baffling, as some of our afternoons together are full of tears and moaning on the floor at having to share me, my having left earlier or soon leaving, me not having heard them quite right in time or not able to understand either of them as they babble in unison. Me just being me: the mom, not quite there enough, not quite able to fill them both somehow. Then they push me away, resentful, maybe, of wanting me so much. Sometimes it looks almost like grief.

Their new and sudden shyness comes as a bit of a shock, though some aspects of it are not entirely unwelcome. They are at long last somewhat cowed by a new situation, and this leads to some cautiousness that comes as a relief. They cling to my legs instead of bolting in opposite directions; and, at least some of the time, they ask me if something is OK instead of pulling something off of a friend’s counter. Yesterday, they both sat up front in church with me for the first part of the service, quiet as church mice. Even four months ago, this would have been unimaginable.  But, when we meet new people, they also sometimes collapse into my legs, pull me down to them, wrap their suddenly long arms around me and bury their faces in my shirt. When they got up to the front of church with the other kids to sing their song to thank the year’s Sunday School teachers, they were mute and nervous. Both boys made their way down the row of kids and into my lap halfway through the first song, hands doing the hand movements but faces buried in my shirt.  It doesn’t usually last long, this complete burrowing into me, but for that moment, I am their entire universe in a way I haven’t felt since the stranger-anxiety phase of 10 months-or-so-babies.

As was the case a year ago, we’ve been watching the bird feeder and re-learning the bird calls this Spring. We’ve been watching our baby chicks grow, and admiring the robin’s egg I brought home and put in our china cabinet along with a butterfly wing and a couple of feathers. We’ve been reading about nests and baby birds, putting out dryer lint for the mama birds to line nests with, and talking about what baby birds eat. It should come as no surprise, then, that some of their play together involves baby birds. The couch is often their “nest”, and they each lie behind one of the blue back cushions, feet to feet, and call out, “Mama, mama! Feed me!”. I pretend to bring them a worm, and they wiggle all over in delight, giving me a kiss in return for my offered treasure. They seem revel in playing the role of utterly helpless.

Yesterday afternoon, their game took on a new twist. From a book at the library, they’d learned about fledglings, and seemed a bit concerned at the fact that the mama sometimes pushes the baby birds out of the nests. We spent a long time talking about it. With the setting sun angled low and bright through our living room windows, they took turns being the mama and the baby bird, pushing each other gently out of the “nest” and onto the floor. Sometimes they could fly and sometimes they couldn’t, but their joy in trying out both options was obvious, each boy taking his turn flying around the room, or dusting himself off, climbing back onto the couch and saying, “not yet, Mama bird”  to his brother.

Sitting on the floor folding laundry, I choked up unexpectedly, watching their pageantry, their rising and falling, flapping, and laughing. I’ve been a little weepy like this all week – probably from knowing that they’re in a preschool for Fall that we’re comfortable with, a sweet, nurturing place that feels anything but institutional. Wiping away tears while watching my boys play, I feel silly—it’s only preschool— but I am reminded that separation is hard for me and for them, and that we’re all a bit new at it. I’ve never really had to push them out of the nest, to tell them they’ll be fine, they’ll have a good time with the nice lady, the nice new toys. It’s hard. Leaving them in a school is not the at all the same thing as leaving them with their Daddy. We haven’t had to reach this milestone yet—to grow in confidence that people who are not family can also nurture them, look out for them, even love them.

I think that’s what’s been hard lately: having faith in the world they’re moving out and into. I can build the nest, but I can’t build the world. And this is only the first, tiny step.

 

suburban farmers

My MIL told me about this great story she heard on Nightline, and since we don't have a TV, I was able to look it up.
This is just so awesome. A family in Pasadena, of all places, growing all their own food and living richly on peanuts. Seriously, think of the problems we could solve if the average American did even 10% of what they do. I love something that makes me feel inspired to further pursue my already eccentric tendencies. The one question I really wished they'd asked, though, was how they pay for health care. For us, at about $600 (including prescriptions and co-pays) per month, the health care monster rules how we live our lives.

let me off, please

So far, cute little chicks notwithstanding, this has been one hell of a crappy month. I had a root canal fall apart in my mouth a couple of weeks ago, leading to a very expensive crown and post. My car was towed (unjustly, I might add, but “good luck with that” as the city employee told me). I’ve been sick with a hacking cough and laryngitis. One of our teeny chicks died suddenly in my hand. Our water heater went out. Yesterday (1 minute after getting off the phone with you, Caro) I went to my car after work and the key wouldn’t turn. $700 later, it works just beautifully. All that adds up to the equivalent of a couple of mortgage payments, thankyouverymuch, and things are already tight. What’s next, you think? Maybe I should earn it back by taking bets. A meteor through the roof? A lightning strike? Injury from a falling brick? Maybe the boys could stuff something really expensive down the toilet. Like the bills.

One decent piece of news: the boys are “in” at our 2nd choice preschool. It’s afternoons, and quite a bit further away than our first choice (where we remain on the waiting list but it doesn’t look good), but it is on a bus-line and we genuinely like the school. It’s a Reggio Emilia school with a big emphasis on social skills and art, and I think it will be a good fit for them. We even got a nice tuition break because there are two kids. So there’s that.

Oh, and as I was walking back to the car today (praying it would both be there and start) a tiny robin’s egg shell fell through the air, still glistening, probably pushed out of the nest right after the baby bird pecked it’s way out. I suppose there are worse signs from above.

Oedipal

My boys can’t seem to get enough of me lately. They fight over me, act tragically jealous when I hold a baby in the church nursery, and act like hellions if we are together around anyone who ever babysat them (needing much reassurance that I don’t plan on leaving right then). Comments about my appearance and/or anatomy are frequent, and no opportunity to peek into the shower when I am in it is ever missed. "You have two of those, Mama! You have a big bottom!” Ahem. When I’m dressed, the comments are sweeter: “This is so fancy, Mama!”, while playing with a necklace. “You are a bootiful Mama”. They demand to be carried, flail on the floor if they are denied, demand to be heard right the first time and act mortally wounded if I didn’t. They demand to be the only boy in my lap, and ask for a thousand hugs a day, pushing brother aside. At bedtime, little arms squeeze around my neck so hard it hurts, and when I close the door to their rooms, my face is wet from all the insistent kisses I must be given before deigning to leave. Every kiss will have needed to be returned, every "I love you" matched with an "I love you, too". When I leave the house, I am left with long faces, boys that say, “When you go, I will be so sad”.

Mama, mama, mama.

Mamaaaaa!

What vast reservoir of need must I fill before it is enough? Is there ever enough, at this age? Is this a boy thing, a three year old thing, both? When does it pass? It was nothing like this at our house a few months ago, and I admit, I was unprepared for this outpouring of love and adoration.

So very sweet, and so very much.

chicks in the city

Our chicken adventures continue, though not exactly unhappily. Since the Unfortunate Incident Involving a Dog and a Chicken, Fanny’s buddy Clara has developed a bad (and painful to our other hens) feather-picking habit. We tried several well-researched things to try and get her to stop, including separating the three hens and letting the feathers grow back, but none worked even a little. Clara’s habit was engrained, and she then taught the same thing to another hen. That left one hen that could be integrated with new chickens, and then we would have had to wait for her to completely re-feather, plus for the other chickens to be the same size as her before integrating them. It seemed like we’d be better off starting over if we ever wanted to get up to 6 hens, and I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out what to do with three good layers that couldn’t live together in this situation. Thankfully, there was a solution: the nice guy who runs the farm & feed store where we got the ladies to begin with was willing to take them in to a couple of his mixed flocks, where such behavior would be better regulated under an established pecking order. I think that it was a decent solution, and I’m very grateful he was willing to do that. He went over all the causes of pecking, and not one fit our situation at all except for the trauma, and since that’s exactly when it started, I’m pretty confident it won’t happen again. The odds are against it, in any case. We’ve learned a lot over the last year, and we’d certainly do some things differently if we had to do it all over again, but we’re very happily committed to continuing. It has been a good experience overall: we love the eggs, their daily care is very easy, and we’ve gotten attached to their companionable clucking in the yard. Even our black lab seems to like them (an not for breakfast, thankfully).  With the price of organic eggs at over $4 a dozen, the savings don’t hurt either. Soooo, we drove back up to the feed & farm store in the pouring rain, said goodbye to Clara, Susan, and Marcy, and got six chicks!

They're a week old. Here they are doing synchronized waddling and peeping:

 

Aren't they cute? They're on top of our piano for the next couple of weeks, then they'll go out to the hen house in the garage along with the heat lamp.

You can probably guess who is most excited. The boys awake in their rooms until after 9 PM last night, they were so wound up. O named the "chipmunk one" you see here "Queenie". N had already decided to name two of them "Sukie and Polly" after the girls in the folk song. I named the rest Coco, Winnie, and Mabel. We continue to walk squarely down the fine line between pet and livestock, but naming them is just too much fun to resist. We got two of the same breeds we'd had, and a few new ones.

Mabel: Blue Cochin

Winnie: White Cochin

These are the gentle giants of the chicken world; big and mellow and sweet.

Coco: Cuckoo Maran (looks very similar to a barred rock like we had, but lays chocolate-colored eggs)

We did some work last week to make the run a little bigger and make both the run and dog kennel a little more attractive.

It feels so strange to go back there and not hear the ladies crooning at me, and even stranger to throw perfectly good food scraps into the garbage. Very inconvenient, this no chicken thing...The peeping from the top of the piano kind of makes up for it, though. The only thing that kind of sucks is that we won't have any more eggs till October at the earliest, but after that, we should hopefully be good for a few years. Now we have to hope that none of our ladies turn out to be gents - not a sure bet for at least another month or so.

natural (or maybe not)...

In the comments to the post below, Ella said that maybe I wasn’t exactly being fair to the role of my instincts. We people-types have a tendency to make things either/or, and I think maybe she’s right. I  do actually have that little voice or gut feeling, even often, that leads me in a certain direction. Often that feeling or voice is valid and helpful. The difference for me is that it almost never ends there, and I would never hold "following your gut" without some further reflection up as a goal. I feel like I need my “gut” to partner with rational reasons for doing things a certain way in order to feel like I’m making a sensible choice. I don’t, however, mean to imply that doing that is such an overwrought or onerous process. I don’t particularly struggle with the common complaint that all the parenting books contradict each other, at least not anymore. I don’t assume that any book is going to solve all my parenting issues or provide me with a perfect system (again, at least not anymore). I read fast and I’m good at gleaning, taking a tip or two and leaving the rest. Someone could certainly argue that in doing that, I ultimately end up trusting my instincts, and perhaps they’d be right. I kind of have my process down pat: a problem presents itself, I have a preliminary perspective on the matter, I do a little research, ask around a little, examine my biases and experiences a bit in the process, and draw a conclusion. Then I do it and feel pretty confident about it all, at least most of the time. But I rarely just say “Eh. I think I’ll do this, just because it feels right the first time I’ve thought about it, and my “gut” says that what I should do.”  My conclusions are often very different from my first take on a dilemma.

There have been times though, where my attachment to my “research” has come at the expense of the twin teachers that are instinct and experience, especially if I’ve done that research before I’ve actually gotten to that stage. I’ve also come to realize, especially over the past year, that the questions a particular book or method might answer, or the need they might speak to, are very different from person to person. Attachment parenting is a great example. A lot of us were taught that babies should be put down a lot so they don’t get spoiled, that one must never sleep with a baby, that breastfeeding should ideally only be done alone and for a few months, maybe a year. If that’s the message you’re getting, or if you grew up with a certain amount of stinginess when it came to affection, the AP books will probably especially kindly speak to you. If you set out to put your baby in a crib down the hall and found that your baby only sleeps on top of you or in your bed, or maybe that you don’t actually want to put baby down as much as you’d planned, or that breastfeeding on demand just seems to be what works, then getting your hands on a copy of a Sears book was probably like water in the desert. I’m actually a big fan of some of the AP hallmarks. I’m all for breastfeeding as long as you’d like, if it’s working out well for you and your child. We wore our boys all the time as babies, co-slept for the first few months (and are SO glad we did, because I cannot imagine having traipsed up and down the hall umpteen time a night), and we had a family commitment to breastfeeding.

However, by the time the boys were born, I’d already been reading Mothering for some time. I’d read all the Sears books while I was pregnant. It made so much sense! The world was all fu*cked up because we modern Westerners were doing it all wrong, so unlike how it was done by everyone since ever! It was, rather ironically, my rational, cerebral approach that started to chafe at me when it came to strictly doing things so “naturally”. I was never nearly as sleep deprived as I might have been because I often pumped milk and got a longer stretch of sleep by having J give them a night feeding once per night. J and I always did what we needed to do to protect one another’s sleep. When one boy woke up to eat, we brought the other sleepy baby to the breast as well, ensuring that we didn’t have night after night of ping-pong feedings. We never left the house without a bottle of expressed milk, because I didn’t want to tandem feed them in public (helloooo, topless mama). I told myself that it was OK because I had twins, that it would be pretty hard on any twin mom to do things in a purely natural manner. Silently, in the back of my mind, echoed college cultural anthropology lectures about how in some indigenous cultures, twin infanticide is not uncommon because twins are just that hard on how things are done in that culture. Also echoing in my mind were lectures on how a lot of different cultures have done things a lot of different ways throughout time, some of which would seem horrible to our Western ways, and about the idea of the Noble Savage, and how that idea had been used to racist and simplistic ends.

I am a stubborn soul, though, and I still felt that I was somehow shortchanging my twins by doing things in a less-than-AP way. I felt conflicted about the fact that my boys clearly slept better in their cribs than with us after they turned about 4 months old. I was sheepish about the fact that I had quite the routine going with my boys, doing naps and bedtime by the clock and finding that my boys seemed to take quite well to that. I also couldn’t deny that this approach was working for our family, that it felt, well, natural. I was clearly lucky enough to have decent sleepers, but I don’t think my kids would have been great co-sleepers or babies who spent all their time in arms and didn’t get put down for regular naps. They both have very regular habits and love routine. AP looked great on paper, but Dr. Sears doesn’t live at our house.

Now here’s the part where I feel like a bit of an idiot – because I’ve met people who consider themselves Sears/AP fans who’ve done things roughly like we’ve done. They didn’t get the guilt or the prescriptive parts out of it, they focused more on the parts about it being OK to be as responsive to your babies as you’d like to. I suppose that makes sense to me now, but it didn’t feel that way then. I’d read the parts about “throughout human history” and about the horrors of babies crying alone, and I’d feel like a sub-par mother because I had twins and couldn’t seem to pull it off.

Then, a few things happened at once. The AP e-mail list I was on, full of women who I used to think had this Mothering thing all figured out, broke into a scuffle over the most ridiculous things, with people lobbing insults over “baby cages” and “baby buckets”, and moms who work or dare take some time for themselves to run a marathon for a day, much less work. I read an article in Mothering that deeply offended me, because it implied that for the first year of life, the only “natural” role of the father was to support the mother in her mothering. From birth on J has been right there with me in the holding, rocking, changing, and feeding, and the idea that he was only good enough to change diapers, fetch me snacks, and rub my feet seemed insane. I had a friend who seemed so tired from getting up all night and breastfeeding every 20 minutes and then never, ever leaving her baby that her relationship with her husband was seriously strained and she looked like an absolute shell of her former self, yet she refused to consider her own sanity in the equation by getting even an hour’s break because if she was doing everything right, then she wasn’t supposed to want it*. I  read this, and had to admit that there might actually be multiple definitions of what is “natural” and that what’s natural in one culture might not work all that well in another.

And then, the kicker: O hit that lovely stage where he no longer took all that kindly to being nursed and rocked to sleep, but he also hadn’t mastered the art of falling asleep on his own without crying. For a while, we had a mother’s helper in the evenings, and I could manage the hour+ long song-and-dance it took to get both boys down without much in-crib crying, but then the money for that ran out, and since J works every evening, I was on my own. I had a feeling that what my kids needed at bedtime was not the same for each of them, and I was eventually proven right. By this time I’d spent a couple of months nursing O to sleep, putting him down, picking him up when he cried, nursing all over again, him getting more frantic as the clock ticked and he grew more and more exhausted until he finally passed out cold from hysteria-induced exhaustion. I was following the AP script, but getting nowhere. I even tried sleeping with him again, but got nowhere. I tried patting and soothing instead of rocking, but he wanted none of it. Eventually, one big psychic realignment of my perceived parenting values later, I finally figured out and accepted that O would go to sleep just fine if he could just cry for a few minutes first. He needed a little space, and a little crying released some built up tension within him (and he’s still that way, and will even say so now). N was a different story, and I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere doing that, but my ideas of what was “natural” was actually getting in the way of meeting O’s needs. By finally doing what seemed like the most sensible thing to do, I got my sanity and my evenings back, and vowed never again to follow any “method” that didn’t appear to be working. I also refuse to apologize for having needs of my own, for being an equally important part of our family even though I usually have to put my kids’ needs first. So I guess I do follow my “gut”, but I see instinct and experience and research as more or less equal partners. I also think that while there are few to no suggestions in the Sears books (which I no longer have in front of me to reference) that I have a problem with anyone doing, I don’t for one minute believe that his ideas are the only way to go, the only way to be a good mother or parent.

But then, other than a few anonymous women on an e-mail list, pretty much the only person who ever told me that was myself. Even Sears himself would likely have been less hard on me than I was on myself, but I think that after years of infertility and too much time dreaming of how, when I finally got the chance to be a mother, I’d do it the right way, I had some blinders on about that. In retrospect, I think I found my own ways to be responsive to my babies, choosing, for instance, to put everything I needed for the next few hours on the floor or in the bed: food for me, diapers, everything, and just get down on the floor or stay in bed with them, giving them all the touch they needed and wouldn’t have gotten if I’d been set on making trips all over the house all the time the way one might with an easily portable singleton. That tactic alone was more effective than any of Sears’ strategies as far as feeling like they really got something like the physical contact and responsiveness a singleton would have.

Three years later, I’m not only a lot more forgiving of myself for what I can’t accomplish perfectly, I’m also a lot more confident of my abilities to make good choices in mothering them without losing my mind in the process. The way we did things wasn’t just making the best of things, it was actually just fine, and chances are, AP or not, your choices were fine for you and your baby too.

*To be fair – this idea did not come from Dr. Sears, but other, more radical AP-ish books. I do think that Sears is a fine physician, and I’ve come to see that his books are a great comfort and resource to a lot of people, even as I’ve also met my share of women who regret having followed his advice to the letter. It’s really only the more dogmatic, prescriptive aspects of it all I have a problem with; the idea that there’s one “natural” way of doing things. His vaccine book is, IMHO, the best around, and I liked the discipline book too, for the most part.